Author Archives: naila

Poet Dean Young visited Smith yesterday and said many beautiful and interesting things about poetry during a question-and-answer session on his work. Here are some of his replies, to the best ability of my hurrying pen to capture them.

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Writing isn’t separate from my life … There’s always room for writing. It’s automatic. It’s like, do you set time for sleeping? Or breathing? Sleeping, it’s most like sleeping. I can always do that.

On being asked what makes a poem

Poetry has to assert itself as a poem in some way. And it does that in relation to the conventions of poetry. Convention’s not a bad word. I like convention. Poetry isn’t a dumping ground for interesting writing.

After saying that when writing, he never knows what he’s doing

Sometimes you’ll find something, and it’s like ‘Aha – a literary device.’ Then you’ll write four or five poems that are good, because for a little while you know how to write a poem. But the imagination isn’t going to tolerate that for long.

His writing pedagogy

A focus on describing what is there. I try not to judge a poem.

On how he writes his poetry

It’s not a Tinguely machine. Tinguely machines are those wonderful machines that throw themselves apart. But that’s not what I’m after. I aim for a poem that has a kind of emotional discovery system.

I try to respond to what’s already in the poem. And something emerges.

Form is created by exclusion.

I’m almost ready to say that poems have souls and that’s why we go to them. But I’m not quite ready to say that.

Breton talks about “putting your trust in the inexhaustible murmur.”

I never have an idea for a poem, never. I sit down to a blank sheet of paper with a blank mind.

Poems are always in the specifics.

On his process of revision

Writing and revision aren’t separate for me, they’re one process … With poems, I either have something in the first seven or eight run throughs, or I don’t. And if I don’t, I probably won’t.

I’m not too interested in poetry that tries to convince me that it has something by drops of sweat fallen from the brow. I’m interested in the bared nerve.

What matters is that whatever you do, you do it. You make a decision and you stick by it … Art as a decision-making process in a charged field. It doesn’t matter what the decision is. The important thing is that decisions are made.

A lot of times you just have to cross out the lines that stink. And then, oh good, there’s the poem. But a lot of times you have to cross out lines that are good, that are not guilty. They’re just not contributing.

On creating white space and tonal variation within poems to give the strong lines room to breathe

Don’t surround them with a lot of loud noise, because that will rob the intensity.

On whether he thinks about his audience as he writes (and answering “no”)

An artist is someone who’s always looking forward. The audience and the critic can only be behind her. They can only follow. The artist’s back is always to the audience. She can’t be turning back, and saying, ‘What do you think about that?’

On being asked, ‘But you’re a published poet – surely you must consider the needs of your audience?’

You have it backwards. You become a public poet because you have an audience. pause … It’s not my fault!

Whatever’s wrong with your work, it’s not what’s wrong. It’s what you’re trying to do with your poems. Never ‘fix’ your poems … You think it’s a mistake? It’s not a mistake. It’s a portal of discovery.

Often people laugh when I give a reading. And I never know what they’re going to laugh at.

It’s not a social communication to me, poetry. For one thing, it’s words on the page, not words out loud. And I really think of poems that way.

How do you know what to put in and take out?

Listen. Listen really hard. I think that your ear knows when things should be over. Duration for me is really important for form. For me, form has a lot to do with just duration …. The answer for me is never content. It’s style.

Sometimes the best endings are abrupt. Sometimes it’s not a good thing to tie things together.

I can tolerate confusion. I can tolerate noise in music. I can tolerate a lot of disjunction and not knowing what’s going on.

On being asked how he deals with discouragement and frustration during times when form doesn’t disclose itself; how does he not give up

It’s a sickness. It’s like malaria, writing malaria. And every time it happens, there’s no reason to think it will end … except that I’ve been through it before. I also believe you can’t wait out those periods, you have to write out those periods. Writing well is easy, it’s wonderful. But writing like crap is really really hard. But you have to do it. … I’ve been through a lot of these cycles. Now when I go through one of these periods, it’s easier, because I recognize the sickness.

On his aims in the poem “Even Funnier Looking Now”“

I was allowing as much of my experiences in life to pile up on each other. It was a real pinball effect … it has this including madness to it. I tell my students, as soon as you have a poem where you think everything can go in, you need to end it. [On the poem’s ending:] It’s elegaic, it ends as an upside-down love poem. [With the end sounds of “snow” and “box,” I wanted] to make a kind of cross stitch to bring the machine to a close … It had exhausted its capacity to keep my attention.

On the title of “Red Glove Thrown in a Rosebush”

[I was interested in the] juxtaposition of two types of red, and in a soft thing in a barbed environment. The title was the last thing thrown on the poem. What I’m interested in is a synaptic gap between the title and the poem … rather than a title that sticks to the poem like label glue. I think of titles as lines of poetry. It’s possible that this was a line of the poem that I couldn’t get settled in the poem and that I didn’t want to lose.

I often read the table of contents first, and if the table of contents is boring, I won’t read the book.

On how the red glove has great personal resonance for him: I believe the investment of a great deal of meaning into something that the reader doesn’t know invests a kind of emblematic energy in it.

On his idea that language is a genius

How meaning will come into a sentence, possess it even when it’s not intended, that’s genius to me.

The title of this post is what Dean Young wrote in my signed copy of “Bender.”

Brazilian mystic poet Adélia Prado visited Smith College this week to share her work and thoughts with us. She gave a reading of her poetry – collaboratively with her translator, Smith professor Ellen Doré Watson – and two question and answer sessions about her work.

She spoke in Portuguese and I translated on the fly, so unfortunately I can’t offer exact quotes, but I’ve included close paraphrases of some of her words about poetry here.

Beautifully, Prado says she knows when a poem is finished when she sees that it’s larger than she is. For me, I love the way her idea contrasts to and builds on Yeats, who said a finished poem will “come shut with a click, like a closing box.” Yeats’ notion is a constraining one – Prado’s, a broadening; both, I think, are useful to poetry.

Prado also compared poetry to other arts, especially painting, which she called the art most similar to poetry. She said that the core of all the arts, is, in fact, poesia – the internal poetic center that drives the power of the artwork.

One student inquired whether this center of poetry is absolute, objective, or whether art is perceived subjectively and differently by different people. I found Adélia’s reply especially wise:

All poetry, all art, she said, has a center of poetry that is a real center – um centro verdadeiro – an absolute center. But “I”, the individual, as an individual, may or may not be able to perceive this center. People may not be able to enter a piece of art, she added, not necessarily because of a lack of sensitivity or sensibility but because of pride. This pride is an intellectual pride, she said – a desire to understand intellectually, rather than through feeling.

“Everything is the house of poetry,” she said: potatoes, washing clothes, mountains, rain, death. She reminded her audience that people tend to label her the poet of the quotidian, of daily life – even, she said, of the kitchen.

Finally, Prado, whose poetry is deeply influenced by her Catholicism, discussed the connection between faith and poetry, but left the idea wide open for people of all persuasions. Poetry, she said, is a fundamentally religious experience because it connects us to a center of significance and order that is larger than ourselves.

A poem by Prado, to close.

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O Poeta Ficou Cansado Adélia Prado Pois não quero mais ser Teu arauto. Já que todos têm voz por que só eu devo tomar navios de rota que não escolhi? Por que não gritas, Tu mesmo, a miraculosa trama dos teares já que Tua voz reboa nos quatro cantos do mundo? Tudo progrediu na terra e insistes em caixiros-viajantes de porta em porta, a cavalo! Olha aqui, cidadão, repara, minha senora, neste canivete mágico: corta, saca e fura, é um faqueiro completo! Ó Deus, me deixa trabalhar na cozinha, nem vendedor nem escrivão, me deixa fazer Teu pão. Filha, diz-me o Senhor, eu só como palavras.

The Poet Wearies Adélia Prado I’ve had it with being Your herald. Everybody has a voice, why am I the one who has to get on board with no say about where we’re headed? Why not proclaim the wondrous woof of looms Yourself, with that voice that echoes to the four corners of the earth? The world’s seen so much progress and you still insist on traveling salesmen going door-to-door on horseback. Check out this jackknife, people, Take a good look, ma’am, it’s magic: slices and screws, tweezes and dizes – a whole set of tools in one! Dear God, let me work in the kitchen. I’m not a peddler, or a scribe, just let me make Your bread. Child, says the Lord, all I eat is words. tr. Ellen Doré Watson