In my lecture on “Emulation, Originality and the Writing Tradition,” I drew on Mary Oliver in A Poetry Handbook discussing a quote by Flaubert she keeps close to her writing desk, and which she originally came upon in Van Gogh’s letters: “Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation.” …
Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires is a meditation on solitude and loss. In fact, it contains many of the elements of the medieval Christian meditative tradition. In his introduction to The Meditative Poem, Louis L. Martz describes this tradition as producing a poem “in which a man projects a self upon a mental stage, and …
The experience of leafing front-to-back through James Wright’s Above The River: The Complete Poems unfolds like a case study in the development of free verse. Stephen Dobyns draws on Wright in his book, Best Words, Best Order: Essays On Poetry to illustrate a multitude of points in this regard. Wright’s career not only spanned the …
James Wright, “On Having My Pocket Picked in Rome” Read More »
Although many of the poems in Henri Cole’s Middle Earth are single-stanza free-verse sonnets, some of the moments I found most technically interesting involved indented lines. Take, for example, the opening poem, “Self-Portrait In A Gold Kimono:” Born, I was born. Tears represent how much my mother loves me, shivering and steaming like a horse …
“A writer is a reader moved to emulation” –Saul Bellow I have been preparing notes for my upcoming talk on “Emulation, Originality, And The Writing Tradition” at the Ojai Center For The Arts. There is no better place than London to have spent time thinking about the English literary tradition. In this talk I intend …
Emulation, Originality, and the Writing Tradition Read More »
In “Biology Teacher,” Zbigniew Herbert speaks about the unspeakable: the murder of his childhood biology teacher. He is one of a generation of poets attempting to come to terms with survivor guilt after the atrocities committed in their native Poland during its occupation by the Nazis. Herbert addresses a subject of both great generational and …
