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Seven Thoughts on Poetry

The best poems walk toward us as lovers do. They don’t have to be chased so much as courted. They catch us with a feeling of total recognition and total surprise, as if in the midst of a joyful embrace, a person in love might break off momently and say: ‘Where did you come from?’

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To alter the figure: the very best poems we write, maybe four or five in a lifetime, are born with a hot, bloody surge of life, like a new child. They smell of bread fresh from the oven and when you first hug them, they have the tang of a wet dog and the faintest whiff of dung — odors which never quite go away.

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Apposition is the devil. A lively poem cuts its way into something resistant, making a line that’s continually new, as acid does on an etching plate. It doesn’t loop back on itself, and rest, but where it burns forward, always forward, at that point there’s a feeling of enormous tension, and even of terror.

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As if an angel with a rough face is pulling you by the hair.

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We might say the genuinely new poem burns, but what it destroys are most of our previous poems. Nothing personal. It’s strange how, in this robust and unexpected company, the weaker poems grow pale and almost completely disappear.                   

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Talk of images can miss the point. Almost any writer can make sharp images, but in the best poems the images become something else because they are carried within a dark stream of purpose. We know writers by their purposes. It’s not a matter of verbal optics, but of deep plot; of sound, rhythm, the mysteries of tone and tempo — of all these things, and much more, living and breathing together.

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It’s impossible to tell the size of a great poem because when meaning and sound are perfectly fused the substance of the poem has the same valency as that of the world itself, and you can have no proper sense either of its volume or its weight. It’s like trying to weigh the scale your also standing on. Nor does the amount of ink used have anything to do with a poem’s size. Take Buson, who wrote all his poems in 17 Japanese syllables:

        I step into our bedroom.
        Sudden chill:
        I have snapped my dead wife’s comb
        Under my heel.

A tiny poem, roughly the size of Othello.