Repost: What is a Poet?

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music."

- Soren Kierkegaard

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What is a poet some may ask
interesting question indeed,
there are many answers I suppose
Webster's gives us a seed,
"a creative writer of great sensitivity,"
and may I add, great objectivity.

Poetry goes deeper than metrical prose
because heart and soul we must expose,
a poet demonstrates imaginative power,
with beauty of expression, "a versifier."
A bard with words to match the wit
a rhymster able to make words fit
embellishing them to tell a story
of love, hate, beauty or hard won glory.

One who can make us laugh or cry
imagine, enjoy or give a soft sigh,
some make us laugh, funny oh yes
they are the happy one's is my guess,
others tend to make us feel sad
which doesn't mean what they say is bad.

A poet can be most anything
their pen allows them to be
as long as the words which they bring
enable us each to see.....

by Jerry Petty (2006)

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What Is A Poet?

This is not an easy question to answer. Apparently, it seems to have a simple answer that poet is the one who writes poems. But if you talk about the philosophical aspects of the word, you will probably drown into the ocean of literature but won't be able to find a final, definite answer for the question.

If you were to ask this question from Plato, he would tell you that a poet is the most insignificant part of a society and hence he could not find any place for him in "Polis".

But if this question was put in front of Aristotle, he would say that poet is the one who imitates nature in written from by decorating it with different ornaments of writing.

And yet for Wordsworth, a poet would be the one who can have spontaneity of expression.

For Keats, he would be a man who would be seeking a constant refuge from the bitter and harsh realities of life.

For Seamus Heaney, he is a man who renders hope to humanity and maintains the equilibrium in society by adding weight to the lighter scale. And yet for an ordinary man, he is the one who is always lost in deep thoughts and has no concerns with practical implications of his thoughts.

- Anonymous

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A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men: the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed—and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and, if demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!

- Arthur Rimbaud

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Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of

"What Is a Poet?"

http://writing.upenn.edu/library/What-Is-a-Poet/index.html

Hank Lazer

On September 19, 2008, at the invitation of Sue Walker, Poet Laureate of Alabama and department chair at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, and I gathered to re-visit and reflect upon the What Is Poet? symposium which had been held at the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa) in October 1984. As the director and organizer for the symposium, the event marked the beginning of my friendship and working relationship with Charles and Marjorie (each of whom I met for the first time in 1983). In organizing the symposium, I worked from a rather naïve set of assumptions about the value of conversation. As I noted in my introduction to the symposium’s concluding panel discussion:

When I began to put this panel together, it should be fairly obvious by now that part of the interest was to create some diversity and controversy. The issue of what is a poet, as Coleridge let us know, is also involved with what is poetry, and these joint issues are issues that the nine people on this panel feel very strongly about and are devoting their lives to dealing with. So it was to be expected that we would have differences of opinion.

Someone asked me, “What kind of principle did you have in mind in putting this together?” For a while I thought the only answer I could give was, “None, except to allow this diversity to take place.” But I guess there is one short proverb that in a way may speak to what we’re attempting to do here, and that is William Blake’s proverb, “In opposition is true friendship.” I think that part of what we have here is a kind of dialectical argument that will be taking place. Part of the conviction and desire behind this particular symposium is that the articulation of different viewpoints is in and of itself worthy of our attention.

University of Alabama Press, 1987

I organized the symposium to investigate and understand better why poets and critics of divergent aesthetics never gathered together to discuss those differences. I had attended a number of other poetry conferences, and the governing rule seemed to be to invite poets (or critics, but not both) who shared common assumptions about what constituted “good poetry.” I wanted to see what would happen – and if conversation was possible – when the participants represented a much more divergent set of affinities. (In retrospect, of course, the symposium’s diversity turned out to have its own limitations: for example, there were no poets of color included; ethnopoetics and non-US perspectives were only minimally represented.)
Each poet presented a lecture and a reading; each critic presented a lecture; all participants took part in the concluding panel discussion. Certain questions came up again and again – in the lectures, in conversations throughout the symposium, and in the panel discussion: what is a poet? what is a critic? what is or ought to be the function of criticism? what is poetry? and, echoing the title of an essay by Heidegger, what are poets for? Finally, there was considerable conversation about the place and function and centrality (or not) of emotion in poetry, as in the following exchange:

Ignatow: Let me ask you this: If poetry is not emotional, then what is it?

Bernstein: I think poetry is related to the nature of the human and that the human is a complex interrelationship of all the words that we have in our language – from to and of to emotion to motion to light to air to green to blue to whatever else – and that to restrict a word like poetry and to equate it to another word like emotion, which are not the same words, seems to me reductive.

As for the poet/critic distinction, Louis Simpson does a good job of stating a key point of contention:

Simpson: I think that this distinction between poets and critics as it’s going around here is not good. I’ve never met a poet who was not a critic. It is impossible to be a poet without being a critic as you write. And most of the good critics have much of the poetic feeling in them. You’ve mentioned Schlegel; you’ve mentioned Coleridge, of course. The differences come when we attack schools of criticism or attitudes of criticism. That is valid argument. I don’t think anybody here, any poet of this panel, would deny the absolutely useful function of good criticism. But I personally as a poet today find certain tendencies of criticism which I consider bad. They may have had a grain of truth in them, but as far as what I consider the making of poetry to be, they are very harmful. For example, the treating of a poem as expository prose, ignoring its dramatic unity or its effect upon the feelings of the reader as a read or heard thing, to me is bad criticism. And there’s a lot of that around. There are more serious questions being raised, such as, I think, Charles’s basic point, and I think Marjorie shares it to some point – the attempt to remove from the poet himself or herself some sort of controlling truth. This is a point on which we will not agree. And to think that culture produces poems – this is a very fighting point on which we will not agree.

Bear in mind, then, that this 1984 symposium took place at a time when the rise of theory – of deconstruction and other modes of European postmodern philosophy – was taking place and the nature of English Departments was, in some universities, undergoing a remarkable transformation. Particularly at universities such as Alabama, where creative writing graduate programs co-existed somewhat uneasily within historically and critically defined English Departments, the conflict between partisans of theory and its opponents was particularly intense, with the vast majority of creative writing faculty deeply opposed to an interest in, much less the ascendancy of, critical theory. You can sense this tension in the exchange among Gregory Jay (at the time, a colleague of mine at Alabama, and, at the time, a partisan of critical theory) Louis Simpson, Denise Levertov, and Charles Bernstein:

Simpson: I think I’m beginning to see a basic reason we’re disagreeing here. You approach the world as a construct which humanity has made, and therefore language is a construct, so you approach experience through language. I would argue that for poets experience occurs as a primary thing, without language in between. I quoted Dante yesterday to you about visions. We have visions, we have experiences for which there is not language, and our job is to create that into a poem. And that seems to me a radically different point of view.

Jay: O, yeah, yeah. We do disagree fundamentally because I don’t think that there is any such thing as uninterpreted experience and I don’t think we ever have an experience of anything that isn’t an interpretation when it arrives to our knowledge.

Simpson: I don’t believe that for one second. If you had been in an automobile accident, or I could give you even worse examples – if you’ve ever had somebody shooting at you in a battlefield, where the heck is interpretation coming in there?

Jay: Well, I have to decide whether the bullet’s going to hit me or not, Louis.

Simpson: But what has that got to do with interpretation?

Levertov: If a child dying of cancer is suffering excruciating pain just as if it were a grown-up person who is able to reflect upon its pain, does that mean that it is not experiencing that excruciating pain? Bullshit!

Bernstein: Of course it doesn’t mean that. I think, I mean nobody is saying that. I think we’re not going to resolve what are essentially philosophical and theological or metaphysical differences, religious differences, really, among us.

Part of the threat posed by Language poetry came from the fact that its chief practitioners were adept, sophisticated readers of continental philosophy, and their own writing manifested little sense of demarcation between poetry and theory (or the essay). The tenor of the symposium was thus deeply contentious. There were occasions when creative writing faculty from the University of Alabama led students and friends in leaving the auditorium in the middle of a lecture (as happened when Charlie Altieri spoke), muttering as they left, “who can understand this shit…” The next poetry reading on the UA campus – a couple of weeks after the symposium – began with both the introducer and the featured poet denouncing the evils of theory and the evils of the recently held symposium. I, myself, was not able to give a departmentally sanctioned poetry on my own campus for fifteen years. The symposium itself proved to be a means for revealing the emerging tensions between creative writing and the rest of the English Department, as well as between poetry of the plainspoken free verse epiphanic mode and the newly emergent innovative poetries (represented, in part, by Language poetry).
Charles Bernstein’s presence – his second major academic conference – became a flashpoint. One of the other poets accused him of polluting the public beach of language. Another accused him of intellectual McCarthyism. Oddly enough, the polarity that I most expected to occur – between critics Helen Vendler and Marjorie Perloff – did not become particularly intense. In fact, a mutual respect and friendship was more evident than any sense of hostility or opposition.

The symposium also took place within the context of a growing number of essays critiquing the rapidly growing institutionalization of creative writing and the equally rapid growth of the writing workshop. Donald Hall – who was invited but unable to attend the symposium – allowed me to reprint his influential essay “Poetry and Ambition” in the What Is a Poet? volume. In that essay (which first appeared in 1983), Hall argued,

The United States invented mass quick-consumption, and we are very good at it. We are not famous for making Ferraris and Rolls Royces; we are famous for the people’s car, the Model T, the Model A – “transportation,” as we call it: the particular abstracted into the utilitarian generality – and two in every garage. …
Thus our poems, in their charming and interchangeable quantity, do not presume to the status of “Lycidas” – for that would be elitist and un-American. We write and publish the McPoem – ten billion served – which becomes our contribution to the history of literature….
To produce the McPoem, institutions must enforce patterns, institutions within institutions, all subject to the same glorious dominance of unconscious economic determinism, template and formula of consumerism.
The McPoem is the product of the workshops of Hamburger University.

The 1984 "What Is a Poet?" symposium took place at a time of considerable tension within the world of American poetry. The emerging critique of the burgeoning creative writing/workshop industry, the rise of critical theory and its importance to English Departments and to interpretive methodologies, and the increased attention to Language poetry and other innovative poetries contributed to the kinds of tensions reflected in the concluding panel discussion. One might argue that the mid-1980s represented a much more polarized time in American poetry – a time when camps and schools of poetry held more sharply delineated differing assumptions and when those affiliations led to a sharp sense of turf (reflected in networks of publication, employment, prizes, and the other apparatuses of official [and unofficial] verse culture). While today it might be more common to assume that we live in an era of happy hybridity – a sort of post-polarized poetry world, in which students are free and encouraged to try any form of writing – that claim belies the fact that there still are walls and differing assumptions about how to proceed as poets. It would be intriguing to have another symposium – again, with the deliberate intention of having poets and critics of differing perspectives (and beliefs) present to articulate and discuss those differences (and commonalities). What made the 1984 symposium unusual, and perhaps historic, is that just such a conversation took place.

—Hank Lazer, July 2009

Final Panel — from right: Hank Lazer, Denise Levertov, Charles Altrieri, David Ignatow, Marjorie Perloff, Gerald Stern, Louis Simpson.(hidden), Helen Vendler, Charles Bernstein, Gregory Jay. Photo by Gay Chow.