Mark Strand On Poetry And Poetics

–from Essays And Interviews Essay, Research Paper

On Donald Justice

From the very beginning Justice has fashioned his poems, honed them down, freed them of

rhetorical excess and the weight, however gracefully sustained, of an elaborate diction.

His self-indulgence, then, has been with the possibilities of the plain statement. His

refusal to adopt any other mode but that which his subject demands–minimal, narcissist,

negating–has nourished him. . . .

If absence and loss are inescapable conditions of fife, the poem for Justice is an act

of recovery. It synthesizes, for all its meagreness, what is with what is no longer; it

conjures up a life that persists by denial, gathering strength from its hopelessness, and

exists, finally and positively, as an emblem of survival.

From Contemporary Poets. Ed. James Vinson. (St. Martin’s, 1980)

On The Monument

I strated writing The Monument and it became less and less about the translator

of a particular text, and more about the translation of a self, and the text as self, the

self as book.

From an interview with Frank Graziano in Graziano, ed. Strand: A Profile (1979)

From The Monument (1978)

(#9)

It has been necessary to submit to vacancy in order to begin again, to clear ground, to

make space. I can allow nothing to be received. Therein lies my triumph and my

mediocrity. Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb. I am

passing it on. The monument is a void, artless and everlasting. What I was I am no longer.

I speak for nothing, the nothing that I am, the nothing that is this work. And you shall

perpetuate me not in the name of what I was, but in the name of what I am.

(#22)

This poor document does not have to do with a self, it dwells on the absence of a self.

I–and this pronoun will have to do–have not permitted anything worthwhile to be part of

this communication that strains even to exist in a language other than the one in which it

was written. So much is excluded that it could not be a document of self-centeredness. If

it is a mirror to anything, it is to the gap between the nothing that was and the nothing

that will be. It is a thread of longing that binds past and future. Again, it is

everything that history is not.

From "A Statement about Writing"

Ideally, it would be best to just write, to suppress the critical side of my nature and

indulge the expressive. Perhaps. But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as

rather tedious–never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving. And because it

has no power, let alone appetite, for self-scrutiny, it fits the reductive, dominating

needs of the critical side of me. The more I think about this, the more I think that not

writing is the best way to write.

Whether I admit it or not, I write to participate in the delusion of my own immortality

which is born every minute. And yet, I write to resist myself. I find resistance

irresistible. (317)

In William Heyen, ed. The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets (1984)

Introduction to the Poems in the Winter 1995-96

Issue of Ploughshares

I was very casual about the way I chose poems for this issue of Ploughshares.

I asked a few friends–those I happened to be in touch with–for recent unpublished work.

I picked what I wanted. Then I went through poems that had come directly to Ploughshares

and which the editors thought would interest me. I recall that most of the poems which I

chose came to me this way.

I have no method for picking poems. I simply pick what pleases me. I am

not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful. I tend to

like poems that engage me–that is to say, which do not bore me. I like elaboration, but I

am often taken by simplicity. Cadences move me, but flatness can also seduce. Sense, so

long as it’s not too familiar, is a pleasure, but so is nonsense when shrewdly exploited.

Clearly, I have no set notion about what a poem ought to be.

Editing a single issue of Ploughshares has not allowed me to

reach any conclusions about the state of American poetry. American poetry still seems to

be "out there," practiced by others in many different places and under many

different conditions. The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for

doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions. Whether or

not this is a healthy state of affairs I cannot say. I simply don’t know. And yet, in a

culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of

entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is

written. A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it

pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be. This is probably because

it speaks for a level of experience unaccounted for by other literary genres or by popular

forms of entertainment. So, perhaps, the fact that so many are writing poetry is a sign of

health.

Whatever the case, I hope that the poems I have chosen for this issue of Ploughshares

find appreciative readers.

source: www.emerson.edu/ploughshares/Winter1995/Strand_Intro.html

from An April 1999 Interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth on PBS

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I’m very interested in your ideas about how a

poem works. You’ve said, "A poem releases itself, secretes itself slowly, sometimes

almost poisonously, into the mind of the reader." How do you think poetry does that?

MARK STRAND: Well, I think it — a lot of it depends on the reader.

The reader has to sort of give himself over to the poem and allow the poem to inhabit him

and — how does the poem do that? It does it by rearranging the world in such a way that

it appears new. It does it by using language that is slightly different from the way

language is used in the workday world, so tha you’re forced to pay attention to it.

[. . . .]

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What do you look for when you read a poem?

MARK STRAND: I look for astonishment. I look to be moved, to have my

view of the world in which I live somewhat changed, enlarged. I want both to belong more

strongly to it or more emphatically to it, and yet, to be able to see it, to have — well,

it’s almost a paradox to say this — a more compassionate distance.

from the complete interview go to http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june99/pulitzer_4-15.html

from "Notes on the Craft of Poetry"

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better. And I for one am

not even sure that I have a recognizable way of doing things, or if I did that I could

talk about it. I do not have a secret method of writing, nor do I have a set of do’s and

don’ts. Each poem demands that I treat it differently from the rest, come to terms with

it, seek out its own best beginning and ending. And yet I would be kidding myself if I

believed that nothing continuous existed in the transactions between myself and my poems.

I suppose this is what we mean by craft: those transactions that become so continuous we

not only associate ourselves with them but allow them to represent the means by which we

make art. But since they rarely declare themselves in procedural terms, how do we talk

about them? To a large extent, these transactions I have chosen to call craft are the sole

property of the individual poet and cannot be transferred to or adopted by others. One

reason for this is that they are largely unknown at the time of writing and are discovered

afterwards, if at all.

. . .

One essay that had great importance for me when I began to write was George Orwell’s

"Politics and the English Language." Reading it, I encountered for the first

time a moral statement about good writing. True, Orwell was not considering the literary

use of language, but language as an instrument for expressing thought. His point was that

just as our English can become ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, so

the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The

following rules, he explains, can be relied upon when the writer is in doubt about the

effect of a word or phrase and his instinct fails him.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing

in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or jargon word if you can think of an

everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These are of course very elementary rules and you could, as Orwell admits, keep all of

them and still write bad English, though not as bad as you might have. But how far will

they take us in the writing of a poem? And how much of that transaction I mentioned

earlier is described by them? If following a simple set of rules guaranteed the success of

a poem, poems would not be held in very high esteem, as, of course, they are. And far too

many people would find it easy to write them, which, naturally, is not the case. For the

poems that are of greatest value are those that inevitably, unselfconsciously break rules,

poems whose urgency makes rules irrelevant.

. . .

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are

either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes. These limits exist

in turn within the limits of the individual poet’s conception of what is or is not a poem.

For if the would-be poet has no idea what a poem is, then he has no standard for

determining or qualifying his actions as a poet; i.e., his poem. "Form," it

should be remembered, is a word that has several meanings, some of which are near

opposites. Form has to do with the structure or outward appearance of something, but it

also has to do with its essence. In discussions of poetry, form is a powerful word for

just that reason: structure and essence seem to come together, as do the disposition of

words and their meanings.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who

would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape. They argue that there

is formal poetry and poetry without form — free verse, in other words; that formal poetry

has dimensions that are rhythmic or stanzaic, etc., and consequently measurable, while

free verse exists as a sprawl whose disposition is arbitrary and is, as such,

nonmeasurable. But if we have learned anything from the poetry of the last twenty or

thirty years, it is that free verse is as formal as any other verse. There is ample

evidence that it uses a full range of mnemonic devices, the most common being anaphoral

and parallelistic structures, both as syntactically restrictive as they are rhythmically

binding. I do not want to suggest that measured verse and free verse represent opposing

mnemonics. I would rather we considered them together, both being structured or shaped and

thus formal, or at least formal in outward, easily described ways.

Form is manifested most clearly in the apparatus of argument and image or, put another

way, plot and figures of speech. This aspect of form is more difficult to discuss because

it is less clear-cut; it happens also to be the area in which poems achieve their greatest

individuality and where, as a result, they are more personal. This being the case, how is

it possible to apply ideas of craft? Well, we might say that mixed metaphors are bad, that

contradictions, unless they constitute intentional paradox, must be avoided, that this or

that image is inappropriate. All of which is either too vague, too narrow, or mostly

beside the point — although there are many creative-writing teachers who have no

difficulty discussing these more variable and hidden characteristics of form. And I use

the word "hidden" because somehow, when we approach the question of what a poem

means, we are moving very close to its source or what brought it into being. To be sure,

there is no easy prescription, like George Orwell’s, of what to say and what not to say in

a poem.

. . .

In discussing his poem "The Old Woman and the Statue," Wallace Stevens said:

While there is nothing automatic about the poem, nevertheless it has an automatic

aspect in the sense that it is what I wanted it to be without knowing before it was

written what I wanted it to be, even though I knew before it was written what I wanted to

do.

This is as precise a statement of what is referred to as "the creative

process" as I have ever read. And I think it makes clear why discussions of craft are

at best precarious. We know only afterwards what it is we have done. Most poets, I think,

are drawn to the unknown, and writing, for them, is a way of making the unknown visible.

And if the object of one’s quest is hidden or unknown, how is it to be approached by

predictable means? I confess to a desire to forget knowing, especially when I sit down to

work on a poem. The continuous transactions of craft take place in the dark. Jung

understood this when he said: "As long as we ourselves are caught up in the process

of creation, we neither see nor understand; indeed we ought not to understand, for nothing

is more injurious to immediate experience than cognition." And Stevens, when he said:

"You have somehow to know the sound that is the exact sound: and you do in fact know,

without knowing how. Your knowledge is irrational." This is not to say that

rationality is wrong or bad, but merely that it has little to do with the making of poems

(as opposed, say, to the understanding of poems). Even so rational a figure as Paul Val?ry

becomes oddly evasive when discussing the making of a poem. In his brilliant but peculiar

essay "Poetry and Abstract Thought," he says the following:

I have . . . noticed in myself certain states which I may well call poetic, since some

of them were finally realized in poems. They came about from no apparent cause, arising

from some accident or other; they developed according to their own nature, and

consequently I found myself for a time jolted out of my habitual state of mind.

And he goes on to say that "the state of poetry is completely irregular,

inconstant, and fragile, and that we lose it, as we find it, by accident," and that

"a poet is a man who, as a result of a certain incident, undergoes a hidden

transformation." At its most comic, this is a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde situation. And I

suppose at its most tragic it still is. But it is astonishing that craft, even in such a

figure as Val?ry, is beside the point. One feels that Val?ry, if given more time, might

have become more like Bachelard, who said among other things that "intellectual

criticism of poetry will never lead to the center where poetic images are formed."

And what does craft have to do with the formation of poetic images? What does it have

to do with the unknown sources of a poem? Nothing. For craft, as it is taught and

discussed, functions clearly only if the poem is considered primarily as a form of

communication. And yet it is generally acknowledged that poetry invokes aspects of

language other than that of communication, most significantly as a variation, though

diminished, of a sacred text. Given such status, a status it has for the poet while he is

writing, it is not validated by an appeal to experience but exists autonomously, or as

autonomously as history will allow. In his essay "On the Relation of Analytical

Psychology to Poetry," Jung comes closest to addressing this issue when he says:

The work presents us with a finished picture, and this picture is amenable to analysis

only to the extent that we can recognize it as a symbol. But if we are unable to discover

any symbolic value in it, we have merely established that, so far as we are concerned, it

means no more than what it says, or to put it another way, that it is no more than what it

seems to be.

This strikes me as a generous statement, for it allows poems an existence ultimately

tautological. On the other hand, Freud, who suggests a connection between daydreams and

poems — but does not elaborate — and who addresses himself to the fantasies of the

"less pretentious writers of romances, novels and stories," making their works

into protracted forms of wish fulfillment, seems most intent on establishing the priority

of mental states. But the purpose of the poem is not disclosure or storytelling or the

telling of a daydream; nor is a poem a symptom. A poem is itself and is the act by which

it is born. It is self-referential and is not necessarily preceded by any known order,

except that of other poems.

If poems often do not refer to any known experience, to nothing that will characterize

their being, and thus cannot be understood so much as absorbed, how can considerations of

craft be applied when they are justified on the grounds that they enhance communication?

This is perhaps one of the reasons why most discussions of craft fall short of dealing

with the essentials of poetry. Perhaps the poem is ultimately a metaphor for something

unknown, its working-out a means of recovery. It may be that the retention of the absent

origin is what is necessary for the continued life of the poem as inexhaustible artifact.

(Though words may represent things or actions, in combination they may represent something

else — the unspoken, hitherto-unknown unity of which the poem is the example.)

Furthermore, we might say that the degree to which a poem is explained or paraphrased is

precisely the degree to which it ceases being a poem. If nothing is left of the poem, it

has become the paraphrase of itself, and readers will experience the paraphrase in place

of the poem. It is for this reason that poems must exist not only in language but beyond

it.

from Strand’s The Weather of Words. (New York: Random House, Inc. 2000)

Use of this excerpt from The Weather of Words may be made only for purposes of

promoting the book, with no changes, editing, or additions whatsoever, and must be

accompanied by the following copyright notice: Copyright ? 2000 by Mark Strand. All

rights reserved. Order this Book.