Danika Stegeman Poem

Okay, I’ll play the philistine. I don’t understand what’s lovely or great about it. I keep reading it over and over again, backwards and forwards, and instead of it becoming clearer, it just gets muddier. I’m being sincere when I write that I would love to know why others think this poem is great. When I read something that others (lots of others) think is the most awesome thing in the world, and I think it’s bad or just meh, then I feel stupid. I’m tired of feeling stupid. Sincerely, HTMLGIANT readers/editors, what about this poem is lovely and great?

(And by the way, I feel stupid even asking this question.)

Thank you.

December 22nd, 2009 / 6:01 pm mike young—

hi jason,

don’t feel stupid. your reaction is as valid as anyone else’s. here are a few reasons why i, as a reader, find the poem pretty lovely:

1) first, in approaching it, i am hoping to be taken in many different directions, to think about different things, to have my neurons pleasingly scattershot. i often do not read poems for a unified clarity or eventual pattern, but instead presuming a sort of unified underlying engine or “spirit of arrangement”

2) that being said, and that being my “preferred method of reading poems,” i am also hoping this poem will teach me how to read it as i go, and i am open to be taught: is the poem going to be a straight narrative with an identifiable I? is it going to have identifiable formal constraints? is it going to be a list of movie titles? etc. all poems teach you how to read them as you and they go, and a poem can be a good or bad teacher, just like a person.

3) the first thing i read in this poem is the title PANACEA, which i know is a word that means “cure all,” so that is the first thing i am thinking about: the notion of a cure all. i am also thinking about the sound of the word “panacea,” and i am waiting to read the rest of the poem to see if things in the poem soundplay with the word “panacea.” this is all happening relatively quickly in my brain; i am not spending too much time worrying about anything.

4) “We live with glass flowers instead of flowers” makes me think of the difference between the constructed object and the live object and also makes me think of the idea of being able to see through flowers—it also is a weird and pleasing sounding first line that makes me want to keep reading

5) “that wilt light. Dinosaurs once owned the scene.” is a cool enjambment with the “flowers” of line 1 because i thought line 1 might be a complete sentence. so now i know to expect cool enjambments and surprises, which excites me and makes me want to keep reading. also dinosaurs show up, and dinosaurs are something i find intrinsically cool, so that excites me. i am not being glib: i really do think dinosaurs are cool, and it’s fun to make my brain jump from glass flowers to dinosaurs. i find that jump lovely. and this line also makes me think of history, flowers dying, dinosaurs dying and turning into oil. again, this is just my brain making very fast and free and sort of lazing around electricity.

6) “I hardly need to mention them to catalog / their numbered bones. A clock flashes on.”

Oh, so now suddenly there’s an I, which is exciting. And the I has a tone; it’s sort of weary and a little elevated. It makes me want to start typing with capitals. It’s maybe a little stiff for my tastes, so my excitement wanes just slightly, but then I get “numbered bones” and the parataxis (side by side placement) of a clock flashing on, which makes me think of a countdown timer, dinosaurs on a death timer, flowers on a death timer, glass flowers pretending there is no death timer. So I’m excited again. Also I let my brain linger a little on the line “I hardly need to mention them to catalog” before going to the next line, to see if there is something before the enjambment, and there is: this line makes me think of cataloging as mentioning, or if the I mentions the dinosaurs are they not going to die? And what does this I mean that it doesn’t “need” to mention to catalog? How else are the bones going to get cataloged? Except by mentioning? Through oil? This introduces a curiosity that I find interesting, so I keep reading.

7) “I’ll tell you how it will work. Nothing / is more likely to lead to an H-bomb // than the specter.”

Now the I is all confident and up in my face, which I enjoy. It’s also funny that the I says it’s going to tell us how it will work then says “Nothing” before going onto the next line. And then there’s an H-bomb, which is new and unexpected, and pleasing for that reason, and then there’s the white space suspense of waiting to find out what’s likely to lead to that H-bomb, and then I find out it’s the “specter.” Which makes me think of ghosts and spectacles, H-bombs being made of someone’s work, the explosion killing flowers, the need for explosion being a need to upset ghosts. These are scattered and incoherent thoughts, but they’re leading my neurons into strange connections, which excites me.

8) “We live in the air death has—/ a tightened belt.”

“We live in the air death has” is the place where I’m totally committed to the poem. This is the line that makes me go “okay, poem, you’ve got me, I am now officially green lighting this poem experience.” “We live in the air death has—” makes me think of how far the ash from an H-bomb might go and how we might live with 1/2053545 of that ash in our bodies or something, and it also makes me think of how we think we have the air but we don’t, and there’s something about the monosyllabic sounds of this sentence that make it seem permanent and sparse and haunting, like getting advice from a starving person. Which I guess goes into the tightened belt thing, but I am not the biggest fan of the tightened belt line, which I read as analogy or metaphor. But that’s okay. I am so committed to the poem now that I ignore my not really liking the tightened belt thing, the same way I would ignore a friend’s crummy shoes.

8.5) It’s important to say here that another reader might have another reading that revolves entirely around this “tightened belt” line, and that if such a reading allows a reader to be pleased by the poem, then the line is a very good line indeed.

9) “The individual is some thing // we share until it hurts. I’ll tell you / how it will work. I would leave with you.”

I am pleased by the long whitespace suspense of the enjambment after “some thing,” which makes me go “some thing what?” and think about why “we share” is important and gets a new couplet. And then the recursion of the phrase “I’ll tell you how it will work,” with an enjambment before the how, which makes me think of processes falling apart, living in the air of death, glass flowers being put together, dinosaurs not existing in the future or maybe existing in the future but only existing for sure in the past. And then there is “I would leave with you” which has the I being surprisingly tender, which makes my chest flutter in a nice way.

10) Now is a good time to say that I am not at any point worried about whether all this is intentional or accidental or a happy coincidence governed by the formal choice of couplets, etc. If I had the opportunity to talk to Danika about this poem, I might think more about intention/nerve/choice versus effect, but right now I can’t talk to Danika so I’m basically presuming this poem has always existed as a sort of magical spell and that it will do its incantatory work for the sake of itself. I am not worried about the author while I read the poem.

11) “The path of life is strewn with bones / and the question is stirring.” The first line of this couplet makes me think of dinosaur bones, people dying from H-bombs, and the choice of “path,” which makes me think that you are walking along in a committed direction and you keep tripping over all the death that’s been before, and what, are you supposed to stop thinking about that, that’s hard to ignore, “we live in the air death has,” which is a depressing realization that nonetheless is doing good stuff in my neurons so I enjoy it, depressing or not. The second line—”and the question is stirring”—is pleasing because it has multiple meanings: is the question itself stirring, like “that little question is stirring around, kick him,” or is it that the question is a question of stirring, “to stir or not to stir.” The line, of course, means both these things and the orbit between these things, which is pleasing to me. This line also makes me think of stirring dinosaurs.

12) “Nothing recounted // could assure intent hangs a lantern / or hope finds a horse.” First, obviously, “intent” has a pleasing sound relationship with “lantern.” Ditto for “hope” and “horse.” And “intent” and “recounted” and “lantern.” I have not really been tracking pleasing sound relationships throughout, but they are there. In these final lines the poem makes what I think of, in context, as an assertion. It makes me think the following, which is sort of an analogy and sort of a summary of my reactive thoughts, thoughts that include the furniture of the poem in them:

“Nothing we remember and re-tell—even if we’re telling people how it will work, how death will come and we’ll all turn to dinosaur bones—even if we’re trying to recount flowers by making glass versions of them, recount as remember and recount as count again—well, there’s no guarantee that will provide the future of flowers or the future of dinosaurs or get me where I want to go, so I’d better just leave with the person I want to leave with.”

And this is not really an epiphany, but it is sort of a lingering or resonant thought, which I am happy to have not because I want to have resonant thoughts at the end of all poems, but because this poem ends with an assertion of a sort of significant sounding tone (“Nothing recounted / could assure” damn! that’s firm!) then the poem invites me to have a resonant closing thought.

13) So now I am done with the poem and scroll up to read the title again and think “huh.” It’s important at this point to say that all this is sort of a rough guess at what actually happened in my brain the first time I read the poem, and a rough guess at why that happening pleased me, and is supplemented by more time-consuming analysis that didn’t really happen during my original reading of the poem, a reading which took a pretty short amount of time—during which I allowed my brain to be slack and reaching and quick with connections—and probably if you asked me my reaction immediately after I would’ve just gone “huh,” while all these things were happening in my brain, seen but unexamined, if the difference between those two makes sense, which I hope it does.

14) So to answer your question about loveliness: I find the poem lovely because of the neurological electricity it puts me through, because of its unexpected introduction of strange nouns like dinosaurs and specters, because of the tender feeling of the I at certain moments, because of “We live in the air death has,” because of the weary and careful tone, because of the rippling of the linebreaks, because of the soundplay throughout, which has a sort of grass bridge quality to it, and because of the pleasing resonance of the final images.

I don’t mean to attempt to convince you of anything regarding the poem’s quality, but I hope this little summary of my reading is at least illuminating as to why one reader found the poem lovely.

December 22nd, 2009 / 6:33 pm Jason—

Thank you, Mike. You offered more than I expected, and for that you’re a rock star. Though I still don’t think I’ll be putting this poem in a personal favorite poem book, I do enjoy and appreciate it more because of your insights and explanations. Sincerely, thank you.

December 22nd, 2009 / 7:23 pm sasha fletcher—

don’t worry a bit about yr opinions vs. those of others.

but i think, at least for me, both as a reader and writer of poetry, a great deal of what i get out of a poem depends on how much i am willing to put into it. that my ability and willingness to accept the poem on its own terms is sort of the catch in terms of what i get out of it.
on the other hand, there are truly those poems that blow us all away.
and there are some poems that, no matter how much we try to suspend our disbelief, no matter how much we are willing to meet it on its own terms, the poem still lets us the fuck down.

i want to emphasize again that you shouldn’t worry if you are bored by things other people find exciting. provided that you can sit down and make sure you understand the reasons why you don’t like it or it bores you or it doesn’t appeal to you, in all honesty, the only opinions that really matter at the end of the day are the ones you can sit down and live with.

i feel that it’s really important that we attempt, whenever possible, to understand exactly what it is that we like or do not like about a thing.

but anyway, in terms of talking about the poem, here we go.
to begin with, the poem is called panacea. now, the internet tells me that a panacea is:
1. a remedy for all disease or ills; cure-all.
2. an answer or solution for all problems or difficulties.
which is a thing we could sort of infer given the recounting of things that have ended. or not. but the notion that an end is a solution to problem of a beginning is certainly one that most of us could be familiar with.
i’m sort of averse to analysis. to a discussion of what a poem means. so i’m probably going to change the course here a bit.
i like the pace of the piece. i think the line breaks add a good rhythm and also allow for a bit of surprise as to where the line will go next.
i also really like sadness. i do. lots of people do i think. some people also don’t. so if sadness isn’t a thing you find exciting, this could probably not be a poem you’d be all that into.

my question to you jason would be what is it about the poem that presents a problem fr you?
other questions would be what poems have you liked a lot and why? and what poems have you disliked a lot and why? or alternately poets. what is it about poetry that appeals to you? are these too many questions? i don’t know that i mean to be a burden, but i feel that understanding comes through a dialog. that answers aren’t things that are given they are things that are gotten and the only way to really get things is to try and get them. that we need to actually talk to someone in order to ask them a question. anyway. alright. lord knows if i’ll check this to get back, but hopefully someone smarter than me will.

December 22nd, 2009 / 7:24 pm sasha fletcher—

someone like mike young maybe.

December 22nd, 2009 / 8:09 pm Ryan Call—

jason, it might be cool to read your thoughts in a form like mike’s? just to get another reaction/reading experience sort of explained?

December 22nd, 2009 / 4:16 pm Jason—

Thank you Sasha for your reply and insights. I agree with you that understanding comes through dialog, and I’m happy that there’s one going on about this poem. Like I mentioned, too often I see people saying “awesome poem,” or “I love it!” and I’m lost as to why. So, I promise if I comment about a work on here, I will always say why I like or don’t like something, and hopefully a dialog will begin.

To answer some of your questions, I think the main thing that irritated me initially about the poem was its (what I perceived at first) disjointness. Thanks to Mike’s in-depth discussion, I now can see how it all fits.

I will admit that I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with contemporary poetry. I know that admission has been made by others, so I know I’m not alone. The kicker is that I don’t want to be frustrated by it. I used to love poetry and would rarely shop any other section in a book store. Some of my favorite poets include a range from Louise Gluck to Gary Snyder to William Stafford to Zbigniew Herbert. But as I read up-and-coming poets (or anyone designated as “cool”), I feel like banging my coffee mug against my head. It’s almost, to me, like everyone is trying to one-up the other in who can have the most abstractions in their poems. The only new-ish (published within the last 10 years) poet that I can think of off the top of my head that I’ve enjoyed is A.E. Stallings. I know she’s a formalist, so maybe that’s what I drawn to more at this time, a sense of containment, of form, a poem that is more like a nesting doll and less like a jigsaw puzzle.

December 22nd, 2009 / 8:31 pm sasha fletcher—

jason i don’t think you have anything to worry about.
it’s real rare i like much poetry written before the 1950’s, let alone the 90’s. there’s a bit that i do like, and i certainly appreciate some of it for what it does and can do, but the things it does to me are, at times, limited.
we all like what we like and the best we can do is to try and understand how and why we are drawn to the things we are drawn to and how and why we are left cold by that which leaves us cold.

me, i’m a huge fan of james tate, sarah manguso, david berman, zachary schomburg and mathias svalina. i like a poem that establishes a world and lives in it. i like a poem that can surprise me. i think if we can allow ourselves to be surprised. i think that figuring out how to allow oneself to be surprised is pretty great. it’s a little tough. i don’t know.

personally i’m a little put off by both nesting dolls and jigsaw puzzles. but sometimes they can be pretty wonderful.

December 22nd, 2009 / 8:34 pm tom weaver—

These comments are a good bit smarter than youtube comments.
But in all seriousness. I’ve always liked poetry and also felt a) that I’m not allowed to like poetry and b) that my reasons for liking poetry are probably not allowed and that there is some better, smarter way of doing it that I am not doing.
I have never been able to exactly get a good answer for what that better, smarter way of reading poems is, one that satisfied me. But I like Mike and Sasha’s answers very much, and I think they might just do it.
The first poet I ever really liked was Yates, which I’m sure is uncool. But he was the first one where the poems really set up camp and LIVED in me after I read them. I read the New Yorker, and occasionally poems in there will remind me of that feeling. Usually I don’t know what exactly, the poems are doing, but the more I read, the more lucid my reactions become. I was an English major, but much more attracted to fiction and non-fiction than poetry, and obviously I haven’t been to grad school for poetry, but I am starting to assemble clues as to why people fall so hopelessly in love with poetry. I see that it can do things that nothing else can do. It has uses. It can fill spaces where nothing else would fit.

My reaction to the poem (another Philistine), Jason, would go something like this:

— glass flowers… reminds me of Zardoz…rooms full of Crystal, 60s hugo award winning science
fiction
— wilt light. I don’t like. First of all, the enjambment feels gimmicky to me. Don’t know why. the mention of dinosaurs I like too, but again, feels kind of gimmicky. I think my tastes might be more conservative than some. “owned the scene” also reminds me of shoe stores. I picture a far side comic of a dinosaur working in a shoe store. Why? I don’t know. But the image doesn’t completely work for me in the context of the poem, even though part of me likes it a lot.

— the second part, about cataloguing numbered bones, I also don’t like. Feels too poemy to me. Do you know what I mean? I feel like there is a lot of cataloguing that goes on in poetry and I never like it. I don’t know why. But it’s one of those things that makes me feel separate from poetry as a whole. My mind never catalogues things. One of those things that makes me want to put down a book of poems completely and say “I am not one of these people. I don’t get them.” But that’s probably just me.

— I’ll tell you how it will work. The “I” out of nowhere IS cool. Gets my attention. The whole next bit I like. H-bomb, the air death has, the specter. I don’t like the tightened belt, why I don’t know. Next to air death has and individual and specter it feels like hiroshima victims, but… well I don’t like it. Don’t know why. It’s not the image. I like that. It’s the way the phrase feels. I sort of feel like I’ve been there before. This is a poem of startling images and that image does not feel startling.

— The whole rest of it I like, and feel like I get. BUT those lines don’t shock me the way the other lines do. Maybe that’s okay. They do nice neat things. The pack up images in my brain and tie little bows. But they feel logical / sentimental and don’t invoke new images. The intent and lantern do sound nice to me but they don’t paint any pictures for me.

So, that’s my philistine take on this.

All in all, a much more satisfying poem to me than any I could write and most I encounter.

December 22nd, 2009 / 10:55 pm mike young—

hi tom,

i liked reading your reading of the poem. i like the thoughts about hiroshima and 60s science fiction. glass flowers would look good on one of those old paperback covers, you’re right.

i feel like comments like this are a good precedent for this first piece of htmlgiant poem/fiction publishing. i know it’s probably overly optimistic, but i always enjoy reading these types of “reader reports” or “read throughs” and it would be awesome to have that be “the thing” for future htmlgiant pieces and, really, anywhere on the internet that publishes fiction/poetry and also allows comments. i feel like sharing these read-throughs sometimes make poems more comfortable and less mystical. and i like these kinds of comments because they’re not “critical deconstruction.” people are just talking about what happened in their head and feelings as they read, bringing the full breadth of their head and feeling to it but not getting flatulent with theory or sentiment, and that’s awesome.

i also like when people just say they like or don’t like stuff. that is okay too.

thank you internet for letting us talk back to your poems.

December 22nd, 2009 / 10:59 pm mike young—

and tom i also like what you’re saying about things being too poem-y. i like the cataloging in this poem, but you’re right. there are contemporary poetic turns and moves that signify a certain “training” behind the author’s head, and sometimes these are off-putting because they seem to pretend they’re not training and they’re just “natural.” but these moves are as much moves as iambic pentameter, and why pretend otherwise.

moves are not inherently bad, i don’t think, if honestly acknowledged as moves. crossover dribble. it would be fun to make a huge list of contemporary poetry moves. i feel like elisa gabbert almost did this on her blog one time, but i can’t remember.

December 23rd, 2009 / 3:29 pm tom weaver—

I think cataloging things has a lot to do with this poem’s heart, and despite that fact that I had an adverse reaction to that line I don’t mean my “read” as a criticism… I don’t think taking into account my reactions (my small likes and dislikes of individual bits) would necessarily help improve the poem. i was only trying to share them for whatever they are worth to read. Also I enjoyed writing them.

It is strange… as an English major interested in poetry and interested in learning more about it, even hanging out with lit mag people, i never felt exactly invited IN to modern poetry. Especially at the highschool and college level, poetry is so busily trying to pretend it has something rare or special to offer, it self-consciously obfuscates meaning or avoids meaning entirely, and everybody involved can feel like a fakester. Later on, at Danika’s level, I think they do realize something they were pretending (or maybe never pretending, just trying for), but I think it take a while as a cynical reader of high school poems to get to the point where you realize that there are poets out there who have found bones that are not frauds and can be assembled into the frames of something extinct and wholly ancient and weird.

I read an article about how the average IQ (always 100) has to keep getting reset every 20 or 30 years…it keeps drifting forward, usually by about 1 point a year. The theory of this article was that what IQ tests really measure is something like the modernness of thought, not any kind of raw intelligence. Modernity has a lot to do with understanding process, adaptation, and structure, even when that structure is made out of generalizations rather than hard rules. Modernity is about higher order thinking, stepping away, looking in from the outside, and objectifying what was traditionally not objectified, breaking apart something traditionally called “the self” and looking at the moving (and unmoving) parts.

I’m not sure where exactly poetry fits into this little theory of modern thought, or if it doesn’t. Probably, the answer, like always, is “it depends” and “both.”

Anyway, I liked Sasha’s emphasis on the importance of deciding why you like and do not like things, and I like Mike’s emphasis on a super-subjective reader reaction — two glass flowers to put on my piano.

December 23rd, 2009 / 3:41 pm Jason—

“I feel like there is a lot of cataloging that goes on in poetry…” Tom, I think those are the words I’ve been searching for for years in trying to describe my frustration with a lot of contemporary poetry.

December 23rd, 2009 / 4:05 pm tom weaver—

jason

just saw your last post. yeah, i don’t know what it is about cataloging… hmm…. it IS kind of at the heart of my aversion to a lot of contemporary poetry as well…. I need to think about that one more.

December 23rd, 2009 / 8:36 pm Jason—

Ryan,

I’ll give it a shot at explaining my reaction/reading experience; however, I must say it’s a little difficult at this time after reading Mike, Tom, and Sasha’s explanations and experiences. I feel influenced by them. Still, I’ll try and get in that first-reading place of mind.

Title–I like the title, because I like the word. Nothing more than that.

“We live with glass flowers instead of flowers / that wilt light. Dinosaurs once owned the scene.”– I immediately think of this restaurant here in Dallas named Glass Cactus. Like Tom, I don’t like the “flowers that wilt light” part. I seems to me the poet is trying too hard to make it sound artsy or poetry-esque.

“I hardly need to mention them to catalog / their numbered bones. A clock flashes on.”– Well, if you hardly need to mention them, then why mention them at all? Just go ahead and catalog them. This line of reasoning probably stems from the editor in me (I work as an editor for an association magazine.), and I’m always on the lookout for superfluousness. I know sometimes poetry deals in that, and it’s a battle I fight all the time when moving from article editing to poetry reading. I do like “A clock flashes on” in the couplet. It hangs there, and…ahem…flashes on. At this point, I’m still with the poem and curious about where it’s going.

“I’ll tell you how it will work. Nothing / is more likely to lead to an H-bomb // than the specter.” — Cool, the poet is going to tell me where the poem is going or how it’s going to work out between us. I enjoy the sounds of the LL’s in the first sentence of this couplet. However, when I read the word “specter,” I immediately think of of Phil Spector. Crazy, right? H-bomb…yep, I think of the bombing of Japan. So now the poet has me thinking of glass flowers, dinosaurs, bones, a clock, Japan, and ghosts. What the what?!

“We live in the air death has— / a tightened belt. The individual is some thing // we share until it hurts.” — Something about the tightened belt line just throws me off. Is there a missing word? Why the em-dash? Should there be a comma somewhere? Is death’s belt tight because he’s not able to kill/eat as many people as are born? Or is it getting tight because his waist is expanding from killing/eating more people than are born? I believe it was at this point that I said to myself, “Screw it, I’m just not cool or smart enough for this poem.” Still, I carried on, because I think the next line is a great one. I read it as we enjoy our individuality until we become so all encompassing with ourselves that we become disconnected with others.

“I’ll tell you / how it will work. I would leave with you.”– I like the repeated phrase; it gives it a ballad feel. I also like the line “I would leave with you,” because it’s direct, similar to the clock line. In my mind, though, I’m thinking, “How does this relate to the dinosaurs, the H-bomb, flowers, etc.”

“The path of life is strewn with bones / and the question is stirring. Nothing recounted // could assure intent hangs a lantern / or hope finds a horse.” — I like the bones line because it goes back to the dinosaur bones earlier in the poem, or at least that’s how I read it. Same with “recounted” and “numbered bones.” At this point, I’m thinking the poet must have some sort of pattern for this poem, and I need to figure it out. Something doesn’t quite click for me, though, and I’m unable to figure out why. So, I move on to the last line, and I read it. Then I read it again. I keep going over that last line for about 27 readings before I go to lunch thinking it will make sense to me when I get done eating. Nope. Still doesn’t make sense to me. Then I read the complete poem several more times, get angry at myself, start to blame Jorie Graham and John Ashbery for ruining poetry, get depressed because I’ve never received an MFA degree and I’m sure that would help me understand this poem, and finally, I accept. I accept that there are some things in life that I’m not going to understand.

Having wrote all of that, I do admit now that the poem is more understandable after reading others’ experiences with it. And I think this is a great thing to comment on poems on here, and I’m glad we have the opportunity to do that.

I know my initial reading is not the most advanced, but it’s what I was feeling at the time (as far as I can remember). I’m curious, though, if the poet is reading this dialog and her thoughts about it.

December 23rd, 2009 / 9:21 pm Ryan Call—

jason, i really liked reading what you wrote here. im always curious about how people try to think of their reading of something. and i dont think you should get too worried about the mfa helping you understand a poem. i think what youve said here is good, in that youre looking for the poem to teach you how to read it? i liked how you said that, and its sometimes how i try to think of reading, especialyl poetry. soemtimes my reactions are little more than ‘i like this’ or ‘i dont like this,’ because i dont know too much. i think youve explained your reactions better than i could.

but, yes, the phil spector thing is crazy.

December 24th, 2009 / 7:25 am sasha fletcher—

i lot of it comes to my aversion to literal reads of things. i think a lot of it comes from this:

some people understand an experience
some people experience an understanding

i guess i feel that what i read is experienced how it is because of who i am and what i think and that this is often difficult to remove myself from. the work i am drawn to is work that, for some reason or other, tends to allow me to just experience it. to become involved with it and to not be aware of the fact that i am reading a made thing. because that is what a poet does. they are making a made thing.

poesis is a greek word meaning essentially to make. i may be fucking this up here. and again, other than this bit right here, this is all based on my feelings about poetry as a poet.

but as to jason, i have never read jorie graham and i haven’t yet really cared about ashberry, although i am sure he’s important. i am not trying to be flip, as there’s a post about ashberry now and i said something on my blog once about how i don’t give a shit about ashberry, and it’s true, i don’t, but i also don’t not give a shit. i really just haven’t gotten it yet. it took a real long time for me to get poetry. to connect with it in a way that made it seem real to me.

anyway. yes. i don’t quite understand where i’ve gotten to here. um. i guess a lot of it is that i don’t have it in me to do what mike did. as a reader that’s just not where i’m at i don’t think. which is a goddam shame.

i am going to try and go back to bed now. maybe it’ll snow again.

December 30th, 2009 / 5:23 pm Elisa—

Hi Mike, I have definitely talked about moves before, moves I like and moves I don’t like and my own signature moves, but haven’t made a real list, certainly not a comprehensive list, certainly not the DEFINITIVE list. Let me know if you want to collaborate on a list of moves for HTMLGiant.

January 12th, 2010 / 6:58 pm HTMLGIANT / Moves in Contemporary Poetry—

[…] back in the comments on Danika Stegeman’s poem “Panacea,” a discussion started about “moves” in contemporary poetry, and I mentioned that […]

Danika Stegeman Poem

Panacea

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