May 27th, 2010 / 11:56 am
Power Quote & Snippets

via thethe

I once heard a scholar use the term “project” as he introduced another poet at a reading. He went on and on: “Her project echoes Dickinson’s project [blah blah blah].” The comparison seemed fine, but I wasn’t really sure the poet in question really had a “project” per se. Nowadays, poetry critics and scholars often refer to an entire body of work by one poet as a “project,” but I don’t think poems work that way. I think poems come from the earth and work through the mind from the ground up. I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain

***

“One day, many years ago, I was walking along the street, minding my own business, thinking of my future, and all that. As I turned the corner, I ran into an acquaintance of mine. He happened to be a poet. This acquaintance asked me what I was doing and I think I said “nothing much.” I asked him the same and he told me that he was working on a project where his goal was to go to the local art museum every day for a month and write a poem about a different piece of art each day. I told him I thought that was nice, because I thought it was. I like when people write poems about art. I like the idea of poetry being alive in museums. Months after our meeting, I went to see my acquaintance give a poetry reading. He was reading from his museum project and I was interested in hearing his poems, especially because I knew the museum he had written them in and liked a lot of the art there. Before he started his reading, he read an essay he wrote about his project. His logic was interesting. Then he read his poems. I did not like them. After the reading, people talked to him about his project and in general, most people liked the idea behind it, as did I. No one talked to him about his poems. His poems were not important to his project. His project was important to his project. Everything that mattered was in the idea.”

***

“When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all.”

***

“Poetry is not the project of a poet—it is the very life of the poet.”


Poetry Is Not A Project by Dorothea Lasky is now available from Ugly Duckling Presse.

11 Comments

  1. mike young

      love this

  2. alexis

      I can’t wait to get this.

  3. Mike Young

      love this

  4. alexis

      I can’t wait to get this.

  5. Stephen

      I think it depends on the writer. I’d argue to my grave that Gustaf Sobin’s project is/was the ineffable; all his poems seem like sections of one lifelong work striving to articulate the beyond-words. But I’d never say the same about a poet whose writing seems more diffuse or polyphonic.

      Also, there’s a typo in the third paragraph of the excerpt which hopefully isn’t in the book.

  6. Stephen

      I think it depends on the writer. I’d argue to my grave that Gustaf Sobin’s project is/was the ineffable; all his poems seem like sections of one lifelong work striving to articulate the beyond-words. But I’d never say the same about a poet whose writing seems more diffuse or polyphonic.

      Also, there’s a typo in the third paragraph of the excerpt which hopefully isn’t in the book.

  7. Alison

      ‘strue… in the sense that thinking in terms of a “project” causes one to constantly live in a reality that hasn’t happened, whereas poetry, I think, is about responding to the moment, which means living in the reality that is really unfolding.

      But becoming becomes an aspect of how we respond to things, that is, the way we respond to the moment is at least partly determined by choices we make based on projected ideas of who we will become. Becoming is always happening in the moment AND in the future. A poetry of reaching.

      So maybe I would say poetry is not JUST a project. Most things are not just anything, I find.

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  9. Alison

      ‘strue… in the sense that thinking in terms of a “project” causes one to constantly live in a reality that hasn’t happened, whereas poetry, I think, is about responding to the moment, which means living in the reality that is really unfolding.

      But becoming becomes an aspect of how we respond to things, that is, the way we respond to the moment is at least partly determined by choices we make based on projected ideas of who we will become. Becoming is always happening in the moment AND in the future. A poetry of reaching.

      So maybe I would say poetry is not JUST a project. Most things are not just anything, I find.

  10. Stephen Faust

      Poetry I do not project
      As I make myself my select
      I do not project my poetry
      Nor define it sufficiently
      To stop projecting my poetry.

      As if leaves fell from a tree!

  11. Stephen Faust

      Poetry I do not project
      As I make myself my select
      I do not project my poetry
      Nor define it sufficiently
      To stop projecting my poetry.

      As if leaves fell from a tree!