Thursday, December 12, 2013

Not a Tuesday Poem - but good advice to poets!

Just reading Jack Gilbert's Paris Review Interview and came across this quote:

But the most important day in my career as a writer was when Linda said, Did you ever think of listening to your poems? And my poetry changed. I didn’t give up making precreated poetry, but you have to write a poem the way you ride a horse—you have to know what to do with it. You have to be in charge of a horse or it will eat all day—you’ll never get back to the barn. But if you tell the horse how to be a horse, if you force it, the horse will probably break a leg. The horse and rider have to be together.
I really like the idea of listening to a poem.

I was introduced to Jack Gilbert by Mal Morgan - another poet who wrote plainsong poems with enormous heart.  Poems from Gilbert's The Great Fires still haunt me. And how wonderful, to be haunted by poems.

3 comments:

Ben Hur said...

Very good advice and how often I forget to do it. Reading a draft of a poem aloud can often alert a poet to when the rhythm falters or if a line sounds clunky. Poetry, after all, was originally very much an oral art. That's why I like to read and listen to other poets read their poems at poetry readings.

Helen McKinlay said...

Yes it great to be reminded of this by someone else. I really push reading aloud but soemtimes forget to do it. It is sooooooo important!

Cattyrox said...

I'm sure Gilbert meant to literally read a poem out loud, because we all know how that can revise a line or phrase - but I also think he meant listen to the poem's direction/intention. You know those times when you sit down with the idea of saying one thing and a different idea edges in and how you can lose the poem by forcing it into the original shaped idea. Like forcing a horse over a jump he can't handle, or riding a spooked horse past something he hates.