This week we’ve been finding out a lot about how accomplished poets feel about their earliest published work. We’ve asked Beth Ann Fennelly, Eavan Boland, Linda Pastan, and Stephen Dunn what they think about their first book now and how they went about creating their first collection. Today, we simply wanted to find out which of their early poems still stick with them to this day. Here’s what they had to say:
Yesterday we asked four poets how the feel about the work they published years ago. Now, the same four poets tell us how they struggled to find the best order for the poems in their debut collection. The methods range from rudimentary to abstract, logical to magical. There seems to be no right way, but in each case the poet knew the moment it felt right. Here is Beth Ann Fennelly, Stephen Dunn, Eavan Boland, and Linda Pastan looking back on their first book of poetry.
The recent publication of Gerald Stern’s Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992 made us curious about how poets feel about their early work. Would they agree with Pericles when he said, “Time is the wisest counselor of all?” We got in touch with Beth Ann Fennelly, Eavan Boland, Linda Pastan, and Stephen Dunn and got the scoop on how they react to their early poetry now that a few years have passed.
Following a tip from Poets & Writers on Twitter, I just read an article in Canada’s National Post about Katherine Leyton. Leyton is a young poet from Toronto who, with the help of a few friends, has been asking strangers to read poetry on camera for the blog, How Pedestrian. From the National Post article:
“I’ve been very surprised by how open people are to being approached, to hearing about the project and to engaging with poetry in front of a camera,” she says, and adds that about 95% of the people she approaches agree to read, and that those who refuse usually do so because they’re nervous about the camera, not the poetry. “I’m bothering people randomly, and yet almost everyone is genuinely excited about participating. The experience has really reminded me of how alive [Toronto] is,” she says. The majority of readers react noticeably to what they are reading, and many request to keep a copy of the poem, to which she always readily agrees.
Sometimes, the week’s poems are grouped around a theme, often tied to an event in Toronto. For two weeks in June she captured the World Cup fever that is consuming the city, bringing poems about soccer to the bars and cafes where supporters congregate. Last week featured G20 protesters reading poems about resistance.
Click through to watch one of the videos filmed at the G20 protests in Toronto.
What I attempted to do in this Early Collected—the first six books of my collected poems—is to reach out simultaneously for a new language and a new subject matter. I was interested in that which was overlooked, neglected, and unseen, from a political, religious, and personal point of view and a voice that bespoke this in the simplest, most honest manner. I found myself returning to early—to fundamental—experiences, as I found myself discovering a new language. This constituted a celebration as well as a kind of mourning or elegy, and the results can be seen in such poems as “Lucky Life,” “The Blue Tie,” “Stepping Out of Poetry,” and “Bob Summer: The Final Poem.” This was a difficult road to hoe, for it expressed neither formal, academic niceness nor bohemian madness. If there are sources they are variously in the Hebrew prophets, in Blake, in Whitman, in Ovid, in Coleridge, and, as far as modern poets, in Yeats, Stevens, Pound, and Hart Crane.
Early in the fourth century BC, when the practice of writing was still novel and controversial in Greece, Plato wrote Phaedrus, his dialogue about love, beauty, and rhetoric. In the tale, the title character, a citizen of Athens, takes a walk with the great orator Socrates into the countryside, where the two friends sit under a tree beside a stream and have a long and circuitous conversation. They discuss the finer points of speech making, the nature of desire, the varieties of madness, and the journey of the immortal soul, before turning their attention to the written word. “There remains the question,” muses Socrates, “of propriety and impropriety in writing.” Phaedrus agrees, and Socrates launches into a story about a meeting between the multi-talented Egyptian god Theuth, whose many inventions included the alphabet, and one of the kings of Egypt, Thamus.
Julie Sheehan has lots of readings coming up to support her new collection Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise. Check out all her Summer 2010 tour dates after the jump.
Guest contribution by Andrew Hudgins:
When strangers ask me what I do, I usually follow the lead of W. H. Auden, who said he was a teacher. So much easier than saying “poet,” and having to deal with the inevitable follow-ups: Have I heard of you? What books have you written? Do they sell that in bookstores?
Those questions are just tune-ups for the really hard one.
“You’re a poet, you say?”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“What kind?”
“Yeah, what kind of poetry do you write?”
I know I’m being offered an opportunity to promote an art that needs promotion and maybe sell a book or two. I know the question is coming, but like a recalcitrant student, I’m always unprepared.
On Tuesday, June 2nd, Adrienne Rich received The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Recognition Award, citing fellow female writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Naomi Klein, Anne Carson, Nicole Brossard, Lisa Robertson and Dionne Brand as inspirations. Since receiving the Yale Younger Poets award in 1951, at the tender age of 21, Rich has strived to make the political personal in her poetry and prose. Rich’s list of achievements is extensive, to say the least, and she has authored 30 books of poetry and prose. It goes without saying that Rich has shaped the content and the form of American poetry in the latter half of the 20th century. I’ll go even further to say that she has been a driving force in dictating the place of women in literature and in the world. I remain truly grateful that she dove into that wreck.
Look for Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007—2010, a new work from Adrienne Rich, in January 2011.
In the current Broadway play Red, Mark Rothko shouts at his assistant for never having read such writers as Nietzsche. It’s both an attack on the younger man’s perceived lack of cultural literacy and a provocative way for the older artist to mentor. All the while, classical music is playing in the background in a kind of surround-sound tutoring. The audience comes to discover something about the assistant’s own musical preferences when he plays a Chet Baker record while the master is out wheeling and dealing in the art world. We also learn that the assistant’s artistic taste runs more toward Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns than toward the high modernism of his self-aggrandizing guru. I’m impressed by the variety of culture represented in that studio.
When I was about that young man’s age, say twenty-eight, I was in the throes of an art movement here in New York City. It was 1983, and the group became known as Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. Reagan was president and he was funding “freedom fighters” to undermine the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and elsewhere in the region. We congregated in the loft of Leon Golub and Nancy Spero.
