Thread by @rckylrnts

7 Statements that Rita Dove (@dovelyrita) shared w/the ‘06 Cave Canem Retreat, just shy of my first year in 2009. Doubtless some ideas here will frustrate & relieve; but the point, I think, is to model how a poet must start to discern & argue these poetic principles for herself.

And as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, we’re hard-pressed to agree about any “rules of the poem” but there is a theory (prosody) which forms a basic line of agreement and mutual appreciation of “the poem” w/in a community, generation, nation, and language.

And you don’t necessarily need to be offended b/c you stumbled across a disagreement; every disagreement or conflict, similar, is not “abuse” or “violence.” Why not use the opportunity to argue your idea *in the writing*? Don’t agree that couplets “balance”? Prove it in a poem.

There happens to be much here that, if I don’t squarely agree with it, I find that it does “make sense.” What we locate in material like this is how one poet (Rita Dove, here) made something we take as true *make sense to her.* This better articulates *our own sense* back to us.

I hope I’m making sense? Lol. Said another way, if I generally agree “rap may be poetry, but poetry isn’t rap,” I’d like to see how Dove came to those conclusions, which likely will differ from mine. Articulating these distinctions is foundation of building one’s poetics.

Because you should have a poetics—a perspective, a politic, a way of seeing how language works and means to you—and not just poems. Worry less about your voice; care better over your poetics, and meanwhile write your poems.

Because it true anyone can write poems, many poems. Anyone can sing a song—many songs—forever, ad infinitam. But we don’t remember or celebrate, say, Whitney Houston because she happened to sing many songs. Famously, actually, her catalogue is very brief.

But what we remember, and miss, is the timber, candor and tones of her voice, it’s weight & color running the spectrum, its diction, vibrato, power & its delicateness, and how she approached the song, and what songs she chose to sing or cover. *Any* melody was exactly *hers.*

If Whitney was a poet, we would call these things we remember in her voice—every little decision she made musically, even those that merely seem effortless—her poetics. & I say “seem” because the whole artifice of art, the craft we’re building, is toward building that easy veil.

So it is easy to chide and buck against statements like these; to immediately find some fault & reduction, but in the end what’s actually easy is usually never very valuable. Harder is it to see the generosity in these statements, and the trust.

Like, if a poet writes casually on his IG story some ideas on—okay, similes, metaphors: that’s still him being very generous w/his time & intellect. B/c the longer project sees you having to read his entire oeuvre—all his books, in their order—to uncover his poetics, his vision.

About vision, Carl Phillips (@CPhillipsPoet) has had many smart things to say. Here’s one idea from an early essay of his that I’ll quote. It’ll probably span over two or three tweets, so bear with me. “Can we trust no one, then, but ourselves?” He begins—

“...and even then are we still at risk of having trusted wrongly? I think it’s a matter, again, of calibration. To trust the opinion of a particular teacher or other respondent to the work doesn’t mean we have to alter the work (or not) in accordance with the response;...”

“... instead, that kind of opinion can be useful in providing us with a means of thinking more consciously—in a sense, more objectively—about the work that arose initially from instinct and intuition, and it’s this ability to be objective that allows us to revise our work—...”

“... which is the craft part, the part that is learnable. The rest is vision.”

If you’ve taken a class with me, knelt down deep into the swirls of my poetics, you’ve heard me rehearse these ideas before: this practice of seeing a poet’s visions, quirks, poetics build and amend themselves over a career. I call this a poet’s “revisionary practice.”

It’s a practice as much about the various styles and approaches we live in the poem, as we do our material bodies & lives, & about who we each become as we process and even revise our world. It’s a class I’ve been developing called Sustained Revision: bit.ly/2HBVMi3

So what’s this all mean? Of course I think the value of reading “long down the corridor” of a poets career affords the best education (and you should be reading like this! at least four or five poets you’ve read everything by! at least two of them should be dead!) But short...

...short of this, which takes time and care, you see how just general classroom instruction, how “Seven Statements,” whether you vehemently agree to their definitions or not, is a great gift to us. No wonder @amejohnston kept these notes from Dove for so long, & aren’t we glad?

Perhaps you’ll take the next seven days to develop your own working “Seven Statements.” Would you be ready to defend them in a week? Where did you differ from Dove? Why? Where did you, like poems do, converge? Ciao, poets. 💋👋🏽

PS. That Whitney Houston jingle is really sexy! Lol. Who wants some steak and ale now? 😂