By James Longenbach
But the resistance to poetry is sort of in particular the sweetness of poetry. contemplating a wide range of poets, from Virgil and Milton to Dickinson and Glück, Longenbach means that poems show wisdom merely inasmuch as they do not want to be automobiles for the effective transmission of information. in truth, this self-resistance is the resource of the reader's excitement: we learn poetry to not break out trouble yet to embody it.
An astute author and critic of poems, Longenbach makes his case via a sustained engagement with the language of poetry. each one bankruptcy brings a clean viewpoint to a very important element of poetry (line, syntax, figurative language, voice, disjunction) and indicates that the facility of poetry relies much less on that means than at the manner within which it means--on the temporal method we negotiate within the act of studying or writing a poem. Readers and writers who include that method, Longenbach asserts, necessarily flinch from the exaggeration of the cultural energy of poetry in complete understanding that to inflate a poem's declare on our recognition is to weaken it.
A sleek and expert learn, The Resistance to Poetry honors poetry by way of permitting it to be what it's. This publication arrives at a serious moment--at a time whilst many of us are attempting to mildew and industry poetry into anything it really is not.
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Additional info for The resistance to poetry
Example text
What else do you need to know? These stanzas from Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Art of Distance” comprise seven iambic lines: a trimeter followed by a pentameter, a hexameter, a heptameter, another hexameter, another pentameter, and a final dimeter. ” We feel another spondaic thrust at the end of “but still she fed with her fingers the squat stove” because the intrusion of extra unstressed syllables (“with her fingers the”) speeds up the line before the collision of stressed syllables (“squat stove”), a collision made more forceful both by the longer duration of the vowels in “squat stove” and by the line’s strategically artificial syntax (not “she fed the squat stove with her fingers” but “she fed with her fingers the squat stove”).
Not as perfect As the die they made Which was imperfect. Checked To tolerance Among the pin ups, notices, conversion charts, And skills, so little said of it. The Objectivist movement in poetry was not about focusing language on objects but about the achievement of form. Both versions of “Debt” feel like George Oppen; they both have something to say about work he experienced as both a laborer and a labor organizer. But the final version feels more quintessentially like Oppen because the focus on a physical act also feels like the exploration of a metaphysical problem.
But to have said so is to have discovered the limitation of the metaphor: whenever we come to the end of the line, no matter how we’ve gotten there, the net is never standing still. the end of the line [ 25 III. Forms of Disjunction think of the final lines of great poems. ” Think of the way in which the poem brings us to that line. Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream— Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily Life is but a dream. A quatrain in ballad meter: alternating lines of tetrameter and trimeter.