Thursday, October 27, 2011

A Snarky Letter


Dear Neruda,

I'd like to write something gloriously beautiful one day. I feel obsessed with it. I want to fill books with it. Maybe my vision is a bit blurred by the want of it. I want to only see beautiful words and read lines that I can feel - ones have thoughts and work behind them.

A really good poem has to have thought behind it. The selection of words should build, lift the poem up to a height that can be seen beyond one's self. I know that there is talent, that not every poem is meant to be pressed on gilded pages but I also know when I read egotistical bullshit - if we're honest, we all do.

Enough of the false syllogisms, just because you can find an example of it in art doesn't mean that every example of it is art. Because good poetry, poetry worth writing, cause "all the rivers [to] sound/ in my body [and] bells/ [to] shake the sky" when they are read.

Love,
Marlys
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I enjoy Larry Levis's poetry more than Williams.  His poems have such striking lines in them, they stick inside of me like a splinter. What is great is that his style seems like a merging of poetic rhetoric and common speech. The diction isn't dense or vague, it's beautifully simple and the narratives are powerful. One of the lines that has stuck with me is from Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire:
                 
                   "No," I said, "But what about Murder Two? Isn't that just . . .
                    The same thing done with a lot more feeling?"

You laugh, you pause and think about it.  It doesn't have fantastical allusions or figurative language or even very powerful images and yet it works, it's outstanding. I think it is because of the poetic rhetoric and the conversational tone that makes these lines both real and also an insight into the human condition.  Our struggle with making sense of the world.  It's true, the end is the same, someone is dead, but it's also true that some deaths are considered more heinous than others.  Some acts are graver than others, even if ultimately, they are both just transgression of the law. This is all from just two lines of a long poem! It's like the philosophical moments in Mad Men. The good good stuff, not the slap-on-the-ass-drink-before-noon-everyone's-into-misogyny-stuff.  (although there may be an argument for that in this poem...) Williams just didn't have the same effect on me.

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