A recent collection of essays, After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography, raises some issues about confessionalism, autobiography, and the role of the lyric I. Confessionalism, that moniker lodged against Lowell by M.L. Rosenthal that was then owned by an entire school of poetry, has of course led to numerous classroom discussions in which students declared that …
One might think the title is a typo, that I meant “Specks of Dust.” Speck, from the Middle English “specke” and deeper still to Old English, “specca,” meaning “a small spot, mark, or discolorization” (American Heritage Dictionary). But it’s no typo. In this case I’m referencing the Latinate “specere”—to look at, to see. As poets, …
The question becomes, in the end, why should I care about your subject matter? Think about it: why should anybody care about the subject matter of your poems? This isn’t meant to be harsh—just a reality check. If your poem is solely about content, solely about things you’ve already known and thought, what insight does …
Much has been said about the importance of the image to the poem. Images function as touchstones in poetry, they help create the landscape of the poem, provide a means by which the reader imagines the world and context of the poem’s thinking. They are the things that embody ideas, as it were, but they …
Many years ago PBS ran a series of television shows about American poetry called Voices & Visions. Each episode focused on one great American poet, and I think that name, Voices & Visions sums up nicely what poetry becomes about for each of us who write it. Voice and vision share a symbiotic relationship within …
What makes a poem a poem? Well, we all accept that a poem is written in lines, rather than sentences, but what does that mean for us as poets? Where do lines “break” and who breaks them? The phrase makes it so accidental, when really line is one of the most deliberate of our choices. …