[stylist] So Long, Mr. Stevens?

[Barbara Hammel]

LOL!  Does this mean I haven't grown up yet since the poets of my childhood 
are still the ones I like?  Though, I must admit, Shel Silverstein has 
somewhat lost his appeal.  But I still do like him and A. A. Milne.

Bill, dark poetry seems to be the trend these days, and has been for quite 
some time so on that front you are definitely not alone.

I'm beginning to think that there are different kinds of poetry because 
everyone processes things differently.  For some, free verse and very loose 
forms work because they have a different way of perceiving things than those 
who love the well-metered and rhyming kind.

I do not understand many of the concepts of pure math, but when you put math 
into science, it comes very easy.  Interestingly, that is the opposite of 
the point I was going to make.  LOL!  For me, I'm beginning to realize, that 
loose form and free verse make me thing too hard about what is being said, 
whereas the rhyming and tight forms are easier because I don't have to work 
on the unexpected while trying to comprehend the poem.

Barbara



Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.--Robert Frost
-----Original Message----- 
From: William L Houts
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2014 12:06 AM
To: Writer's Division Mailing List ; kevin haggerty
Subject: [stylist] So Long, Mr. Stevens?




Hey Peeps,

So, for many years now I've considered Wallace Stevens to be my favorite
poet.  If you don't know his work, Stevens's poetry has a baroque and
dreamlike feel to it.  He uses uncommon words, irregular phrasing and a
nearly infurating logic to create startling effects in the minds of his
readers.  But I recently downloaded a Stevens collection from BARD and
started listening to his poems.  And they still seem delightful in some
ways, but also unnecessarily dense. And though I'm a fairly well
educated dude, I found that I don't really get him anymore.  Some poems
still work wonders for me, like "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks",
and even "The Emperor of Ice Cream", which I know by heart. But his work
just doesn't do the magic for me that it used to.  Not surprisingly,
this revelation comes at a time when my own poetry is changing to a more
accessible mode.  Last summer, I wrote a number of poems which have a
lot of rhyme in them and, I like to think, a kind of joy in the language
itself.  Poems like that, I think, can be delightful, even useful. But
sometimes when you look into them very deeply, you find that they're a
kind of Hall of Mirrors, and only reflect themselves. Within the last
six months or so, though, my work seems to be more serious, more focused
on suffering, death, human fragility and loss. There's a cost to this
development, of course.  My mother recently complained that all of my
poems nowadays seem very dark and full of sadness.  And I had to say to
her that, well, Mom, my last fifteen years, during which I lost my
eyesight and several friends, haven't been very easy for me. But the
upshot is that I feel that my current work is really about something,
something important, and that I'm now using the craft to arrive at
deeper truths about Bill Houts and his world, rather than performing
amusing language tricks --may Mr. Stevens's shade grant me pardon.


--Bill





-- 
"Let's drink a toast now to who we really are."

           --Jane Siberry


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