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Poet Roundtable with
Children's Poets
9.
AOTW: Wordsworth said, "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." Do you agree? If not, what is poetry for you?
Jane Yolen: That is certainly one definition of poetry, and a good one. But there are as many definitions of poetry as there are poets --- as there are poems.
Andrea Perry: Well, not exactly. My poetry doesn't have much to do with tranquility! After all, I'm writing about toe floss, stinky zoo animals, and bouncing dishes! Poetry for me is taking an idea, and then turning it on its head. Sure you can write a poem about snow, but what if the snow bounced? Or a kid had the world's worst bad breath? Or bathtub rings were really made by little guys on rollerblades who live in your drain? I like to say, yes, but what if....?
Tony Mitton: I don't care too much to define what poetry is. I shouldn't want to prevent it from surprising me by being joyously different from what I expected. What poets say poetry is is usually defined by their particular set of cultural circumstances. I'm sure Wordsworth and his pal Coleridge had some idea of what they meant back then when they were saying it, but I'm not the scholar to bother with exactly what that was. I do, however, feel they both wrote some terrific stuff. And if a bit of theory helped them do it, and bolstered their confidence, I'm not going to raise objections.
If you really press me, I might say, remembering T.S. Eliot, or echoing Adrian Mitchell, that poetry is language dancing, while prose tends to be language walking, running, strolling etc. That poetry tends to celebrate itself as well as its subjects. But that doesn't do justice to the wonderful effect it can have when it really sings to you. I think the answer to the question is to be found more in the experience than in the attempt to define it. Is that a cop out?
April Halprin Wayland: Poetry is a place I set up where others can join me. I clear the brush, rake the leaves, drag in an old log to sit on, plant some violets. Readers may not see the same things I see there, or think the same things I was thinking when I wrote the poem, but they can sit next to me and watch me and I will be quiet and let them think their own thoughts.
Brod Bagert: This is one of a handful of flawed orthodoxies that render the promotion of poetry a self-defeating endeavor. It's true but it's not the whole truth. It's like saying an automobile cannot run without a transmission. That may be true but a transmission alone without an engine will not get you very far.
It all starts with Wordsworth's poem, "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud (Daffodils)." Let me start by saying that I love this poem, I have memorized it, and I sometimes perform it. I particularly like the last stanza, which goes like this:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
This is Wordsworth's poetic expression of "emotion recollected" as a powerful spring from which poetry takes it's origin, an accurate but partial assessment of the mechanism which, if taken as the whole truth, results in a lot of poems without engines: poems overly dependent on visual imagery while ignoring devices which stimulate the other four senses; poems in the voice of the ruminating couch potato, static recollections of the past lacking in character, action, and conflict, the elements of dramatic writing that account for the success of the other written genre.
I'd better stop here. I'm probably already in trouble for saying this because lots of people build their whole course in poetry on this idea. But that's exactly why it has become one of my pet complaints about the way we teach poetry. I think Wordsworth himself would be amazed and amused to learn that we have hung our entire understanding of an art form on his single true yet incomplete statement.
For me poetry is a communication in words from artist to audience, situated somewhere between literature (words written to be read from the page) and drama (words written to be heard from the stage) that entertains the audience, evokes in the audience emotion and intellectual responses, and, at it's best, permits the audience to experience a sense of the timeless universal in a moment of the particular.
Nikki Grimes: Some poetry is that, but not all. When I wrote poetry for myself, alone, that was the origin of my work. However, once I began writing themed collections and character driven collections for publication, intentionality became more the order of the day. Yes, I write with emotion, but rather than waiting for it to overflow on its own, I write my way into a zone and tap into that emotion, willfully. The process, for me, is like that of an actor who plumbs the depths of himself to bring life to the lines of a script. I journey into myself in search of the magic that is poetry. In the end, intentional or not, the work is as much a miracle to me, as I suspect Wordworth's was to him.
Maria Testa: Well, he had me until "tranquility." It's a beautiful quotation, though, and yes, I would have to say that fundamentally, I agree. Tranquility ... turmoil ... Who knew they could be interchangeable?
Ron Koertge: I have a book somewhere with twenty definitions of poetry. All are right and there are dozens of exceptions to each one. Take that "emotion recollected in tranquility" stuff. I've seen poems written in haste and heat that were terrific and that would only be tranquilized by revision.
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