::Arc Poetry:: Log Entries - Arc 63 Winter 2010 Archive ::

I’m sceptical of the word “progress” when talking about poets and their careers. Progress implies too strong a value judgement, as though, by some objective measure, we can say that practice and the wisdom of age necessarily make for better poetry. There are too many contrary examples of canonical poets whose best work came in their early- or mid-careers to accept the proposition (Wordsworth and Lowell come immediately to mind). I like “career” much better as a verb—swift, uncontrolled action—and, even better, I like “career narrative” as the record of those twists and swerves. This Way Out is definitely a swerve in Carmine Starnino’s narrative, one that draws out a basic conflict that has been playing through Starnino’s poetry for some time. To be more precise, it’s a conflict in the poetics more than the poems: a conceptual tension between “writing about x” and “writing poetry.”

Read in full

posted by Arc on December 13, 2009 permalink
cats: Reviews | Arc 63 Winter 2010
tags: Carmine Starnino | Chris Jennings | poetry criticism | poetry review

Barbara Myers

Excerpt from essay "On ending a poem"

See how many ends this stick has …
—Montaigne

Essay in excerpt

To come to the end. To stop. Not necessarily the same thing, as far as poems are concerned. In fact, a frequent criticism of a poem is that its stopping place creates a “weak”ending or one that “doesn’t work.” I stumbled into this muddy field recently in asking poet-editors to read and comment on a book I was working on. Critiques of endings dotted the pages, rarely the same view, occasionally even contradicting each other.

How to go about “fixing” a poem when the ending doesn’t “work?” Whose advice to follow, and how does that advice sit with the impulse that wants to express something true and real?

The reader-critic seems to say, I want the satisfaction of knowing the dimensions of this piece, that it isn’t partial, not a draft, and that the writer hasn’t walked away before sufficiently attending to the birth. Conversely, the reader may find that the poem ends too abruptly, or is too neatly tied up, a package with no openings to enter into.

Read in full

posted by Arc on December 13, 2009 permalink
cats: Essays | Reviews | Arc 63 Winter 2010
tags: Barbara Myers | poetry criticism | poetry essay