Easy Doesn't Do It: The Madness of My Poetic Method

Okay, sure. I asked my husband to read one of my poems (a task I have learned, through the years, to but rarely impose on the visual artist to whom I'm married) and he said, in a quick green-tinted e-mail: "sounds nice and I have no idea what it means." I asked another friend; he said, "I tried to understand; I couldn't." I asked my son if he might read the poem I'd blogged for him today. He said, "Tomorrow, Mom, I will read it more closely. Today what I can tell is this: You are happy that I am happy, and you've always loved me a lot."

I write poetry in the heat of fever, in the panic of insomnia, in the utterly rare quiet that I sometimes claim between things. I write it to knock language about and to dirty it up, to go wild against convention. I write it to outsize thoughts and to slim them down, to win the undefended war. To find peace: I write poems to find peace, which is, in my world, so cruelly elusive.

But what is poetry? What should poetry be? I am still trying to figure that out. That's why I so enjoyed this week's New Yorker story, "Slang-Whanger," about the long-deceased but still considerable William Hazlitt (by Arthur Krystal). Take a listen to Hazlitt's words, here:

The language of poetry naturally falls within the language of power.... The principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium. It is every thing by excess. It rises above the ordinary standard of sufferings and crimes. It presents a dazzling appearance.... Poetry is right-royal. It puts the individual for the species, the one above the infinite many, might before right.