Poems from Poems
In today’s post, I discuss a poem from my forthcoming collection, Boat of Letters. And I explore my writing process and analyse the poem. I then read and discuss a poem I had in the back of my mind when writing mine.
My writing is intimately intertwined with my reading. I identify with the lines by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski that rejoice in this aspect of the artist’s process:
In other words, art generates art. And poems breathe out the language, rhythms and reticences absorbed from poetry.
T. S. Eliot put a cynical edge on this when he wrote, ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better.’ Harold Bloom pushed this approach further when he developed his theory in The Anxiety of Influence that ‘The meaning of a poem can only be another poem’, and argued that poets are anxious, jealous and conflicted about the impact of poems they have read on their work. However, I take my cue from Zagajewski in this area, and not from Bloom or Eliot: not all poets experience conflict as their reading is absorbed and reborn into their own work.
With humility and awe, in ‘My Books’, Jorge Luis Borges wrote:
This reminds me of something the poet Catherine Barnett once told me: she prefers to talk about and teach her own poems rather than the poems she loves by others – she finds it ‘embarrassing’ to discuss her favourite poems by other poets – those poems feel so personal and intimate, revealing more about her than her own work.
No matter what approach you take, these quotes from Zagajewski, Eliot, Bloom, Borges, and Barnett all suggest that poetry by others is crucial for poets. Stanley Kunitz once said to me, ‘Poets needs poets like children need parents.’
When I wrote my poem ‘Snakes and Ladders’, I had Stanley Kunitz’s vision for poetry in mind: he said,
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