Poetic Models

(My starting point is that I am less convinced than I used to be that TSE and EP are useful to a poet. But just saying that begs a lot of questions.)

They both make each other look different, and thus (in perverse combination) open possibilities?

This thread is going to take a while to get going.

But it's a good question - what *do* we mean?

I know that asking 'who's a good model?' is stoopid: everyone and no-one; as many as you like. I guess I came to it specifically via thinking: are TSE and EP *useful*?

So there's a rephrase: what poets might be *useful* to a poet? Are TSE / EP useful, now?

But if we're using it to mean "the exemplar of what poetry is", then you would hopefully have a wide array of poets to draw from. But should those include, or favor, Eliot or Pound?

I mean, to a certain degree, there are also models of poetry in terms of the, ah, format of your writing -- you can be like Bishop or Oppen and leave behind so little it can be collected in a single, slim, readable volume, or you can be like Zukofsky or Olson or Pound (or Byron?) and leave behind one large work and a collected shorter works, or write "books" in the sense of Spicer or Hejinian, or just write poems like Dickinson, or write one long work over and over again like Whitman, or... some combination of them. That also seems like an interesting thought as far as what kind of poet you are.

First of all, I think it's important not to think of a poet as a thing itself but to think of our relationship as the thing. That is to say the obvious--whether they are good models is entirely dependent on how well their influences mesh with the subject matter of you.

You can cross-apply this point not how well the poets camouflage or clash with the other literary patches in your background. Personally, I tried to understand Pound through Eliot, who I felt like I understood intimately--but never really understood him until I had "understood" Whitman and Melville. Authors aren't just quantities to be digested, things you can imbibe at any time. It has a lot to do with practical ends, what you need at the moment, how well you've set the stage.

Finally, I think we need to be careful how we use words like "influence" or "model." "Influence" does not = "write like Eliot." I think the thing you get out of writers are rarely who they believe themselves to be (or if what you get out of those writers is what is representatively themselves, then it seems like you've got it wrong). Eliot himself got an ironic sentimentality from Jules La Forge's non-ironic dandyism. In a way that might be more empirical (and satisfying to all you EP/TS haters out there), Gary Snyder said one of the most influential books for him was THE CANTOS--read it over and over, memorized it. But just for the sound, couldn't figure out what it was about.

Finally, I think thing with models is that it's better (or unavoidable) to start out and find that someone more famous and dead than you is still remarkably like you. You become intimate and close-minded. Then the rest of your life is a series of discoveries, leaning how to like what you don't like. I think in this beginning stage, though, it's hard to pick your models, any more than you can pick the people you have crushes on.

Whose work comes closest to the Platonic ideal of poetry, for you?

I imagine you have to get past that idea before you can start writing anything really interesting, but still I think it's part of a poets apprenticeship, so to speak, to pick various models and try them on. And I think that's what the original question is asking, whether Pound or Eloit make good answers to that question.

I also think that for a lot of the 20th Century, Eliot was the model, the person you read and said "oof, that there is poetry all right!" Endless revisitings of "The Waste Land" and "Prufrock" in high school and college underlined his place as ideal of all that is poetry today.

And I think Eliot made a terrible model.

I agree with most of what kenchen says.

When I said that eg. I had begged a lot of questions + my starting question might be stoopid, I sought to acknowledge the risk of the kind of misconceptions he abhors.

I think that the reason I've become dubious about TSE and EP as 'models' may be something to do with rhythm. Maybe I am thinking that maybe the Cantos are not that rhythmically consistent, and thus are so idiosyncratic as EP's diary / thoughts / scrapbook that it's hard to take anything 'tranferrable' from them. But by now I am not only begging questions, which I am, but likely getting things plain wrong.

Four Quartets too, though - I am no longer sure how rhythmically successful, or perhaps I just mean how rhythmical?, that work is -- so I wonder if its voice is thoroughly idiosyncratic.

Yet people did learn, or take, from the Quartets.

I think I would stick, somewhere, to my notion of clashing models, working between things, working with the friction.

Does Auden show one unEliotic way into and out of Eliot, or rather, an Eliotic way away from Eliot?

All that said, and all this being under personal preference: Sharon Bryan and Mary Oliver. Oliver takes a lot of flack for being maybe overly optimistic and kind of airy spirituality that border on Oprah-isms at times BUT both of them write very lucid and tight poems. They are good models for me because my tendency is to over-complicate and bury poems cryptic imagery, and both of these poets remind me that poetry is not about obfuscating and "poeticizing" your writing, but ultimately about clarity.

I would have no idea how to imitate Eliot or Pound offhand. It'd probably make a good exercise though.

ELEGY FOR A CHILD WHO SKIPPED ROPE

Here lies resting, out of breath,
out of turns, Elizabeth,
whose quicksilver feet not quite
cleared the whirring edge of night

Earth, whose circles 'round us spin
'til they catch the lightest limb--
shelter now Elizabeth
and for her sake, trip up Death.

Pine: The reason TSE made a bad model is, obv, because I don't like the poets who seemed to be influenced by him, and much prefer those who don't. Eliot actually seems really monotone to me (and that tone is, more or less, a worldweary sigh) (and yes, there are a few examples of things that don't fall under that category -- the book of cats, I guess? -- but overall), and while he was very good at that sigh, you ended up with a lot of poets who spent a lot of time sighing, and it isn't until Ashbery that you get someone really skewering that sigh and giving it new purpose (...OR DOES HE?).

That said, it's far easier for me to talk about poets I do like than those I don't; or those I haven't read much of (such as Auden, who I've been meaning to read deeper for ages; some of the not-so-famous poems that I've seen have been interesting). There's a whole period between Eliot and, say, Ginsberg or O'Hara that I'm totally unfamaliar with, mostly because what I've seen there I haven't enjoyed for being too under Eliot's influence.

To me, a poetic model would be something much more holistic than just someone whose style or content I imitated. It's about a whole approach, maybe?

I don't know really, because I have never immersed myself in any one poet enough to call them anything like a model. I think the best way to experience poetic influence is unconsciously, through intelligent reading. I agree with bnw that too many poets probably don't read anything but their own work, and the results are plainly negative.

If one poet speaks to you more than any other during your reading, maybe it is (or should be?) because your own voice is already a bit like theirs, not because you've made a calculated decision to model it like that.

I haven't read these posts (Funny, mistyped; "poets") as carefully as I probably should, but again at the risk of being dumbly analytical, I think we need to separate out the questions. It seems like we initially thought you were asking: "Are these people useful to my poetic project?" but you're really asking "Are these people good poets?"

So, there are sort of three general questions going on:
(1) What do you think of poetic apprenticeship, imitation, etc.?
(2) What/who is an ideal poet?
(3) Talk trash or defend EP and TSE.

To talk on the third question, I think TSE and EP get unfair treatment these days. First, I think it's important to separate your disliked from the people (or even their putative subject matter) from your dislike from their poetics. Eliot's emotional range might be small, but his rhythmic and stylistic range is enormous; just on a petty quantitative level, try to notice how many different types of poems are in the Four Quartets. This might be an authoritative thing to say, but I think TSE and EP have the best sound in English of the Twentieth Century. I usually don't like making these types of proclamations. But this is the kind of game that talk of preferences turn into. It's like playing a game of war when all the cards don't have numbers but your aesthetic assumptions. Secondly, it's important to separate out who you think TSE is and what his poems reveal. It's become a habit to treat TSE as if he were his reputation, in such a way that liking him is the poetic equivalent of admitting you're a republican.

ii. All my best work is completely in other peoples’ heads.

iii. Strong poets learn to protect themselves from anxiety by "misreading" their predecessors.

iv. I'm not sure what a model is.

v. 'Not Traditions - Precedents!'

vi. 'To break the pentameter - that was the first heave.' (Pound) This sets a good example, I think, to younger poets and, I think, to poetry. Ambition and originality, both formal and substantive. Break continuities. Does this constitute 'modelling'?

vii. I mucked up my order: 'v.' should be 'vi.' and 'vi.' 'v.', see?

viii. So much else, said, on thread, that I dread, having to answer.

ix. More.

xi. (I'm not going to be able to go a whole poetry thread without mentioning his name, OK? So -.) DP has been keen to emphasise his worry at repetition. He has developed tricks against this; and, if you are to read, his poetry, you can see in evidence a stunning range of styles, strictures, stocks, freedoms, rolling beaches, skys. Sonnets &c. We can learn the tricks from him. And he's funny, too.

xii. It might be that I'm right, this will be ratified later I guess, to stress the keen musical quality of Eliot's poetry. Of course, all poems are already set to music: this is why when a poem is placed within the setting of song or accompaniment the attendant noise can only do violence to the poem: it has the effect of augmenting or dissolving an effect latent or patent in the poem. Robert Burns, for example, is criminally abused by this affect. But I'm talking about poetry again when I should be talking about models.

xiii. This is to be a thread about Eliot or models, even Pound.

xiv. I'm too young for this.

xv. It's too nice a day.

va. The phrase 'Not Traditions - Precedents!' is taken from The Scottish Chapbook (published August 26^th, 1922, under the editorship of one Hugh MacDiarmid.) Is he a good or a bad model for a poet?

vb. I think good.

vc. MacDiarmid would be a good study, I think, as, with broad sweeps, he would be, or is, easily reducible and, thus, understandable. He can be easily broken down into the colour-bled blank-canvas of the paint-by-numbers exemplar. I mean, his enthusiasms and loves are so big and blatant and his styles so varied as to commit to almost one style alone that he might, just might, be a good case study on the effectiveness of and desire for a model.

(Just to clarify, I'm not arguing that Eliot wasn't rhythmically interesting.)

I'm starting to think, though, that my biases are more negative -- that is, there are trends in poetry that annoy me, and taking on certain poets as models seems to reenforce those trends. (A certain monotony in "voice" and syntax, and the desire for all poems to be momentous statements on everything, being the two main things that drive me mad.)

I agree with much of Archel also.

I like Aimurchie in Plathian langour.

Cozen, have you ever thought: 'to make the pentameter, that's the next heave'?

"Of course, all poems are already set to music: this is why when a poem is placed within the setting of song or accompaniment the attendant noise can only do violence to the poem: it has the effect of augmenting or dissolving an effect latent or patent in the poem. Robert Burns, for example, is criminally abused by this affect."

Re: Robert Burns - It's the songs AND poems of Robert Burns that have endured - not just the poems. "The De'ils Awa Wi Exciseman" was meant to be spoken? He was as much a bard as he was a poet - I fail to see the lyricism of "Sweet Afton" or "Ae Fond Kiss" ruined by being lyrics.

Well, obv not all.

Chris: no? Poems are already set to music; 'the setting of a good poem... is the sound of something working out its own redundancy.'

I'm still unsure as to whether 'all poems are set to music.'

It's true that the idea of there being great poetry in a song doesn't translate into "if you put the lyrics down on paper, it will make good poetry".

Anyway. If you have a wide enough definition of "music" then sure, you could argue that all poems are set to music -- though if you do that you should immediately be asking yourself if you can read poetry as set to architecture, or painting, or film, or dance. Which, of course, you can, though it might change which poems end up being "good" and which don't.

Now that sounds pretentious. But getting back to robberies: find someone you love who didn't nail everything down. Put on your burglary costume and creep up to their den. The trick is not to steal their words, but what's inside them

wow.
um, does it have to be about theft?

I don't write poetry but I do make maps, so I am also guided by models (not only cartographers but also writers, musicians, etc). to me it's like my models are drawing from the same underground river, and I think about that river and how they connected to it, and then it helps me to see the river better and then I can connect to it, too.

but now that I think about it maybe that's still theft of "what's inside them"

If you had to pick only one poet's work and say "That, that is poetry, more than anything else, that is poetry should be like", which would it be? Whose work comes closest to the Platonic ideal of poetry, for you?

The whole point of using certain poems or poets as models is to move beyond using those poems or poets as models. It is a kind of bootstrapping process, where one becomes excited or engaged by poetry as an idea through encountering a specific poem that excites or engages one.

Because of this excitement, one naturally looks for new examples that produce a similar excitement. But where to look? Normally one looks for more examples from a similar source, starting with the poet whose poem originally engaged you. If that fails, you look for poets who appear to share similar traits, such as poets writing in the same language during the same time frame who are classed together within a school or style. This kicks things off and usually leads to elevating one or two poets whose works are most like the first poem that really excited you.

For anyone who really loves poetry this state of affairs cannot last and the sooner it is outgrown, the better. Ideally, you reach a stage where the questions quoted above seem unanswerable and wrong-headed. Or, if you are a committed and self-regarding poet, the only possible answers become "me and my poetry".

yeah you sound pretty commitedly self-regarding here

Nah. I don't write enough poetry to claim myself as my ideal poet and I never quite attained that level of self-regard. I think there would be thousands of poets who have worked at their art long enough and hard enough they would fit that description. Not being one of them, I enjoy far too many types and styles of poetry to point at anyone as a platonic ideal or a model of 'what poetry ought to be'.