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Steve Knepper's avatar

If you enjoyed Alice's essay here at New Verse Review, be sure to check out this one on the (near) pointlessness of writing advice over at Tar River Poetry: https://tarriverpoetry.com/prose/

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Alice Allan's avatar

You're the best, Steve!

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GAIL WHITE's avatar

When Jeremiah tried to stop preaching to the completely indifferent Jews, he said the Word of the Lord became like fire in his bones. And that's why I keep writing poetry. Not because I think I can make it matter, but because I can't stop the fire.

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Sally Thomas's avatar

That's a perfect figure. Yes.

And I hope I'm not alone in reflecting that while I certainly have ambitions for my poetry, they mostly don't have to do with reputation or success or whatever, without which I've gotten along pretty well for most of my life (I mean, I'm only human and not that noble, but mostly this is true). The best and truest of those ambitions is simply that what I write be as excellent as it can be --- of its kind. It really can't be anything other than the kind of poetry I would write. I can only be who I am, not another kind of personality. I can only notice the things I do notice, and think the things I do think about those things I notice. And I have to think that whatever I bear witness to in my poems is worth bearing witness to, even if it is (as it often is) small and private and domestic in its most obvious scale.

I also have to think that the small, private, domestic scale doesn't cancel the possibility of taking on the vastness of eternity. Walt Whitman was consciously monumental, but it was Emily Dickinson who inhabited that infinite landscape exactly as if she belonged there.

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Sally Thomas's avatar

I can't lay my hand on the book right now to get the quotation right, but the editor of Janet Loxley Lewis's Selected Poems says something to this effect about her poems (which I love) --- that they may look small, but their scope is much bigger than might first appear. I'm all for the monumental if somebody wants to go for it, but not at the wholesale cost of overlooking what is great in the small things of the world.

ETA: I don't think this is what Elijah was really arguing for, but it is so easy to throw out babies with bathwater.

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Elijah Perseus Blumov's avatar

Sally, I completely agree with you about big things often coming in small packages— I too would take Dickinson over Whitman any day. I also have a No Infant Defenestration Policy, which is why I made sure to qualify both that I mean “monumental” in spirit, not in size (which Dickinson often is), and that I don’t seek to impose some kind of universal aesthetic regime. For those who see eternity in a grain of sand, I say: give us your vision! As long as it is eternity, and not the flotsam of the moment, I am on board.

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Sally Thomas's avatar

Yes, I suspected, on looking back at your essay, that this was the case. And I know that there's an argument to be made for bringing back the epic, the grand subject, etc, simply because that kind of vision hasn't been done (much) in the last century, or at least the last 50 years --- I've heard other people make that argument, and I don't disagree. It can begin to sound absolute, like a call to restore poetry to its rightful subject matter or scope (or vice versa), and I think that can be a sensitive spot for poets working with small and immediate subject matter, or in the lyric.

And you know, I kind of didn't think you were a Whitman guy . . .

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Sally Thomas's avatar

And I do love the idea that poetry takes ephemeral things out of time and holds them there, so that they don't just vanish away, out of our notice. It's not quite a monument, as in a statue, and it's not amber in which they're preserved --- it's something more alive, with more scope for the ephemeral things to have a kind of life in it, than either of those images suggests.

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Elijah Perseus Blumov's avatar

Well, as Rossetti said, a sonnet is a "moment's monument." I agree with you that capturing the flickering beauty of the ephemeral is something poetry can do well. I myself have occasionally written poems partly out of the desire to take a kind of mental photograph of an experience. I do fear that the impulse to capture quotidian reality is one of the greatest culprits behind so much of contemporary poetry's trivial, tedious, self-indulgent output. On the other hand, bad poetry will always predominate, no matter which artistic status quo prevails.

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Melanie Bettinelli's avatar

Alice, your essay resonates with me much more than Elijah's. Maybe in part because I'm also a middle aged woman. But I think even when I was twenty-something I would have been just as passionate-- not in arguing with him exactly, but in pushing back with my own vision. I'm not interested in the sublime or in ambition or in greatness, though I'm fine with those as his mode. I just think there is a different mode of being a poet that I am after.

But my pushback isn't because of fear, it's just that his rhetoric feels too large, too ambitious, too bombastic. It feels so very young and very masculine.

My poetic sensibility hovers between this quote from Flannery O'Connor: "The moral basis of poetry is the accurate naming of the things of God," and this from Basho: "Learn about pines from the pine and about bamboo from the bamboo. Don't follow in the footsteps of the poets of old, seek what they sought." I want a poetic voice that takes seriously the small and the humble, the ordinary and the daily and finds greatness there. I love the homeliness of Eavan Boland's Night Feed and find that more inspiring as a poet than the epic or the tragic modes.

My aims are small, but I think one can be great-souled while also being little. Great souled isn't measured by ambition but by greatness of love. I don't aspire to importance but to seeing the world clearly, naming it accurately, loving it as best I can, and giving praise thereby to the One who made it.

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Phil O'Mara's avatar

Ms Allan has landed on square one, I think. I am grateful. UI write verses, some of them genuine poetry, I think, some of them showing wit, sympathy, awareness of the world, I think; I think that care in composing verse (sometimes metrical and in rhyme) and doing it regularly is good for me, Probably good for many others. Rarely published, which matters little. Phil O'Mara

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Frank Dent's avatar

Confession time. I’m sympathetic to some of Elijah’s (and Matthew’s) poetic concerns, but when you read Louise Carter’s “Foothills” on your podcast (episode 284), I realized with a certain level of alarm that this was a poem that I tell myself I shouldn’t like (it’s about the world of poetry, it’s autobiographical, it’s free verse), and yet I kept going back to reread it in the podcast transcript. I can only think that Carter captured a moment of true feeling in a way that I seldom see in more formal poetry. I guess that’s what I’m looking for, nothing grander.

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Alice Allan's avatar

I appreciate this, Frank. I have a proprietary attitude toward “Foothills”—that thing that happens when a really excellent friend writes a really excellent poem. I’m glad the show brought someone new into contact with it.

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Zina Gomez-Liss's avatar

Can someone send me a link to Louise Carter’s “Foothills”? I think I need to read it.

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Alice Allan's avatar

Hi Zina! Here's the episode in which we read it (I think I might've read it in the intro? outro? anyways this is a fun chat which people seemed to enjoy): https://poetrysays.com/ep-284-louise-carter-and-the-gilded-door/

Of course, I can't recommend Lou's book highly enough: https://giramondopublishing.com/books/louise-carter-golden-repair/

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Steven Searcy's avatar

Alice, thanks for writing this. I’m sympathetic to Elijah’s argument but I also very much understand your perspective, and think it will be helpful to many out there. I think it’s wonderful that two poets with such different personalities and outlooks are great friends who can write and discuss about these things in such a congenial way.

I also love Jane Kenyon. Some of my favorites of her poems seem to bridge both yours and Elijah’s sensibilities, with a humble, intimately personal perspective that still reaches toward the transcendent. Thinking of her (justifiably) most famous poem, “Let Evening Come,” or another of my favorites, “Looking at Stars”:

The God of curved space, the dry

God, is not going to help us, but the son

whose blood spattered

the hem of his mother’s robe.

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Alice Allan's avatar

Thank you for reminding me of this poem, Steven. And yes, I’m very lucky to have Elijah in my life. I can’t overstate how patient and open-hearted he is as a friend. (When I sent him this essay, he wrote back immediately, encouraging me to send it on to Steve.) Also, the guy's *funny*.

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Shannon Winestone's avatar

As someone who did indeed hear a “call to arms” upon reading Elijah Blumov’s Monumentalist Manifesto, I find Alice Allan’s countervailing essay very moving. It is heartfelt, beautifully written, and disarmingly honest. After much reflection, I can honestly say that I relate to both essays. I definitely share Elijah’s poetic ideals and got all fired up when I read both The Iron Lyre and The Monumentalist Manifesto. I have long possessed a yearning for the sublime. When I write a poem, I hope to create an immortal piece of art that will be valued long after my death. My poetry is rife with references to history, literature, religion, mythology, geography, and folklore, partly because I take a certain nerdy delight in these things and partly because I feel that doing so connects my work to something that transcends myself and whatever cogitations initially sparked my creativity.

Additionally, I have gotten on my soapbox on numerous occasions over the past two years to rail against the sad state of contemporary poetry. At the same time, I wonder if I even have any business doing this, given that I am a newcomer to the literary world and am likely much younger than the majority of its members. I also find myself wondering if I am part of the problem; like Alice, I worry that “I am in fact neurotic, self-obsessed, and lily-livered, and so is my poetry.“

Like Alice, I fear poetry. I am not a prolific writer at all and frequently suffer from writer’s block. I can often go months upon months without writing anything at all. Thanks to Alice’s lovely essay, I have finally allowed myself to admit that this recurring problem is mostly due to fear. Sometimes I fear that my poetry is either terrible or mediocre, even though it has been extremely well-received by poets whom I deeply respect and admire. At other times, I am able to read my published work with pride. Yet even this induces anxiety, as I then fear that I will never again write anything that measures up to my prior work. Ultimately, I fear that I, like Belshazzar, shall be “weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

I offer my sincere thanks to Alice Allan for writing such a beautiful essay and to New Verse Review for publishing diverse perspectives on poetics.

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Alice Allan's avatar

I feel really lucky to get such a thoughtful response, Shannon. Thank you.

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Shannon Winestone's avatar

You’re most welcome, Alice! I thank you for your appreciation of what I had to say. I greatly appreciate it.

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Peter Whisenant's avatar

Appropriate that this response to Elijah's essay--which I read with interest and whose thesis I vehemently disagree with--would be written by a woman. In general, women have the good sense, the healthy skepticism, the wisdom, the humility, to question the whole notion of the "epic" or "monumental." Men--again I'm generalizing--are much more likely to believe their marvelous brains can come up with grand narratives that encompass everything and put everything in its place. It's hard to imagine a female Hart Crane or a female James Joyce or a female Thomas Pynchon or a female David Foster Wallace. I'm glad you mention Dorothea of "Middlemarch," Mrs. Casaubon. Her husband, the desiccated scholar poring over his musty manuscripts in search of the "key," illustrates a form of ambition common among (mostly) men and akin to the ideals Elijah touts in his Manifesto.

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