Writing Space

i started this post weeks ago and then didn’t finish it.  well, it’s done now and quite lengthy at that.

(There is more where this came from … )

 i hope this makes sense

 I fell completely in love with Heaney’s poetry while reading the first assigned section of poems.  The way Heaney taps into a collective memory without nostalgia necessarily I really found intriguing, because I think a lot of American poetry and fiction when referencing shared history or memory too often looks with rose colored glasses and glosses over especially horrific moments in that shared history.  We’ve encountered a lot of exceptions to this nostalgia and sense of longing in copo, but even in poetry today (I’m thinking specifically now of Ted Kooser and Billy Collins) there is a lot of romanticism of early American life or a “simpler time.”  One of the aspects of today’s lecture by

Temple
Cone that I was happy to learn about was more of the Irish history that influenced Heaney’s writing.  I thought it gave elucidation to Heaney’s poetry, which is steeped in history, but has no illusions of romanticism.  I find it oddly appropriate, however, that Heaney considers himself a Wordsworthian: odd because generally, I think of Wordsworth as highly Romantic, but that should be inverted (the Romantics are very Wordsworthian); appropriate because Heaney and Wordsworth share a preoccupation with memory and connection to the land.

maybe it’s lame to have song lyrics stuck in your head and fall in love with them like a poem, but here’s some of the music/lyrics that have been running through my head all day:

[note: these are partial lyrics]

Intuition – Feist

And in came a heatwave
A merciful save
And you choose, you chose
Poetry over prose

A map is more unreal
Than where you’ve been
Or how you feel

so i was watching The Upside of Anger, which actually, isn’t a great movie, but it did contain one moment that made me laugh.  the mother is trying to encourage her college-bound daughter to help with dinner, and the mother threatens to her, “maybe you’ll catch me in time to pull my head of the oven.”  for any non-english or poet majors who had been watching, the mother explains to her daughter in the next scene or two that she wanted to study poetry.  like i said, it’s not really any category we have, but i thought people might get a chuckle out of it.

(this was actually written Sept.27, but i had some difficulty getting to this window — sorry!) 

“I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You’re out in the open field. You’re actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it’s easy to criticize something you can understand.” – Billy Collins

I think Billy Collins sums up the courage of the confessional poets in this brief quote he gives (it’s the feature quote on the poets.org website).  Collins expresses that truth is more dangerous than to lie, and beyond truth, writing it in such a way that even the common reader can understand the intensity of what’s written.  Not that other poets lie, but confessional poets put out there a deepness of truth and honesty of themselves that we don’t always see, and in such a form that is accessible and smart without being erudite.    

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