Anglo-Saxon

Ted Hughes's poetry conveys the force of Germanic/Anglo Saxon words brilliantly. He used many short, frequently monosyllabic words, words which are concrete, compact and full of force and violence. Sometimes these words do battle with the Latinate words. Here's a poem of his, which exemplifies this clashing:

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Words of Latinate origin: luminous - vanish - entertain - tremble

Words of Germanic / Old-Norse / Old-English origin: coal - drummed - grip - stone - shatter - bang - brunt

Say..yes, say...yes

I need to guard against too much randomness, too much parody and too much poetic rhetoric.
Christian Marclay's "More Encores" contains tracks that spur me to creativity, especially the Gainsbourg / Birkin treatment.

Kleinzahler

As my reading of 'Red Sauce Whiskey and Snow' advances beyond the half way point, I am digging it more and more.

Details, concreteness, sense of place, diction.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order.

A poem by John Ashbery

THIS ROOM

The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us.
Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.

Ted Hughes

'Eliot says that the best thing a poet can do is read aloud poetry as much as he can. This should be sound. Silent reading only employs those parts of the brain that are used in vision. Not all the brain. This means that a silent reader's literary sense becomes detached from the motor parts and the audio parts of the brain which are used when reading aloud - tongue and ear. This means that only one third of the mental components are present in their writing or in their understanding of reading - one third emotional charge...' (letter to Sylvia Plath 1956)

nothing to say

Don't remember where I found this


The journeys on which Ashbery sends us do not run from A to B. Any linearity of thought is lost in the woods. Rather, insights accrue at the margins, sudden revelations are not what we first thought, emotions are located but cannot be tracked. The question is how - not what - do his poems mean. Composition and content amount to the same thing. As the poet Charles Simic has observed: "Whatever an Ashbery poem eventually turns out to be about is not an idea he started with but something he stumbled upon as he shuffled phrases and images like a pack of cards. It's precisely because he has nothing to say initially that he is able to say something new