Counterbalance

Billy Collins - Introduction to Poetry

Poetry Appreciation (less spasmodic, of course) continues this week as I've not even scratched the surface of what a "proper" down & dirty poetry week might consist of......and there are still so many of you that were interested in contributing. So, just when we thought we were safe and could shrug off that poetry nonsense (complete with eye-roll) to get back to more bookish pursuits, the week claims another week for itself. Should be fun, let's see where this goes.

While it seemed far too obvious to begin the first poetry week with a poem by our poet laureate, eight days in seems like a fine time to point you towards one of Billy Collin's poems that captures the very reason I wanted to have a down & dirty poetry week in the first place:

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside a poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Copyright 2001 Billy Collins
Excerpted from Sailing Alone Around the Rom, New and Selected Poems

This sums up my academic poetry experience quite well.  You?

Matthew Tiffany's Poetry for Dummies - With a Powerful Twist

The ever-insightful & always-frank Matthew Tiffany, of Condalmo, shares his insights about a poetry appreciation that starts off "vanilla", veers towards poetry for dummies, and ends up being just what he needs: something that resonates within him throughout the day.  Isn't that what we all hope for with poetry?:

My relationship with poetry is pure vanilla - plain, unadorned, no surprises.  I went to University of Maine at Farmington, a school with a good creative writing program, a good English major, good liberal arts in general (I think it's been rated top liberal arts college in the Northeast many years in a row now).  Wes McNair teaches there, or did; same with other well known poets, the names of which escape me, because I never took any classes with them.  My major was English, and I have no memory of any classes in poetry, which is sad.

My extracurricular poetics lead to some overheated stanzas here and there.  I worshipped at the altar of Bukowski, like any good English major.  (I was accused once of only liking Bukowski because of the U2 song about him, on their Zooropa album.)  I liked his poems, bought a book of his letters, thought Post Office was dynamite.  (Not poetry, I know.)  Dead Poets Society - yep, loved it times ten, but was wise enough to know a bad idea when some guy tried to start a DPS at our school.  Towanda, indeed.  I joined the writers' guild; I liked e.e. cummings, or E.E. Cummings, depending on who you asked.  Liked him enough to buy the $60 Complete Poems book, which I immediately filled with little scraps of paper, marking the ones I liked the best.  Soon after buying it, I received a birthday present copy of it from an ex-girlfriend with a slightly randy inscription.  My inability to tell her I already had it, and my unwillingness to move all those pint-sized paper scraps, lead to both volumes being shelved, and I've rarely opened them since.

In the past few years, I've come back to poetry for the briefest of periods - probably far less than anyone else that will contribute other, better posts to this subject.  I very much like William Stafford's work, "An Introduction to Some Poems" in particular.  I've printed poems here and there that I thought spoke well of the human condition, especially in our modern times, etc. blah blah.  I posted them at workplaces; nobody cared.  I retreated and bought Good Poems - both paper and on CD, read by Keillor and others - which I suspect puts me at the equivalent of reading John Grisham for Dummies on the train, but I don't care, because I like what I see in there.  Something about those small poems, most a page, two at the most - I read them right before bed (though not for a long time now), just one a night, and it settles me.  It does the job.  Fiction - prose - I need to interact with it, immerse myself in it, feel it surround me, feel the weight of it in my head when I am working and can't get to the book.  Poems are a break.  The only poem with one of those little slips of paper is Marge Piercy's "To Be of Use", which I am glad to discover tonight, opening this book after a long time away from it, because it speaks well to my mindset these days.

Lit Bits & A Bit About LAist

• Poetry Appreciation Week continues with more posts forthcoming from some of your favorite litbloggers.  In fact, it seems that the "week" might spill over into next week.  What does that meant to you? It means that if you are lurking in the shadows and have only now gotten up the courage to share your thoughts on poetry (surely the Clash post set the bar very low, did it not?), there's still plenty of time. Please comment or email me about your desire to share and I'll make it happen.
• Michael Redhill's Consolation is now in bookstores stateside! I had a chance (thank you Michael!) to get an advance copy of this (my very first, i must school myself on how to do this better in the future) and it was a moving read that I keep thinking about weeks after finishing it. It lingers in the mind.  My full report on it will be up next week. In the meantime, do check out what the blogcritics have to say. No NYT or LAT love just yet...hopefully we'll see something soon.
• Ed points out a Birnbaum interview with Heidi Julavits which perfectly illustrates the point I'm planning to make in my final Julavits post in the coming days.  She is smart, possibly too smart to seem down-to-earth enough during a reading, but she is a writer who captures the true essence of human beings and all of our faults and pretend non-faults.  Stay tuned.
• Condalmo shares what could be one of the top highlights of my 2007: Twin Peaks, Season Two. On DVD. April 10, 2007.  Mark your calendars and ask for the week off!
• Kensington Gardens is slowing a bit for me, despite my intense praise (which still holds). Reaalllly slowing. Anyone else experiencing the same?
• And finally, I've just been added on as a contributor to the LAist, the premier metroblog for Los Angeles!  Very exciting stuff -- and a huge thank you to Carolyn Kellogg for kicking me in the butt and telling me to go for it.  They cover it all and do so with an attitude seen nowhere else.  I'm so new (and green?) that I won't be on the staff pages for awhile. Have to build up the blog cred and all that.  But, I will be able to cross-post here 48 hours after posting there.  So, watch for that and do check in at the LAist on a regular basis.

A Different Kind of Poetry

One of my first introductions to poetry of an altogether different kind (but, really, how different?), was through the music of The Clash.  It wasn't until college that I discovered them -- I know, a crime. I was a child of the 80's and you know what that meant....big hair, big earrings and terrible music.  A dear friend of mine loved The Clash and had a marvelous story about using their lyrics for a junior high assignment. (Thank you Steve, wave hello, you're on camera.) 

I don't quite remember the details -- did the teacher ask them to write a poem, or just summarize their summer vacation? -- but Steve came in, stood at the front of the class and read the lyrics to "Lost in the Supermarket" by The Clash:

I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality

I wasn't born so much as I fell out
Nobody seemed to notice me
We had a hedge back home in the suburbs
Over which I never could see

I heard the people who lived on the ceiling
Scream and fight most scarily
Hearing that noise was my first ever feeling
That's how it's been all around me

I'm all tuned in, I see all the programmes
I save coupons from packets of tea
I've got my giant hit discoteque album
I empty a bottle and I feel a bit free

The kids in the halls and the pipes in the walls
Make me noises for company
Long distance callers make long distance calls
And the silence makes me lonely

And it's not hear
It disappear
I'm all lost

Quite powerful lyrics now matter what age -- but particularly poignant coming out of a 12 year old's mouth, no?  Apparently the teacher was very concerned that Steve was experiencing abuse at home, or at the very least, had some abusive neighbors and was suffering from loneliness. She was also a bit stunned at the poetry coming out of this kid. So worldly, so mature. One can almost imagine her sighing "ah, they grow up so fast."  In reality, he was just a very hip kid who knew a good poem when he read it.

While not an example of the most poetic Clash lyrics ever penned, and there are many in my opinion, these words do capture a very specific kind of feeling, a mood. "I wasn't born so much as I fell out" is very powerful to me and is, again, an example of how the right combination of words packs a punch.

I always smile when I hear this song and imagine Steve's teacher being both horrified and, I suspect, a tad jealous at his early poetic skill.  It reminds me that poetry can be found anywhere...in anything...especially outside the turreted castle walls of academia. 

Escapegrace Finds A Way Back In...To Poetry

The very clever & cunning Chris from escapegrace has graced us with her thoughts (post birthday rock & roll karoke hangover, no less! happy birthday!) on her on-again/off-again affair with poetry.  She mentions one of MY most favorite reads for 2006 by Maggie Nelson -- please run to buy this and read this! She also explores the idea that I think we're all secretly laboring under -- when did poetry get so damn serious and how can we make it fun again?:

When I was in third grade, I transferred to a brand new elementary school designed on the classrooms without walls model. If you were bored, you could look through the bookcases at the grade next door. I don’t think I was bored very often though, because I spent much of my free time that year composing an epic poem in rhyming couplets. (This was years on from the early experiments of “I see a flower in a tree/I see a flower on a bee” with illustrations.) To remember this shocks me because I feel so estranged now from poetry as a way to express or entertain myself. Callie’s request for poetry reflections made me wonder why this is.

Often times when I read poetry, I can’t find a way in…someone to talk to, or more specifically, someone to tell me a story. My first reaction is to describe this as a lack of “voice,” but the problem may be that I’m just not listening closely enough. Reading a novel is relaxing – the narrative is usually clear in even the most avant-garde fiction – but with poetry, the meaning and movement are more subtle. Frankly, you often have to work for it. Having spent the entirety of my adulthood pursuing a doctorate and “working” on literature, I didn’t want to work for pleasure. As a result, I read less and less poetry as time went on. In my few attempts to write poetry, I felt I was writing a story with line breaks and sadly, I am no Robert Browning.

Now that I’m through with school – walled and unwalled classrooms alike – I’m finding my way back to poetry slowly through the incredible privilege of having poets as friends. Jean Gallagher came out with two volumes in the past year or so – both of which are stunning: This Minute and Stubborn. Ali Liebegott won a Lambda Award for her prose/poetry hybrid The Beautifully Worthless last year, though I have to say old habits are hard to break – I’m even more excited for the new novel, The IHOP Papers. My excellent advisor and two former classmates also have recent collections worth checking out: Wayne Koestenbaum’s Best-selling Jewish Porn Films, Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder, and Geoffrey Jacques’s Just for a Thrill.

In considering the titles above, I think that part of the reason I’m being drawn to this poetry (aside from knowing its creators) is that the genre is becoming more fluid, allowing bits of prose to poke through without somehow undermining the seriousness of the poetry. Perhaps it’s an image problem. Somewhere along the road – taking the long way to avoid Bukowski’s house after the Beats off-ramp – poetry got so serious. I’m glad to see there’s some play at work in the genre, making it more available to be the voice of serious times.

Ai's Salome

Another poem that immediately comes to mind for me when I remember poetry is out there and mine for the reading, is Ai's Salome. What struck me most about her work when I first read it was how brutal it was. How frank and honest.  At the time I was so used to the flowery poetry of sonnets & more canonical poets I was supposed to find interesting.  Instead, I was drawn to Ai's powerful, almost gut-wrenching poetry. It was like nothing I had ever read before. I didn't know poetry could be like this and it fascinated me.

The collection that I always come back to is Sin. In it (and several of her other collections), she writes her poems as dramatic monologues by assuming the persona of a historical or fictional character.  Something else I had never seen in poetry before I read her work.  As a writer of fiction, this immediately appealed to me and I marveled at how she pulled it off. What she imagined them to be thinking, what she invented and made her own. The poem I found most powerful (and shocking and altogether, what the hell?) from the Sin collection is Salome. The first four lines in particular have always been an example to me of how powerful a few simple words can be when arranged in a specific manner.

Brief bio from another outstanding poetry anthology - The Before Columbus Foundation Poetry Anthology:

"A true child of America's multiethnic and multicultural drift, Ai's father was Japanese and her mother was part black, Choctaw, and Irish. Just as she refuses to compromise her particular vision by writing from some preordained 'women's' point of view (a fact which draws criticism from some), she refuses to be placed into any ethnic pigeionhole.  Ai's poetry relentlessly goes for the jugular. Critics have commented on the knife-like quality of Ai's writing; and her poems do slash sharply -- through history, across contemporary cultural divisions, and deep into the consciousness of the reader -- to lay bare the profound disorder that lies just beneath the surface of things."

Salome:

I scissor the stem of the red carnation
and set it in a bowl of water.
It floats the way your head would,
if I cut it off.
But what if I tore you apart
for those afternoons
when I was fifteen
and so like a bird of paradise
slaughtered for its feathers.
Even my name suggested wings,
wicker cages, flight.
Come, sit on my lap, you said.
I felt as if I had flown there;
I was weightless.
You were forty and married.
That she was my mother never mattered.
She was a door that opened onto me.
The three of us blended into a kind of somnolence
and musk, the musk of Sundays. Sweat and sweetness.
That dried plum and licorice taste
always back of my tongue
and your tongue against my teeth,
then touching mine. How many times?--
I counted, but could never remember.
And when I thought we'd go on forever,
that nothing could stop us
as we fell endlessly from consciousness,
orders came: War in the north.
Your sword, the gold epaulets,
the uniform so brightly colored,
so unlike war, I thought.
And your horse; how you rode out the gate.
No, how that horse danced beneath you
toward the sound of cannon fire.
I could hear it, so many leagues away.
I could see you fall, your face scarlet,
the horse dancing on without you.
And at the same moment,
Mother sighed and turned clumsily in the hammock,
the Madeira in the thin-stemmed glass
spilled into the grass,
and I felt myself hardening to a brandy-colored wood,
my skin, a thousand strings drawn so taut
that when I walked to the house
I could hear music
tumbling like a waterfall of China silk
behind me.
I took your letter from my bodice.
Salome, I heard your voice,
little bird, fly. But I did not.
I untied the lilac ribbon at my breasts
and lay down on your bed.
After a while, I heard Mother's footsteps,
watched her walk to the window.
I closed my eyes
and when I opened them
the shadow of a sword passed through my throat
and Mother, dressed like a grenadier,
bent and kissed me on the lips.

Ai, “Salome” from Sin (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986).
Copyright © 1986 by Ai. Source: Sin (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986).

See what I mean? I cringed just now while re-typing it.  Sheesh. Heavy stuff.  Not where my usual interest in poetry lies. Yet there is something so sinister and dark -- so strongly stated -- that it's always stood out for me as an excellent example of what poetry can communicate. Perhaps I also have a soft spot for her because she is both Choctaw Indian and Irish, as am I.

A brief insight into why she explores such dark topics, is her response to why she changed her name to Ai: "Ai is the only name by which I wish, and indeed, should be known. Since I am the child of a scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop, and I was forced to live a lie for so many years, while my mother concealed my natural father's identity from me, I feel that I should not have to be identified with a man, who was only my stepfather, for all eternity."

Other Ai links to check out:
Critics & Her Response

PBS Interview with Ai
Interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth of the Jim Lehrer News Hour

Lauren Cerand's Cosmic Poetry Connection

The lovely, delectable, and intrinsically stylish Lauren Cerand of Lux Lotus offers her views on poetry & mentions some great poets and new books (books! new books!) I cannot wait to check out. She also makes the first stab at what I had hoped this week would be all about -- making the connection between poetry and the world we're living in at this very moment:

It's rather cosmic that you asked me about poetry because it's a subject that I've been thinking about a lot lately. Whenever I'm feeling busiest in my day-to-day life as an arts publicist, I often find myself turning to the compact intensity of a poem during the brief moments I have to read for pleasure before bed or in transit.

Not too long ago, I found myself carving out a new identity following the demise of a long-term relationship that defined most of my twenties... perhaps this explains my awakened interest in the sort of furtive, grasping love that poets seem to capture so eloquently!

The Stray Dog Cabaret, recently published by NYRB Classics, is my idea of a perfect volume of poetry. Loosely gathering work by poets active just before the Russian Revolution, it conjures a sense of place in the reader's mind that is at once enchanting, doomed and austere. It's hard to imagine while we're young that long after we're gone the only image that might remain, if any, is of a shawl slipping from a lover's shoulders; that truth and beauty fade. And yet, it is what it is, unabashedly ephemeral and ever more wondrous for ever having existed at all.

Other stand-alone poems I've been returning to repeatedly lately, all classics: "The Young Fools" (Les Ingénus) by Paul Verlaine, "Dear Miss Emily" by James Galvin and "The Métier of Blossoming" by Denise Levertov. In  a more contemporary vein, I love "Deer Quake" by Aase Berg and Robert Baker's "your limbs are like the cranes, my little fascist" the latter of which Michelle Lin of New York Brain Terrain turned me on to not long ago.

It would seem that my love of all things poetic has even crept into my professional life, given two of the books that I'm publicizing at the moment: David Breskin's Supermodel, an epic poem that tells the story of an archetypical supermodel in one sentence, interspersed with found text from the Internet (Soft Skull Press), and Gayle Brandeis' Self Storage, a novel about a woman whose habit of buying and reselling storage unit contents sets her on a path of self-discovery inspired by Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. While very different in many respects, both books are extremely culturally relevant and firmly place poetry in its most resonant context: commenting on the world around us, right now. I am grateful for it.

Lauren Cerand writes about art, politics and style, broadly defined, at LuxLotus.com.

Down & Dirty Poetry Appreciation (Or, please let's not get precious)

As I sit here reviewing the poets that I return to again and again (when I remember that poetry exists at all), I'm struck by something that I failed to make very clear, very plain from the outset: I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Not really. Not in the academic sense. When I boldly declared a "let's all appreciate poetry" week late on Sunday night, I had no grand visions of poetry analysis, of discussing the merits of various forms and their place in the shifting landscape of poetry through the centuries, of comparing the differences in structure between poets & their relevance in the artistic world.  I only meant to say - hey - the beauty of a well crafted phrase, of a carefully chosen word, can inspire those of us who write longer works and so what of it.

Instead, I'm afraid (and I believe you are as well) it might appear as if I've invited you all to provide some sort of academic treatise on poetry. There seems to be, among most of the writers I've spoken to in the last 24 hours, a real hesitancy to comment on anything related to poetry because there is an inherent "academia" angle that none of us wants to touch with an 80 foot pole. We aren't poetry scholars after all and so what could we possibly contribute that would add value? Shed light?

But that is exactly my point.

For me, poetry has always had the stink of PhD analysis and academic importance. Weight. Heft. All those things that a fiction writer might not bother with once they are out of the academic life.  It was only when I started to see poetry as something that was less scholarly -- and more accessible -- that I began to appreciate it. I suspect this is true for many of us, which is why we twitch and twitter at the thought of discussing poetry. For the most part, we read books. We discuss them at length because we feel comfortable doing so. We can talk about narrative threads and leitmotifs and all those things that make a novel a novel because we have more practice reading them and writing them. With poetry...eh...not so much. We are out of practice, our poetry instruments rarely, if ever, tuned.

So, with that, I will say this: let's get down and dirty about it. Let's toss the snobbery and snootery out altogether. Let's just be frank. Whose poetry do you read and why? What do they do for you that you can't get from another writer? If you don't read poetry, why? Throughout the course of this week, I will likely mention poets you've never heard of that have never won a thing and won't be found in any canon. You may dislike everything they've ever written. You will likely highlight poets that I've never heard of and realize I want to learn more about...or not.  Someone may decide to chuck poetry altogether after a few quick glances at the poems posted. You may point out that poetry to you is the third verse of a Radiohead song, the opening line of a Dylan anthem, the words written on a notecard from a friend, a quote you keep toting around year after year. That is what it's all about. Taking the precious out of the poetry.  Can we do that? Am I crazy?

Eugenio Montale's Thieving Ditch

As I mentioned in the post that kicked off my mad "let's appreciate poetry because we never properly do week" (more on precisely how mad later), there are a few lines or word couplings that immediately spring to mind when I re-discover poetry every year. The one that always re-presents itself to me, ALWAYS, is the phrase "thieving ditch" from Eugenio Montale's The Storm. I'm not an avid fan of Montale's work. I don't even own a single book of his work.  I only have the four poems he contributed to the Against Forgetting anthology, which I mentioned in my last post.

Thieving ditch. What is so powerful about those words? This phrase always struck me as so...odd. It leapt of the page the first time I read it many years ago and I haven't been able to shake it since. How could a ditch be a thief? How could it take from you? And ditch? Such careful selection of the word...not hole, not crevice, not anything other than a ditch.  It immediately establishes a vision. The very idea that a ditch could actively conspire to take from you, from others, from something else entirely, always hit me hard because it is so inventive and so specific. After you read it, you can't help but think "Of course! The thieving ditch!" -- but never before would I have imagined those two words together. To me, that is the power of poetry. Especially for a writer of longer works.  Inventive use of words that when placed side by side, convey an entirely new, yet fully appropriate, meaning.  Thieving ditch.  Yes, of course.

To provide context for the phrase, a brief bio of Montale and the full poem is below. Strange that I never remember the rest of the poem, as the thieving ditch has always overshadowed all else.

Bio from Against Forgetting:

"Montale's formative experience came as an officer in the Italian infantry during World War I. Marked by the cultural pessimism that pervaded postwar culture, Montale was an early opponent of Fascism. During World War II, when he was a director of a library in Florence, he joined the 'hermetic' movement of poets; their highly subjective, difficult verse has been described by Joseph Brodsky as 'an act of cultural self-defense -- linguistic self-defense, in the case of poetry -- against Fascism.'  Montale was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975."

The Storm:

The storm splattering the tough magnolia
leaves, with the long rolling March thunder
and hail,
(tinklings of crystal in your nocturnal
nest startle you, out of gold gone
from the mahoganies, on the edging
of bound books, a grain of sugar
still burns in the shell
of your eyelids)

the lightning blanching
wall and trees, freezing them in that
forever of an instant -- marble manna
and destruction -- which you carry sculpted
inside you for your damnation, and that binds you
to me, strange sister, more than love --
then the hard crack, the castanets, the shaking
of tambourines over the thieving ditch,
the stamp of the fandango, and overhead,
some gesture, groping...
As when you turned around and, with your hand, the cloud of hair
clearing from your forehead,

you waved to me -- and stepped into darkness.
                                  -TR. William Arrowsmith

With A View to Less Spasmodic Poetry Appreciation

A few blogs over the past week have mentioned poetry.  Whether quoting poetry as a comment on recent events or pointing to a recent article on short stories that quotes US poet laureate Billy Collins, these brief inclusions made me realize that I've got a sort of on again/off again thing with poetry.  I'm very hot/cold. When it's on, it's on. When it's not...eh.  I've read poetry for years, yet I've failed to keep it top of mind, failed to tap into it each day/week/month for the precision (of word, of thought, of meaning) that can only be found in poetry.  Instead, I reach for it only when in need, become obsessed all over again, then drop it a month later just as quickly as I took it back up. 

I realize this is foolish. Any writer, of any stripe (or none, in my case) can learn a great deal about language, rhythm, meaning, double meaning -- word economy -- from poets.  Every time I'm reminded again that poets exist (why must i need reminding? this is crazy. what is wrong with me?), a few specific poems & poets leap immediately to mind. Phrases that have always struck a chord (but always? how can it be always if i forget until i'm reminded?) spring forth and bloom again within me.  I lug out all my poetry anthologies, every slim volume from every poet I've admired over the years, every photocopied page of handwritten lines from a friend at a reading.  As soon as I re-read the words that have inspired me again and again, I am renewed, strengthened. Fortified.  After spending time with poets (in print or in person), my own writing becomes better, more succinct, clear, full of life.  Regular readers will likely wish me to read poetry every morning in an effort to stem the tide of words that often flows here and could (always) be pared, shorter, sweeter. Clearer. So why, why do I keep forgetting that poetry exists?

Ironically, one of the anthologies I always reach for when I fall back in love with poetry is Against Forgetting - Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness edited by the divine Carolyn Forche.  "Bearing witness to extremity -- whether of war, torture, exile, or repression -- the volume encompasses more than 140 poets from five continents, over the span of this century [20th] from the Armenian genocide to Tiananmen Square." This collection contains works by some of the best poets I've ever read & introduced me to a slew of others I'd not yet read when I first encountered this anthology many years ago.

The second collection I pull out as soon as I find myself getting all hot and bothered by poetry (hot/cold, hot/cold) is Aloud - Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, edited by Miguel Algarin, founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York city which showcases "the work of the most innovative and accomplished word artists from around America."  The introduction by Bob Holman begins with this: "DO NOT READ THIS BOOK! You don't have to. This book reads to you."  I have always loved that beautiful intro and find it to be remarkably true of this collection. It features spoken word poets that I had never read until happening upon this collection (thank you Quincy Troupe for lighting the way) and their work is so powerful it's simply unacceptable that I only remember them once a year at most.

In honor of these powerful poets and a few others that I find spilling out of my shelves and yet not spilling out of my mouth, not crowding my mind on a daily basis as they no doubt should be, I declare this "let's make our love of poetry less spasmodic" week.  Or, more simply (because isn't that the point of poetry? at least for me? economy of words? less is more? all that?): rediscover poetry week. I'll be taking a look at some of the poets that I keep revisiting again and again (but not often enough) and I'll explore how poetry informs and inspires those who do not write poetry, but fiction.  I hope to hear from all of you about the poets you read, the poets you don't, and, when all is said and done, what role these poets and their poetry play in the creation of your own work.