I thrill to Marianne Moore’s animal poems, and I wish I’d discovered “The Pangolin” before including a pangolin character in one of my Christmas pageants a few years ago. (“My tongue is longer than my body! Wanna see?”) However, Grasshopper, today’s lesson comes from Moore’s “The Buffalo” (1934), which has the unusually humorous line and… Continue reading A cool line-break
Author: Paul Baerman
Thinking syntax
I quite like Emily Khilfeh’s “Ekphrasis On ‘The New York Times’ Headline ‘Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom’,” which I find especially moving and especially well crafted. The Palestinian topic was outside my experience yet accessible to me. Oh, here’s a related and interesting interview she did. It all led me to this,… Continue reading Thinking syntax
Wait, you get to decide what you like?
My reading of verse this year has been sometimes depressing, since I’ll never be able to write like, say, Wallace Stevens; it’s also made me angry given the pretentious, self-absorbed habits of some contemporary poets bred in the hothouses of writing programs where novelty was valued more highly than rigor or sense (pace Flannery O’Connor),… Continue reading Wait, you get to decide what you like?
Being messy
I always feel reassured when I see other writers’ first drafts, since they look kind of like mine–hopeless. On the other hand, Ben Jonson commented that his friend Shakespeare never revised, though readers then and now agree that sometimes he should have. We have it on no lesser an authority than Ernest Hemingway that the… Continue reading Being messy
From poem to lyric?
Not every poem can be easily or beautifully set to music. A few years ago I read Auden’s Christmas Oratorio with great excitement, but it’s not hard to see why Benjamin Britten reneged on his promise to write music for it: I’m pretty sure it would have been longer than The Ring Cycle! Today I… Continue reading From poem to lyric?
Louis MacNeice
I’ve begun studying Autumn Journal (1939) with great love. Though shorter, it’s every bit as brilliant as Tennyson’s In Memoriam or Wordsworth’s Prelude. I have to take my time to read the sections over and over, noticing and appreciating different things on each read—diction, rhythm, assonance, consonance, rhyme, closure, the power and pathos. I’m sorry… Continue reading Louis MacNeice
Thinking about Jenny Xie
A few things I noticed about Xie’s verse…
Five Pages of Verse
Yesterday my friend Kristin and I completed our submission for an Orange County grant that would enable us to commission and perform a song cycle based on my poems. The idea excites me. Also yesterday, I submitted five pages of verse, as required, to the North Carolina Poetry Society, which offers a weeklong residency at… Continue reading Five Pages of Verse
Reinventing myself (again)
I’ve reached iteration Paul 9.0, Poet. I test-drove a few poems in performance in front of local audiences this spring was surprised at how receptive people were…