Moxley's Moxie

The first time I read Jennifer Moxley's "Fragments of a Broken Poetics" was when it was published on the Poetry Daily website, under their prose feature which reprints pieces from other journals, in this case from Chicago Review, Spring 2010.

Yesterday I was reminded of the piece when listening to a lecture that Moxley gave at the University of Chicago in which she read the "Fragments" in its entirety (now that's a funny sentence!). (This lecture can also be downloaded on iTunes U under the University of Chicago's Poem Present Reading and Lecture Series.)

Moxley extensive musings about poetry and poetics have evolved into 50 fragments that brush against topics such as audience, semantics, imagination, authenticity, and others. Some fragments seem to contradict others. And the ones that stood out to me this time (pasted below) are undoubtedly not the ones that impressed me the most the last time I read this piece, inexhaustibility of the piece under repetition being a sign of good thinking and often also of good writing.

 from Fragments of a Broken Poetics

by Jennifer Moxley

III

A poet only needs one poem, a poem only one reader. Moving from singular to shared in this instance is a rudimentary economy. It is less affecting than a mortal kiss, more than a passing conversation. The poem will always provoke an acute desire to know its creator, "acute" because hopeless.

X

The poet who foregrounds the surface qualities of the word—sound, texture, look—must be especially scrupulous when building the poem's semantic foundation. Effects should enhance complexity, not replace it, otherwise they risk giving complexity, which already struggles to justify itself, a very bad name.

 

 

XVII

Sleep, to whom Keats partly owes his "worthy rhymes," has long been kin to poetry. Saint-Pol Roux affixing a sign that reads "poet at work" to his bedchamber is the most playful example of this alliance. Both sleep and poetry open a passage to the unconscious, one by nature, the other by artifice. Both create memories of astonishing wakefulness, one through dream, the other through imagination. It is almost impossible to reproduce or transmit such experiences by other means.

XXVIII

Poems demand a concentrated lingering to which we are unaccustomed. This is why they cause discomfort. When we stand still in one place, attempting to document and respect the details, we feel as vulnerable as a small creature in an open field beneath avian predators. Rapid and sequential page turning gives us a sense of progress and accomplishment, relieving us from the double threat of frustration and impatience.

 

XLI

After a point, even the poem can grow bored with its own devices.

Stallings Interviewed by Gylys

Here's a great interview of poet A. E. Stallings by poet Beth Gylys. The link is to the Poetry Daily Prose Feature, but the original interview comes from Five Points.

Stallings discusses a few of my obsessions: motherhood and writing, and formal writing. Below enjoy an exchange from the interview.


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Gylys says: In an interview in Valparaiso, you said, "I do need some sort of difficulty, though, to catch myself off balance, to make me keep my wits about me, to keep the right brain from knowing what the left brain is doing, as it were (or is it vice versa?)." I love this idea that form somehow confuses you enough to free you at the same time. I often talk to my students about this need to find ways to get out of our own way. . . .

Stallings replies: I do believe that form is not about having control, but about giving up control, or the illusion of control, to the poem. A rhyme might give you permission to say something that you might have hesitated to say, or might not even have thought to say. It opens up the possibilities, for me, rather than closing them down. I find that I do have to have some sort of surface difficulty, usually, to get purchase on a poem. But not so much difficulty that it becomes an exercise in cleverness. I try to let the poem make its own rules. But I suppose all poets do that in their own way.

Poems on 9/11

Here is what you will read if you visit the Poetry Daily Website today, 9/11/11 (with visual imagery of the New York skyline in light gray, the missing towers in shadow gray).

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SEPTEMBER 11

Poetry Daily is dark today
as we join our friends around
the world in remembering those
who died as a result of the
events of September 11, 2001.

*******************

I understand this impulse to silence. But I also understand why so many people turned to poety right after the devastation, and still do today. After all, poetry is  heightened language, and sometimes it is the best that we can do. Sometimes it is the only thing we can do.

The Poetry Foundation discusses some of the poems that address that horrific day or have comforted us in its aftermath in these two podcasts:

Two 9/11 Poems
The Mutilated World (after the poem title containing that phrase by Adam Zagajewski)

Interestingly, many of the poems cited in the second (and longer podcast) are from Polish poets, and they capture the mood and contemplation of post-9/11, even though they were written prior to the event in response to something else entirely.

If you want to reference the Jenny Holzer project mentioned in the first podcast, click here for an article by Shelley Jackson. Holzer's project is based on the idea that all of us with our fragmented impressions together make up the whole that not one of us alone can ever embody.

It ends with these haunting lines:

but

but whose

but whose full

but whose full meaning

but whose full meaning will

but whose full meaning will always

but whose full meaning will always remain

but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.