my poem keeping it pure has popped up at ars poetica (the poems-about-poetry project of infinite reach where poets invite other poets & one poem appears a day. i’ve joined great company.)
i’d nearly forgotten about it. my piece is a re-write of an old piece & is a couple of years old. it’s interesting therefore: is what i was thinking then what i am thinking now? it was written because the poet / editor susan hampton told me to write a ‘poetics’, & i did it as a poem. it was homework.
i guess things in the poem are still familiar. the basic message is it’s difficult to write a poetic statement. how stupid. but shklovsky said the key was metaphor: original metaphors bring us back to life, help us ‘see’. people suspect ‘newness’ but they shouldn’t. kinsella said somewhere periphrasis was good, that is using more words than necessary to describe something. susan thought it more likely to mean ‘over-writing’ but i didn’t & don’t.
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