A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver

Introduction

***** Exercise
Poems:
- written in emotional freedom
- the content of the language

"A poem that is composed without the sweet and correct formalities of language, which are what sets it apart from the dailiness of ordinary writing, is doomed. It will not fly. It will be raucous and sloppy - the work of an amateur."


Getting Ready

"Writing a poem is not so different - it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens."

*** a passionate relationship and speak what is in tis own portion of your mind, the other responsible and purposeful part

"A final observation. Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness ti receive it - indeed the world's need of it - these never pass."


Reading Poems

"The truly contemporary creative force is something that is built out of the past, but with a difference."

"To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the first through the mountain. Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a nee idea into the air."


Imitation

"It demands, finally, a thrust of our own imagination - a force, a new idea - to make sure that we do not merely copy, but inherit, and proceed from what we have learned. A poet develops his or her own style slowly, over a long period of working and thinking - thinking about other styles, among other things. Imitation fades as a poet's own style - that is, the poet's own determined goals set out in the technical apparatus that will best achieve those goals - begins to be embraced."

Poetry of the Past
"To be without this felt sensitivity to a poem as a structure of lines and rhythmic energy and repetitive sound is to be forever less equipped, less deft than the poet who dreams of making a new thing can afford to be. Free verse, after all, developed from metrical verse."

"The presentation of metrical verse first is often so off-putting that it is worthwhile letting it rest on the tracks. There is much to be said for the idea of reading, talking about, and imitating contemporary - and I mean congenial contemporary - poems first, and then, later, as students become more confident, ambitious, and sophisticated, suggesting that they move on to (or back to) the difficult patterns of metrical verse."

"The space between daily language and literature is neither terribly deep nor wide, but it does contain a vital difference - of intent and intensity.

**** in structure or statement

"Language, ... , is the medium that will be quick and living - the serviceable clay of one's thoughts."

Poetry of the Present

*** "the familiarity of the language itself - not very different from the language that we use daily - gives confidence."

"One learns by thinking about writing, and by talking about writing - but primarily through writing.
Imitating such poems is an excellent way to realize that they are not very similar after all, but contain differences that are constant, subtle, intense, and radiantly interesting."


"Emotional freedom, the integrity and special quality of one's own work - these are not first things, but final things. Only the patient and diligent, as well as the inspired, ..."


P. 1 Introduction - P. 18 Imitation
A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide To Understanding And Writing Poetry
by Mary Oliver
A Harvest Original, Harcourt, Inc. , 1994