The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

A Horse with Two Wings: A Note on Criticism and Poetics

❧ A Horse with Two Wings A Horse with Two Wings A Note on Criticism and Poetics Pegasus, the winged horse of poetic inspiration, was a child of the Gorgon Medusa and the sea-god Poseidon. But Pegasus was not born until Medusa was beheaded by Perseus; the winged horse waited inside his mother until that ruthless sword approached her, Bashing in the open sunlight, slicing off her head with one Bawless and merciless swoop. Freed by the violence of reason (Perseus sometimes being associated with the power of reason), the horse of inspiration emerged out of the wound, scattering drops of his mother’s blood with his hooves as he took wing for the Arst time into the skies of poetry. When I Arst learned this story I startled with recognition. I write as often as not out of a self-induced, incantatory dream state, chanting and acting out my poems as I compose. I advise my students not to worry about whether their poems make any sense when they Arst write; I’ve been known to remind them to keep a Bashlight by the bed so they can catch each gift of the unconscious mind in its Arst slippery jumpings out of the murk of primary process thought. But still it is my Arm belief that the creative murk teems more urgently and with more fertile passions after a revitalizing encounter with Perseus’s brilliantly honed, reBective sword. I think of Pegasus’s two wings as a wing of instinct and a wing of consciousness, both of them necessary for writing individual poems. If the horse stands for the art as a whole, we might think of them as a wing of creativity and a wing of criticism. Over hundreds of years, most of the major texts of criticism about poetry Based on a paper delivered at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (December 2003). have been written by poets: Horace, Campion, Sidney, Dryden, Johnson, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, Arnold, Eliot, Blake, Auden, Yeats, Crane, Williams, Bogan, Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Miles, Lowell, and on and on, and among contemporary poets Gloria Hull, Alicia Ostriker, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten , Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan GrifAn, Gary Snyder, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and many more. The work of creating, maintaining, and revising literary tradition has always been carried out largely by creative writers, whether through editing, reviews, translation, literary criticism, letters, conversation, or teaching. This truth has been somewhat obscured in the past several decades, as teaching young creative writers has become the prevalent day job of most creative writers , often to the displacement of these other more traditional day jobs. I can’t imagine poetry without criticism, or criticism without poetry. I’ve been lucky enough to have been forced, during my education, to train my poetic brain with lots of thinking about other poets, and far from making me dried up or stale, as some writers fear, it has made me stronger and taught me more faith in the uniqueness of my creative process. During the Arst decades of my own career as a poet, each of the two wings has nurtured the other, inspired the other with newness, kept the other beating forward, kept me Anding new approaches to poetry and new angles of both thought and inspiration. In addition to completing four books of poetry, I’ve written two books about poetics and edited or coedited another six books on poetics—and in fact, almost every bit of that critical writing and editing has arisen out of my own speciAc challenges as a poet and has in turn enriched and recontextualized my creative work. Here are two Arsthand examples of this kind of fertile interaction. Studying nineteenth-century popular culture in graduate school, I began to notice in myself a Aerce attachment to a group of obscure, neglected poets. The challenge of uncovering critical justiAcations for my attachments led me to a new understanding of poetic subjectivity in my own poetry and eventually to recognizing the importance of ritual and community in my work. Later, while writing my Ph.D. dissertation, I traced out a dactylic rhythmic pattern infusing numerous passages of poetry I loved. Disciplined by the need to Anish the book, I listened 2 to this pattern in other poets until I could no longer ignore it. And then—perhaps not surprisingly—I was compelled to write in this rhythm and in other new rhythms myself, leading to a new vein...