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Technology and Inspiration Introduction to A Poet’s Craft No other art besides poetry has had such a mythology attached to its sources of inspiration. Painters have no myth of Helicon, the sacred spring whose water brings inspiration. Dancers have no Pegasus to ride, composers no Mount Parnassus to climb. Everyone knows that “the Muse” is a poet’s companion. Why do poetry and poetic inspiration hold such a special place among the arts? Poetry offers balance between the logical, verbal left side of the brain and the musical, spatial right side of the brain, combining meaning and rhythm as no other art can do. Poetry uses the same words we all use every day, and so it transmutes the intimate chatter of our lives into something more powerful. Maybe that is why the word “poetic” is used so widely in our culture ; I’ve heard it used in popular journalism to describe a Alm sequence, the movements of a dancer, a work of architecture, an especially sublime landscape, and a delicious dessert. Anthropologist Julian Jaynes writes about a special connection between poetry and the unconscious: in preliterate cultures , deities always talked in poetry, and some poets still “hear” their poems spoken by an internal voice. His idea explains the age-old association of poetry with religious ritual and magical incantation: poetry transports us in a way that no other art can do, because it brings the conscious and unconscious mind into a new relation. No wonder poetic inspiration is considered so precious. While exciting, such widespread stereotypes about “poetic inspiration ” can be something of a burden for a poet. On the one 43 Introduction to A Poet’s Craft, a poetry-writing textbook in progress. hand, if “poetry” or “poetic” can apply to just about anything lyrical or graceful, that implies in turn that just about anything lyrical or graceful can be poetry. Many of the students I have taught start by deAning poetry as nothing more than “self-expression” or “intense language.” On the other hand, inBated stereotypes about poetic inspiration can make poetry seem capricious and impossible for a mere mortal to control. Some beginning poets are afraid to read poems by anyone else, fearing to damage the purity of their inspiration. Others are hesitant to revise and improve their poems, because they feel that only their Arst drafts have been sanctiAed by direct contact with the Muse. Taken to its extreme, the fetishization of poetic inspiration can lead to a Romantic machismo of self-destructive behavior, ranging from Rimbaud’s “systematic derangement of the senses” to the suicidal madness of Berryman, Crane, and Lowell described in Eileen Simpson’s memoir Poets in Their Youth. Such a life is not many contemporary poets’ lifestyle of choice, and it doesn’t increase the odds of writing good poetry. Yet the students who are afraid to damage their inspiration are sometimes those who treasure poetry the most, recognizing in it a precious art that does have the power to render language transformative. How can such attitudes be reconciled? How can we acknowledge and honor the special, unique power of poetry, and at the same time bring the process of writing poetry into our lives in a balanced way? A Poet’s Craft is built around a personal solution to this dilemma, arrived at through decades of my own service to the Muses. My solution to the problem of how to write poetry amid such contradictory stereotypes is a paradoxical one, based in the root kinship between the word “grammar” and the word “glamour,” the link between the technical and the transformative aspects of poetry. Poetry uses a basic raw material of human daily life, language , in a unique way. It abstracts certain physical aspects of language—rhythmic pattern, word sound, phrase—and shapes them, molds them, transforms them, through one simple technique : repetition. Such use of repetition is one of the very oldest and most universal cultural strategies on the planet. The tools of poetic repetition developed in every tribal society as a way to allow poets to memorize traditional stories and chants, preserving for the living the voices of long-dead ancestors. It 44 takes several days for seventy-year-old Jussi Huovinen, the last living singer of the Finnish epic poem “The Kalevala,” to recite the entire poem that was handed down to him by previous poets, using certain repeating phrases as a base, in a meter based on the hypnotic motion of rowing. To listen to...

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