Forming Question

Commenting on another blog, I realized that perhaps the idea of a "gift" can become part of a question about poetry. I shy away from the starry-eyed questions ("What was your inspiration for the poem?" or "How do you get inspired?") though that's not to say that those questions aren't valuable or even necessary. But a question involving poetry as a gift, or a poem as a gift, or that assumes gift as part of the question, or that assumes the writing process as a gift -- one of these might lead to a provocative answer from any poet/writer who might be asked.

Yet One More Question, or Three

• How much of writing a poem involves performance?

Or, better yet:

• what kind of performance goes into writing a poem?

Or, maybe:

• what kind of performance is writing?

This last one seems the most promising . . . but seems to want tweaking.

More Questions for Poets

Two questions that I retrieved from some previous notes and conversations:

1. "The role of poetry is to purify the language of the tribe." (Mallarme) -- How does poetry in the 21st Century relate to the emerging "language of the tribe"?
2. When you write a new poem, what do you want from it?

I also thought of a question on the road last night:

• Of what particular joy is poetry?

or a variant,

• What part of poetry manifests the most joy for you?

Maybe "joy" isn't the right word, but I think this last question may be close (though it does seem to be a bit wordy, for some reason).

I do hope to begin this project of asking five questions of poets some time in the next month. I'm still not sure if putting the questions and the responses on a separate blog would be more effective that posting the sets here.

If there is a lurker or two out there who have an opinion, please do leave a comment. Also, if there's a question you'd like to offer, please do.

Another Question for Poets

For the question project (five questions to ask different poets and perhaps post here), I thought to ask,

"What is the poet's duty?"

But this question seems too bound, too mired in some sort of filial piety or some such.

My wife, however, came up with this:

"What is the poet's responsibility?"

This one hits much closer to the quick, easily understood but provocative question I like. The only issue to decide now is whether to use "a poet's responsibility" or "the poet's responsibility."

Questions for Poets (and Editors) (and ?)

I have been collecting questions for some time in hopes to put together, perhaps here on this blog, a series of short interviews. Originally, I hoped to cobble five questions that an "interviewee" could answer to any length desired. I also hoped to get questions that provoke interesting responses and which poets (and others) would find useful in their work.

So far, the only question that I've found that hits the right note is:

• What is your stance on the nature of language?

If there are any lurkers here, are there questions you wish someone would ask poets and others who base their working lives on writing?

All my other questions have been either too long and involved in the asking or too trite.

In short, I'd love to have five pithy questions that are direct but highly relevant and provocative. Much like a poem, I suppose. . . .

Names and Titles That Become Something Else

I don't know if this blog will take the direction that this post might promise, but:

Sometimes titles or names become divorced from their original feel. Take Sturgeon's Law, a blog title that has taken on less and less the tone and framing radiating from the science fiction author's proverb ("Nothing is always absolutely so" according to Wikipedia) as I have visited it over the past year or so. I am thinking: if you visit a blog or house or other named thing (novel, perhaps?) often enough (or any other blog like "Avoiding the Muse" or "Exoskeleton," for that matter), the name takes on a different feel, one less explicable, perhaps. Think of the bands The Police or The Beatles. I don't think of cops nor do I think of bugs. Perhaps this is because we (I!?) develop a relationship to the object, text, etc that begins to override the original tone/meaning.

By which I mean, Nietszche was right about the pliability of language, of the human capacity to redefine, to reconcretize language into habit of meaning. Or something close to that.

So, in titling a manuscript that has been worked quite a bit, does the same thing happen? Do we concretize the title as something else (a collection of poems, for example) rather quickly, or do we work to stay that process, trying to keep the language fresh?

End of Run

I've ended the run of commenting on and with "Fugue:in medias res" over at Beloit Poetry Journal.

I noticed that the link to The Modern Review is dead. None of the links on their sites are working, so I wonder what has happened to the folks that edit and publish the journal up there in Canada. Anyone know?