Anne Stevenson on Art

I recently attended a "Lunch with Honors" session with poet and UM alumna Anne Stevenson. I found the talk pertinent to what we had discussed in class earlier that week (Ezra Pound's poetic principles), particularly as she listed her own three principles of poetic creation (presumably inherited from Elizabeth Bishop): accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery. For comparison, Pound's three principles, as stated in his essay, were: direct treatment of the subject/object, to use no unnecessary word (is this the same thing as conciseness? doesn't one lose something by being too concise?), and to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase (i suppose this means to treat poetry as music, to make the words come alive in all dimensions, starting with acoustics). I thought Stevenson's principles were frankly easier to understand (perhaps that was because she was there to explain it in person), even though some of them coincided with Pound's. They both seem to stress the value of knowing exactly what it is that one is writing about ("accuracy" and "direct treatment") and to present it in an honest fashion; does this also agree with Pound's statement that no word should be superfluous--for if one is addressing a specific subject, would dressing it up in unnecessary words be an act of dishonesty? Would it be kind of analogous to (modern day) rap music--its value found solely in phonetic flow, and lacking substance? Is music enough to count as substance in poetry? Does it really matter what the words are saying as long as they invoke some visceral response? Is that the final goal of art? Or is it useless unless it's cognitively provocative? I found the last of Stevenson's principles to be vague and a bit troubling: "mystery." A poem must not be too explicit, else it grow incestuously obvious to the reader, was what I gleaned from her statement. Isn't this irresponsible, to purposefully try to veil your work from the audience's understanding? But I also do agree that poems lose much of their beauty and power when they become too obvious. Does Pound's insistence on conciseness also entail obviousness? No, because as long as the writer knows what he or she is doing with each word, the construction of the poem is still purposeful and unoccluded by mere distractions, figures placed here and there for reasons not even understood by the author himself. And another one of Stevenson's principles also contrasts with Pound's (or what I understand to be Pound's) doctrine; she values spontaneity in her poetry. While this does impart a freshness to the work, is it really at its best stage after you first work through it? I guess Kerouac took it to the extreme when he refused to give any of his poems a second glance, published them all as they were right after conception. While that does offer an invaluable snapshot into his creative process, sometimes work needs to be revised over and over again (like the mapping project for this class) as more material accumulates in the brain. Stevenson also stated in her talk that "poetry is not logic. Above all, it is about emotions." I used to use visceral tension as a gauge for the quality of a poem, but I've begun to reprocess that thought; isn't it a little cheap to ride on emotion alone? A little too easy? Sure, the transcription, time-encapsulation of emotion is extraordinarily resonant, but I keep feeling like there is something else...Harold Bloom writes in his essay, "The Art of Reading Poetry," that the highest form of poetry should invoke a sense of "strangess" of being. Provocation. Innovation. These take a large reservoir of creative resources to remain faithful to. Is it really true that if you have nothing new to say, you shouldn't say it at all?

She also brought up another interesting topic that relates in a way to the artist's duty (what is it, exactly?). She discussed the state of modern poetry and its movement away from traditional forms into more and more formless products, and perhaps consequently more and more nebulous products that fail in large part to capture either music or meaning. Writing can serve as therapy for the writer, but though these pieces can sometimes resonate on a short wavelength, true art serves as therapy itself, resonating, dislodging, breaking apart something in the brain stem or soul, allowing for regeneration, re-creation, and blooming.