From Walking Light by Stephen Dunn

From the introduction:

"Poems should shimmer with a necessity, or otherwise be "holidays of the mind" -romps fpr the serious, trips to worlds that resemble ours."

"A free verse poem is a dance made of words, which moves at a rate not dictated by an y theory, a dance on an open road."

"A poet is someone who is constantly liberated and constricted."

"Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done. Poets who remain poets have, presumably, worked through the terrors of influence, and are willling to acknowledge their debts by using them in order to go their own way. They've learned what Thomas Mann knew: "A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

"The revision process is when we worry the poem toward its virtues. We arrange and rearrange, suppress amd add. We try to make it seem as if we danced all the way home."



pg . 18 - 19: "Poetry should offer us something we can believe abour ourselves and the world, or it should offer us something that will provoke or suggest contemplation about ourselves and the world."


The Good and Not So Good:

"The good poem is implicitly philosophical. The not so good poem conversely, may exquisitely describe a tree or loneliness, but if the description does not suggest an attitude toward nature, or human nature, we are left with a kind of dentist office art - devoted to decoration and the status quo."

"The good poem maintains a delicate balance between strangeness and familiarity. The author must make the familiar strange enough to be reseen or re-felt by the reader....But a poet should never be strange for the sake of being strange."

"The absence of wit or humor in a body of work is understandable. For some poets the conditions of their lives and the world are too dark for such leavening elements. But the absence of language-play, even in the darkest poems, is a sign of compositional torpor." (I couldn't agree more. I often have a hard time enjoying poetry that doesn't own a bit of wit (ex: Louise Gluck)...but I do find myself enjoying poetry that is not humorous if there is a presence of astounding words or language play.)

"It is often tempting to conclude that in a good poem the poet has taken large risks. But risk is rarely the right word. Ambition is more precise. ... The success of a good poem is linked to its necessity, to a subject that presents itself to the poet with a particular urgency." So I guess he's saying that it's more ambition than risk, because ambition is more subjective...more of a necessity, and therefore the poem will be more powerful, more profound in its message. Risk only involves bravery where as ambition involves bravery and need. A good poem derives from a poet's craving/need to write or express.