Synopses & Reviews
To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic waysandmdash;guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetryandrsquo;s stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed articulation that expands inner experience, imagining with words what cannot always be imagined without them. Through translation, poetry has diversified poetic traditions, and some of poetryandrsquo;s ways of thinking begin in the ancient world and remain potent even now. In How Poems Think, Reginald Gibbons presents a rich gallery of poetic inventiveness and continuity drawn from a wide range of poetsandmdash;Sappho, Pindar, Shakespeare, Keats, William Carlos Williams, Marina Tsvetaeva, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many others. Gibbons explores poetic temperament, rhyme, metonymy, etymology, and other elements of poetry as modes of thinking and feeling. In celebration and homage, Gibbons attunes us to the possibilities of poetic thinking.
Review
andquot;This is a writersandrsquo; bookandmdash;a must for poets. Poet-critics get at the meaning behind literary forms, and Reginald Gibbons does just that. He analyzes leaps of thought urged by rhymes, metaphors, and lexical choices. Chapters on the translation of Russian and of ancient Greek poetry are dazzling. This enormously readable book is part memoir, part report, part essayandmdash;and always conjectural, reaching forward.andquot;
Synopsis
"This anthology brings together essays by 20th-century poets on their own art: some concern themselves with its deep sources and ultimate justifications; others deal with technique, controversies among schools, the experience behind particular poems. The great Modernists of most countries are presented here—Paul Valéry, Federico García Lorca, Boris Pasternak, Fernando Pessoa, Eugenio Montale, Wallace Stevens—as are a range of younger, less eminent figures from the English-speaking world: Seamus Heaney, Denise Levertov, Wendell Berry. . . . The reader will find here a lively debate over the individualistic and the communal ends served by poetry, and over other issues that divide poets: inspiration and craft; the use or the condemnation of science; traditional and 'organic' form."—Alan Williamson,
New York Times Book ReviewSynopsis
Reginald Gibbons collects here a lifetimeand#8217;s worth of thoughts on composing and translating poetry. Not a manifesto or a general theory of the lyric, rather, the book explores how a poem thinks: that is, what results from the circumstances of a poetand#8217;s native language, choice of words and topics, the mentality that the poet shares with other writers, and the range of poetic possibilities (and limitations) in a given language. Through exemplary case studies taken from his own experience in writing poetry, as well as in translating poetry from languages ranging from Sophoclesand#8217;s and Pindarand#8217;s ancient Greek to their contemporary French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish successors, Gibbons traces the curious persistence of classical modes and images into the twenty-first century. He shows how the very language used in composing a poem, be it ancient Greek, Renaissance English, or contemporary Russian, both limits and enables how a poet thinks and what the poet can say. Even in describing difficult poetic concepts and operations, Gibbons writes in a clear, companionable style, entirely accessible not just to practicing poets, but also to general readers interested in poetry, and to writers of various stripes interested in the way our native language can often circumscribe what and how we think poetically, and affect how we compose poetry and prose. This book joins other titles by this award-winning writer on the Pressand#8217;s list.
Description
Bibliography: p. 297-300.
About the Author
Reginald Gibbons is the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. His most recent poetry collections are Creatures of a Day, a finalist for the National Book Award; and Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories.
Table of Contents
Preface
I. Origins: The Sources and Motives of Poetry
Czeslaw Milosz, Ars Poetica?
Fernando Pessoa, Toward Explaining Heteronymy
Osip Mandelstam, The Word & Culture
Boris Pasternak, Some Statements
Federico García Lorca, The Duende: Theory and Divertissement
Luis Cernuda, Words Before a Reading
Wallace Stevens, The Irrational Element in Poetry
René Char, from The Formal Share
Eugenio Montale, from Intentions (Imaginary Interview)
George Seferis, from A Poet's Journal
Delmore Schwartz, The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World
Karl Shapiro, What Is Not Poetry?
A. D. Hope, The Three Faces of Love
Hugh MacDiarmid, Poetry and Science
Günter Kunert, Why Write
Wendell Berry, The Specialization of Poetry
II. Practice: The Poet's Work
Marianne Moore, Poetry
Antonio Machado, from Notes on Poetry
Paul Valéry, A Poet's Notebook
Hart Crane, General Aims and Theories
Dylan Thomas, Poetic Manifesto
William Carlos Williams, Projective Verse and The Practice
Louise Bogan, The Pleasures of Formal Poetry
Marianne Moore, Idiosyncrasy and Technique
Randall Jarrell, The Woman at the Washington Zoo
W. H. Auden, Writing
Denise Levertov, Some Notes on Organic Form
Robert Duncan, Notes on Poetic Form
Seamus Heaney, Feelings into Words
Gary Snyder, The Real Work (Excerpts from an Interview)
A Very Selective Reading List
Notes on the Poets and Selections