Just wanted to share with my friends here that Roy Bentley, a poet and friend of mine, invited me to come visit him for a couple of days to discuss my recent work.
I felt a bit like "Grasshopper" in the tv show Kung Fu. I am at the airport headed back to Dallas as I write this. We talked of many things, mostly centering on how to "open up" my work. We talked about lines of import, points of interest, in medias res, intentionality, "furniture" and so forth. It was priceless. We talked about how to add other voices to turn some of my "thought poems" into broader pieces, and how to answer some of the questions raised by my fledgling work here. We spoke a lot about how adding even more details can, somewhat counter-intuitively to me, make a work a poem more universal. We talked about flipping stanzas and the importance of opening and closing lines. We talked about editing in sequence and avoiding the trap of trying too hard for "compression" in the first draft (which I'm guilty of in order create a poetic rhythm or sound from the outset beginning); better to get the intention on the page and then cut out the unneeded language. In short,
to put the intention ahead of the schematic.
This was all done conversationally across a table while sharing a meal or in opposing comfortable couches. None of it was offered as Gospel, or delivered in a pandantic way. We looked at the poems of others and talked about how they went about their business. To me, it felt like watching the curtain pulled back, exposing some of the mechanics.
I share this mainly because the trip strengthened my passion for poetry. I have a long, long way to go. But I have a better sense of my bearings. I just needed to share.
A little about Roy:
"Roy Bentley has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Ohio Arts Council. His poems have appeared in the Southern Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Pleiades, Blackbird, Sou’wester, American Literary Review and elsewhere. He has published nine chapbooks and three books of poetry, including The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana, which won the White Pine Poetry Prize and was published by White Pine in 2006. (The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana). His fourth collection, Starlight Taxi, is the winner of the 2012 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry and is currently availble for purchase from Lynx House Press (http://lynxhousepress.org/how-to-order) and from Amazon.com (Starlight Taxi)."
http://www.roy-bentley.com
http://arts.gov/writers-corner/bio/roy-bentley
I felt a bit like "Grasshopper" in the tv show Kung Fu. I am at the airport headed back to Dallas as I write this. We talked of many things, mostly centering on how to "open up" my work. We talked about lines of import, points of interest, in medias res, intentionality, "furniture" and so forth. It was priceless. We talked about how to add other voices to turn some of my "thought poems" into broader pieces, and how to answer some of the questions raised by my fledgling work here. We spoke a lot about how adding even more details can, somewhat counter-intuitively to me, make a work a poem more universal. We talked about flipping stanzas and the importance of opening and closing lines. We talked about editing in sequence and avoiding the trap of trying too hard for "compression" in the first draft (which I'm guilty of in order create a poetic rhythm or sound from the outset beginning); better to get the intention on the page and then cut out the unneeded language. In short,
to put the intention ahead of the schematic.
This was all done conversationally across a table while sharing a meal or in opposing comfortable couches. None of it was offered as Gospel, or delivered in a pandantic way. We looked at the poems of others and talked about how they went about their business. To me, it felt like watching the curtain pulled back, exposing some of the mechanics.
I share this mainly because the trip strengthened my passion for poetry. I have a long, long way to go. But I have a better sense of my bearings. I just needed to share.
A little about Roy:
"Roy Bentley has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Ohio Arts Council. His poems have appeared in the Southern Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Pleiades, Blackbird, Sou’wester, American Literary Review and elsewhere. He has published nine chapbooks and three books of poetry, including The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana, which won the White Pine Poetry Prize and was published by White Pine in 2006. (The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana). His fourth collection, Starlight Taxi, is the winner of the 2012 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry and is currently availble for purchase from Lynx House Press (http://lynxhousepress.org/how-to-order) and from Amazon.com (Starlight Taxi)."
http://www.roy-bentley.com
http://arts.gov/writers-corner/bio/roy-bentley
Last edited: