Comments on: Reevaluating James Wright’s “A Blessing”

By: Loren Webster

Loren Webster — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:53:22 +0000

This certainly isn’t my favorite Wright poem, by a long shot, but it seems like a love poem, and I’d rather expect a love poem to be “sentimental,” right?

There’s certainly nothing “sentimental” in a better poem like “Small Frogs Killed on the Highway” or â€œLament for My Brother on a Hayrakeâ€

Wright is too formal for my taste, but his early poetry seems more depressing than “sentimental.” So I can forgive a little sentimentality in his later poems.

By: An Exemplary Lyric by Jane Cooper : Sharp Sand

An Exemplary Lyric by Jane Cooper : Sharp Sand — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:04:03 +0000

[...] artist. In my own work & as a teacher I love physical detail & plain speaking that “blossom” into emotion. Cooper’s poem “Rent” is exemplary: If you want my [...]

By: Robert Peake

Robert Peake — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:14:34 +0000

Three cheers for educated emotion.

By: jd

jd — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 22:11:51 +0000

I think the horses are horses, Laura, and Wright should have satisfied himself with having the experience and recording it rather than celebrating his own sensitivity, which is how the poem reads to me now. WCW & Chas. Reznikoff created an “objective” poetry in reaction to the emotional slush of a previous generation. I’ll take my stand with those guys.

Jim, I couldn’t agree more that the artist has to come up to the line & maybe even slip across sometimes. I’d even argue that the main reason for poetry’s existence in our culture is to enable educated emotion — what Flaubert called “sentiment” as in A Sentimental Education.

And I think there should be an artist on every planning board in the country. Science does not have an exclusive claim on the truth, obviously.

By: Laura Jensen

Laura Jensen — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 21:39:08 +0000

In July 2004 I attended an ecology meeting that discussed Washington’s Growth Management Act’s Best Available Science policy – information can be produced only by a valid scientific process, work conducted by qualified individuals using documented methodologies. The moderator specified that works of art would not be admissable as testimony. Since then I have noticed the subject of art reevaluated – for example, in the Focus The Nation project, 50+ instructors are included under Obstacles to Change, their suggested panel should contain an artist who talks about what makes a polar bear such a powerful iconic image. My experience with the dismissal of art had begun there, my experience with poetry had included a lot of works with nature as the topic. Maybe James Wright has been considered the Best Available Art on such a topic as two horses and the different approach concerns the idea of sentimentality. Are the horses an icon or a sentiment?

By: Jim Finnegan

Jim Finnegan — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 20:18:04 +0000

Probably the worst thing that could be said about a poet is that he/she is being sentimental. Yet it’s also the emotional boundary line that has to be approached boldly, and maybe even crossed, if you’re going to write poetry that is important to people other than specialists.

By: Tad Richards

Tad Richards — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 03:07:07 +0000

A lot of people don’t like Billy Collins. Probably fewer don’t like Shelley. But I think both of them are writing on a sufficiently professional level to be used as examples, for beginning poets.

I used Collins because I happened to have one of his books close to hand at the time I started musing on this, and made up the concordance to the two student poems.

By: Jonathan Mayhew

Jonathan Mayhew — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:24:17 +0000

Have you thought of using better poems than those Billy Collins? They are not exactly models I would put out there to be emulated.

By: jd

jd — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:31:23 +0000

Tad, I haven’t had time to go through that handout, but a quick once-over suggests it’s very interesting & just the sort of thing some of my students might respond to.

By: Tad Richards

Tad Richards — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:27:08 +0000

I don’t make any rules that can’t be broken, and I always let my students know that they may want, at some point or other, to break any rule or guideline I ever give them. And I tell them that every word, and every construction, and every part of speech in the language is there for a reason, and all of them have their place.

But I do think that beginning poetry students use too many modifiers. I give them this handout, which breaks down some poems by part of speech:

http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/tiredworking.htm

And you’ll notice that at the end of the handout, I point out that Allen Ginsberg broke every rule I ever established, and wrote superb poetry.

And I still think Wright’s adverbs are flaccid and unnecessary, and contribute mightily (aha!) to the sentimentality of the poem.