American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work, ed. by Joe David Bellamy
Univ. of Illinois Press, 1984
The endlessly-quotable American Poetry Observed is a must-read for every poet, and will be an engaging read for anyone interested in the creative process behind the writings of the 26 major poets interviewed. Joe David Bellamy has done the world a great service in compiling these interviews from a wide array of sources, sometimes even cobbling together several interviews for a single poet.
Not only is it interesting to read these poets’ thoughts on the creative process, but we also get quite candid glimpses of their opinions about their own contemporaries – many of whom are included in the collection. For example, Mark Strand elaborates: “…a lot of the time I like the work of poets because I like them personally. I make great excuses, I guess unconsciously, for their poems. With Stafford, I’m just not interested in what he writes about or how he writes it. I don’t like his preachiness, his self-righteousness.”
Certain names crop up again and again among lists of poetic influences: William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, and Marianne Moore, for example. But many of the poets interviewed here are also translators, so it’s nice to see familiar and not-so-familiar poets whose works we in the U.S. might not know of if not for the dedication of translators: Cesar Vallejo, Herman Hesse, Georg Trakl, and Carlos Drummond Andrade.
I say that American Poetry Observed is endlessly quotable, so I will conclude with two of my favorite quotes, which relate to the notion of craft and technique in poetry:
Galway Kinnell – “A poem is not interesting because the technique is superb; it’s interesting because the person has understood something. So the only way to teach writing is to tell people to forget about writing superbly and to learn something.”
Josephine Miles – “A poem that draws attention to its craft is my idea of a poem caught in the middle of a process, one which hasn’t arrived anywhere yet. My ideal of a poem would be one which is almost transparent – where you hardly know that it’s not everyday conversation.”
313 pgs.
