This blog is an off shoot of my class at Santa Monica College Continuing Education, Poetry Writing and Reading Workshop, which is starting up on Feb. 21. It will let me share a lot I won’t have time to cover in the class proper. I will be happy to answer any of your questions I think I can shed light upon, and welcome all comments.
Let me get my credentials out of the way: I have studied poetry with A. E. Stallings, Ed Hirsch, Eavan Boland, David St. John, and Cecilia Woloch. My poems have been published in the poetry journals: The Antioch Review, Transformation, The Truth about the Fact, Indefinite Space, Slant, Pinyon, in the Parisian journal, Upstairs at Duroc, and most recently, in the anthology, Beyond the Lyric Moment. My chapbook, This Desert Inclination, was published in 2007 by a local small press, Conflux Press. I am a painter as well as a poet.
I grew up in Bluefield, West Virginia, regularly visit my large extended family in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, and yet have been living in LA long enough to have developed a sense of deep roots in both East and West. I have a Masters in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis from Loyola Marymount University LA, was inducted into the honor society, Alpha Sigma Nu.
My poetry aesthetic: I began wiring free verse, have come to enjoy and even need formal verse (rhymed and in meter) from time to time, and also written some poems I consider experimental. In other words, for me all approaches to poetry are good, and being restricted to any fixed allegiance to any particular form would shut us off from a great deal of fascinating poems and seriously diminish the pleasure, love, joy and happiness available to us.
In my class, I am always happy to take requests, and one of my “repeat attender” students, Loene Trubkin, made note of the recent passing of Mark Strand, one of America’s highly honored and respected poets, and she requests that we spend some time with his work in the upcoming class. So we will be looking at some poems by Mark Strand among others. For me reading or listening to poems is my greatest source of inspiration, and keeps me intimately in touch with the huge poetry community, which extends not only around the globe, but also reaches far back into the earliest time of human consciousness, just as it will carry forward into future, limited only by the span of human existence.
But to come back to America in the early part of the 21st century, and Mark Strand. In addition to his work, I highly recommend his book of essays: Weather of Words, and also the anthologies he edited, especially the Golden Ecco Anthology – 100 Great Poems of the English Language. From Strand’s introduction: “This is a distillation of my list [of favorite poems] as it currently stands—a list within a list, an inner circle. For a poem to be on the list it must have remained an undiminished source of pleasure over innumerable readings and set such a high standard of technical accomplishment that it seems as much an object of wonder as it does a form of communication.” Well, of course, his list, and my list, and your list will differ greatly, but we can learn a lot by perusing his choices and perhaps reflecting how they differ from ours and why. And for my class, of course, we are much more free-wheeling, in the sense of being open to a great variety of poems, many of them NOT of great technical ability, again to learn why not and how to improve our own work. More soon.