Note on Poetry

Most poetry (most writing of most kinds, to be honest) is terrible. This includes mine. Most of it is bad because it is written on an extant level. You've thought about something, and then you write it, and then you try to make it sound nice. Sometimes you edit your thoughts to make it sound nicer, or sometimes you don't care how nice it sounds because you don't read your poetry out loud. That's when you produce 99% of the trash that's out there. I'm not excluding myself from this; everyone's written like this at some point, and even when you've learned to write with more patience, a steady hand, so on and so forth, you still write with the surface of yourself more often than not. It's a heinous truth, but there it is, like stomach cancer.

I read something by Pound in my "literary translation" readings that really slapped me upside the head because I'd been trying to say it all last semester in a class, and I couldn't say it clearly. Here goes: "Nothing counts in a poem save the quality of emotion." I was trying to say something about sincerity on the writer's part, not necessarily to the subject of the poem, but to the composition of the poem, and people thought I meant sentimentality or lack of humor, irony, or wit, which is clearly not what I meant. Whole heart in, I guess.

Translation's a sticky subject. I'll talk more about it later. I'm going to go buy a bagel or something.

I like some Adam Zagajewski, I think, but I don't know, as I don't know Polish. And I worry that I can only read most modern Polish poetry in translations by Clare Cavanaugh. There are few, sometimes no, alternatives.