It's rare today to hear anything worthy of your attention said about poetry. A pleasant exception is an interview David Yezzi, a poet and executive editor of The New Criterion, gave last week to Mensnewsdaily.com. Yezzi has good things to say about Geoffrey Hill, Kay Ryan and other great living poets. Here's a sample of Yezzi's common-sensical understanding of poetry:
"Fortunately, poems have always been written in traditional verse, even in the free-verse heyday of the later twentieth century. I suspect they always will be. Good poems are nigh impossible [to] write, and any poet who abandons certain time-tested and powerful tools and techniques (on political or aesthetic grounds) does so at his peril. Formal verse technique is strong medicine—the most precise instrument we have for calibrating shades of meaning and emotion. Doing without it is not just playing tennis with the net down (as Robert Frost said) but playing without a ball. I’m not opposed to free verse, but I am opposed to those who are reflexively for it to the exclusion of all else."
1 comment:
He says some good things, like his point that a master's degree in poetry is worthless, and what follows.
He also says some dumb things, though, like his apparently complete dismissal of free verse, and what follows.
An interview from poetry's more conservative wing, by all appearances.
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