Whitman

And I Chose—All: Mary Ruefle

by Colie Hoffman Poetry
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Picasso wrote this well before Mary Ruefle started publishing books, but if his words could be an egg, Ruefle’s Selected Poems would hatch right out of it.

Tagged as: abstraction, Collie Hoffman, mary ruefle, paul’s fish fry in bennington, Picasso, Pynchon, selected poems, timberland, Vermont, Whitman

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‘Those are not the words’: Walt Whitman’s collapsing taxonomy of poetry

by Daniel Silliman Language
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Whitman seeks to establish a taxonomy of poetry, a system classifying what is good poetry, what bad, but the structure he establishes keeps collapsing.

Tagged as: death, Leaves of Grass, Poetry, poetry theory, Whitman, “Song of Myself, ” anxiety

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Trying to do something important: a couple of thoughts on ambition in a work of art

by Daniel Silliman Aesthetics
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Melville worries that his ambition will fail, that his picture of the whale will “remain unpainted at the last.” He is always aware he’s always on the verge of the whole thing breaking down, but the ambition is there. Beating underneath. It acts as the will to will it onward, the drive to make it work, a promise to try to do something great, the stakes that are high enough to make it worth while even if the whole thing fails.

Ambition, all by itself, makes the work a thing of value.

Tagged as: "A", ambition, important works, Louis Zukofsy, Melville, Moby-Dick, Sufjan Stevens, Whitman

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Towards a Different Kind of Workshop

by Joe Weil Academia
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I am not the expert teacher here, but the experienced learner, the one who has a love for poetry and gets excited by weird things like grammatical ambiguity, or how the poet used the weather to suggest a mood.

Tagged as: A Darkling Thrush, beginner poets, Poetry, Thomas Hardy, When Lilacs by the Dooryard Bloomed, Whitman, workshop

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