'A Poem is the Case of the Deliberate Transformed by the Accidental...'

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...is a quote from poet David Kirby's article Why, Poetry? which can be found here.

David Kirby is an American Poet and Professor of English at Florida State University.

The article includes his ideas on pretty much every aspect of poetry. The first one being what a poem is and what the poet’s relationship is to the poem, he says the following:

A poem is a reluctant lover. You, the poet, are crazy about it, but it couldn’t care less about you. Pursue the poem aggressively and it’ll run away or, like a figure out of Greek myth, fall dead at your feet when you touch it. Reverse psychology will only get you so far: If you ignore a poem, it might whisper a line in your ear the way the answer to a crossword clue pops into your head when you’re not looking at the puzzle, but it won’t whisper two lines, much less a whole stanza.

Great summing up, don’t you think? The two-way choice – fuss the poem into oblivion or give it the cold shoulder and strike lucky only on the barest of an offchance.
He later goes on to say that:

A poem is the case of the deliberate transformed by the accidental.

The deliberate is the intention of writing a poem and the accidental is the unexpected that happens to jolt life into the poem. He says that in the film Casablanca, the deliberate happens when a woman walks into a bar, the accidental is what follows, the play-it-again-Sam lift that makes what starts out as trivial transform into art. In Ode to a Grecian Urn – the deliberate is the guy noticing some pottery; the accidental is what happens because of him noticing the pottery.

He also speaks of the reaction people give when he says he is a poet:

When strangers ask what I do and I tell them I’m a poet, a typical reaction is, “Gee, I just don’t get poetry.” But do you “get” Rossini’s String Quartet in C Major, I reply? Or if you’re at a dance recital, do you stand up in the middle of row H and shout, “Stop! I don’t get it!” Just give poetry a chance, I say. Many poems don’t work for me either, but most are short, so I just keep reading until I find one that, as Emily Dickinson put it, takes the top off your head when you read it, or gives you a chill no fire can warm.

I love the parallels he makes here between ‘not getting’ poetry and the idea of someone stopping in mid-listen or mid-look to cry similar regarding ‘not getting’ a piece of classical music or a dance recital. The idea of giving poetry a chance and not having the need to ‘make things click’ immediately is one of the fundamentals of enjoying poetry. One can allow music and art to wash over them and bring them ‘there’ but it seems that poetry is deemed to have the ‘I don’t get it’ cry attached to it for life.

He goes on further to talk about how poetry is a unique art form. He compares poetry with fiction by saying:

If art parallels life—if it recreates on another level the mixture of light and shadow that is human existence—then what makes poetry unique as an art form? Let’s compare poetry to its closest relative, fiction. This is a simplification, but in fiction, the writer is usually trying to get George to Sarah’s house by eight o’clock with a bunch of roses, say, whereas in a poem, there’s usually neither a George nor a Sarah but an “I” who is trying to understand something that will probably never be fully understood.

The rest of the article is very interesting as well. He goes on to talk about reviewing poetry and the whole American history of the practice of poetry since World War II.

One line I found totally enchanting and revealing is the below. He uses this line to explain what writing about poetry is like ...and it seems to sum it all up. : )

So writing about poetry is like taking a photo of Bigfoot: There’s a grainy image, but the main thing you notice are the tracks leading into the trees.

* As an aside, there is a David Kirby connection to one of my poems and The Wrong Miracle, albeit a tiny, tiny connection, but this is how I discovered this guy. : ) I talk about it over there...