The Uselessness of Poetry

Paul Muldoon doesn't think poetry is necessarily good for anything:

Though I think it’s true that poetry may help us to understand aspects of the world and think about the world in unexpected, revelatory ways, I’m not sure if I have ever quite accepted that it has a use, that there’s a utility in terms of helping us live our lives. That is certainly a theory of poetry that we’ve seen have some currency, and indeed I think Seamus Heaney probably believed something along those lines. It’s a tradition in recent years that one can see extending through Seamus to people like Czesław Miłosz. It’s a theory of poetry which suggests that it might be able to truly bring us succour and solace, almost religious benefits. But, however attractive it might be as an idea, I’m not sure if it quite works. I go to poetry for engagement with language and for revelations that are momentary rather than longer-term. It may be that the moment can be repeated or extended. But the moment in which we accept that the flea, according to John Donne, is a marriage-bed and a temple is a moment that is quite fleeting. It’s a moment that embodies a truth, but I’m not sure if it’s a truth that truly helps us live our lives.

Maxine Kumin 1925 – 2014: Reax

Philip Schultz:

Maxine, or Max to friends and family, was nothing if not a pioneer. A Jewish woman poet at a time when it wasn’t exactly fashionable to be any of those things, she knew firsthand how to make room for herself in hostile terrain. Even her farm (which she affectionately and ironically named Pobiz, after the perilous mixing of poetry and business) had to be imagined and then made out of brambles and hard labor over a period of fifty years. Her poetry represented both an alertness to and an investment in the sanctified details of the natural world, a love of the music of the commonplace. Her desire to experience and take note was unlike anyone else’s I know.

Dan Piepenbring:

Her precision earned her plaudits, though she was sometimes chagrined by the extent to which her gender tinted her reception; she said in 2005, “I so resented being told by male poets, ‘You’re a good poet. You write like a man.’ When you drove them to the airport to catch that flight at the last minute: ‘You did a good job. You drove like a man.’ It was such a different world. The expectations were so different … I was not influenced by women writing poetry. There weren’t any women to admire. I could admire Marianne Moore, but I certainly couldn’t write miniaturist poems like her. And I admired Elizabeth Bishop, but she was very classical and held everyone at a distance. Mentor was not a verb at that time. I certainly wasn’t being mentored by anybody.”

Carol Muske-Dukes:

Kumin wrote deceptively straightforward poems. The "below surface" artistry of these poems lay in their ability to transform familiar experience to precisely calibrated insights, couched in a quietly elegant style. She served up tart helpings of pure joy—but she could do "dark" as well as the gloomiest poets.

Paul Muldoon:

Like the horses she raised on her farm in New Hampshire, Maxine Kumin was a thoroughbred. She belonged to the line in American poetry that may be traced back through Robert Frost to Mistress Bradstreet. Her poems have the virtue of being meticulously observed and of dealing plainly with the things of the world.

Don Share:

The land got into her writing so deeply that when someone called her “Roberta Frost,” she accepted it as a compliment. Her sense of place sustained her and her poems, which now sustain us. “Poetry’s like farming,” she wrote: “It’s/ a calling, it needs constancy.”

Play It By Ear

John McAuliffe isn't entirely convinced by Paul Muldoon's foray into song-writing:

Rock lyrics, though, are far more confining and precast, formally, than the expansive long rhymed poems and brilliant sonnets and sequences of Muldoon’s poetry. At times a reader can almost hear the sounds of Muldoon’s wheels spinning as he attempts to drive the lyrics towards the territory of his poems.

Matthrew Zapruder reminds us of the difference between poems and song lyrics:

Words in a poem take place against the context of silence (or maybe an espresso maker, depending on the reading series), whereas, as musicians like Will Oldham and David Byrne have recently pointed out, lyrics take place in the context of a lot of deliberate musical information: melody, rhythm, instrumentation, the quality of the singer’'s voice, other qualities of the recording, etc. Without all that musical information, lyrics usually do not function as well, precisely because they were intentionally designed that way. The ways the conditions of that environment affect the construction of the words (refrain, repetition, the ways information that can be communicated musically must be communicated in other ways in a poem, etc.) is where we can begin to locate the main differences between poetry and lyrics.

Is the Postmodern Poem a Dead End?

Leontia Flynn thinks so.

"Rather than figuring the endless textual networks with which we have all become so familiar, I want to stop clicking, scrolling and speed-reading and shuffling on to the next song, and instead focus on poetry which stays still and feels something. And this is what I want to write too. Not unmediated self-expression, of course, but not pre-emptively cut off with a glib reflex."