April 22, 2009
The pink dogwood I bought and planted last year hasn’t pink flowers at all, but small pale green ones. This is a disappointment that cannot even be remedied, as I’m not about to dig up and discard a living tree.
Gave up two theater possibilities to attend a poetry reading at the university last night. For years I’ve done the thing in the city when it has conflicted with the thing on campus, but my trip to Exeter made me think I should try to turn that around for a while. Maybe not. The highly touted poet (a friend of one of my colleagues) was a nice man, surely, but a gawdawful poet. The badness was worse than the wasted hour and missed opportunities: the room was full of students who were begged, coerced, commanded to attend, and now they are confirmed in their notion that poetry is a bore, a kind of spiritual castor oil that nobody likes but everyone takes from time to time. My anger is inappropriate, perhaps, but anger it is. Some poets think–and Iowa is the epicenter of those that think it–that poetry is the translation of everyday experience into striking language. Even when the language is in fact striking, that is not what poetry is, nor is making the audience approve of the poet’s sensitivity and diligence and depth what poetry is for. Last night the poet bragged– I suppose he was bragging–that there was one poem he’d been working on for five months and still hadn’t gotten it right. I wonder if it never struck him in the last five months–or fifty years-- that maybe he had chosen the wrong profession. His wife sat in the front row guiding us by chuckling adoringly in all the right places.
Poetry points forever away from the poet.
Poetry is not the ordinary overwrought, but the extraordinary wrought as simply as possible.
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Robert Dana is the author of ten collections of poetry and two works of literary nonfiction, and has recently completed his tenure as Poet Laureate of Iowa. He is the winner of numerous literary awards including a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship and was the founding editor of the revived North American Review. Dana was Poet-in-Residence at Cornell College for forty years and has been Distinguished Visiting Writer at Stockholm University and at the University of Florida. His most recent book of poems is Morning of the Red Admirals, published by Anhinga Press.
At the 2007 AWP conference in Atlanta, Anhinga Press celebrated Dana’s long poetic career with a panel made up of editors from major literary journals throughout the U. S. The Chattahoochee Review joined in the celebration by co-hosting, with Anhinga Press, a reception in Dana’s honor.
Nevertheless. . . . .
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