AFTER CLASS MARCH 20


I even spelled "write" as "right" in the criteria sheet.
Geez, the heat and sleep deprivation I guess. Here is that
"reader notes" sheet I handed out. I'll bring a hard copy
next Tuesday with corrections!

reader notes

1. Interesting persona—can you indentify the speaker,
and is he/she more than just the teller of a collection of various
poems? Is it intelligently constructed via content/style/voice
etc. Is the poet someone you’d like to talk to at a party or
someone who’d bore you until all you could think about was
escaping? Is the speaker identifiable, and somehow an
interesting blend of the “poet” and some fictional construct?

2. Is there somehow a narrative running through the sequence
of poems, "postmodern" or otherwise? Meaning: even if the
poem feels ambiguous and fragmentary, like a photograph of a
field of consciousness, you can you feel the presence of a
story, either in some unidentifiable subtextual manner or as a
record of the present tense moment(s) of composing?

3. Is the poet’s ability to “tell” (while not "showing" via metaphor
etc) interesting in and of itself?

4. Do the poems feel urgent, necessary, while at the same time
maintaining, in the voice or style—whatever—a sense of play?
In other words, do they avoid the sentimentality of high
seriousness in tone, while somehow expressing emotion that is
vivid and deeply felt? Or is the whole thing just clever,
ironic-seeming, a reason to show off or be “in the reader’s face”
as it were?

5. Read the table of contents. Is that alone interesting enough
to make you want to keep reading (or start)? It should be.

6. Is the form necessary? If the poems were simply shaped
into prose would it matter much? It should.

7. Again, how about the humor (comedy), playful OR black?
Entering a book of poems should not feel like watching a soap
opera. What do we care if your father hit you when you were
little. You still have to surprise us and we still need to struggle
a bit with the reading of the poems. There should be some
willful difficulty involved. That is a kind of pleasure poetry
can bring to a reader (and some fiction) . . .

8. Is the tone original, or is it just the tone of some poet
telling/writing poems once again, good God please help us?
Or a case of “I like to read mythology and then write poems
showing how much more I know than the average person.”