Notes from the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival

After a 2004 semi train wreck of a Dodge Poetry Festival somewhere in Princeton (redeemed by Edward Hirsch and Philip Levine after the weather, the parking and the trekking between tents tried to ruin what had always been a great experience), the Dodge returned to Waterloo Village. For me, Teacher Day was about dualities, what Tony Hoagland called dialectical poems and what Billy Collins referred to as “two-ness” or “double-ness.” These dualities carry in their kit bags the paradox, ambiguity and ambivalence – all the confused feelings – that belong to the realm of poetry and usually disturb us when we find them elsewhere.

I’ll start from the Main Stage, where Billy Collins did a late morning session. I’ve always liked Billy Collins, ever since I heard Bill McCarthy read “On Turning Ten” at a Connecticut Writing Project session. He’s disarming – Collins, that is – and for whatever reasons, some people can’t get past that, and assume that he’s not taking his craft or his ideas seriously. Hogwash.

In distinguishing between prose and poetry, Collins said that prose is a continuation of noise, while poetry is an interruption of silence. And after a few moments, I realized that whenever I read a Billy Collins poem, I am silent after the last word. At the end of “On Turning Ten,” for example, you are required to have a moment of silence. Maybe it’s the sounds of the poem itself that take you there, or maybe it’s the sympathy you have for the protagonist in the poem, or maybe it’s your own feeling that there’s some truth to the idea that you’re ET for a time and you shine when you’re cut, but at some point you, just like the rest of us, or I, just like the rest of you, bleeds when we’re cut. Whatever it is, the silence isn’t an absence of noise, but an active, noiseless movement of the mind.

Unlike some of the poets at the festival, Collins is very aware that his audience on Friday is teachers. His discussion of double-ness in poetry speaks to the dualities in the audience – people who love to read and perhaps write poetry, who also take upon themselves the responsibility to teach young people to read and perhaps write poetry. He began by giving his audience a number of definitions of poetry, all of which have embedded in them the tension that characterizes poetry. Here they are:

Poetry is:

“things that are true said in words that are beautiful” (Dante)
“musical thought” (Carlyle)
“emotion set to measure” (Hardy)
“the best words in the best order” (Coleridge)
“meaning that moves” (Rukeyser)
“dancing with attitude” (Bird – I have to confess, I don’t know if I got this one right)
“the clear expression of mixed feelings” (Auden)
“the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits” (Macleish)
“an arrangement of words written in lines whose length is determined by some principle other than the width of the page” (Henry Taylor) How ironic that blogger doesn't allow me to determine the length of my own line right now.

And I missed the ending of the Kenneth Koch “No dogs allowed on the beach” definition, but that was where he started to move to distinctions between prose and poetry. The upshot of this definition, which included some discussion of poodles and dachsunds, is that poetry elevates the prose statement into a condition of play.

Even the poetic act is an act of doubleness, he said. Yes, it’s true that both prose writers and poets write sentences; but the poet is writing a sentence and lines at the same time.

Anyway, all of these definitions do demonstrate that double-ness that Collins spoke to throughout his session, the tension that he talked about in a different tent six or eight years ago at the Dodge. While he elaborated expertly on each of these, I’ll spare you my paraphrasing unless it ever comes up naturally in conversation. I’ll leave this topic with a final sentence of his that seems appropriate for a leave-taking: Poetry appears when prose has been exhausted.

Still to come from Notes on the Dodge:
Non-poetic poetic influences
The absurdities of some teaching of poetry
Tony Hoagland’s wit, his observations about poetic “agendas” and dialectical poems, poorly reconstructed by me