Sound & Sense: An Open Thread
The second of our recurring opportunities to learn what your fellow readers are reading — and writing
There has always — well, maybe not always, but for millennia, at least — been poetry about poetry. Take Horace’s c. 19 B.C. Ars Poetica, hexameters about the writer’s art. Along the way, we’re told ut pictura poesis (l.361): “as painting, so poetry.” That’s a theme that will run through the centuries, reaching a peak in the eighteenth century with the formal sensibilities of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) in English and Gotthold Lessing’s 1766 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry in German.
Or take the famous sonnets about sonnet-writing: Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, etc. But then we start to get to villanelles about villanelle-writing, haikus about haiku-writing — limericks about limerick-writing, for that matter — and one might be forgiven for thinking that the vast majority of poems about poem-writing have been written in recent decades.
Even while admitting there exist some great ekphrastic poems (poetry describing another work of art, typically a painting), I’m not as big a fan of the genre as my fellow founder of Poems Ancient and Modern, Sally Thomas. Still, something peculiar has taken place when poetry spirals inward toward an ekphrasis of itself. And that’s what we’ve seen for some while now. Here’s a typical online list of poetry about poetry, with (at quick glance) only three out of the sixty-six poems from before 1900 and even only three more before 1929 (the current cutoff for copyright protection in America).
That may reflect the failing of historical memory in the presentism that Sally and I decried in our opening manifesto for Poems Ancient and Modern. But I think it also has to do with a failure of nerve in contemporary verse — and an effort to find a purpose in versifying when verse no longer arrives in a poet’s hands with a sure sense of the unity of truth: the complicated, difficult, but abiding connection of reality, thought, and language.
So, what are you thinking about? Reading? Writing? This is an open-mic thread, available to both free and paid subscribers, where we learn what’s in your mind these days.
I'm reading Sextus Propertius & the French poems of Rilke.
I'm writing a talk/reading to keynote a University of St. Thomas poetry conference in a few weeks. No one has ever handed me 90 minutes before (except John Dingell in an oversight hearing) and it's taking me longer than I expected.
I just finished rereading Inferno, and I can't wait to starting reading Purgatorio (and then eventually Paradiso later this year). I enjoyed the Ciardi translation more than the Wordsworth translation I'd read the first time around, if anyone agrees or differs on that (or prefers another translation altogether).
There's far, far too much I've been thinking about Inferno, so I can only say honestly that it's astounding as a vision that's simultaneously poetic, theological, cosmological, and thrilling. Even that statement is fairly lame as to all that Dante was up to. Also, I can say honestly that I'm furious that the Comedy wasn't required reading when I studied literature in college.