The popularity of Pearl London’s classes reveals how fascinating it can be to hear poets speak about their drafts and to learn first-hand how a great poem is made.
As Poetry in Person details, students and poets were eager to be involved in London’s course at the New School in New York which, for much of its 25-year history, took place in a distinctive room with a nine-panel mural by Thomas Hart Benson.
What a great teacher London was! She asked witty and intelligent questions and drew out warm, wise and humorous responses from the poets.
The book’s editor, Alexander Neubauer, says, “There was a narrative drive behind the rhythm of her questions, energised by a deep love of poetry — and poets. Her classroom became the thirtieth poem, and, one hopes, that energy and love will be present in this book.”
London’s comments and questions aren’t included in this two-part post so you’ll have to read Poetry in Person to encounter her more directly.
Here (and in Part 1 of this post) are some of my favourite quotes from the poets that feature in the book.
Stanley Plumly visitied London’s class five times from 1977 to 1993. He believed that poetry wouldn’t live if it didn’t “imply the single thing … But a lot of people will seek out the unique thing and, I would say, end up inventing. They’ll end up with clams playing accordions. They will invent into the object; they’ll twist it, bend it in some way, distort it: they’ll project into it to make it unique. That’s where the mind has triumphed over what Rilke calls the certainty of the object.”
C. K. Williams visited the class in 1988. He told London, “At one point I decided I wasn’t going to write poetry anymore, because it was obviously destroying my life … And then I wrote a couple poems — just as notes, almost — in these long lines. Not really thinking about poetry, because I wasn’t a poet anymore … Then I went to give a reading one day, I read these poems and realised I was onto something, that these poems had taken into account portions of my consciousness that I wasn’t using in the poetry I’d been writing … [in which I’d been] leaving out an awful lot of people. And leaving out an awful lot of myself, too.
“Another idea that came to me at the same time was that I wanted to speak in a voice that was closer to the voice I actually spoke in. Wordsworth said exactly the same thing, as we well know; that he wanted to write in the language that men speak. That [longer] line also seemed a way to get closer to that, too.”
Williams also said, “The rhythm of the poem moves the mind and rhythm generates meaning. That’s one of the splendours of poetry, that it moves the reader’s mind in a way that wouldn’t move itself. And maybe it’s why we need poetry.”
Molly Peacock visited London’s class in 1992. Peacock said, “I began to be interested in shaping a line to retain my initial impulse in music. Because I found that when I revised, I lost the feeling. That part of the poem is very unconscious, the music coming out of you — that’s your voice. I began to see these lines and the rhymes as a way to preserve my voice, the freshness of my own speech.”
Referring to her poem “The Hunt”, Peacock said, “I couldn’t write a poem like this in stages. I sat down and I wrote it right out. I wrote it out in an hour and fifteen minutes or something like that. I wrote it in bed, where I usually write. With a pencil on paper, like this. Getting up occasionally to get something and come back to bed. And this was one that just came out pretty much whole except for that ending. Where I keep struggling …”
Edward Hirsch visited London’s poetry seminar in 1993. He said that “Poetry begins in loss, begins with alienation, and speaks against our vanishing.” It is also, he said, “an encounter with the worst and trying to bring something back out into the light”.
Hirsch also talked about not having a symbolic scheme but being immensely attracted to “several situations” in poems. “I like dawn and I like dusk. I like transition. That moment is immensely powerful to me. I don’t even know exactly why, but this is where purple comes in, the moment of transformation from light to darkness. I think purple is a bruised way of getting from brightness to darkness or from darkness back out.”
Li-Young Lee visited the class in 1995. He said, “I feel more than ever that there is no ‘I’. That’s where I am today — I might feel differently five years from now. All the versions of personhood — that my parents have given me, the culture has given me, my brothers and sister, wife, children friends — one is greater than all of those versions. And that greater someone can’t be nailed down with a pronoun like ‘I’.”
Charles Simic visited the class in 1995 and shared his working draft for “Official Inquiry Among the Grain of Sand”. He told London, “A lot of things that occur in writing are a product of chance. Something pops into your head, and you have no idea how it pops into your head. The foundation of poetry is based on chance. You cannot will a good metaphor, or even a crummy simile … You cannot will a great figure of speech; they happen. So at the foundation of poetry there is that element of chance, of accident, of something that cannot be … so one is always open …”
Eamon Grennan visited the class in 1996 and bought the poem “Ants” in draft form saying some of the poem occurred “a result of browsing. It’s foraging”. London commented on the line “Rummaging in the yellow splendour of the daylily” and said she loved the word “rummaging” and was disappointed it had disappeared in later drafts. Grennan said, “Yeah, ‘rummaging’ is a good word. Too bad to lose ‘rummage.’ But in another poem I talk about ‘the flagrant short-lived blaze of the daylily,’ I thought I’d keep it for that.”
Grennan also said, “How little can you get away with? Deliberate explanation looks, I would say, like scaffolding. And by the time the poem is working it should be freestanding. You should have kicked away the scaffolding. The building has to stand on its own. But it may not get built without the scaffolding — remind yourself of that.”
Maxine Kumin visited the class in 1973. That same year, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her fourth book, Up Country: Poems of New England. During the seminar, Kumin explains the role of poet: “Not to moralise, not to polemicise, not to grieve, not to praise, and not to damn. But to name, to tell, to authenticate, to be specific, to support what he sees and what he feels. I suppose if I have a credo, that would be the credo that I have.”
Robert Pinsky visited London’s class in 1993. He talked about his poem “The Want Bone” and the object it relates to; the jawbone of a shark “frozen open, gaping like the embodiment of wanting”. The poem ends with a line London found very beautiful. It was “my fin my life my lightness my O”. Pinsky explained that the “O” that is the want bone registers abundance but also signals desire’s futility.
Marylin Hacker visited the class in 1980. Hacker spoke about her poem “The Hang-Glider’s Daughter”— a series of Petrarchan sonnets that reveal the interior monologue of an adolescent girl going to watch her father hang-gliding. Hacker told London, “People come to reading poetry for different reasons: for love of language, because they’re looking for writers who express their own concerns and can create some order, at least verbal, musical order, in those preoccupations. Art, at the very least, has the function of taking one’s mind places it hasn’t been before — at least that’s one reason why I read.”
Useful information
Some of Pearl London’s conversations with the poets are available as audios at Neubauer’s blog.
I purchased my copy at a great price from Readings bookshop.
So this is how great poetry is made … (Part 1)
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