And I am not being clever. For some reason, blogger sometimes does not allow the possessive apostrophe.
*
But some things, to get this back to poetry, y’all. Ah, I got one in there by cutting and pasting.
Here ya go:
1) The hated C-word: "Craft"--what does it practically mean? Does the word itself carry connotations that result (in a workshop situation for instance) in aesthetic hegemony? Or am I just a sloppy writer?
2) Poetry and Performance. Are there alternatives to the poet voice? (See Brian Turner's reading of Body Bags for a good example of this.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Craft, for me, is simply what the poet does, the choices the poet makes, to convey the feeling (the texture, the tension) that every word in the poem is supposed to be there, and that includes every line break, punctuation mark, etc. You know as well as I do that even a sloppy poem has to have some level of craft (measure, balance, timing -- my sense of it, anyway) to work.
I've never attended a workshop before. My idea of craft is naturally home-spun, a little superstitious, a little paranoid, too.
Massey
I like Massey's notions. Craft implies delicacy and precision. Even the word "craft" has a goodly amount of other associations, most of them bound up with the G.I. Joe Hovercraft - in fact, let's use this old toy as a tool, and let's say I assembled the thing myself, back in the day. If we take the Hovercraft to be a poem, then the poet's (or child's) craft would correspond to the time it takes to put all of those "NO STEP" decals and Killer Whale insignias in the right place, and fit the hidden hover sled in the front fold-out door... but then when it's playtime (a.k.a. it's time to read the poem), you just want that Hovercraft to careen on in, plastic cannons loosing fusillades the likes of which Cobra ain't never seen. I suppose craft amounts to care, I guess, which later buys the player/reader the illusion of a fully realized reality.
This doesn't really further Massey's comment. But man. The Hovercraft was a fine toy.
Post a Comment