A POETRY HANDBOOK
by
Mary Oliver
Harcourt, Inc.
Paperback, 126 pages, $13
ISBN 0-15-672400-6
Like many others, Mary Oliver asserts that poets are born, not made in school, and that something mysterious and innate, unable to be taught, is essential to the poet s soul. But like painting or sculpture or music, much can be learned to add to what cannot be schooled. What she offers in A Poetry Handbook is the teacher s lesson the family of sounds (aspirates, semivowels, liquid semivowels, mute consonants that stop harder than other mutes); the number of feet in a line, the number of stresses in a foot, the metrical feet of iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, and spondee; the interplay and variation of metrical feet; the end of a line, enjambment, and turning the line; the difference between diction, tone, and voice; the use of image; and the need to know the patterns of poetry in the past to write free verse today.
On imagery, she has this to say, applicable to so much contemporary poetry so ensconced in William Carlos Williams no idea but in things that nothing is said except by image, such that the collection of images contains no collected idea and says nothing:
The poem that, all along its line of endeavor, pauses to give out jolts of imagery may end up like a carnival ride: the reader has been lurched, and has laughed has been all but whiplashed but has gotten nowhere.
The right image, used precisely, makes the poem more meaningful, with more of a sense of discovery within the poem. Perhaps too often we feel the need to disguise meaning, either because we are unclear about it ourselves, or we fear the tag of something simple and clear. There is, of course, the famous anecdote of Hart Carne who showed a poem to a friend, and, upon learning that the meaning was clear, promptly revised it to obscurity.
There is also the problem of creativity, and making it new, as Ezra Pound said. In making it new, we search for ways to shed the past. Oliver suggests a different approach imitation.
[I]n the world of writing it is
originality that is sought out, and praised, while imitation is the sin of
sins.
Too bad. I think if imitation were encouraged much would be learned well that is now learned haphazardly.
The argument here is not to imitate forever, as medieval Chinese mistakenly did of the Tang period, but to build a foundation on which a new and different, and hopefully better, house can be built. How harmful can it be to study and practice the word-repetition and rhythms of Shakespeare, the precise imagery of Tu Fu, the long electrical lines of Whitman?
Oliver s point is that the house takes years and patience and skill and hard work and a magical essence no one can define. For her part, she revises 40-50 times before beauty is born. Then there is this advice, hard to take, but as a friend once said, preparing me for his criticism, None of us want to be told our child may have a wart on the end of his nose. Or as Mary Oliver said about the necessity of bad-tasting medicine:
It is good also to remember that, now and again, it is simply best to throw a poem away. Some things are unfixable.
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