Profiling a Poet
Poetry derives from the ego and consequently is a product of that ego. It combines thought and experience with artistic talent. Great numbers of people feel a need to express something through poetry. They all have an ego, however the few great are separated from the mass primarily by a depth of life experience and knowledge. Artistry is manifest in aesthetic appreciation, yet it is laden with variables including taste, intrinsic skill, and eloquence. Poetry suffers a problem in that anyone can assert to being a poet, and within an egalitarian age all offerings are sacrosanct. Thus the good and great poets float in a tub with the mediocre and the down right horrible and few readers can tell the difference or even care to discern. This sad fact means that civilization’s great oral and literary art form, the one that for three millennia has spoken directly for the people, is now cast within a polluted bilge, losing its functionally, its historic utility, and its honored position as a fine art.
To read the profile of poet Duane Robert Pierson click here
Our Favorite Poets (on first recall)
We are sometimes asked our favorite poets, and the ones who influenced us. There are many and we are certain that there are others who belong on this list. This group has common character in that virtually all lived lives necessary to formulate a blend of sensitivity, pathos, and creative tropism. Yet, all speak artistically to humanity in a clear unaffected voice -
André Chénier 1762 - 1794 (Guillotined during the Reign of Terror)
Robert Frost 1874 - 1963
Louise Gluck 1943 -
Heinrich Heine 1797 - 1856
John Keats 1795 - 1821
Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892 - 1950
Czeslaw Milosz 1911 - 2004
Arthur Rimbaud 1854 - 1891
César Vallejo 1892 - 1938
William Butler Yeats 1865 - 1939
Adam Zagajewski 1945 -
(There are others poets whom we concede are great indeed, however we have little patience with those whose styles have us interpreting and deciphering rather than enjoying and understanding)
Diamonds Amidst the Sludge
The state of poetry is stupefying. Once a magnificent art form that spoke to all people, poetry has become a mess. The vast majority of today’s poetry is the product of people with nothing to say saying it. Anyone with an emotional itch can put words on paper and call it poetry. It is as if all the refrigerator door sketches by every parent’s dimwitted child have suddenly been declared fine art.
Style is now a muddle in extremes; there is over styling that obfuscates and frustrates, and free verse that has become loose verse, or most realistically something that can be declared no verse at all. Ninety nine percent of poetry seen today is unreadable, much less memorable.
Our problem is to find traces of this fine ancient art in the sludge pile. Unfortunately, in this egalitarian society within which we dwell, all that is declared art is art.
What is Great Poetry?
Excellent poetry, like art in any form, is very difficult to create. It requires great skill and innate talent. Far more is involved than a simple urge to put words on paper.
Our test for good poetry is simple. We begin to read. If the words seize our attention and move us, if we feel the artistry, it is good poetry. If the poem imbeds within our mind as a splendid experience, it is great poetry.
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