Monday, April 11, 2005

the road not taken

We had a guest lecturer in Poetry Writing today: Rod Jellema.  We had been given a few of his poems to read over the weekend, and I really liked them, but they didn’t have his name on them, so I didn’t realize they were his.  Then he came into class, and Professor Klatt announced that we had been reading his poetry over the weekend.  Everything clicked. 

And I was thrilled, because I knew I wanted to write like that, and I couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say.

He wasn’t disappointing.  I scribbled notes the entire hour, when I wasn’t listening to him read his poems.  He had a lot of good advice about how to approach writing poetry, how to view being “stuck,” and how to think as you’re writing.  He talked about the poets he admired (Roethke, Stafford, Wright, and Kinnell), and quoted Picasso: “When you run out of red, use blue.” 

He really motivated me, and convicted me on griping about sonnets and postmodern poetry.  (Well, he didn’t address me personally, but it certainly applied to me…) 

When we had to write sonnets a few weeks ago, I protested through the entire process.  I hated thinking about accented syllables and rhyme schemes… the rhymes all sounded silly, the lines seemed forced, and I thought How could anyone voluntarily do this, let alone make it sound decent?? 

But Jellema was saying how conforming to a pattern forces a poet to seek out new words or different phrases that wouldn’t have been sought otherwise.  And this searching and changing and stretching is very good for an artist.

So I bit my lip and thought more kindly about sonnets.

And then he talked about contemporary poetry, and he really nailed me.  I always feel so assaulted by postmodern poetry.

It’s like
everythinnnnnng has to be so pun-
chy and they [@] just
want to
SHOCK SHOCK SHOCK]
you with all of those worrrrrds and * so
they ### do weird things…

and I just lose patience for all of this so fast, and say it’s not communication, and it’s not art, and it’s not worthwhile. 

But here again, Jellema had a very good point.  He was talking about physicists, and how a physicist wouldn’t write a report without reading about what other physicists are doing right now.  The same should be true for poets.  And he’s right.  He’s really right, and I know not all of contemporary poetry (perhaps not even most of it) is as weird and “let’s-shake-things-up” as I feel it is.

So now I have a new resolve to seek out those good, contemporary poets, and this will be good for me and my poems.

Anyway, he was so fun to listen to, and the class period flew by.  I was thrilled to find out that he’s also lecturing tomorrow night in the Calvin chapel for the Wiersma Memorial Lecture.  And I am so there, ready to hear more…—jl

Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 04/11 at 09:18 PM
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