The new Tilt is up

Rachel Mallino did a great job with the layout of the new Tilt, and the guy who reviewed the books didn't totally suck.

Dueling Poets

I have mixed feelings about QuickMuse as reported in Dinitia Smith's article
On Your Marks, Get Set, Poeticize: Dueling Poets on the Web in the NYT. Two poets were given fifteen minutes to write poems based on a statement by Elisabeth Bishop on the writing of poetry. First, such a prompt invites poetry about poetry, which Paul Muldoon did in an Animal Planet kind of way. Thylias Moss wanted us to know she had a headache and problems finding her favorite shows on cable TV. Ok, whatever.

I have mixed feelings for several reasons. First, I personally don't like to write to a prompt. I want to be inspired, but I don't wait around to be inspired: I read, I discuss, I think. I try to cultivate my mind for maximum inspirational receptivity. But my brain's not a Wal-Mart for poetic ideas.

The other thing I'm not comfortable with is the competitory nature of having two poets square off against each other. Yes, I know that competition exists even in the world of poetry, but such focused jousting doesn't appeal to my nature.

I disagree with Robert Pinsky: "You may not write your best, Pinsky said, "but you should be able to write something that is memorable." I don't have a problem with a poem being written quickly, but fifteen minutes seems a bit short to generate something truly memorable.

On the other side of the spectrum, Gary Snyder, whose poetry I wish didn't bore me as much as it does: "Being spontaneous doesn't interest me nearly as much as getting 'it' right — 'it' being the poem," he said. "I write slowly, come to conclusions slowly, and for better or worse I am just a slow poet." I'd say, perhaps for worse in Gary's case.

One of the features of the site is to have the poem's typing being replayed in actual time. And I thought dressage was boring!

Well, it's another one of those ideas that sounds somewhat intriguing in concept but fails to compel me in its execution.

Gone is a Member of the Community

Stanley Kunitz died yesterday, and so the deathwatch over the hundred-year-old poet can now come to an end. I have a couple books by Kunitz: one of selected poems; and the other translations of Akhmatova. I've enjoyed both, though a single poem doesn't jump out in my memory. Like William Stafford and Robert Lowell, he was a conscientious objector during WWII. Unlike them, he was the target of Anti-Semitism.

He seems to have lived more for poetry than by poetry, refusing tenure at the schools in which he taught; refused because he wanted to be a poet who taught instead of a professor who wrote poetry.

Kunitz said: "I think all artists, and especially poets, are forever in search of a community. It’s a solitary act, and you need a community of like-minded souls to survive and to flourish. So the search for a community is really a lifetime engagement."