Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry - Hardcover

Koch, Kenneth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068483992X ISBN 13: 9780684839929

Publisher: Scribner, 1998

Synopsis

In Making Your Own Days, celebrated poet Kenneth Koch writes about poetry as no one has written about it before -- and as if no one had written about it before. Full of fresh and exciting insights and experiences, this book makes the somewhat mysterious subject of poetry clear for those who read it and for those who write it -- and for those who would like to read it and write it better. Koch accomplishes this revelation of poetry by presenting the idea that poetry is a separate language, a language in which music and sound are as important as syntax or meaning. Thus he is able to clarify the many aspects of poetry: the nature of poetic inspiration, what happens when a poet is writing a poem, revision, and what actually goes on while one is reading a poem -- how confusion or only partial understanding eventually leads to truly experiencing a poem.The language of poetry, like other languages, can be learned by reading it and writing it. To assist the reader in learning the language of poetry, Koch provides a rich anthology of poems -- each accompanied by an explanatory note -- specially designed to complement and illuminate his text. There are lyric poems, excerpts from long poems and from poetic plays, poems in English and in translation. Among the poets whose work is included are Homer, Ovid, Sappho, Shakespeare, Byron, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Li Bel, Stevens, Williams, Lorca, Ashbery, and Snyder.In this book, Kenneth Koch's genius for making poetry clear and bringing out its real pleasures is everywhere apparent.

About this title

About the Author

Kenneth Koch's most recent books of poetry -- One Train and On the Great Atlantic Railway (Selected Poems 1950-1988) -- both published in 1994, were awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. Among his other books of poetry are Thank You, The Pleasures of Peace, The Art of Love, On the Edge, and Seasons on Earth. He has also published fiction and plays, as well as books on the teaching of poetry: Wishes, Lies and Dreams; Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?; and I Never Told Anybody. A new book of poems, Straits, will be published in the spring of 1998. Kenneth Koch lives in New York City, where he is professor of English at Columbia University.

Reviews

Koch, a preeminent American poet and author of two best-selling books on teaching poetry to children, has at last produced a guide for adults. This book is divided into two parts: a series of essays on subjects such as meter, rhyme, and personification and an anthology of favorite poems. Most remarkably, non-English poems often appear with several translations, underscoring the flexibility of poetic language. Making Your Own Days will be most useful to writers already familiar with the basics. However, while some of the playfulness that marked Wishes, Lies and Dreams (HarperCollins, 1980) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (Vintage, 1990) creeps in, the overall tone is that of a lecturer, and Koch covers the same ground as Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux's The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (LJ 10/15/97), though in a less engaging manner.?David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

The Two Languages

Poetry is often regarded as a mystery, and in some respects it is one. No one is quite sure where poetry comes from, no one is quite sure exactly what it is, and no one knows, really, how anyone is able to write it.

The Greeks thought, or at least said, that it came from the Muse, but in our time no one has been able to find her. The Unconscious has been offered as a substitute, but that, too, is hard to locate. How anyone is able to write it is explained in this way: the poet is a Genius who receives inspiration.

One way to get a little more clarity on the subject was suggested to me by something Paul Valéry said when he was thinking about the things that could be said in poetry and not otherwise: he said that poetry was a separate language or, more specifically, a "language within a language." There would be, in that case, the ordinary language -- for Valéry French, for us English -- and, somehow existing inside its boundaries, another: "the language of poetry." Valéry let it go at that; he went on to talk about other things. I thought it worth taking literally and seeing where it might lead; I thought it might explain something important about how poems are written and how they can be read.

According to this idea, a poet could be described as someone who writes in the language of poetry. Talent is required for doing it welt, but there are things that can help this talent to appear and to have an effect -- for example, you have to learn this particular language, which you do by reading it and writing it. The language itself helps to explain inspiration, which is always, at a certain point in its development, the appearance of some phrase or sentence in the poetic language. You may be moved by the West Wind, but until the words come to you "O wild West Wind" the inspiration is still in an early, pre-verbal phase. Once "wild West Wind" is there, it leads to more of this oddly useful language; once the tone, the channel, the language level is found, the poem can take off in a more purely verbal way.

Before I came on this idea of poetry as a separate language, I had been thinking of the analogy of a verbal synthesizer, computer, or pipe organ. You sat down at this instrument and played; you didn't tap out a clear message in teletypical prose. Whatever you said would be accompanied by music, and there were keys to press, to make comparisons, to exaggerate and lie, to personify, and so on. This idea of a synthesizer seemed to help explain the joy, even the intoxication, poets may feel when about to write, and when writing, and the similar joy and intoxication others may feel in reading their works. This joy seemed to me an element that was left out of most explications of poetry, or of the "poetic process." The synthesizer idea finally seemed to me a little askew, though, because it was too far away from language.

I also thought of likening writing poetry to going to a party. It puts you in a good mood. You know there will be music, even dancing; there's no work to be done there, just drinking, talking, and flirting. This analogy was fine for the initial pleasure part but not descriptive of what happens later, since in writing poetry you really do have to work, to make some kind of sense, and to bring things to a conclusion, which you don't usually have to do at a party.

A poet learns the language of poetry, works in it, is always being inspired by it. Just to use this language is a pleasure. I don't remember clearly that time in my childhood when to speak was an adventure, but I've seen it in other children; and I do remember the first year I spent in France, when to speak the French language gave me the same kind of nervous sense of possibility, ambition, and excitement that writing poetry has always done.

Poetry is an odd sort of language in that everyone who uses it well changes it slightly, and this fact helps to explain poetic influence and how poetry does change from one time and one poet to another.

Poetic purposes of a sort -- a magical, religious sort -- may be at the very origins of language or may have appeared very early on. To name things or beings was a first step to speaking to them and to trying to control them. Since its unknowable beginnings, however, language has become mainly a vast, reasonable, practical enterprise, with vocabulary and syntax and grammar to enable you to say almost anything you wish. The part the "almost" applies to is what can be said only by poetry.

If we take the idea of a poetic language seriously, it can be defined first as a language in which the sound of the words is raised to an importance equal to that of their meaning, and also equal to the importance of grammar and syntax. In ordinary language, the sound of a word is useful almost exclusively in order to identify it and to distinguish it from other words. In poetry its importance is much greater. Poets think of how they want something to sound as much as they think of what they want to say, and in fact it's often impossible to distinguish one from the other. This is an odd position from which to speak, and it's not surprising that strange things are said in such a language. The nature of the language can be illustrated by the way a nonsensical statement may, simply because of its music, seem to present some kind of truth, or at least to be something, even, in a certain way, to be memorable. For example:

Two and two
Are rather blue

"No, no," one may say, "two and two are four," but that is in another language. In this (poetry) language, it's true that "two and two are rather green" has little or no meaning (or existence), but "two and two are rather blue" does have some. The meanings are of different kinds. "I don't know whether or not to commit suicide" has a different kind of meaning from that of "To be or not to be, that is the question." Repetition and variation of sounds, among other things, make the second version meditative, sad, and memorable, whereas the first has no such music to keep it afloat. The nature of prose, Valéry said, is to perish. Poetry lasts because it gives the ambiguous and ever-changing pleasure of being both a statement and a song.

The music of language needs to be explained, since most often in reading prose or in hearing people talk we aren't much aware of anything resembling music. There are no horns, no piano, no strings, no drums. However, words can be put together in a way that puts an emphasis on what sound they make. Sound is part of the physical quality of words. "To sleep" means to rest and to be unconscious, and usually that is all it means, but it also has a physical nature -- the sounds sl and eep, for example -- that can be brought to the reader's attention, like the sounds hidden inside a drum that emerge when you hit it with a stick. Once you are listening to the sound as well as to the meaning -- as you won't, say, if you read "Go to sleep" but will, almost certainly, if it is "To sleep, perchance to dream" (Shakespeare) -- then you are hearing another language, in which that sound makes music which in turn is part of the meaning of what is said. The poetry language is used by persons who have things (known to them or not known) that they need to say, and who are moved by this need and by a delight in making music out of words.

The poet is led in uncustomary directions by the musically weighted language, and readers are led there in their turn. Poetry would just as soon come to a musical, as to a logical or otherwise useful conclusion; and in fact its logical or useful one would have to be also musical for the work to be poetry at all. In the ordinary language of ordinary experience, the thought or the remark "The sun is shining this afternoon" is likely to lead to other words related to these

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 068483992X
• ISBN 13: 9780684839929
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320