Part of the Academy of American Poets’ Forum 2008, a full day of panel discussions yesterday at NYU produced a series of conversations that explored the mysteries of creativity and writing from a number of angles. Some of these conversations will be soon available on the Poets.org web site. Here are a few of the bon mots I enjoyed.
Ron Padgett: The best poems make me dance in my head
Lyn Hejinian: The collision of natural place vs the built environment is a vast impasse, the big aporia. I feel a horrified, appalled grief about the built environment. I loathe concrete.
Robert Pinsky: Contemporary poetry is informed largely by translations from non-Western sources.
Susan Stewart: When we’re born, we enter the world through a door that won’t allow us to return. When we die, we leave the world through a door that won’t allow us to return.
Stewart: We turn to the Light, but it blinds us, and we must turn away.
Ron Padgett: Any line repeated many times is not the same thing. It goes through transformations.
Louise Glück: All memorable poems are difficult. But that doesn’t mean you must write a poem that is so harrowing and violently perceptive that people flee from it.
Glück: Every great poem teaches its readers how to read it.
Carl Phillips: Poets see things clearly that other people either (a) don’t see clearly, or (b) can see, but more easily turn away from.
Ellen Bryant Voight: Poetry presents difficulties of several kinds: Density, Reference, Protean form, Erasure, Derangement of senses, and Tonal complexity. Easily accessible poetry has no tonal complexity, or no tone at all.
Carl Phillips: Reading a poet’s entire body of work chronologically shows a record of a mind surprising itself, and then incorporating those surprises.
Glück: A poem begins as an urgent, felt need to bring a perception into a form.
James Longenbach: A good poem teaches the writer how to write it.
Carl Phillips: A good poem teaches its readers how to read themselves as people.
Ellen B Voight: The difficulty and discipline of Art gets us out of the igloo of the Self.
James Longenbach: when a student complains that a poem is boring, I say, “That’s fine. But it’s your fault.”
Gerald Stern: I’m disorganized today. It’s good to be disorganized. It makes you pay attention.
Frank Bidart: Poems are models of Self-making.
Sharon Olds: My early work was informed by a counter-phobic boldness.
Gary Snyder: Place is more important to our identity than race or gender. Place gives us our body. Place is possible on any scale.
Lyn Hejinian: I look for the sublime point of encounter. When unlike things encounter each other they create an extraordinary event.
Hejinian: Every idea has a terrain, and every work has a contextual landscape. Some writing is highly focused, poly-focused. It is a writing of rolling surfaces with peaks and valleys that fold into the whole.
Victor H. Cruz: The Caribbean is a form of Cubism: elements of Spanish, Taino, and African, with language and accents a jagged line that runs through the painting.
Hejinian: the best antidote to global capitalism is global imagination. Imagination is not administratable.
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For a much more thorough account of the panel presentations, see Dennis Sullivan’s post.
And Dan Wilcox offers an amusingly bitchy review of the awards ceremony.
Wordsalad 
Hmm, much food for thought there. I particularly like, “Every great poem teaches its readers how to read it.”
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Louise Glück: All memorable poems are difficult. But that doesn’t mean you must write a poem that is so harrowing and violently perceptive that people flee from it.
Hahahahaha! Tough!
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