Are Poets Born Not Made?

[Catamite]

Stuntpickle, I think you are right about developing an ear, but where that ear fo sound will be developed is surely in relation to one's enviroment, to common speech, to the music of poetry, not the writing of poetry itself. You mentioned jazz - Miles Davis said that his time at Juliard was invaluable because of his instruction in music theory. A poet must refine the methods for expression -which can come only from hard study of method and of poets themselves- for their own idiosyncracies in sound or form to be of any use. To be revlotuinary one must know what one is revolting against - not that should ever be the intention of a poet, for it is weak. In the end, all this talk of poetry that 'disturbs' is childish - doesn't Shakespeare disturb you? Dante? Spenser? If not you probrably aren't reading poetry very well.

[MorpheusSandman]

Can you fix your logic in this one?

I don't see what needs fixing. Your own quote seems to violate your notion about poets being born and not made because, by your logic, everyone is born a poet because we all have inborn moods, sensitivities, and emotions. Of course I'd agree that we're all born with those things, but then what allows some to become (insert great poet here) and others not to? Could it be that the (insert great poet here) is actually made because they learn how to write poetry, and how to transfer those inborn things into language and form and drama?

The discussion about music largely concerns culturally relevant artists from the last fifty or so years, whereas the discussion of literature concerns relics as far back as antiquity (Virgil!). Has the disparity occurred to no one?

I know you're a fan of ignoring contexts, but if you had paid attention you would know that the disparity was recognized when it was introduced, and it was introduced because of that disparity.

J was absolutely correct when he talked about artists developing a "craft" as opposed to becoming scholars.

Then, by extension, I was right about the same thing when I was discussing it back on Page 2 before J had ever posted. He was the one who equated "scholars" and "intellectuals" as opposed to poets "learning technique," which was all that had been discussed before he entered. I even noted this on page 3: "There's a disconnect between what was originally being said about artists studying their art, and them being academics."

it is generally acknowledged that a preoccupation with literary theory, on the part of postmodern writers, has had a corrosive effect on the literature of the last fifty years.

Weasel words: "generally acknowledged" by whom? Why wasn't such a "preoccupation" corrosive to those who concerned themselves with theory BEFORE postmodernism?

Should a writer be familiar with his predecessors? Of course. But he has a more immediate need to be familiar with his immediate predecessors.... The learning an artist does is more osmotic than analytic.

It's good we have you to try and contradict us by stating what we have already stated:

Me (on studying craft VS intellectuals/scholars, Pg. 3): "I would argue that Keats... clearly thought deeply about poetry, as even many of his comments and scribblings testified to... Really, that kind of "study" is all I meant by the term in the first place. Obviously being a great poet does not require one to be a scholar or academic."

Me (on reading predecessors, Pg. 2): "I certainly agree that new poets need to balance studying the distant masters as well as the more recent masters and their contemporaries. All three, I think are important for getting a grasp on where poetry came from, where it's recently been, and where it's at."

Me (on osmosis, Pg. 2): "Shakespeare might not have been a scholar, he was still clearly well-read and had an amazing ability to absorb, digest, and then represent almost everything (and everyone) experienced."

The truth is that work is the easiest thing to do

All the more reason to deride those that refuse to do it!

[miyako73]

"I don't see what needs fixing. Your own quote seems to violate your notion about poets being born and not made because, by your logic, everyone is born a poet because we all have inborn moods, sensitivities, and emotions. Of course I'd agree that we're all born with those things, but then what allows some to become (insert great poet here) and others not to? Could it be that the (insert great poet here) is actually made because they learn how to write poetry, and how to transfer those inborn things into language and form and drama?"

Again, your reading is frustratingly flawed. I said (or wrote) "my mood", "my sensitivity", and "my emotions". No two individual personalities are the same. I write a certain way, I am not a Milton or a Heaney, and I will never become like them because they have their own unique moods, sensitivities, and emotions.

[MorpheusSandman]

"my mood", "my sensitivity", and "my emotions". No two individual personalities are the same.

No two individual personalities are completely unalike, either, so I still don't get your point. Everyone has SOME moods, sensitivities, and emotions, and not everyone can write as well as everyone else. As someone in another thread said, people are pretty much people wherever you go. You can't chalk up their talent as being due to their "unique moods, sensitivities and emotions," in which case why can two writers express the same mood and emotion and one be better at it?

[miyako73]

No two individual personalities are completely unalike, either, so I still don't get your point. Everyone has SOME moods, sensitivities, and emotions, and not everyone can write as well as everyone else. As someone in another thread said, people are pretty much people wherever you go. You can't chalk up their talent as being due to their "unique moods, sensitivities and emotions," in which case why can two writers express the same mood and emotion and one be better at it?

One can have a mood to murder, the other, a mood to write. The problem with you is your assumption that all writers have the same mood, the same sensibility, and the same emotion, and if someone has those, he should be a writer. Also, you assume all moods, sensitivities, and emotions are the same. Damn! Just damn! Is this a first grade philosophical logic lost in the misreading of psychology 101?

[stuntpickle]

I know you're a fan of ignoring contexts, but if you had paid attention you would know that the disparity was recognized when it was introduced, and it was introduced because of that disparity.

I know the context: you weaseling out of everything you say. You use asinine terminology such as "innate intellectual" in order to obscure any sort of rational discussion so long as you can maintain the facade of being right. You might as well talk about "naturally manufactured" caves.

Because you seem deaf to any connotation, let me quickly explain that "intellect" and "intellectual" generally imply a rational or academic faculty, as opposed to an emotional or intuitive one, and that you would use that word to describe Keats is ridiculous. For Chrissake, you had someone for whom English is a second language trying to explain this to you.

Me (on studying craft VS intellectuals/scholars, Pg. 3): "I would argue that Keats... clearly thought deeply about poetry, as even many of his comments and scribblings testified to... Really, that kind of "study" is all I meant by the term in the first place. Obviously being a great poet does not require one to be a scholar or academic."

Me (on reading predecessors, Pg. 2): "I certainly agree that new poets need to balance studying the distant masters as well as the more recent masters and their contemporaries. All three, I think are important for getting a grasp on where poetry came from, where it's recently been, and where it's at."

Me (on osmosis, Pg. 2): "Shakespeare might not have been a scholar, he was still clearly well-read and had an amazing ability to absorb, digest, and then represent almost everything (and everyone) experienced."

Yeah, unfortunately, I read all your bogus posts wherein you desperately tried to backpedal to keep from looking absurd. Keats was no intellectual despite all your "research" on Wikipedia.

All the more reason to deride those that refuse to do it!

Look, I have an advanced degree in English literature that is absolutely worthless unless I want to teach overconfident dullards who go around quoting Pope as if it matters. Who is it that you think isn't doing this work? Which poet is it that a twenty-six year old writer of mediocre verse is entitled to deride?

That you think aspiring poets need to be told to read and work at their craft is ridiculous. But that's not really what you were saying. You seemed particularly concerned about who they're reading and how. And when someone suggested that your antediluvian study plan was unnecessary, you suggested that he was anti-intellectual.

One minute you're crying about how your presence here testifies to how much you have to learn, and the next you're making pronouncements on the Canon from atop your wobbly soapbox.

For the record, poets don't require a "balance" of antique and modern literature. They can do just fine with the modern stuff alone.

[JCamilo]

Then, by extension, I was right about the same thing when I was discussing it back on Page 2 before J had ever posted. He was the one who brought up "scholars" and "intellectuals" as opposed to poets "learning technique," which was all that had been discussed before he entered. I even noted this on page 3: "There's a disconnect between what was originally being said about artists studying their art, and them being an intellectual and/or academic."

Sorry, but words like anti-intellectual and intellect are there before I posted. Anyways, I told you we do not have much disagreement and I was not answering you, but rather someone else that mentions you (Pierre) and that come to a jump in space, equating domain of technique as fully understament, reading experience as fully understandment, etc.

Afterwards we developed this discussion with two pararel topics, because I found the use of the world intellectual (you just are in love with this word) confusing as Intellectual - even by the same wikipedia link who relate intellectual with analyct thinking and use of reason in the place of intuition and emotion that is represented by Keats or the word study, which you used in the place of Learning. It seemed to me you were claiming everytime a man thinks something, he does it in a specific way and everytime he learns he also did in a specific way. But as I said, I can see what you want to mean and there is no need for wasting time with vocabulary discussions, considering in the end we are not claiming poets are born writing poetry.

Also, it became an argument about Keats, which is topic related (as Keats composition method, ideas, etc. help it), but seems like we are the only two interessed and it can be left to a specific Keats topic.

Either way, I do think you are presenting with a very specific kind of poet (or artist) but our disagreements seems to be so small relating this thread that it is better we wait another oportunity to discuss it as we are not leaving the site so soon.

You guys can keep patting one another on the back and reassuring each other how central this or that Elizabethan is to the Canon, but being conversant in Romantic verse and Structuralist inanities has little to do with being a writer in the 21st Century. Should a writer be familiar with his predecessors? Of course. But he has a more immediate need to be familiar with his immediate predecessors. He isn't concerned with an academic approach to the Canon, but rather his immediate cultural antecedents. And he's interested not in applying the mechanisms of critical evaluation, but in emulating the mechanisms of artistic generation, and these are not the same. One needn't know what a foil is to write one. The learning an artist does is more osmotic than analytic. And this is well understood among the initiated.

Now that you talk, I seem to recall to read (I think in Guardian) about a research that showed today writers are making more references to writers from now than classic writers.

They do not present the full study, but first wondered if they considered how relevant is this reference and if they really analysed if past writers didnt the same (for example, Wordsworth and Byron influence on keats seems almost as notable as Spencer and Champman)... Popular poetry influence seems much closer, I have seen poets improvising on spot poems with classical structure which they learned listening to other poets and then trial and error.

[miyako73]

Some people in this forum have the annoying braggadocio of a latent megalomaniac. They create their own literary terms as if they have the authority, in skill and in scholarship, to do so. In truth, they actually build mirrors and smokes, so they can still project a semblance of what is true, valid, and correct. The fact is that they haven't written any poetry or prose that has moved me the way those of the canonical authors have. This is the danger in this forum. Due to cliquish patronizing and thoughtless appreciation of mediocrity, the mediocre think they are superior. What a farce!

[stuntpickle]

Stuntpickle, I think you are right about developing an ear, but where that ear fo sound will be developed is surely in relation to one's enviroment, to common speech, to the music of poetry, not the writing of poetry itself. You mentioned jazz - Miles Davis said that his time at Juliard was invaluable because of his instruction in music theory. A poet must refine the methods for expression -which can come only from hard study of method and of poets themselves- for their own idiosyncracies in sound or form to be of any use. To be revlotuinary one must know what one is revolting against - not that should ever be the intention of a poet, for it is weak. In the end, all this talk of poetry that 'disturbs' is childish - doesn't Shakespeare disturb you? Dante? Spenser? If not you probrably aren't reading poetry very well.

This is addressed to me, so I will assume you're speaking to me. Having said that, I don't recall ever having discussed "disturbing poetry". But now that you bring it up, I would say that someone should read "disturbing" poetry if that's what he wants to read. Moreover, I would say it is childish to pretend to instruct him on what he should read instead. I take it for granted that what someone likes is automatic and not susceptible to change by way of lecture.

I'll resort again to the beer analogy. There's nothing wrong with drinking an American lager even though some idiot demands you drink Guinness under the pretense that it is "better". In fact, I find drinking a beer one likes far more respectable than drinking one simply because other people like it. Of course, some people do actually like dark beers, but they generally don't give a **** what anyone else is drinking. The people who concern themselves with what other people are drinking/reading/watching are called "snobs".

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

You guys can keep patting one another on the back and reassuring each other how central this or that Elizabethan is to the Canon, but being conversant in Romantic verse and Structuralist inanities has little to do with being a writer in the 21st Century. Should a writer be familiar with his predecessors? Of course.

This is (and the rest of your post, except the little rant about us discussions music, which was a sidetrack discussion in the first place) pretty much what a lot of us have been saying.

And what "back-patting"?

One can have a mood to murder, the other, a mood to write. The problem with you is your assumption that all writers have the same mood, the same sensibility, and the same emotion, and if someone has those, he should be a writer. Also, you assume all moods, sensitivities, and emotions are the same. Damn! Just damn! Is this a first grade philosophical logic lost in the misreading of psychology 101?

He didn't say any of that.

I like when someone gets so caught up in showing up another person because they don't like them that they'll go to such great lengths to purposefully obfuscate their points in an attempt to make them look stupid. It's quite amusing.

Some people in this forum have the annoying braggadocio of a latent megalomaniac. They create their own literary terms as if they have the authority, in skill and in scholarship, to do so. In truth, they actually build mirrors and smokes, so they can still project a semblance of what is true, valid, and correct. The fact is that they haven't written any poetry or prose that has moved me the way those of the canonical authors have. This is the danger in this forum. Due to cliquish patronizing and thoughtless appreciation of mediocrity, the mediocre think they are superior. What a farce!

I thought you didn't like canonical authors. . . that they didn't **** you awake, or whatever that dumb saying was.

[miyako73]

Mutatis, read what he wrote:

"Everyone has inborn moods, sensitivities, and emotions; not everyone can write like Milton, Keats, Heaney, etc."

Who told you I don't like canonical authors? I don't like all of them. Auden's queer works excited me as if it was a woman who wrote them. I've been reading canonical texts since I was a kid. My reading is separate from my writing.

[stuntpickle]

Popular poetry influence seems much closer, I have seen poets improvising on spot poems with classical structure which they learned listening to other poets and then trial and error.

Yes, this is much like what occurs at "jam sessions". You get all the historical context second or third-hand. Culture is a synthesizing machine that keeps building on itself. There's no reason one HAS to go back and start at the beginning.

The irony, of course, that I'm sure you, of all people, are aware of, is that I greatly appreciate Shakespeare and the English Romantics. I think reading Shakespeare can be aesthetically rewarding and that the Canon is pedagogically useful, but not for any PRACTICAL reason. "All art is useless," etc. I don't think close reading of Shakespeare is necessary to be a good poet. I can't even imagine how someone would think it was.

This is (and the rest of your post, except the little rant about us discussions music, which was a sidetrack discussion in the first place) pretty much what a lot of us have been saying.

And what "back-patting"?

It's unfortunate that you cut the quote off where you did since the following sentence expresses something very different from what everyone else has been saying. My point was that, yes, artists should acquaint themselves with their predecessors, but they should acquaint themselves with more culturally relevant predecessors. You know, someone who has lived in the last century--sort of like how you guys relate to music. I wasn't ranting about the music. I think everyone's statements here about music are more honest than their statements about literature, which I find to be largely affected.

And by "back-patting" I meant giving each other pats on the back.

[My2cents]

considering in the end we are not claiming poets are born writing poetry.

I change my mind; poets are made...still art can't be taught. You can be guided in the right direction but what does that mean ultimately? That you understand the value of taking directions? Which in turn would mean that you're just one of the guys, a normal fella like everyone else. Nothing wrong with that. But that's not art. That's being a normal guy, well respected, humble--being someone no one could possibly hate. It's what 99% of humanity aspires to.

[miyako73]

"For Chrissake, you had someone for whom English is a second language trying to explain this to you."

I hope there is no condescension in that, Stunt. English may be my second language, but I like to think my thoughts are not second-rate; thus, I should speak.

[stuntpickle]

"For Chrissake, you had someone for whom English is a second language trying to explain this to you."

I hope there is no condescension in that, Stunt. English may be my second language, but I like to think my thoughts are not second-rate; thus, I should speak.

Uhm... I didn't know English was your second language. I was talking about J. I just thought it was telling that someone whose native language is Spanish was informing a native English speaker about the appropriate meaning of a word in English. Of course, I suspect that Morph knew what it meant. I just think his whole "innate intellectual" was a retrospective rationalization he used to attempt an escape from his initial use of "anti-intellectual".