It's so much better unrecited. You make me like Wilbur, which I've never wanted to since I saw-heard him read at Rutgers University in the late 80s (nor did it help his cause that he'd been invited by our our most pretentious fellow graduate student). Wilbur was what Frost never could allow himself, as too ashamed and embarrassed by poetry, to be. So we have had to endure his mostly monosyllabic American humorist rhyme, with its occasional falls into beauty and sadness in recondite slang, as Wilbur had to endure it. Wilbur just couldn't not be poetic, and couldn't not be so in a diction and syntax raised one power over Frost's into an altitudinousness and attitudinousness free of any Stevens humor or Eliot disgust. But you bring out the best in him, Alexander.
Better unrecited! - I guess I chose a bad poem to start this series with.
Feeling as you do about Robert Frost, I’m not surprised that Wilbur is a poet you argue with. I argue with Wilbur too, but I love him, as I said in my reply to Peter Whisenant.
Wilbur can be funny, though generally only if wearing his funny hat. He does indeed lack disgust - and vulgarity, for that matter. He’s often too grand, too poetic, too poeticised. And his worldview seems maddeningly limited. And yet…. I’ll have to think more about what to say.
Nothing wrong with your choice or recitation (yours? another's?).I remember the first time I heard a recording of Dylan Thomas reading: hated it. Precious and high-minded and broadcasty, such that I couldn't believe he had the reputation he did have as a "voice on wheels." In the US, anyway, I took it for our generally stupid infatuation with "the English accent," stupid in that comes without knowing all the variations in England alone, let alone in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Didn't match at all the silent reading of Thomas's poems, many of which I love. Same with T. S. Eliot, though I like very few of his poems, and Heaney, et al. Frost, too: he hurried through his poems, sure he didn't want his audiences to catch a whiff of "poetry being read," and then hurried through them once more (a trick he got the idea for from a Browning poem). Hell, I have recordings of me reading mine that I wish matched their silent uptake from the page. Better, I think, the silence of print, the unvocalized mind-voicing, especially for page poets like us. As for stage poets? That chanty, wave-sloshing rhythm they get—thanks, but no thanks, in almost all cases. (I really liked Common's rap during a Stevie Wonder song just the other day at the opening of the Obama presidential library.) I prefer a strict demarcation between music-less page poems and lyrics sung as songs. A great gulf fixed between lyric poems and song lyrics should hold (that's my limitation). The nadir for me was hearing Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti come on and "say" poems during the "Last Waltz" concert film. But so much for my petty prejudice against poetry recitations (and of course I'd be happy to give a reading, should anyone ask!). Your words here about Wilbur in this reply to me are, I think, right on.
No, the choice and the recitation are both mine: unfortunately I really sound like that. I know that there are those who are infatuated with the ‘English accent’, just as there are some people (especially in the UK) who’ll dislike me and make all sorts of assumptions about me the minute they hear me speak. But I guess that if I have put up with the latter, I might as well try to take advantage of the former. I don’t think you should be too hard on people in the US, though… after all, the British are more willing to talk about ‘an American accent’ as if there were only one.
I don’t really agree with anything you say about word-music, but I suppose I’ll say that in my reply to the other comment. For what it’s worth, I tend to enjoy Dylan Thomas’s recordings of his own poetry, though I dislike his recordings of other people’s (his readings of Auden seem especially disastrous).
He’s bloodless. I like at least an occasional flash of fangs, a slash of claws. He seems neutered (or, worse, spayed). I can’t imagine him either killing himself or killing someone else, which I guess does make him unique among mid-20th century male American poets. I look forward to your “defense” of him, but then I enjoy all your productions.
This reminds me of how a friend of mine reacted when I said I liked Spielberg’s films. Then again, I think the damned always understand the saved better than the saved understand the damned.
Anyway, I’m beyond delighted as ever that you enjoy my productions!
Thank you for saying so! (I’m stuck sounding the way I do, I guess, and mine is one of those accents that lets people think they know everything about me from the get-go, which can be good and can be bad.)
I don’t see any “angle” from which this poem could be considered “utterly horrifying.” Pretty poem for comfy people. And what in the world is “lofty” doing in the last section? Is it modifying “standing”? An optimist? Attuned to nature? Can one be both? A stone looks like a stone? Duh.
This is a fascinating comment and for a lot of it I agree and disagree with you at the same time. I have a strong temperamental inclination to dislike a poet like Richard Wilbur, and yet I love him.
For now I’d say that by attuned to nature I mean visually observant (the ‘knuckled grip’ for example); that Wilbur’s evaluation of existence is separate from his visual observations of nature; that the image of the stone is (in my opinion) supposed to be flat; and that I’m none the wiser than you are about the penultimate line.
I called the poem ‘horrifying’ for the reason I gave in the piece, but that depends on my finding it beautiful. So if you don’t find it beautiful, you won’t find it horrifying, and I definitely don’t think I can persuade anyone to find something beautiful.
𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑏𝑢𝑟 𝑎 𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡 𝑝𝑜𝑒𝑡? if sylvia plath was the preeminent poet of her era (as i do believe), then he certainly would feature among the most accomplished minor poets*. is there any reason for this classification? i say a poet can write one or two poems that deserve to be remembered, & be a "great minor" (or just "minor" since that adjective conveys only my appreciation); a "major poet" is one who influences other poets (at the time or after death), & by whose presence the tradition afterwards is not the same. lots of formal poets admire wilbur (as frost's urbane brother...). did his having written change anyone else's work?
now, if he had written more alliterative poems like "junk" or "the lilacs" (now 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒'𝑠 a wilbur deep-cut). the poets of the alliterative revival could embrace him as a forerunner & i might be more inclined to reclassify him. but these are not the poems one thinks of in connection with his name.
* berryman & lowell being right on the edge, fading now except for their handful of greatest hits, i think. --it's senseless to confine this to poets in english just from america. put wilbur next to geoffrey hill & compare.
It's an interesting point and the notion of innovating and influencing or changing others' work is definitely something that can mark a poet out as great. Then again I wonder if poets can do that without being themselves great - for me, Ezra Pound would be a prime example (I realise that that may be a controversial opinion). You couldn't call Wilbur a great innovator or the founder of a school or anything like that. (Then again, was Mozart?)
Thank you! It’s probably a weakness of mine that I have to hear a poem first and foremost, but, as you say, for me that is what makes it live, and keeps it alive.
This is excellent and much needed. And the combination of reading with a brief, personal introduction works well. I suspect revived attention to spoken poetry could give it a wider audience than it currently enjoys on the page. In fact, I wonder if one effect of AI might be to restore poetry to its former preeminence. AI can write novels, but it can't replicate the human voice reciting language in its most powerful form. At any rate, I look forward to your future readings.
Thank you! I have many more in the pipeline so watch this space.
I suppose people will say that AI either can or will be able to to recite poetry, too, but I hope that that isn’t true and that, even if it is, most readers won’t put up with that. I continue to agree with Ezra Pound (of all people) that poetry atrophies when it drifts too far from music.
I’m pretty much with you in the anti-music camp. My favorite poets—Marianne Moore, EE Cummings—are typewriter poets. The affinity isn’t with music; it’s with sculpture. Moore, the only poet who dazzles and delights me endlessly, is an interesting case: her rhymes are visual: you see them rather than hear them.
I like Moore and Cummings as well. There’s no reason one kind of poetry need exclude the other. Poetry is already too narrow a field to have the luxury of splintering. I would simply argue that sound carries further - both in terms of meaning and in terms of potential audience.
Yep, no reason to exclude anything. I wasn’t being prescriptive at all. As often happens with me, I look at myself, see how I am and say, damn, I wish I were different. Along the same lines as my “seeing” poems rather than “hearing” them, I would rather look at paintings in a gallery than watch/hear a movie. In a broad sense, I seem to prefer the static/stationary to the moving/theatrical. Not sure why that is.
One: curiously, Richard Wilbur was a passionate reader of Moore and influenced by her in early life. Not that that has any particular relevance, but it seems interesting.
Two: for my part, I find Cummings I wonderful reciter of his own poetry and an intensely musical poet. Plenty of his dramatic monologues were written to be spoken as well as read, and a lot of his more formal poetry (like 'I carry your heart with me' and 'It is at moments after I have dreamed' and 'It may not always be so') is fabulously recitable.
I wouldn’t call this fatheaded so much as needlessly literal-minded. Talking about the music of a poem seems as unobjectionable to me as talking about the imagery of a poem, or for that matter a poem’s tone or its voice or its rhythm or its persona or its form.
Digressions about the etymology of words, though interesting, are irrelevant: at best an attempt to pretend that the subjective is really objective, and at worst (again) just literal-minded. Someone who objected to the use of the word ‘form’ in poetry on the grounds that a form is a physical shape (and after all, a villanelle has the same shape visually on the page as terza rima) would have missed the point.
And as for somebody who seriously didn’t understand the notion of word-music in any sense… I’d just conclude that that person and I, when we talk about poetry, are not talking about the same thing.
It's so much better unrecited. You make me like Wilbur, which I've never wanted to since I saw-heard him read at Rutgers University in the late 80s (nor did it help his cause that he'd been invited by our our most pretentious fellow graduate student). Wilbur was what Frost never could allow himself, as too ashamed and embarrassed by poetry, to be. So we have had to endure his mostly monosyllabic American humorist rhyme, with its occasional falls into beauty and sadness in recondite slang, as Wilbur had to endure it. Wilbur just couldn't not be poetic, and couldn't not be so in a diction and syntax raised one power over Frost's into an altitudinousness and attitudinousness free of any Stevens humor or Eliot disgust. But you bring out the best in him, Alexander.
Better unrecited! - I guess I chose a bad poem to start this series with.
Feeling as you do about Robert Frost, I’m not surprised that Wilbur is a poet you argue with. I argue with Wilbur too, but I love him, as I said in my reply to Peter Whisenant.
Wilbur can be funny, though generally only if wearing his funny hat. He does indeed lack disgust - and vulgarity, for that matter. He’s often too grand, too poetic, too poeticised. And his worldview seems maddeningly limited. And yet…. I’ll have to think more about what to say.
Nothing wrong with your choice or recitation (yours? another's?).I remember the first time I heard a recording of Dylan Thomas reading: hated it. Precious and high-minded and broadcasty, such that I couldn't believe he had the reputation he did have as a "voice on wheels." In the US, anyway, I took it for our generally stupid infatuation with "the English accent," stupid in that comes without knowing all the variations in England alone, let alone in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Didn't match at all the silent reading of Thomas's poems, many of which I love. Same with T. S. Eliot, though I like very few of his poems, and Heaney, et al. Frost, too: he hurried through his poems, sure he didn't want his audiences to catch a whiff of "poetry being read," and then hurried through them once more (a trick he got the idea for from a Browning poem). Hell, I have recordings of me reading mine that I wish matched their silent uptake from the page. Better, I think, the silence of print, the unvocalized mind-voicing, especially for page poets like us. As for stage poets? That chanty, wave-sloshing rhythm they get—thanks, but no thanks, in almost all cases. (I really liked Common's rap during a Stevie Wonder song just the other day at the opening of the Obama presidential library.) I prefer a strict demarcation between music-less page poems and lyrics sung as songs. A great gulf fixed between lyric poems and song lyrics should hold (that's my limitation). The nadir for me was hearing Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti come on and "say" poems during the "Last Waltz" concert film. But so much for my petty prejudice against poetry recitations (and of course I'd be happy to give a reading, should anyone ask!). Your words here about Wilbur in this reply to me are, I think, right on.
No, the choice and the recitation are both mine: unfortunately I really sound like that. I know that there are those who are infatuated with the ‘English accent’, just as there are some people (especially in the UK) who’ll dislike me and make all sorts of assumptions about me the minute they hear me speak. But I guess that if I have put up with the latter, I might as well try to take advantage of the former. I don’t think you should be too hard on people in the US, though… after all, the British are more willing to talk about ‘an American accent’ as if there were only one.
I don’t really agree with anything you say about word-music, but I suppose I’ll say that in my reply to the other comment. For what it’s worth, I tend to enjoy Dylan Thomas’s recordings of his own poetry, though I dislike his recordings of other people’s (his readings of Auden seem especially disastrous).
He’s bloodless. I like at least an occasional flash of fangs, a slash of claws. He seems neutered (or, worse, spayed). I can’t imagine him either killing himself or killing someone else, which I guess does make him unique among mid-20th century male American poets. I look forward to your “defense” of him, but then I enjoy all your productions.
This reminds me of how a friend of mine reacted when I said I liked Spielberg’s films. Then again, I think the damned always understand the saved better than the saved understand the damned.
Anyway, I’m beyond delighted as ever that you enjoy my productions!
Damn, you can read a poem. (Please, lord, in my next life let me sound like an Englishman.)
Thank you for saying so! (I’m stuck sounding the way I do, I guess, and mine is one of those accents that lets people think they know everything about me from the get-go, which can be good and can be bad.)
I don’t see any “angle” from which this poem could be considered “utterly horrifying.” Pretty poem for comfy people. And what in the world is “lofty” doing in the last section? Is it modifying “standing”? An optimist? Attuned to nature? Can one be both? A stone looks like a stone? Duh.
This is a fascinating comment and for a lot of it I agree and disagree with you at the same time. I have a strong temperamental inclination to dislike a poet like Richard Wilbur, and yet I love him.
For now I’d say that by attuned to nature I mean visually observant (the ‘knuckled grip’ for example); that Wilbur’s evaluation of existence is separate from his visual observations of nature; that the image of the stone is (in my opinion) supposed to be flat; and that I’m none the wiser than you are about the penultimate line.
I called the poem ‘horrifying’ for the reason I gave in the piece, but that depends on my finding it beautiful. So if you don’t find it beautiful, you won’t find it horrifying, and I definitely don’t think I can persuade anyone to find something beautiful.
second only to "Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran Act" among his works
That’s a fascinating choice - I remember liking that poem, but I’d never have put it so high. I must revisit it…
𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑏𝑢𝑟 𝑎 𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡 𝑝𝑜𝑒𝑡? if sylvia plath was the preeminent poet of her era (as i do believe), then he certainly would feature among the most accomplished minor poets*. is there any reason for this classification? i say a poet can write one or two poems that deserve to be remembered, & be a "great minor" (or just "minor" since that adjective conveys only my appreciation); a "major poet" is one who influences other poets (at the time or after death), & by whose presence the tradition afterwards is not the same. lots of formal poets admire wilbur (as frost's urbane brother...). did his having written change anyone else's work?
now, if he had written more alliterative poems like "junk" or "the lilacs" (now 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒'𝑠 a wilbur deep-cut). the poets of the alliterative revival could embrace him as a forerunner & i might be more inclined to reclassify him. but these are not the poems one thinks of in connection with his name.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
* berryman & lowell being right on the edge, fading now except for their handful of greatest hits, i think. --it's senseless to confine this to poets in english just from america. put wilbur next to geoffrey hill & compare.
It's an interesting point and the notion of innovating and influencing or changing others' work is definitely something that can mark a poet out as great. Then again I wonder if poets can do that without being themselves great - for me, Ezra Pound would be a prime example (I realise that that may be a controversial opinion). You couldn't call Wilbur a great innovator or the founder of a school or anything like that. (Then again, was Mozart?)
https://substack.com/@graywyvern/p-155338933
Boom!
Of course the poem is excellent, but so are your voice and recitation!
Thank you!
In Oz, suburban Eisteddfods kept recitation alive in gorgeous middle class student pride. Your reading brings resonance to fuller life.
Thank you! It’s probably a weakness of mine that I have to hear a poem first and foremost, but, as you say, for me that is what makes it live, and keeps it alive.
This is excellent and much needed. And the combination of reading with a brief, personal introduction works well. I suspect revived attention to spoken poetry could give it a wider audience than it currently enjoys on the page. In fact, I wonder if one effect of AI might be to restore poetry to its former preeminence. AI can write novels, but it can't replicate the human voice reciting language in its most powerful form. At any rate, I look forward to your future readings.
Thank you! I have many more in the pipeline so watch this space.
I suppose people will say that AI either can or will be able to to recite poetry, too, but I hope that that isn’t true and that, even if it is, most readers won’t put up with that. I continue to agree with Ezra Pound (of all people) that poetry atrophies when it drifts too far from music.
I’m pretty much with you in the anti-music camp. My favorite poets—Marianne Moore, EE Cummings—are typewriter poets. The affinity isn’t with music; it’s with sculpture. Moore, the only poet who dazzles and delights me endlessly, is an interesting case: her rhymes are visual: you see them rather than hear them.
I like Moore and Cummings as well. There’s no reason one kind of poetry need exclude the other. Poetry is already too narrow a field to have the luxury of splintering. I would simply argue that sound carries further - both in terms of meaning and in terms of potential audience.
Yep, no reason to exclude anything. I wasn’t being prescriptive at all. As often happens with me, I look at myself, see how I am and say, damn, I wish I were different. Along the same lines as my “seeing” poems rather than “hearing” them, I would rather look at paintings in a gallery than watch/hear a movie. In a broad sense, I seem to prefer the static/stationary to the moving/theatrical. Not sure why that is.
I'm exactly the opposite, and equally none the wiser as to why that is
About Moore and Cummings...
One: curiously, Richard Wilbur was a passionate reader of Moore and influenced by her in early life. Not that that has any particular relevance, but it seems interesting.
Two: for my part, I find Cummings I wonderful reciter of his own poetry and an intensely musical poet. Plenty of his dramatic monologues were written to be spoken as well as read, and a lot of his more formal poetry (like 'I carry your heart with me' and 'It is at moments after I have dreamed' and 'It may not always be so') is fabulously recitable.
I wouldn’t call this fatheaded so much as needlessly literal-minded. Talking about the music of a poem seems as unobjectionable to me as talking about the imagery of a poem, or for that matter a poem’s tone or its voice or its rhythm or its persona or its form.
Digressions about the etymology of words, though interesting, are irrelevant: at best an attempt to pretend that the subjective is really objective, and at worst (again) just literal-minded. Someone who objected to the use of the word ‘form’ in poetry on the grounds that a form is a physical shape (and after all, a villanelle has the same shape visually on the page as terza rima) would have missed the point.
And as for somebody who seriously didn’t understand the notion of word-music in any sense… I’d just conclude that that person and I, when we talk about poetry, are not talking about the same thing.
um…reading out loud? have you heard of that? i believe people who call themselves poets used to do that.
Well, you said it. Fatheaded with a tin ear.
Oh, no. Ugliness.
My apologies. I should not have written that. I am deeply sorry.
Thank you. I appreciate your apology and accept it.
Let Richard Wilbur be a great poet:
he knew he was, and now 4,000 others know it.
I heard him say, when he was in his 60s,
that he’d never had a submission rejected.
Would he’d had a hundred poems displease
the journals and the presses! I’d still be dejected.