When one poet asks another poet what his/her aesthetic is, this meaning of aesthetic seems to be the one used (taken from the OED): The philosophy of the beautiful or of art; a system of principles for the appreciation of the beautiful, etc.; the distinctive underlying principles of a work of art or a genre, […]
Archives for May 2013
Some basic thoughts on the workshop
May 13, 2013 by
I know I’m not the first poet with opinions about the concept of a workshop. Many have written for or against the concept, while of course having a certain idea of what a workshop is and what it entails. I think it is true that a workshop won’t necessarily make someone become a better writer; […]
On mathematics as language
May 13, 2013 by
The following is something I wrote back in summer of 2010, directed toward a friend who had studied mathematics and said, “Math is the truth.” … If one says, “Math is the truth,” it begs me to ask: what is “truth” in this context? I’m tempted to think of “Truth” as something that is always […]
Some autobiography, Part 2; or, the science continued; or, the decision to know poetry
May 13, 2013 by
As described in a previous post, I was a chemistry nerd in high school. Despite this seemingly disparate interest, I was enthusiastic about writing poetry. To give you an idea of this, one summer in high school, while in an internship in which I helped out in a lab/performed some experiments, I wrote poems while […]
Some autobiography; or, in defense of the ignorant
May 13, 2013 by
We begin life with ignorance; sure, some instinct, but also ignorance. And, certainly, some ignorance will always remain. When I began writing poetry as a sophomore in high school, I, honestly, had no models beyond the generic, public notion of what “poetry” was: a rhymey thing with metaphor…. I hadn’t even read any modernist poetry. […]
What is a poem?
May 13, 2013 by
As someone writing about poetry and writing poems, I should probably make a statement regarding what a poem is. I have a broad definition of poetry: it is stimuli composed of language. I don’t think it is just the words themselves, just the static physical manifestation; it happens in the reader’s brain. But of course […]