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Jimena Martinez
notes

The word lyric comes from a greek word meaning musical instrument

The musical element of the poem is from its origin in singing chanting and recitation

Before the eighteen hundreds there were no distinction between melodic lyrics such as the songs of Shakespeare’s plays, and the nonmusical written lyrics, such as sonnets

During the renaissance writers began to write for the readers instead of for performance

They started to have more visualizing aspects in their poems

major ideas

The poem is made to appeal to the ear

quotes

"The poem appeals to the ear. At one boundary we have the lyric as a poem dependent upon music for its full effectiveness. "

"The poet was once a performer, a bard, a scop, a troubadour."

" The lyric became an instrument of greater inwardness. "

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The poem appeals to the ear. At one boundary we have the lyric as a poem dependent upon music for its full effectiveness. The word lyric derives from the Greek lyra, or "musical instrument." The Greeks spoke of lyrics as ta mele, "poems to be sung." The musical element is so intrinsic to poetry that the lyric never entirely forgets its origins in musical expression-in singing, chanting, recitation to musical accompaniment. The poet was once a performer, a bard, a scop, a troubadour. In the Renaissance the lyric was repeatedly associated with the lyre and the lute. Here is how Milton evokes the juncture of poetry and music in his poem "At a Solemn Musick":

Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heav'ns joy,
Sphear-born, harmonious sisters, Voice, and Vers,
Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ

Of the nine celestial sirens assigned to the nine spheres of the universe, Milton is here specifying two-Polyhymnia, the muse of sacred song, and Erato, the muse of lyric poetry-and calling upon them to join together. Before the eighteenth century, writers or critics seemed to make little or no apparent distinction between melodic lyrics, such as Campion's ayres ("Whoever dreams of a poem where language begins to resemble music, thinks of him," Charles Simic writes) or the songs of Shakespeare's plays, and nonmusical written lyrics, such as Shakespeare's sonnets or Donne's love poems.

Yet it was during the Renaissance that English writers first began to write their lyrics for readers rather than composing them for musical performance. They began to shape their poems to a visual medium. The space for writing as writing, for the poem as something to be read, opened up, for a written poem, unlike an oral one, has a spatial dimension. It becomes a physical object on the page. It appeals to the inner ear, to unique experience. As the idea of the individual emerged during the Renaissance, so did the lyric poem take on fresh elements for expressing that newfound selfhood. The lyric became an instrument of greater inwardness. Later, that dimension of inwardness would start to feel like lyric poetry itself. And some poetry would start to aspire to the pure condition of music.
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Harmonious Sisters, Voice, and Vers by Edward... | Poetry Foundation

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The poem appeals to the ear. At one boundary we have the lyric as a poem dependent upon music for its full effectiveness. The word lyric derives from the Greek lyra, or "musical instrument." The Greeks spoke of lyrics as ta mele, "poems to be sung."

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The Immense Intimacy, the Intimate Immensity

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The Immense Intimacy, the Intimate Immensity

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Dani Garza
Major Ideas:

reading poetry can give your information that you won’t find anywhere else because it can be intimate

Notes:

poetry can be very intimate that it is able to get under your skin

poems are not just emotions, they are experiences

The spiritual life is embodied in language

Poets are those who are carried into the world poetry creates that they are taken by the intensity that poems have.

Emily Dickinson says she doesn’t know poetry, but she knows what it does to her

How poetry can be anything and be found in many things, and can still produce an emotion or reaction

She says only strong poetry is able to produce such a response.

With poetry, she wants to be surprised and to be stunned.

For the author, reading poetry is an act of the most immense intimacy, of intimate immensity. They are shocked by what they see in the poem but also by what the poem finds in them.

Cool Quotes:

“a poem is able to carry you to another plane of time, outside of time.”

“a poem needs a reader to posses it and to be possessed by it.”

I think that means that for poetry to have a lasting impact on the reader, by “possessing” the reader, they are able to carry the experience and the teachings for their entire life.

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Alejandro Romo

Notes
- It in itself is written in a very poetic or metaphorical way.
- Talks about what a poem is and how it and how it is a way of taking you to another place or how it took a long way to get to you.

Major idea
- Poems take us and to places and manifest a message for us.

Quotes
- "A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps."

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Read these poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture-the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us-has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you. I think of Malebranche's maxim, "Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul." This maxim, beloved by Simone Weil and Paul Celan, quoted by Walter Benjamin in his magisterial essay on Franz Kafka, can stand as a writer's credo. It also serves for readers. Paul Celan said:

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the-not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense, too, are under way: they are making toward something.

Imagine you have gone down to the shore and there, amidst the other debris-the seaweed and rotten wood, the crushed cans and dead fish- you find an unlikely looking bottle from the past. You bring it home and discover a message inside. This letter, so strange and disturbing, seems to have been making its way toward someone for a long time, and now that someone turns out to be you. The great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, destroyed in a Stalinist camp, identified this experience. "Why shouldn't the poet turn to his friends, to those who are naturally close to him?" he asked in "On the Addressee." But of course those friends aren't necessarily the people around him in daily life. They may be the friends he only hopes exist, or will exist, the ones his words are seeking. Mandelstam wrote:

At a critical moment, a seafarer tosses a sealed bottle into the ocean waves, containing his name and a message detailing his fate. Wandering along the dunes many years later, I happen upon it in the sand. I read the message, note the date, the last will and testament of one who has passed on. I have the right to do so. I have not opened someone else's mail. The message in the bottle was addressed to its finder. I found it. That means, I have become its secret addressee.

Thus it is for all of us who read poems, who become the secret addressees of literary texts. I am at home in the middle of the night and suddenly hear myself being called, as if by name. I go over and take down the book-the message in the bottle-because tonight I am its recipient, its posterity, its heartland.
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Heartland by Edward Hirsch | Poetry Foundation

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Read these poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert.

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Pablo Costa
Notes
- Poems aren't sometimes meant for someone specifically
- Poems choose the reader or in other words impact and appeal to the reader's heart
- Poems as talked in heartland are such as messages in bottles. Tossed in the ocean not with the best hopes but one day it will be picked up and appreciated by someone
Major Ideas
- Poems take a long time to reach the perfect reader which becomes the secret addressee

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Paulina Flores
Notes
- Poems are meant to be somewhat timeless
- Poems can survive through changes in society and in the world
-  Poems are like a "living eternity"
- The reader completes the poem by their own experiences and perspective
Major Ideas
- Poems being timeless is like stored magic
Quotes
- "It crosses frontiers and outwits the temporal. It seeks to defy death, coming to disturb and console you."
- "True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words"
- "You are reading poetry—I mean really reading it—when you feel encountered and changed by a poem, when you feel its seismic vibrations, the sounding of your depths."
- “There is no place that does not see you,”

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The lyric poem seeks to mesmerize time. It crosses frontiers and outwits the temporal. It seeks to defy death, coming to disturb and console you. ("These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand," John Berryman wrote in one of his last Dream Songs: "They are only meant to terrify & comfort.") The poet is incited to create a work that can outdistance time and surmount distance, that can bridge the gulf-the chasm-between people otherwise unknown to each other. It can survive changes of language and in language, changes in social norms and customs, the ravages of history. Here is Robert Graves in The White Goddess:

True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than-coincidences, into a living entity-a poem that goes about on its own (for centuries after the author's death, perhaps) affecting readers with its stored magic.

I believe such stored magic can author in the reader an equivalent capacity for creative wonder, creative response to a living entity. (Graves means his statement literally.) The reader completes the poem, in the process bringing to it his or her own past experiences. You are reading poetry-I mean really reading it-when you feel encountered and changed by a poem, when you feel its seismic vibrations, the sounding of your depths. "There is no place that does not see you," Rainer Maria Rilke writes at the earth-shattering conclusion of his poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo": "You must change your life."
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Stored Magic by Edward Hirsch | Poetry Foundation

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The lyric poem seeks to mesmerize time. It crosses frontiers and outwits the temporal. It seeks to defy death, coming to disturb and console you.

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Kate Dutcher
- To read a poem is to depart from the familiar, to leave all expectations behind.
- Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.
- Reading is a point of departure, an inaugural, an initiation.
- Poetry is a way of inscribing a feeling of awe.
- With reading poetry comes "a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness.”

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The reader of poetry is a kind of pilgrim setting out, setting forth. The reader is what Wallace Stevens calls "the scholar of one candle." Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder. "Beginning is not only a kind of action," Edward Said writes in Beginnings, "it is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness." I love the frame of mind, the playful work and working playfulness, the form of consciousness-the dreamy attentiveness-that come with the reading of poetry.

Reading is a point of departure, an inaugural, an initiation. Open the Deathbed Edition of Leaves of Grass (1891-1892) and you immediately encounter a series of "Inscriptions," twenty-six poems that Walt Whitman wrote over a period of three decades to inscribe a beginning, to introduce and inaugurate his major work, the one book he had been writing all his life. Beginning my own book on the risks and thralls, the particular enchantments, of reading poetry, I keep thinking of Whitman's six-line poem "Beginning My Studies."

Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

I relish the way that Whitman lingers in this one-sentence poem over the very first step of studying, the mere fact-the miracle-of consciousness itself, the joy of encountering "these forms," the empowering sense of expectation and renewal, the whole world blooming at hand, the awakened mental state that takes us through our senses from the least insect to the highest power of love. We can scarcely turn the page, so much do we linger with pleasure over the ecstatic beginning. We are instructed by Whitman in the joy of starting out that the deepest spirit of poetry is awe.

Poetry is a way of inscribing that feeling of awe. I don't think we should underestimate the capacity for tenderness that poetry opens within us. Another one of the "Inscriptions" is a two-line poem that Whitman wrote in 1860. Called simply "To You," it consists in its entirety of two rhetorical questions:

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you
not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?

It seems entirely self-evident to Whitman that two strangers who pass each other on the road ought to be able to loiter and speak, to connect. Strangers who communicate might well become friends. Whitman refuses to be bound, to be circumscribed, by any hierarchical or class distinctions. One notices how naturally he addresses the poem not to the people around him, whom he already knows, but to the "stranger," to the future reader, to you and me, to each of us who would pause with him in the open air. Let there be an easy flow-an affectionate commerce-between us.

Here is one last "Inscription," the very next poem in Leaves of Grass. It's called "Thou Reader" and was written twenty-one years after "To You."

Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I,
Therefore for thee the following chants.

I am completely taken by the way that Whitman always addresses the reader as an equal, as one who has the same strange throb of life he has, the same pulsing emotions. There's a desperate American friendliness to the way he repeatedly dedicates his poems to strangers, to readers and poets to come, to outsiders everywhere. Whoever you are, he would embrace you. I love the deep affection and even need with which Whitman dedicates and sends forth his poems to the individual reader. He leaves each of us a gift. To you, he says, the following chants.
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To the Reader Setting Out by Edward Hirsch | Poetry Foundation

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The reader of poetry is a kind of pilgrim setting out, setting forth. The reader is what Wallace Stevens calls "the scholar of one candle." Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

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Mere Air, These Words but Delicious to Hear

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Mere Air, These Words but Delicious to Hear

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Aidan Gaul

- The author begins the article by recalling an anecdote when he read the phrase "Mere Air, These Words but  Delicious to Hear" at a Greek history museum.

- Poetry is a process. From the syllables to the words, from phrases to the sentence, from sentences to rythm, mood, and emotion.

- You can't paraphrase poetry because if you change the way a poem is read you lose the original meaning

- Poets are language workers

- Poems make it seem as if the universe "reveals itself through the mother tongue."

- “you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all”

- "if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven’t been rumpled, poetry hasn’t spent the night."

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From syllable to word to phrase to sentence, the sound of poetry is the source of its primitive pleasures.

I remember once walking through a museum in Athens and coming across a tall-stemmed cup from ancient Greece that has Sappho saying, "Mere air, these words, but delicious to hear." The phrase inscribed into the cup, translated onto a museum label, stopped me cold. I paused for a long time to drink in the strange truth that all the sublimity of poetry comes down in the end to mere air and nothing more, to the sound of these words and no others, which are nonetheless delicious and enchanting to hear. Sappho's lines (or the lines attributed to her) also have a lapidary quality. The phrase has an elegance suitable for writing, for inscription on a cup or in stone. Writing fixes the evanescence of sound. It holds it against death.

The sound of the words is the first primitive pleasure in poetry. "In poetry," Wallace Stevens asserted, "you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all" ("Adagia"). Stevens lists the love of the words as the first condition of a capacity to love anything in poetry at all because it is the words that make things happen. There are times when I read a poem and can feel the syllables coming alive in my mouth, the letters enunciated in the syllables, the syllables coming together as words, the words forming into a phrase, the phrase finding a rhythm in the line, in the lines, in the shape of the words crossing the lines into a sentence, into sentences. I feel the words creating a rhythm, a music, a spell, a mood, a shape, a form. I hear the words coming off the page into my own mouth-in transit, in action. I generate-I re-create-the words incantatory, the words liberated and self-reflexive. Words rising from the body, out of the body. An act of language paying attention to itself. An act of the mind.

" Mere air, these words, but delicious to hear." In poetry the words enact-they make manifest-what they describe. This is what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls "the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation." Indeed, one hears in Hopkins's very phrase the trills or rolled consonants of the letter r reverberating through all four words, the voiced vowels, the r-o-l of "roll" echoing in the back of "ca rol," the alliterative c's building a cadence, hammering it in, even as the one-syllable words create a rolling, rising effect that is slowed down by the rhythm of the multisyllabic words, the caroling creation. The pleasure all this creates in the mouth is intense. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God." I read Hopkins's poems and feel the deep joy of the sounds creating themselves ("What is all this juice and all this joy?"), the nearly buckling strain of so much drenched spirit, "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!"

The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. Osip Mandelstam suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven't been rumpled, poetry hasn't spent the night. The words are an (erotic) visitation, a means to an end, but also an end in and of themselves. The poet is first of all a language worker. A maker. A shaper of language. With Heinrich Heine, the linguist Edward Sapir affirmed in his book Language, "one is under the illusion that the universe speaks German." With Shakespeare, one is under the impression that it speaks English. This is at the heart of the Orphic calling of the poet: to make it seem as if the very universe speaks and reveals itself through the mother tongue.
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Mere Air, These Words, but Delicious to Hear by... | Poetry Foundation

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From syllable to word to phrase to sentence, the sound of poetry is the source of its primitive pleasures. I remember once walking through a museum in Athens and coming across a tall-stemmed cup from ancient Greece that has Sappho saying, "Mere air, these words, but delicious to hear."

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David Villarreal
Notes
-The author addresses the reader as his equal
-Poetry is good at evoking emotions from the reader
Major Idea
-Reading poetry is a "point of departure"
-Poetry can help connect people from different backgrounds
Quotes
- "Beginning is not only a kind of action, it is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness."

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The reader of poetry is a kind of pilgrim setting out, setting forth. The reader is what Wallace Stevens calls "the scholar of one candle." Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder. "Beginning is not only a kind of action," Edward Said writes in Beginnings, "it is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness." I love the frame of mind, the playful work and working playfulness, the form of consciousness-the dreamy attentiveness-that come with the reading of poetry.

Reading is a point of departure, an inaugural, an initiation. Open the Deathbed Edition of Leaves of Grass (1891-1892) and you immediately encounter a series of "Inscriptions," twenty-six poems that Walt Whitman wrote over a period of three decades to inscribe a beginning, to introduce and inaugurate his major work, the one book he had been writing all his life. Beginning my own book on the risks and thralls, the particular enchantments, of reading poetry, I keep thinking of Whitman's six-line poem "Beginning My Studies."

Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

I relish the way that Whitman lingers in this one-sentence poem over the very first step of studying, the mere fact-the miracle-of consciousness itself, the joy of encountering "these forms," the empowering sense of expectation and renewal, the whole world blooming at hand, the awakened mental state that takes us through our senses from the least insect to the highest power of love. We can scarcely turn the page, so much do we linger with pleasure over the ecstatic beginning. We are instructed by Whitman in the joy of starting out that the deepest spirit of poetry is awe.

Poetry is a way of inscribing that feeling of awe. I don't think we should underestimate the capacity for tenderness that poetry opens within us. Another one of the "Inscriptions" is a two-line poem that Whitman wrote in 1860. Called simply "To You," it consists in its entirety of two rhetorical questions:

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you
not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?

It seems entirely self-evident to Whitman that two strangers who pass each other on the road ought to be able to loiter and speak, to connect. Strangers who communicate might well become friends. Whitman refuses to be bound, to be circumscribed, by any hierarchical or class distinctions. One notices how naturally he addresses the poem not to the people around him, whom he already knows, but to the "stranger," to the future reader, to you and me, to each of us who would pause with him in the open air. Let there be an easy flow-an affectionate commerce-between us.

Here is one last "Inscription," the very next poem in Leaves of Grass. It's called "Thou Reader" and was written twenty-one years after "To You."

Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I,
Therefore for thee the following chants.

I am completely taken by the way that Whitman always addresses the reader as an equal, as one who has the same strange throb of life he has, the same pulsing emotions. There's a desperate American friendliness to the way he repeatedly dedicates his poems to strangers, to readers and poets to come, to outsiders everywhere. Whoever you are, he would embrace you. I love the deep affection and even need with which Whitman dedicates and sends forth his poems to the individual reader. He leaves each of us a gift. To you, he says, the following chants.
Return to the Guidebook

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To the Reader Setting Out by Edward Hirsch | Poetry Foundation

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The reader of poetry is a kind of pilgrim setting out, setting forth. The reader is what Wallace Stevens calls "the scholar of one candle." Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

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Sebastián Odriozola
Notes
- We participate in a poems flow, we give ourselves to the rhythm, to the process of merging.
- A wave is made up by composition and muscle, and the same goes for lyric poetry.
Major Ideas
- Renewal is the "Pivot of lyricism"
- A poem moves from the eye to the ear, to the inner ear and then to the inner eye.
Quotes:
"It guides our reflections. It actualizes an intuition flowing deeper than intellect."

"We use our senses in poetry, but it is a mistake to try to use our senses everywhere."

"The poem plunges us from the visible to the invisible, it plunges us into the domain of psyche, of soul. It takes us into the realm of the demonic."

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Renewal is the "pivot of lyricism," as the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva says, comparing the lyrical element to the waves of the sea. "The wave always returns, and always returns as a different wave," she writes in her essay "Poets with History and Poets without History":

The same water-a different wave.
What matters is that it is a wave.
What matters is that the wave will return.
What matters is that it will always return different.
What matters most of all: however different the returning wave, it will always return as a wave of the sea.
What is a wave? Composition and muscle. The same goes for lyric poetry.

The poem is a muscular and composed thing. It moves like a wave and dissolves literalizations. We participate in its flow; we flow in its participation. We give ourselves up to its rhythm, to the process of individuation, the process of merging. When Tsvetaeva compares the lyrical element to the waves of the sea, I think of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," I think of Wallace Stevens's seashore lyric "The Idea of Order at Key West," which leads to Elizabeth Bishop's "The End of March," Mark Strand's "The Idea," and Allen Grossman's "The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River." I think of Heraclitus's idea, expanded upon by Jung, that "It is delight . . . to souls to become wet." James Hillman explains in The Dream and the Underworld that "Water is the special element of reverie, the element of reflective images and their ceaseless, ungraspable flow. Moistening in dreams refers to the soul's delight in death, its delight in sinking away from fixations in literalized concerns."

The poem moves from the eye to the ear, to the inner ear, the inner eye. It drenches us in the particulars of our senses, it moves us through the articulations of touch, taste, and scent. It actualizes our senses until we start to feel an animal alertness opening up within us. It guides our reflections. It actualizes an intuition flowing deeper than intellect. ("Beneath my incredulity / All at once is flowing / Joy . . . Intuition weightless and ongoing / Like stanzas in a book / Or golden scales in the melodic brook."-James Merrill, Scripts for the Pageant.) We use our senses in poetry, but it is a mistake to try to use our senses everywhere. The poem plunges us from the visible to the invisible, it plunges us into the domain of psyche, of soul. It takes us into the realm of the demonic. Goethe notes:

In poetry, especially in that which is unconscious, before which reason and understanding fall short, and which, therefore, produces effects so far surpassing all conception, there is always something of the Demoniacal.

We discover in poetry that we are participating in something which cannot be explained or apprehended by reason or understanding alone. We participate in the imaginary. We create a space for fantasy, we enter our dream life, dream time. We deepen our breathing, our mindfulness to being, our spiritual alertness.

Poetry is an animating force. It comes alive when the poet magically inscribes a wave and thereby creates a new thing, when the text immobilizes it, when the individual poem becomes part of the great sea, when the bottle washes ashore and the wanderer happens upon it, when the reader experiences its inexhaustible depths. . . .
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The Wave Always Returns by Edward Hirsch | Poetry Foundation

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Renewal is the "pivot of lyricism," as the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva says, comparing the lyrical element to the waves of the sea. "The wave always returns, and always returns as a different wave," she writes in her essay "Poets with History and Poets without History": The same water-a different wave.

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Gabriel Hasson
Notes

- Poetry charts the change in language

- When you recite poets out loud it sounds like a poem
Major ideas

- Precision in poetry is very important, it gives your words depth and importance.

- By doing this you can convert the common word into a spell.
Quotes:

“Belongs to no-one and to everyone”

“The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.”

“Poetry charts the changes in language, but it never merely reproduces or recapitulates what it finds.”

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The medium of poetry is language, our common property. It belongs to no one and to everyone. Poetry never entirely loses sight of how the language is being used, fulfilled, debased. We ought to speak more often of the precision of poetry, which restores the innocence of language, which makes the language visible again. Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

Poetry charts the changes in language, but it never merely reproduces or recapitulates what it finds. The lyric poem defamiliarizes words, it wrenches them from familiar or habitual contexts, it puts a spell on them. The lyric is cognate with those childish forms, the riddle and the nursery rhyme, with whatever form of verbal art turns language inside out and draws attention to its categories. As the eighteenth-century English poet Christopher Smart put it, freely translating from Horace's Art of Poetry:

It is exceedingly well
To give a common word thespell
To greet you as intirely new.

The poem refreshes language, it estranges and makes it new. ("But if the work be new, / So shou'd the song be too," Smart writes.) There is a nice pun on the word spell in Smart's Horatian passage since, as tribal peoples everywhere have believed, the act of putting words in a certain rhythmic order has magical potency. That power can only be released when the spell is chanted aloud. I'm reminded, too, that the Latin word carmen, which means "song" or "poem," has attracted English poets since Sidney because of its closeness to the word charm, and, in fact, in the older Latin texts it also means a magic formula, an incantation meant to make things happen, to cause action (Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric). And a charm is only effective when it is spoken or sung, incanted.

The lyric poem separates and uproots words from the daily flux and flow of living speech but it also delivers them back-spelled, changed, charmed-to the domain of other people. As Octavio Paz puts it in The Bow and the Lyre:

Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or uprooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.

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Give a Common Word the Spell by Edward Hirsch | Poetry Foundation

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The medium of poetry is language, our common property. It belongs to no one and to everyone. Poetry never entirely loses sight of how the language is being used, fulfilled, debased. We ought to speak more often of the precision of poetry, which restores the innocence of language, which makes the language visible again.

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Adrian Flores
Notes:

- Reading poetry is an act of "reciprocity".
- The relationship between the author and the writer solely depends on the text.
- Poetry is a voicing, a calling-forth.
Major Ideas:
- The "lyric poem" is a highly concentrated and passionate form of communication.
- Reading poetry is a way to connect even more deeply with yourself, and even with others.
Cool Quotes:
- "When I recite a poem I rein-habit it, I bring the words off the page into my own mouth, my own body."
- "I become its (poem) speaker and let its verbal music move through me as if the poem is a score and I am its instrumentalist, its performer."

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The message in the bottle is a lyric poem and thus a special kind of communiqué. It speaks out of a solitude to a solitude; it begins and ends in silence. We are not in truth conversing by the side of the road. Rather, something has been written; something is being read. Language has become strange in this urgent and oddly self-conscious way of speaking across time. The poem has been (silently) en route-sometimes for centuries-and now it has signaled me precisely because I am willing to call upon and listen to it. Reading poetry is an act of reciprocity, and one of the great tasks of the lyric is to bring us into right relationship to each other. The relationship between writer and reader is by definition removed and mediated through a text, a body of words. It is a particular kind of exchange between two people not physically present to each other. The lyric poem is a highly concentrated and passionate form of communication between strangers-an immediate, intense, and unsettling form of literary discourse. Reading poetry is a way of connecting-through the medium of language-more deeply with yourself even as you connect more deeply with another. The poem delivers on our spiritual lives precisely because it simultaneously gives us the gift of intimacy and interiority, privacy and participation.

Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, and the lyric poem exists somewhere in the region-the register-between speech and song. The words are waiting to be vocalized. The greatest poets have always recognized the oral dimensions of their medium. For most of human history poetry has been an oral art. It retains vestiges of that orality always. Writing is not speech. It is graphic inscription, it is visual emblem, it is a chain of signs on the page. Nonetheless: "I made it out of a mouthful of air," W. B. Yeats boasted in an early poem. As, indeed, he did. As every poet does. So, too, does the reader make, or remake, the poem out of a mouthful of air, out of breath. When I recite a poem I reinhabit it, I bring the words off the page into my own mouth, my own body. I become its speaker and let its verbal music move through me as if the poem is a score and I am its instrumentalist, its performer. I let its heartbeat pulse through me as embodied experience, as experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds. The poem implies mutual participation in language, and for me, that participation mystique is at the heart of the lyric exchange.

Many poets have embraced the New Testament idea that "In the beginning was the Word," but I prefer Martin Buber's notion in I and Thou that "In the beginning is the relation." The relation precedes the Word because it is authored by the human. The lyric poem may seek the divine but it does so through the medium of a certain kind of human interaction. The secular can be made sacred through the body of the poem. I understand the relationship between the poet, the poem, and the reader not as a static entity but as a dynamic unfolding. An emerging sacramental event. A relation between an I and a You. A relational process.
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In the Beginning Is the Relation by Edward Hirsch | Poetry Foundation

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The message in the bottle is a lyric poem and thus a special kind of communiqué. It speaks out of a solitude to a solitude; it begins and ends in silence. We are not in truth conversing by the side of the road. Rather, something has been written; something is being read.

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It Is Something of an Accident That You Are the Reader and I the Writer

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It Is Something of an Accident That You Are the Reader and I the Writer

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Marite Quintero
Notes:
- Poetry is described as going" beyond mutuality,  identification, into identity itself", as well as creates its own autonomous world.
- In a way, the poem lets itself be read while the reader simply listens.
- Lyric poetry is a form of verbal materialism or an art of language
Major Notes:
- Poetry arouses and intensifies a spiritual desire
- Writing embodies while reading contacts.
- A poem is a creative act that can is finished incompletely and abstract moment for the final product in the work.
Cool Notes:
- "The reader "exists" on the horizon of the poem."
- “Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form.”
- “There is then creative reading as well as creative writing,”

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In Plain American Which Cats and Dogs can Read

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In Plain American Which Cats and Dogs can Read

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Joaquín González
Notes:

Poetry is neither singing nor speaking. It is a verbal art directly linked to speech.

The 'self-conscious' words mark the way words behave in rhythmic lines.

The language poems use allow the reader to capture reality in a special way and make them learn more.

Major Ideas:

Rather than speech, poetry is a verbal art

Poetry capture reality for thee reader

Cool Quotes:

“not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand, / but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!”

"marks the poem as a verbal construct is the self-conscious treatment of the words themselves"

"Poetry is not speech exactly—verbal art is deliberately different than the way that people actually talk"

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The lyric poem walks the line between speaking and singing. (It also walks the line between the conventions of poetry and the conventions of grammar.) Poetry is not speech exactly-verbal art is deliberately different than the way that people actually talk-and yet it is always in relationship to speech, to the spoken word. "It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place," as Wallace Stevens puts it in his poem "Of Modern Poetry." W. B. Yeats called a poem "an elaboration of the rhythms of common speech and their association with profound feeling" ("Modern Poetry"). W. H. Auden said: "In English verse, even in Shakespeare's grandest rhetorical passages, the ear is always aware of its relation to everyday speech" ("Writing"). I'm reminded of the many poems in the American vernacular-from Walt Whitman to William Carlos Williams ("The Horse Show"), Frank O'Hara ("Having a Coke with You"), and Gwendolyn Brooks ("We Real Cool")-that give the sensation of someone speaking in a texturized version of American English, that create the impression of letters written, as Marianne Moore joyfully puts it, "not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand, / but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!" A demotic linguistic vitality-what Williams calls "the speech of Polish mothers"-is one of the pleasures of the American project in poetry.

Here is the opening of Randall Jarrell's poem "Next Day":

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,

Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.

One hears in this poem the plaintive, intelligent voice of a suburban housewife who knows she has become invisible, who wants only to be seen and heard. What particularly marks the poem as a verbal construct is the self-conscious treatment of the words themselves, the way the words behave in rhythmic lines and shapely stanzas. There's the delightful pun on the names of household detergents, the play off "hens" and "flocks," the acute way the woman sums up her companions in the supermarket, how she pivots on the word "overlook" and ruefully quotes William James's pragmatic American notion of "wisdom." I've always been touched by the way Jarrell animates the woman's voice in this poem, how he inscribes his own voice into her voice and captures the reality of someone who is exceptional, commonplace, solitary.
Return to the Guidebook

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In Plain American Which Cats and Dogs Can Read!... | Poetry Foundation

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The lyric poem walks the line between speaking and singing. (It also walks the line between the conventions of poetry and the conventions of grammar.) Poetry is not speech exactly-verbal art is deliberately different than the way that people actually talk-and yet it is always in relationship to speech, to the spoken word.

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Charu Krishnan
Notes:

Poems could be considered to be metaphors of their own, and they can include metaphors within them.

Through poems, poets create and restore relations between things that don't have anything in common, therefore invoking all kinds of thoughts and emotions.

Kennings: compound expressions in Old English and Old Norse poetry with metaphorical meanings.

Ex: referring to the sea as "swanrad" ("swan-road") or referring to a ship as "oar-steed".

Major Ideas:

Metaphors are an intimate thing; while the poet issues the metaphor, the reader acknowledges it and makes an effort to find meaning in it. It's a "transaction" that results in both parties actively engaging in deep thoughts and emotions.

All of this ends up encouraging the reader to delve deeper into poetry and understand it better, s well as using their imagination actively.

Cool Quotes:

"Poetry is made of metaphor. It is a collision, a collusion, a compression of two unlike things: A is B."

"...a metaphor transfers the connotations or elements of one thing (or idea) to another. It is a transfer of energies, a mode of interpenetration, a matter of identity and difference."

"...the poet enlists the reader’s intellectual and emotive involvement and [...] the reader actively participates in making meaning in poetry."

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The transaction between the poet and the reader, those two instances of one reality, depends upon figurative language. Poetry evokes a language that moves beyond the literal and, consequently, a mode of thinking that moves beyond the literal. "There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry," Robert Frost confesses in "The Constant Symbol," "but chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority." Poetry is made of metaphor. It is a collision, a collusion, a compression of two unlike things: A is B. The term metaphor comes from the Latin metaphora, which in turn derives from the Greek metapherein, meaning "to transfer," and, indeed, a metaphor transfers the connotations or elements of one thing (or idea) to another. It is a transfer of energies, a mode of interpenetration, a matter of identity and difference. Each of these propositions about the poem depends upon a metaphor: the poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets ( William Carlos Williams). A poem is a well-wrought urn (Cleanth Brooks), a verbal icon (W. K. Wimsatt). A poem is a walk ( A. R. Ammons); a poem is a meteor ( Wallace Stevens). A poem might be called a pseudoperson. Like a person it is unique and addresses the reader personally (W. H. Auden). A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

When Paul Celan wrote, "A poem . . . can be a message in a bottle," he didn't think literally that he would be dropping his poems into the Seine (though he was writing them from Paris) and that someone might find them floating ashore on the banks of the Chicago River (though I was living in Chicago when I first read him). What did he mean then?

The language of poetry, Shelley claims in his Defence of Poetry, "is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension." Shelley is suggesting that the poet creates relations between things unrecognized before, and that new metaphors create new thoughts and thus revitalize language. In his fine book Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield remarks that he would like to change one detail in Shelley's phrase, to alter "before unapprehended relations" to "forgotten relations." That's because poetry delivers back an archaic knowledge, an ancient and vitally metaphorical way of thinking, now mostly lost. The poet, by creating anew, is also likely to be "restoring something old."

The oldest English poetry, for example the Anglo-Saxon and poems written in other old Germanic languages, has a number of poetic tropes that enable the poet to describe things at an angle, without naming them, and thus invite the listener to imaginatively construct them. The most widespread are known as kennings; these occur in compounds, such as calling the sea swanrad ("swan-road") or winegeard ("home of the winds"). The word ken, meaning "to know," is still used in Scottish dialects, and indeed such figurative language is a way of knowing.

What especially concerns me here is how the reader actively participates in the making of meaning through metaphor, in thinking through the relation of unlike things. How do we apprehend these previously unapprehended or forgotten relations: in ironic tension, in exact correspondence, in fusion? The meaning emerges as part of a collaboration between writer and reader. Out of this interactive process comes the determination to what extent a metaphor works, where it breaks down, to what extent a poem can be a message in a bottle, or a machine made out of words (Williams), or a derangement of the senses (Rimbaud); to what extent "a book is a cubic piece of burning, smoking conscience-and nothing else" (Boris Pasternak); to what extent, as Shelley writes,

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer
its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced
by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they
are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

The singing of a nightingale becomes a metaphor for writing poetry here, and listening to that bird (that natural music) becomes a metaphor for reading it. One of the premises of Shelley's metaphor is that the poet "sings" in "solitude" without any consideration for an audience and that the audience-"his auditors"-responds to the work of an "unseen musician." They can't actually see him because they are physically removed from each other. And yet they are brought into mysterious (visionary) relation.

The philosopher Ted Cohen suggests that one of the main points of metaphor is "the achievement of intimacy." Cohen argues in "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy" that the maker and the appreciator of a metaphor are brought into deeper relationship with one other. That's because the speaker issues a concealed invitation through metaphor which the listener makes a special effort to accept and interpret. Such a "transaction constitutes the acknowledgment of a community." This notion perfectly describes how the poet enlists the reader's intellectual and emotive involvement and how the reader actively participates in making meaning in poetry. Through this dynamic and creative exchange the poem ultimately engages us in something deeper than intellect and emotion. And through this ongoing process the reader becomes more deeply initiated into the sacred mysteries of poetry.
Return to the Guidebook

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Metaphor: A Poet is a Nightingale by Edward Hirsch | Poetry Foundation

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The transaction between the poet and the reader, those two instances of one reality, depends upon figurative language. Poetry evokes a language that moves beyond the literal and, consequently, a mode of thinking that moves beyond the literal.

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(Miranda Yee)
Notes:

"Language has become strange in this urgent and oddly self-conscious way of speaking across time."

The author Edward Hirsch focuses on the relationship "I and a You" by explaining the relationship between the Lyric Poem, writing, and reading poetry.

Lyric Poem: Has a speech and a song. This also can be unsettling.

"Words are ready to be vocalized."

"Reading poetry is an act of reciprocity, and one of the great tasks of the lyric is to bring us into the right relationship to each other."

"It is a particular kind of exchange between two people not physically present to each other"

Reading Poetry: This is a medium of language that can be able to connect deeply with others.

Has a stronger relationship between the reader and the writer.

Major Ideas:

"The message in the bottle is a lyric poem and thus a special kind of communiqué."

Lyric Poems are short and effective by their passionate, concentrated, and intense lyrics.

Cool Quotes:

"I made it out of air." -  W. B. Yeats

"Many poets have embraced the New Testament idea that In the beginning was the Word, but I prefer Martin Buber’s notion in I and Thou that In the beginning is the relation.”

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Robert Graves writes in On English Poetry, "Henceforward, in using the word Poetry I mean both the controlled and uncontrollable parts of the art taken together, because each is helpless without the other." No one entirely understands the relationship in poetry between trance and craft, between conscious and unconscious elements, and, indeed, poets have been obsessed by the problem of what can and cannot be controlled in the making of art. This is especially instructive to readers who bring their own conscious purposes to poetry, their own unconscious mechanisms of displacement and identification, of sublimation, projection, condensation . . . .

Sometimes the emphasis is put on conscious reason, on the conscious aspects of making. Paul Valéry spoke of "une ligne donné"-"the given line"-and suggested that everything else was labor, a matter of making. Baudelaire talked of "the labor by which a revery becomes a work of art." In his 1846 essay " The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar Allan Poe emphasized the conscious method of trial and error:

Most writers-poets in especial-prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy-an ecstatic intuition-and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought-at the true purposes seized only at the last moment-at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view-at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable-at the cautious selections and rejections-at the painful erasures and interpolations-in a word, at the wheels and pinions-the tackle for scene-shifting-the step-ladders and demon-traps-the cock's leathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.

Here Poe is giving enormous preference-and theatrical privilege-to the nature of reason in the creative process.

But there is something else. It may be true that the poet is given only a single line but that line is nonetheless a gift from the unconscious, a hunch, an intuition, and a perception. The poet is one who often thinks by feeling. Remember the famous Cartesian cogito ("I think, therefore I am") and Paul Valéry's useful variation on Descartes, "Sometimes I think; and sometimes I am" ( Analects). Inspiration is in-breathing, indwelling, and poetry can never be entirely willed-as Plato knew. It is often connected to passion, to mania, to childlike play, to the unconscious itself. Poets have always known they are trying to invoke for us something that can't be entirely controlled. This is the necessary touch of madness that Plato made so much of, the freedom that terrified him. Here is Socrates in the dialogue Phaedrus:

There is a third form of possession or madness, of which the Muses are the source. This seizes a tender, virgin soul and stimulates it to rapt passionate expression, especially in lyric poetry, glorifying the countless mighty deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity. But if any man comes to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found.

In this view poetry is dangerous. It is allied closely to madness and is not entirely at the dispensation of the poet's conscious will or intellect. "Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will," Shelley writes in his romantic defense of poetry:

A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.

Whoever calls out "Help me, O Heavenly Muse," advertises a dependence on a force beyond the intellect. In general, the fierce power that sometimes comes through the work of the great poets of reason, from Samuel Johnson to Louise Bogan and J.V. Cunningham, comes from the deep undertow of the demoniacal that is fended off by the conscious activity of making. Visionary poets welcome the wind of madness-I think of Rimbaud and Shelley, of Hart Crane and Federico García Lorca-but part of their power comes from the fact that the sudden illumination is what the mathematician Henri Poincaré calls "a manifest sign of long, unconscious inner work," and that the wind is shaped to the exigencies of form. I have always liked the dictum of the baroque Jesuit poet Tommaso Ceva that poetry is "a dream dreamed in the presence of reason."

The poet would call the muse "Laura" or "Beatrice," the poet would name her "Mnemosyne" (personification of memory) or "Clio" (muse of history). The poet would borrow Freud's notion of the "uncanny," the unconscious, or Jung's collective unconscious, or Jacques Maritain's idea of creative intuition. The older poet advises the younger poet: mystery abides. So W.S. Merwin, for example, remembers his teacher John Berryman giving him advice in the years just after the Second World War:

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

Berryman also said that

the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

A transfiguring passion. A force beyond the confines of the conscious self.

There is no true poetry without conscious craft, absorbed attention, absolute concentration. There is no true poetry without unconscious invention. The reader, too, enters into the relationship between the controlled and the uncontrollable aspects of the art. Shelley says that "Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man." The poem is a genie that comes out of the bottle to liberate the reader's imagination, the divinity within. The writer and the reader make meaning together. The poet who calls on help from the heavenly muse also does so on behalf of the imaginative reader.
Return to the Guidebook

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Help Me, O Heavenly Muse by Edward Hirsch | Poetry Foundation

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Where does a poem come from? The sources of inspiration are many, from reason to a touch of madness.

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(Monica Probert)
Notes:

Poetry can be connected to feelings, passion and mania

Poets are trying to give the audience reactions that can't be controlled

Both the things that we can control and things that we cannot create the art of poetry

Many poets accept with open arms " manifest [signs] of long, unconscious inner work,”

"The poem is a genie that comes out of the bottle to liberate the reader’s imagination, the divinity within. "

Major Ideas:

"There is no true poetry without conscious craft, absorbed attention, absolute concentration."

Poets find inspiration from their muses

Cool Quotes:

“I think, therefore I am” - René Descartes,

"Sometimes I think; and sometimes I am" - Paul Valéry

"Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will,”- Shelley

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Robert Graves writes in On English Poetry, "Henceforward, in using the word Poetry I mean both the controlled and uncontrollable parts of the art taken together, because each is helpless without the other." No one entirely understands the relationship in poetry between trance and craft, between conscious and unconscious elements, and, indeed, poets have been obsessed by the problem of what can and cannot be controlled in the making of art. This is especially instructive to readers who bring their own conscious purposes to poetry, their own unconscious mechanisms of displacement and identification, of sublimation, projection, condensation . . . .

Sometimes the emphasis is put on conscious reason, on the conscious aspects of making. Paul Valéry spoke of "une ligne donné"-"the given line"-and suggested that everything else was labor, a matter of making. Baudelaire talked of "the labor by which a revery becomes a work of art." In his 1846 essay " The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar Allan Poe emphasized the conscious method of trial and error:

Most writers-poets in especial-prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy-an ecstatic intuition-and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought-at the true purposes seized only at the last moment-at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view-at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable-at the cautious selections and rejections-at the painful erasures and interpolations-in a word, at the wheels and pinions-the tackle for scene-shifting-the step-ladders and demon-traps-the cock's leathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.

Here Poe is giving enormous preference-and theatrical privilege-to the nature of reason in the creative process.

But there is something else. It may be true that the poet is given only a single line but that line is nonetheless a gift from the unconscious, a hunch, an intuition, and a perception. The poet is one who often thinks by feeling. Remember the famous Cartesian cogito ("I think, therefore I am") and Paul Valéry's useful variation on Descartes, "Sometimes I think; and sometimes I am" ( Analects). Inspiration is in-breathing, indwelling, and poetry can never be entirely willed-as Plato knew. It is often connected to passion, to mania, to childlike play, to the unconscious itself. Poets have always known they are trying to invoke for us something that can't be entirely controlled. This is the necessary touch of madness that Plato made so much of, the freedom that terrified him. Here is Socrates in the dialogue Phaedrus:

There is a third form of possession or madness, of which the Muses are the source. This seizes a tender, virgin soul and stimulates it to rapt passionate expression, especially in lyric poetry, glorifying the countless mighty deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity. But if any man comes to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found.

In this view poetry is dangerous. It is allied closely to madness and is not entirely at the dispensation of the poet's conscious will or intellect. "Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will," Shelley writes in his romantic defense of poetry:

A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.

Whoever calls out "Help me, O Heavenly Muse," advertises a dependence on a force beyond the intellect. In general, the fierce power that sometimes comes through the work of the great poets of reason, from Samuel Johnson to Louise Bogan and J.V. Cunningham, comes from the deep undertow of the demoniacal that is fended off by the conscious activity of making. Visionary poets welcome the wind of madness-I think of Rimbaud and Shelley, of Hart Crane and Federico García Lorca-but part of their power comes from the fact that the sudden illumination is what the mathematician Henri Poincaré calls "a manifest sign of long, unconscious inner work," and that the wind is shaped to the exigencies of form. I have always liked the dictum of the baroque Jesuit poet Tommaso Ceva that poetry is "a dream dreamed in the presence of reason."

The poet would call the muse "Laura" or "Beatrice," the poet would name her "Mnemosyne" (personification of memory) or "Clio" (muse of history). The poet would borrow Freud's notion of the "uncanny," the unconscious, or Jung's collective unconscious, or Jacques Maritain's idea of creative intuition. The older poet advises the younger poet: mystery abides. So W.S. Merwin, for example, remembers his teacher John Berryman giving him advice in the years just after the Second World War:

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

Berryman also said that

the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

A transfiguring passion. A force beyond the confines of the conscious self.

There is no true poetry without conscious craft, absorbed attention, absolute concentration. There is no true poetry without unconscious invention. The reader, too, enters into the relationship between the controlled and the uncontrollable aspects of the art. Shelley says that "Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man." The poem is a genie that comes out of the bottle to liberate the reader's imagination, the divinity within. The writer and the reader make meaning together. The poet who calls on help from the heavenly muse also does so on behalf of the imaginative reader.
Return to the Guidebook

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Help Me, O Heavenly Muse by Edward Hirsch | Poetry Foundation

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Where does a poem come from? The sources of inspiration are many, from reason to a touch of madness.

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(Carolina Nunez)

Notes:

Rhythm creates a pattern of yearning and expectation, of recurrence and difference.

It is a combination of stressed and unstressed syllables which create a feeling of "fixity and flux, of surprise and inevitability.

Major Ideas:

Rhythm can differentiates us and it creates a sense of consolation.

Recurrence and change.

Has an "oceanic" feeling.

The rhythm of the emotion determine the texture of the sounds.

Cool Quotes:

"Rhythm is a form cut into time" (Ezra Pound).

"Whitman creates through the rhetorical rhythm of these lines the very urgency of fundamental memory triggered and issuing forth."

“A reminiscence sing.”

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Epic, Drama, Lyric: Be Plural like the Universe 

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Epic, Drama, Lyric: Be Plural like the Universe 

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Sofi Margain
Notes:

Poetry tells the history, is engaging and fulfilling.

Epic of narrative: narrator speaks in the first person, and then the character speaks for itself.

Drama: characters do all the talking

Lyric: first-person

true= we encounter lyric poetry put into words of characters.

Pessoa wrote poetry in three ways making three different fictive “authors”.

Poetry has a lot of mystery and relation to music.

Major ideas:

What the 3 different ways to write poems; epic, drama, lyric.

Quotes:

“from lyric poetry to dramatic there is one continuous gradation.”

“I think we ought to take to heart his Whitmanesque motto, “Be plural like the universe!”

“Poetry never loses its sense of sacred mystery.”

“private exchange that takes place between writer and reader.”

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There is a lively history of poetry, and poetry keeps engaging, fulfilling, and transgressing that history. Each of us becomes a more effective and responsive reader as we learn more about poetry's past and its forms. Literary works have conventionally been divided into three generic types or classes, dependent upon who is supposedly speaking:

epic or narrative: in which the narrator speaks in the first person, then lets the characters speak for themselves;
drama: in which the characters do all the talking;
lyric: uttered through the first person.

This useful but flawed textbook division evolved from Aristotle's fundamental distinction between three generic categories of poetic literature: epic, drama, and lyric. All were radically presentational: recited, spoken, chanted, sung. "Like all well-conceived classifications," the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa writes in "Toward Explaining Heteronymy":

[T]his one is useful and clear; like all classifications, it is false. The genres do not separate out with such essential facility, and, if we closely analyze what they are made of, we shall find that from lyric poetry to dramatic there is one continuous gradation. In effect, and going right to the origins of dramatic poetry-Aeschylus, for instance-it will be nearer the truth to say that what we encounter is lyric poetry put into the mouths of different characters.

Pessoa himself wrote poems under three different "heteronyms," creating three distinct bodies of work, all distinguished, under the signature of three different fictive "authors." He also wrote poems under his own name-equally dramatic, equally personal. I think we ought to take to heart his Whitmanesque motto, "Be plural like the universe!"

Aristotle's traditional groupings more or less held until the eighteenth century, but since then the epic and the novel, the drama, and the lyric have continually shadowed and shaded each other. They have blurred, transmuted, crossed boundaries. Readers experience how the narrative or storylike element drives lyric poems; how the musical element, the rhythm of emotions, charges narrative poems; how the element of dramatic projection empowers many narratives, many lyrics. These varieties are continuous, like the universe. All have their origin in religious practice and ritual.

Poetry never loses its sense of sacred mystery. Poetry emerged with the chant and the dance. As Sapir puts it, "Poetry everywhere is inseparable in its origins from the singing voice and the measure of the dance" ( Language). Written poetry is for the most part no longer part of a communal religious practice. It is the medium of individuals for individuals. I myself am mostly interested in the existential experience of reading poetry, in the kind of private exchange that takes place between writer and reader. I emphasize the magical effectiveness of words as words, but I'm also aware that poetry has a strong relation to music on one side and to painting on the other. It has a musical dimension, a pictorial element. Poetry and music are sister arts. So are poetry and painting. It's as if the eye and the ear were related through poetry, as if they had become siblings, or lovers.
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Epic, Drama, Lyric: Be Plural Like the Universe!... | Poetry Foundation

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There is a lively history of poetry, and poetry keeps engaging, fulfilling, and transgressing that history.