Archive for the ‘K.S. Ernst’ Category
Entry 1645 — Part of Something from 1994
Friday, November 28th, 2014
I was going to write something new for today but it fell apart somewhere before its midpoint. I have hopes for it, but . . .
So, in place of it, here’s commentary on poetry from an article published twenty years ago that I actually got paid for: 9 pages on all the neglected kinds of poetry then extant (just about all of which are still extant, and neglected). As is the case with nearly all my poetry commentary/criticism, no one every wrote me about it.
I was going to use just what I said about Kathy Ernst’s “Philosophy,” then thought it might be interesting to present the whole page in media res. Less work for me, at any rate. So, here is page 6 from the November/ December issue of Teachers & Writers:
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Entry 900 — The Anthology from Fantagraphics
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012
I got my contributor’s copy of this yesterday. I don’t love every work in it but I think there are almost no works in it that I’d call poor, and many that I think terrific. My highest rating is always for works I want to steal from, or steal completely, and I’ve already come across more than ten of these, in just a few fast skims. My favorite so far in one by Kathy Ernst, “Viole(n)t,” which is . . I was just about to say unstealable because anything you could use it or a part of it in would look stupit compared with it. Then I thought of one way you could steal from it, or from any work: steal just a detail, or–better–a fraction of a detail, just enough so a viewer knowing Kathy’s work wiykd recognize it; this way you could use it as an allusion that might make everything near it seem minor, but not the whole work it was in due to how small it was. Hey, I think I could make it work!
Note: I think every good poem has stolen elements in it. It may be the the more stolen elements it has, the better it is. No, make that the best poems have the most stolen elements, but some bad poems have a lot of stolen elements, too.
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