What is a poet?

What is a poet? Who are the cutting edge and accomplished poets today? What defines poetry today as opposed to other times? How many poets are there in the world?

First we look at a definition of poetry:

The art or work of a poet. Poems regarded as forming a division of literature.
The poetic works of a given author, group, nation, or kind. A piece of literature written in meter; verse.
Prose that resembles a poem in some respect, as in form or sound. The essence or characteristic quality of a poem.
A quality that suggests poetry, as in grace, beauty, or harmony: the poetry of the dancer's movements.

Middle English poetrie, from Old French, from Medieval Latin poētria, from Latin poēta, poet. See poet. (From American Heritage Dictionaries)

In these days of Spring 2007, I have hoped to examine poetry in the light of who are poets in the world? how do poets share their art with others? & how is poetry relevant to the world today?

So here we are again, starting again, in the library this time, not at a friend's house. I live between things and people. Sometimes I live in a car, sometimes on the road, on the sidewalk, sometimes on someone's porch, sometimes in my father's house or the nursing home where my mother is right now, I hope right now and not in an ambulance on her way to the morgue.
Furthermore, I hope to demolish the stereotypes of poets. You know, that of the airy-fairy, artsy fartsy idealist, nose in a book or gazing at the clouds, traipsing along lah dee dah, without a care in the world. Or that of the "Hopeless Romantic," ready to DIE for any cause, specially that of his or her fatal ego. Enough said.

And more than enough of my introduction to our topic. Here goes:

I got six books;
got five on the right of me,
one to the left, stage left
for you there behind me,
stage right
for you there in front of me,
you angels who were standing
on the head of a pin,
until just a moment ago
when I liberated you
like so many baby spiders
out of that soft silk pod
hung up in the corner
of the window.



So, first book:

Anne Sexton: The Complete Poems--

ISNB: 0-395-29475-4
or 0-395-32935-3 (pbk)

With a foreword by Maxine Kumin "How it was"

"Anne Sexton as I remember her on our first meeting in the late winter of 1957, tall, blue-eyed, stunningly (beautiful no that's café's subconscious bubbling up) slim, her carefully coifed dark hair decorated with flowers, her face skillfully made up, looked every inch the fashion model. And indeed she had briefly modeled for the Hart Agency in Boston..." (page xix)

Enough reading that. Let's look at some links for her poetry... Ready? Okay hold on. Jump!

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1324/sexton.htm

Jim Morrison, in the Prologue to his The Lost Writings (eponymously named) talks about art and literature:

"I'm kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers.
I always wanted to write, but I always figured it'd be no good unless somehow the hand just took the pen and started moving without me really having anything to do with it. Like automatic writing. But it just never happened.
I wrote a few poems, of course. I think around the fifth or sixth grade I wrote a poem called "The Pony Express." That was the first I can remember. It was one of those ballad-type poems. I never could get it together though.
...
...
Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything, it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you..."

Jim Morrison wrote that from Los Angeles in the winter of 1969 into spring and summer of 1971. But enough took, of that here now. You find his work and read it--

http://www.huddersfield1.co.uk/poetry/morrisonpoetry.htm

One of a group of randomly selected poets, drawn from the shelves at the Galesburg Public Library, is Patty Seyburn, winner of the 1997 Marianne Moore Poetry Prize, and author of Diasporadic, poems published by Helicon Nine Editions of Kansas City. It won the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award for 2000.

Molly Peacock wrote of Diasporadic, Patty Seyburn's first volume of poetry:

"What distinguishes (this) is her magic habit of managing disparate but simultaneous perspectives. Almost yoga-like, she seems able to to train her focus at once on big subjects nd small details, as if she had a different capacity for perspectives than the rest of us. Yet what is really new about these poems is their unsureness, the un-authority of this author as she makes her way..." (from off the back cover of Diasporadic).

So who is Patty Seyburn? Maybe Jewish of culture or upbringing, she grew up in Detroit, lived in or near Chicago, getting a degree at Northwestern University, worked as a journalsit for seven years begfore earning an MFA in poetry from U of California Irvine. She was, in 1998 earned her Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at University of Houston. She was also, at time of publishing of Diasporadic, living in Southern California with her husband Eric Little.

Patty Seyburn also published another books of poems: Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998), . Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Paris Review, Poetry, New England Review, Field, Slate, Pleiades, Bellingham Review, Crazyhorse, Seneca Review, Passages North and Third Coast, and in the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2005).

Ms. Seyburn currently co-edits a journal of poetry in Los Angeles, POOL: A Journal of Poetry.

http://www.poolpoetry.com/Past%20Issues.htm

Apparently she has become one of the faculty of CAlifornia State University's College of Liberal Arts.

Let's take a look at one of Patty Seyburn's, the eponymous Diasporadic, whose title hearkens to both the dispersed communities of Jewry throughout the world, and to the ability of certain very ancient plants to reproduce and spread throughout the planet by means of a very small kernel of life, tiny and dark and definite like a period, each holding a secret to generations and the world:

When I saw the Jews floating, I knew
it was time to pack up, when the water
struck their oak boxes, the small stones
placed atop their graves in memory
scaattering, the great slabs engraved
like charms on a bracelet swept
downstream as though rocks were
driftwood, rocks were feathers--

Like a cinematographic eye to a cataclysm, Seyburn opens up both the story of the poem and ushers us into viewing her eye's camera. I enjoy this image partly because of my own diasporadic inheritance, my grandmother's account of seeking her ancestor's grave, only to find that the Nazis had bull-dozed the lapidaries into the German ground, somewhere near Hamburg, or maybe Hanover.

As I continue to read Seyburn, I hope to come back and edit this work, both expanding on it and inviting you further into a dialogue on her poems and her life.



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I happened to learn about Derek Walcott by also pulling a volume of his from the book shelf at the library in my father's town. This chanced to be The Prodigal, an epic of travel and culture both European and Latin American, published in New York by Farrar, Straus, Giroux three years ago, 2004. I consumed this while walking the streets of Galesburg, while sitting on my porch drinking shiraz, or whilst sitting at coffee houses or all night greasy spoons imbibing the brew of brown bean, with tip enough to pay some hour's rent. And I fell in love with the verse of this Caribbean poet and raconteur.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-bio.html

For my birthday, my lady friend got me a voucher for some books, one of which I chose Derek Walcott's Omeros, also of New York by Farrar Straus Giroux, almost two decades ago, in 1990. I began reading the first poem, a retelling of how men and their forefathers on the Caribbean islands built the pirogues from the ancient trees. Also in these first days of summer, I hope to recount to you more of what I learn of this magnificent poet and wise old man of the sea.