a series in partnership with the Massachusetts Poetry Festival
Fred Marchant, on 'What Is Poetry?'
This is the fifth (and last) installment in a series brought to you by Read Write Poem in partnership with the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, which is being held Oct. 15-18 in Lowell and various cities across Massachusetts. Visit the organization’s website for a complete schedule of events, to watch videos of poets performing at the 2008 festival, for ticket information and more.
For this series, featured readers at the festival were asked to answer the question, “What is poetry?” Here is Fred Marchant’s response.
What is poetry?
At the very least, poetry’s a way of saying more, and saying it more intensely, than other ways of saying things.
I like the relativism of this formulation, and the way in which it proposes a continuum rather than an essential disjunction between forms of writing.
The Excel database is pure information, and is at one end of that spectrum. Maybe the lyric poem is at the other.
I also think someone right now is probably trying to figure out some Excel-based modality of poetry, just as someone is working out a sestina somewhere.
The whole idea of this art is to explore the carrying capacity of language. And each poem written is fundamentally a record of that exploration.
With luck and labor, there might be a really valuable poem waiting at the end of the exploration, one that redraws the horizon of possibility for this art.
Fred Marchant is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Looking House from Graywolf Press. Eamonn Wall, in his review of this book in The Irish Times, has called Fred Marchant “a master of the poetic line,” and Barbara Berman has written in The Rumpus that this book is “filled with sure-footed muscularity and details that sound as pitch-perfect as they feel.” Find out more about Marchant at Poetry Daily.
Marchant, director of the creative writing program and the Poetry Center at Suffolk University in Boston, will be reading at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival Saturday, Oct. 17, at 3 p.m. in Lowell. Learn more about the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival by visiting the festival’s site.
This series has been wonderful, and I want to thank the great folks at Massachusetts Poetry Festival for helping to organize it, as well as all the poets who took the time to reply.
If members want to continue the conversation, they can do so in the comments of this post (or any of the posts in this series) or over at the What Is Poetry group, led by C.E. Chaffin.
Now I want to write a poem on an Excel spreadsheet. I think it might have to be interactive, so that things change depending on what word the reader enters in certain cells. I did once start a poem with the words “the city is a spreadsheet” – I think spreadsheets are magical!
I love the phrase “horizon of possibility.”
I wrote a poem using an Excel spreadsheet once. Probably not in the way that tool might generally be used … so many possibilities!
I so wish I could have heard Fred read. I’ll just have to read to myself, I suppose. Sigh.
Deb Scott replied:
October 17th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Get Fred’s book and read, I meant to say.
“The whole idea of this art is to explore the carrying capacity of language. And each poem written is fundamentally a record of that exploration.”
That is a beautiful encapsulation of poetry!
This has a been a great series. I hope this rich conversation continues on the “What is Poetry” forum.
Thanks Deb, I have never seen a reason to have a spread sheet near me. Now i’m inspired to open up a new worksheet and try your idea out.
Ooops that was meant to read ‘Deb, Catherine & Fred’