Interview with Rosanna Warren:
http://www.kenyonreview.org/interviews/current.php
(There are a few poems of RW on the net, and you can find them by googling.)
Rosanna Warren's not just an amazing poet, but a teacher who transforms her students. For me, I felt like she was one of the teachers (like DW) who both completely overturned and crystallised my relationship to poetry. A lot of what I've been going on about on this list comes, as you will see, from them. So here is an interview with Rosanna Warren, so that you might as well get it from the source, rather than me. Relevant excerpts from the interview below:
"Tragedy means not that it's sad. Tragedy... means that there are irreconcilable imperatives. I guess I'm looking for an art that has that strength of mind, that does not say "Oh, boo-hoo-hoo" but that can shock us to the core by putting us face-to-face with what is irreconcilable, and it can include great pathos, like Achilles' horses weeping for the death of Patroclus."
...
"I think there's a great misunderstanding (well, even to go back even twenty-five years in this country) between so-called open forms (and the ideological claims being made for them, even politically, which seems to be an amazingly crude way of thinking) and the traditional metrical forms. Free verse itself is now a tradition of over a hundred years old... My sense of form is any organic set of constraints, of structural constraints that the poem sets up for itself, which should engender a powerful form of resistance, internal resistance. A poem that doesn't have these two elements, I find, lacks life."
...
[The Sappic stanza] carries with it, like the sonnet, a powerful erotic charge, which can then be used as a sort of fund of energy by poets who might write against it.
...
"I think young poets need to study the complexities of the past, and not little potted histories of the past, but to go back and look at the actual documents... I try to encourage my students to think that the past is revolutionary and more interesting than most of us aremore intelligently questioning, more grave about busting things open, about exploring what the world can be."...
"I think of poetry as being lyric in the deep and archaic Greek sense, as song and dance. By the time it is translated to the drawing on the page that we call writing, the markers of dance and song are no longer present. Writing tries to conjure the presence. In that sense, I think of poetry as a kind of elegy for that transient intensity of experience. And translation, more specifically, sacrificial and elegiac in that it takes you to the heart of the mystery of what is poetry, which nobody can define, but we keep dancing around it. It's an essence, which is not just engineering, which you can't just get by riveting together choriambs or dactyls, and yet which involves the engineering at some level. The image of the human body is a good one since most of us have the illusion, at least, that who we are is not merely the engineering of our bones and flesh and nervous system, though we wouldn't be here without them. So translating means teleporting a body, teleporting Sappho into another body. Inevitably in that passage, the molecules, the cells are damaged and yet we reconstitute it in something like a good translation which gives us the illusion of another dance being made, another breath being breathed, another nervous system pulsing."...
"I think of it [the visual shape of a poem] as an iconography, whether it's quatrains that look like bricks stacked or a nice chunky sonnet or a wandering, long, dispersed, French modernist poemyes. I think there's an iconic aspect to the way the poem performs itself on the page.... How have different poet cultures played out this ratio between the visual and the acoustic or oral? Both are intense experiences and the poem is a fantastic hybrid form because it captures the elegy for the lost song and it also captures a monumentalizing visual desire to have a timeless shape on the page. It's in time and it's out of time, it's in the ear and in the eye. Finally, in some Mallarmean sense, it's in the soul, beyond voice, beyond vision."
...
"I try to have students think harder and hear more, both the internal balances and imbalances in the lines they're writing. When contemporary poems in English are weak it has partly to do with not taking line seriously. A metrical grid is not necessarily the way to do it. A metrical grid can be just as bad as a weak free-verse line. It can be like a laundry line that's gone slack. Meter won't do it alone. Meter is just a training for the ear. I have a mystical sense; the line should be a metaphysical unity and have that coherence, and then it needs to be related to the lines before and after it with dynamic momentum. If you can get that ratio right between momentum across the lines and unity within the lines, then you've got a poem starting."
...
JC: If you have one piece of advice for young poets, what would it be?
Rosanna Warren: Find the resistance that you need. Find your proper resistance. Art without resistance is weak.
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