Judy Leaver, Professional Writer | Best Words, Best Order

Archive for January, 2010

Literary Mileage
Ecstasy and Discipline

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Miles Frieden, Executive Director of the Key West Literary Seminar

“Ecstasy and Discipline: Relations between Imagination and Form” was the title of a panel discussion at the Key West Literary Seminar I attended last week. This annual event saturates attendees with top-flight writers who read from their work, participate on provocative panels, and give talks on various aspects of their genre.

This year’s seminar theme was about poetry. “Clearing the sill of the world: a celebration of 60 years of American poetry” honored Richard Wilbur, who will turn 89 later this year. (“Clearing the sill of the world” is a line from Wilbur’s poem, “The Writer.”) You may be thinking this sounds about as exciting as watching grass grow. You would be wrong.

It’s like a two-year graduate curriculum crammed into one week in an environment that includes free-range roosters and six-toed cats who share the sidewalk with drinkers, derelicts, Jimmy Buffet wannabes, and the ghosts of Hemingway, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens. It was poetry appreciation on steroids.

A Washington Post reviewer describes Wilbur’s poetry this way: “His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection.”

I didn’t know Wilbur’s work before this seminar, and I assumed he was a smug literary elitist who writes poetry I don’t understand. If a poem (or any writing for that matter) makes me feel stupid, I slam the door shut. Unfortunately, I think that happens far too often. If you were traumatized by an early poetry experience, like having to memorize Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Old English, you stopped reading this blog four paragraphs ago. If not, thanks for staying with me.

Besides reflection and illumination, poetry can provide comfort and relief as described by Yusef Komunyakaa who took a book of poetry with him to Vietnam. “It took me to another place while I was there.” He originally planned to be a psychologist, but became a poet instead. As one writer notes, “Yusef takes on the most complex moral issues, the most harrowing ugly subjects of our American life….and shows us what it is to be human.”

You can learn more about Richard Wilbur, Yusef Komunyakaa, and the Key West Literary Seminar at www.kwls.org.