How Poems Mean

Abstract

How Poems Mean Laura C. Stevenson (bio) Vermont Poets and Their Craft Neil Shepard and Tamra Higgins, eds. Green Writers Press www.greenwriterspress.com/book/vermont-poets-and-their-craft/ 274 pages; Print, $24.95 Vermont Poets and Their Craft originated as a ten-part lecture series delivered three years ago at Vermont bookstores and other venues under the auspices of Sundog Poetry Center, an organization founded by co-editor Tamra Higgins to promote poets and poetry throughout the state. The lectures, televised by Vermont Public Television, were subsequently revised for publication, and seven other Vermont poets were invited to submit pieces for an anthology. The result is a substantial collection of essays, all but one of which (Chard DeNiord's mainly analytical "Suspense, Suspension, and the Sublime in the Poetry of Robert Frost") are concerned with the question classically worded sixty years ago in John Ciardi's title How Does a Poem Mean? (1975). A reader searching this excellent anthology for common threads will find them less in the poets' different answers to Ciardi's question than in the similar success of their careers. Many of them teach or have taught at Vermont's colleges and universities; several are associated with the Bread Loaf Conference; two are present or past Vermont Poet Laureates, one a past Poet Laureate of Maine. Their professional reputations extend well beyond Vermont's boundaries: several of them have been awarded fellowships from Guggenheim and the National Endowment of the Arts, many have received national poetic awards, and they have been published in presses widely distributed throughout the US. They are, for the most part, seasoned professionals: thirteen of the seventeen speak about their craft on the basis of thirty or forty years of practice. Behind their different styles and interests also lie common assumptions. The forbearers they revere—"our great grandparents of American poetry," as Neil Shepard puts it in "The Art of Concealing and Revealing in Poetry"—are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Baron Wormser's essay "The Irony and the Ecstasy" dwells upon the intensity of Polish poets who take poetry out of "the precincts of amiable sensitivity" and make it a "desperate call for fair play"; David Budbill's witty "Poetry: Special or Ordinary" draws on Taoist poets; but in the main, the poets they choose to quote and their own works reveal their debt to are Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and other modernists of the previous century. Above all, they share Sundog Poetry Center's desire to reach out poetically to Vermont's present general audience. In any state, such a general audience encompasses a variety of auditors, but it may be presumed that among them are experienced or nascent poets seeking fresh perspective or advice on their craft. To those seeking advice, several articles mix technical discussions with sophisticated literary understanding that raises them far above the level of "how-to." David Huddle's "Technique, Tradition, and the Lucky Lot of the Poet," the most Ciardian of the essays, discusses the techniques that makes certain lines in well-known poems by Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Bishop overwhelmingly powerful. Beautifully crafted poems like these, he argues, open the door for new poems: "one poet teaches another, one poem helps another make it into the world." Stephen Cramer's "Making the Road: Tools for the Poet's Journey" starts by describing an exercise that encourages the "curiosity and investigation" that are necessary parts of poetic craft, then moves on with an excellent discussion of poetic diction. Sydney Lea's "Inviting the Reader: Narrative Values, Lyric Poems" argues for clarity in poetry, offering a rule of thumb that he applies to his own poems: "who, why, what, where? If my poem can't answer at least some of these questions, I feel I need to work on it further." At the opposite end of the spectrum, Martha Zweig's "Gnarly" opens by asking "how can readily accessible communication possibly be a goal of poetry?" She prefers "flirtatious" poems that begin by teasing the ear; and she suggests engaging in verbal calisthenics ("Roughhouse, rough trade, roughshod, roughage, ruffian, ruffle, kerfuffle") with the confidence that "meanings will suggest themselves along...