On Writing Poetry: Four Contemporary Poets

Abstract

In 1978 the University of Michigan Press published the first book in its on Poetry series, Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird by Donald Hall, who is also the general editor of the series. Since then the series has published books by Robert Bly, Donald Davie, Robert Francis, David Ignatow, Galway Kinnell, Richard Kostelanetz, Maxine Kumin, Philip Levine, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, and Diane Wakowski. This article focuses on three of these books-Hall's Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird, Stafford's Writing the Australian Crawl (1978), and Bly's Talking All Morning (1980)-and on Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town (1979), published by W. W. Norton. On the back cover of each book in the on Poetry series is this note: Poets on Poetry collects critical books by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. As varied and tentative as these articulations are-each book collects work done over a period of several years and, therefore, pursues no single line of thought-these books are unified, as is Hugo's. All four of them are testaments of similar faiths in the vocation of the poet. What they say implicitly unites American poetry to international modernism and suggests that poetry in the United States today is closer in method and spirit to poetry produced in European and South American countries than it is to much poetry previously written in the United States and England. Explicitly, these books discuss the poet's attitude toward language, the choices poets make during the writing of a poem, and the value of the poet's vocation. The authors of these four books attempt to show what poetry is, and is becoming, by discussing what happens in the act of writing. All of them view writing as a mysterious yet discussable activity that involves alogical, associative kinds of thinking. Although Hall is more Freudian and Bly is more Jungian and Hugo and Stafford are less inclined to speculate about the psychic origins that lie behind writing, all four hold compatible views, and all four are comfortable in the presence of the mystery. Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town is probably the most directly useful of