Reading Poems

Yowza. I was blown away by an essay Mark Strand wrote called, "On Becoming a Poet." Strand took a look at an Archibald MacLeish piece called "You, Andrew Marvell". Bottom line, it's probably always gonna be personal preference and I get the fact that literary criticism just isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I read an essay like that and I walk away feeling like you just can't possibly help becoming a better writer by reading more. Before you start in on me, with the "blah, blah, blah...I am an original and my creativity is so superior that I need no external influences..." or whatever the hell the current argument against scholarship and context are, I just have to go back to the level of analysis that Strand demonstrates. That level of consciousness about language, about phrasing, about poetic device....I'm convinced the mere awareness of all the tools available to poets can only help. A guy with knowledge of those tools is armed to hurdle all the limitations of the written word. And if you think about it, that's sort of what poetry is all about, it's using this frail tool that humanity is equipped with, language, to try to cross the barriers of our own isolation to communicate experience. That experience, be it sensory or emotional, and the need to communicate it, is just one more manifestation of our need to try and connect with the world, and more specifically, humanity outside of our selves. We're trying to convey something very personal in a form that, hopefully, crosses over into the universal and then back into the personal (i.e. Writer to broad audience to reader to readers personal association) and we're doing it with a tool (the written word) that is ultimately limited. And there's really no point to any of this other than, go read that essay. It's brilliant.