Andrew Hudgins
Andrew Hudgins has published five books: Babylon in a Jar (1998), The Glass Hammer (1995), The Never-Ending (1991), After the Lost War (1988), and Saints and Strangers (1985). A new collection, Ecstatic in the Poison was published by The Overlook Press/Sewanee Writers' Series in 2003. He's also the author of a collection of literary essays, The Glass Anvil, which was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1997. Saints and Strangers was one of three finalists for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; After the Lost War received the Poets' Prize in 1989, and The Never-Ending was one of five finalists for the National Book Award in 1991. He is Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at The Ohio State University.
Statement
In poems, I look for rhythm first. That's how poetry first caught my attention. I first
loved Eliot and Pound and Dylan Thomas and Housman because the movement of their lines
caught me and swept me up. And then Yeats and Lowell. And then I was able to look
backwards and see that my immature reading of Shakespeare's plays and the King James Bible
had prepared me for this new way of reading, and I came to a fuller appreciation of their
greatness as poetry.
If a poem uses the pulse of unfolding language to sweep me along, I'll let myself be swept
along. I don't read poems for ideas, though poems need ideas. I don't read for emotion,
though poems need emotion. I confess that a story or anecdote will sometimes pull me
through a weak poem, simply because I'm curious to see what's going to happen--even when I
know what's going to happen. I have the same weakness with potboilers and bad movies,
though less than I used to. But that only works once, and once I know what happens in the
story I have no reason to return to it unless the rhythm of the lines and sentences, and
the sound of the language, especially assonance, pulls me back to it. And that's when I
begin to get interested in the ideas and emotions in it. Of course in real life these
things happen so fast as to be indistinguishable and as I move into a poem the various
responses begin to talk to reinforce and interrogate another, often at cross purposes. But
if I try to break the process of appreciation down, this is what seems to be going on.
I've noticed that meter has an advantage over free verse in catching my ear when I'm
reading something new. I'll follow a metrical poem about ten lines in just because verse
can disguise itself as poetry for about that long even in the absence of poetry, but free
verse is ruthless in exposing when it lacks poetry. Any flabbiness in the line shows up
very quickly, the whole thing devolves into chopped prose, and I lose interest.
Occasionally that can be overcome by good images or a compelling scene or a good anecdote
or an intriguing tone of voice or something else, but . . .
Back to PoetryNet