Jacqueline
Osherow is the author of Looking for Angels in New York (University of
Georgia, 1989), Conversations With Survivors (University of Georgia, 1994), With
a Moon in Transit (Grove 1996), and Dead
Men’s Praise (Grove, 1999). Her most recent book, The Hoopoe’s Crown, was published by BOA
Editions in November of 2005. Osherow has been
awarded the Witter Bynner Prize by the Statement:
A statement of poetics? I’m interested in poems, not poetics. I can’t imagine a statement of poetic principles that some genius couldn’t -- with a new and brilliant poem -- immediately and thoroughly disprove. In fact, I can’t imagine a poetics that hasn’t been disproved already. Surely it was precisely in order to escape this kind of statement that I got involved with poetry in the first place. Is there another medium so welcoming to contradiction?
So why delimit with poetics? Any poetic orientation , in the right hands, can produce great poems. And no notion of poetics, no matter how subtle or complex, can generate a great poem by itself.
Of course, I have preferences, strong ones, even. But I can honestly say that I’ve been exhilarated by poems that came out of an idea of poetry I would have found anathema, and I’ve been left cold by the work of poets whose notions of poetics I applaud.
The closest thing to a statement of poetics that I’d be willing to make is: use whatever works. It’s hardly earth-shattering or original; indeed, I suspect it to have been the guiding poetic principle of the poets of Hebrew Bible. (An understanding of their metrical system has eluded scholars for years, largely because they didn’t have one.)
That said, it’s not as if I don’t avail myself, on many occasions, of imposed constraints -- sometimes formal, sometimes factual. I like constraints in poems. They create possibilities. I even like constraints no reader could be aware of. I don’t change facts, when I’m speaking of facts. I get a peculiar satisfaction from making poems out of the actual stuff of the world I’ve been handed. I speculate in poems, but only when the facts are unavailable. Of course, I’ve gotten things wrong – all too often – but I was always certain they were right.
I tend to agree with Auden that it’s easier to write good formal poems than good free verse ones. There’s a sense of direction, all kinds of built-in occasions for explosion, or, at least, surprise. And form sometimes seems to keep a sort of sonic slingshot in its back pocket that propels whatever you put in it a little further. But I’ve often found myself engaged with material resistant to that kind of help, that kind of ease. And I have no interest in form for its own sake. I’m an opportunist, not a formalist.
And I certainly don’t think other poets need stick to the actual. This practice was imposed on me when my step-mother-in-law started telling me holocaust stories, knowing I was a “writer,” expecting me to put them down. It would have seemed obscene to tamper with such stories. And then I discovered I preferred the rigor of specifics that refused alteration.
But hearing people’s stories and attempting to be true to them does not make me a poet of witness. I’ve been horrified to see this phrase applied to me. I am not any kind of witness. And, where the holocaust is concerned, I have no reason to doubt Primo Levi, who was , after all, in
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