A Time for Poetics 4: The Red and The Yellow

So what exactly did I mean anyways? Well, I’m into Pueblo pottery these days. Beverly bought me a beautiful pot made by a San Ildefenso artist, and I purchased one made by a Hopi artist. The San Ildefenso is a small redware pot with a cream-colored, slip-painted, Avanyu motif wrapped around its upper surface.

The Hopi pot is a larger yellow vase painted with a Sikyatki migration pattern. If each pot were a poem, the San Ildefonso is a free verse open form, and the Hopi is a tight metrical design. Each is worthy in its own way. And each is unafraid and unapologetic for its standing. As well they should be. Each tells its own story, has its own rhyme, its own reason, a season.

A Time for Poetics 3: Digging the Meter

Not that I didn’t learn a lot, if not everything, in workshops. And one of the things I learned was an appreciation of meter. But as there are some who feel that meter supplies the only form acceptable for poetry, and as there are some who believe that meter is some anachronistic or reactionary way of fools or fiends, I think of its as a way to work the clay of words.

A Time for Poetics 2: Playing Doctor

This is only my outlook. From every climb, there’s many. But from my viewpoint, I see poets writing for neighbors, associates, friends, and relatives. And not just other poets. The business of poetry these days is, as if, after attending medical school for all those many years, a newly appointed Doctor attends only to other Doctors then and thereafter. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be some consultation. But…

A Time for Poetics 1

I appreciate words of praise about any poem of mine these days more from persons who know nothing much about poetry than those who think they know a lot. There’s a time, it’s been said. A time for communing and a time for learning. A time for living and a time for workshops. A time for people and a time for poets.

PS Sometimes it’s a time to listen to other poets answer questions from another poet to hear some wiser words than mine. Oh, and mine as well.