A Poet's Craft chapter 1

I'm working my way through Annie Finch's A Poet's Craft. If you are a poet, and don't have or haven't read this book, GET IT NOW. Amazon will deliver it, you don't even have to go out (and Powell's is closed for the duration anyway).

I gave the whole book a fast read-through, and am now going back through and working on some of the exercises, and there are some thoughts I want to share if only to clarify them for myself.

I really hate the Daphne story. Not the legend itself, so much as the way it's glorified. Let's face it, this is a story about attempted rape. When Daphne asks her father the river god for help, what does he do? Turns her into something that can neither move nor speak. (Thanks, Dad.) How often have we heard rape survivors say that they felt numb or paralyzed during the attack? How much do we see their voices ignored, discredited, or otherwise silenced?

And what does it accomplish? Apollo doesn't get to rape Daphne, but he feels free to rip off her leaves and appropriate them as his own symbol. It's pretty hard not to read this as validating his entitlement over her.

Yes, I know, this is a presentist reading and is not how the classical Greeks (or Romans-- the version I'm most familiar with is Ovid's) would have intended or interpreted the story. But if the question is, "What can this story tell us about poetry?" then in my mind, it does call for a psychologically presentist reading, not a historically or anthropologically accurate one. And there's nothing in this reading that I care to apply to my art. The best I can do with it is: if you chase a poem too hard, you're likely to lose it and end up with a handful of dead leaves instead.

Gender politics aside, there just isn't anything in this story that relates to how I experience writing. Assignment to self: Start and maintain a list of fiction that contains metaphors for art and the creative process, that work for me.

First example that comes to mind, the fairy fruit in Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist If you haven't read this book, you should.

Neil Gaiman's story "Calliope," a stand-alone in the original Sandman series. I blogged about some of the implications here. More of a cautionary tale than a process metaphor.

Daniel Abraham's "Long Price Quartet." Rather horribly Faustian, to a poet.

Available! High-Voltage Lines, Knocking from Inside