Sometimes, on the campus of the university where I work, a visiting writer will explain to a captive audience how great poems-more often than not his own-get written.These explanations often sound a bit mystical, occasionally even mystifying.So I was amused to read the opening lines of Dobby Gibson's tongue-in-cheek " Small Craft Talk," a poem our readers discovered in a box of paper slush, and which you'll find in our Spring issue:
In some languages the word for dream is the same as for music
is the kind of thing poets like to say
Before you know it, Gibson's takedown of writing-program clichés shades into a wonder at how poems can make us feel ourselves, as Wallace Stevens once put it, "more truly and more strange":
as if you're hearing the song
of your own mind sung into being so that you become yourself
by becoming more like another self
When I read a poem like Gibson's, I usually think, Wow, what a great poem.
In some languages the word for dream is the same as for music
is the kind of thing poets like to say
Before you know it, Gibson's takedown of writing-program clichés shades into a wonder at how poems can make us feel ourselves, as Wallace Stevens once put it, "more truly and more strange":
as if you're hearing the song
of your own mind sung into being so that you become yourself
by becoming more like another self
When I read a poem like Gibson's, I usually think, Wow, what a great poem.
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