the "LUMP" and the WORDS (buy "WHO OPENS")

I've been reading Seamus Heaney's poetics essay, "Feeling Into Words," for class and taking a break from it by reading Jesse Seldess's volume of poetry, "WHO OPENS." My poetry professor from last semester gave me the latter text at the Charles Bernstein reading from last week and it has provided an interesting contrast--or seeming contrast--to what Heaney's essay has been discussing. (By the way, I'm supposed to tell everyone to purchase a copy of "WHO OPENS." It was published by my professor's press, Kenning, and it is some truly good stuff. See: www.spdbooks.org and the photo above. Okay, there's my spiel (*almost... spiel is a German word, you know).)

To help get out some of the essential ideas in his essay, Heaney referred to the following quote by Robert Frost: "a poem begins as a lump in the throat, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words." Heaney had previously made the distinction between craft and technique and he returns to discuss technique as "more vitally and sensitively connected with that first activity where the 'lump in the throat' finds 'the thought' than with 'the thought' finding 'the words.'" I seemed to have wanted to hear someone say something like this, or something that puts limits on poetry and what it should be. See, I've been deeply pondering this writing thing. This act of writing and what can be considered poetry, what not... when is a first thought an okay thought--if it is no longer considered a dumb thought? Can poems begin from the words that are thought or slammed on paper, or should a poet have at first an idea or feeling--a "lump in the throat"--that can drive the poem to its end? So far, Heaney (and Frost) seem to believe that the words of a poem will take the shape of the idea / feeling / "lump in the throat" that started first.

As I've been reading "WHO OPENS" (buy it) I feel as though the words in the poem--the essential and carrying words--are what take the poetry to its end, and are what create the sense, the feeling of the poem... I might even call this feeling "the lump in the throat." To help give you a better idea of "WHO OPENS," (buy it) let me say that the poems must be read aloud--they are dependent upon sound and, as one reviewer noted, "a certain elasticity." Yet, somehow a core set of words came into importance in this poetry -- there's a tremendous amount of repetition of phrases, words, sounds in this work, but certain core words that weave each line within the poems together -- and I wonder if these core words originated with that "lump in the throat" or with themselves.

Perhaps this work doesn't contrast with Heaney and Frost's ideas at all... I suppose only the poet knows and can speak on the matter. Any of you have any thoughts on this? Even having not read the works I've been talking about... I wonder whether we could successfully find a poem that began outside of that "lump," but rather sprang from a word itself. However, when they say that the words are supposed to come after the thought, which comes after the lump, doesn't that seem constricting to poetry? Isn't poetry an almost limitless entity? I don't think "entity" is really the word I mean, but it could be.

By Heaney and Frost's standards, is poetry that starts with a word (that we know starts with a word -- imagine it if you can) not actually poetry? Or is it poetry that falls outside of what certain scholars call "good" or "bad"? I think I've shifted the discussion from technique to all poetry in general... and maybe that's a problem, for the sake of being true to Heaney's words.

Ah, well... I've gone on long enough. Thoughts or confusions?

P.S. Thanks for humoring me in the advertisement for "WHO OPENS" (buy it -- I really mean it).