Recently we read again, after many years, a book of poems by an old teacher of ours at Cornell, and realized after a while that the poems stunk, although we still like the guy all right.
We figure everyone has bad as well as good poems in them, and it is good to get them out, either way.
Our old teacher might have been suffering compared to Yeats, whom we had been reading, and is always good, whether you know Irish mythology or not. We don't, but admire how his poems sound, and the fact that he seems to be trying to say things, not hide things.
We have a friend in Ithaca who is a serious poet, by which we mean hard-working, and he is planning a new poetry magazine, which is laudable, and while it might seem anachronistic, we hope and trust it isn't.
We think that poetry is poised to make a comeback, as peoples' attention might swing back from the Internet. The Internet is not going away, and is fine, but it tends to favor and feature the new and immediate, rather than the lasting.
Poetry lasts. It does not need a link. Its link is the mind.
We don't want to jinx our friend's project any more than we already have. We will keep you posted on the prospects for the new magazine as they come around.
Steve Burke
for Ithaca NY Blog
No comments:
Post a Comment