a dentist may indeed need a mop

I love epigrams and aphorisms, especially about poetry. I love them in two ways: 

Way 1: if they're good, they give you a whole field to ruminate on. They shut you up and make you masticate a bit. 

Way 2: they're fun to grapple with--to explore how they might play out in concrete terms, to quarrel with, to figure out whether I agree with them or not (usually back and forth in an interior monologue), etc. 

Way 1 and Way 2 may be nearly identical. Not sure.

Anyhow, I was please to recently read Mark Yakich's "Yakking Points" which he wrote for his students & published in the Boston Review. I generally admire Yakich's work and admire poets who have the guts to throw general statements out there to the wolves. Being part wolf myself, I've copied some of Yakich's epigrams (in blue italics) and interspersed them with my inane commentary (I did a similar post on a piece by Jennifer Moxley last summer.)

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Written language, especially poetry, is inherently a flawed translation of lived life. This sentence included. 

I'm inclined to disagree with the premise here. I don't believe language translates life at all--this model of thinking necessarily incurs the "flawed copy" syndrome (i.e. Platonism). Rather, language intersects with life as a kind of force (of will, expression, enthusiasm, sorrow, etc). In its intersections it both influences life and is influenced by life.

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Whenever you read a poem, read it out loud. Your ear will pick up more than your head will allow. That said, poetry had better be more than a medium for saying things in a pretty way. Poetry is more than ear candy.


I agree and I agree sort of. I mean, there's nothing wrong with ear candy. I'm waiting for the human so evolved that she can find her sustenance  on candy alone. The underlying metaphor here is that poetry should be more "substantial," or provide better "sustenance" than candy. Well, I don't mind the emotional or spiritual sustenance that certain kinds of poems can supply, but I'm not ready to write off other more sugary delights. 

But I agree in this regard:  I can't stand "kiss me I'm poetical" work, poetry too in love with its own rhetoric, its own voice, its trills and riffs.

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There is no hidden meaning, only “meanings” you’ve not yet realized are right in front of you because you’re not practiced in reading poems. Poetry is a convention like anything else. And you learn the rules of it like anything else—e.g., driving a car, baking a cake, fondling a lover.

Agree and disagree. I can't stand the notion that there's a hidden meaning waiting to be uncovered by readers who know how to cut through the rhetoric and wield their hefty analytical tools--the kind high school exercise that drives kids crazy. But on the other hand, suggesting that there are "rules" only begs to one to break them.

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Although many consider figurative language the essence of poetry, for the life of a poet metaphor will sooner or later become an illness.

Cool point. Sometimes I think poetry itself is a kind of illness, a viral outbreak, a contagion that cannot be contained because it spreads by contaminating others with a kind of magnetic linguistic-musical-spiritual enthusiasm--like cells multiplying, poets divide and proliferate. 

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Literary theory is just another kind of literature.

Yep. I've been saying that for a long time. 

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Poetry is a form of prayer. Though most poets don’t know to whom or for what they are praying.

This is the kind of cheesy shit that gives poets a bad name.

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The word “honest” in describing a poem is about as useful as a mop is to a dentist.

I don't know, after a particularly intense root canal, a dentist may indeed need a mop. 

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When reading a poem, try to come to it on its terms, not yours. Don’t try to fit the poem into your life. Try to see what world the poem creates. Then, if you are lucky, its world will help you re-see your own.

Yes. Good point. 

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You will gain a greater understanding of a poem by writing a single parody of it than by reading all the literary criticism of it.

Having tried both approaches, I'd say rather that one gains different understandings. But maybe understanding's not even the right term. Really, do we want to understand poems? No I'm not making an argument for hermeticism or obscuritanism -- but I think tuning ourselves to the right feeling of a poem is as important as "understanding" it. And good criticism, too, enhances one's ability to think and feel with a poem, not simply to understand it as a coded message. Rather, I think a part of me becomes the poem, or is becoming-poem x, and find the right way to plug into this model of feeling/becoming is what I want out of reading poems. In becoming-poem a reader follows the poem's trajectory which usually leads to surprises and transformations. Thus, I agree with Yakich's assertion that:

If your main claim to a poem is that you can relate to it, you aren’t reading it sufficiently. Poems are not meant to be related to; they are meant to offer you something you didn’t know, experience, or imagine before.