Volume 24 113
What advice do you have for poets who are
relatively new to their craft but who want to pur-
sue it as a serious endeavor?
Read widely and memorize the poems that
move or delight you. Immerse yourself in the
medium. All writers begin as readers. I also rec-
ommend spending your twenties lonely, broke, and
unhappily in love. It worked for me.
Source:Dana Gioia and Christina Vick, “Interview with
Christina Vick,” in Louisiana Review, Vol. 4, Fall–Winter
2004– 2005
Bruce F. Murphy
In the following review, Murphy analyzes
Gioia’s form of lyric poetry and finds “fluency and
passion.”
Samuel Johnson said that we would worry less
about what people think of us if we knew how lit-
tle time they spent doing it. I was reminded of this
humbling quip by a recent essay by Billy Collins
(Poetry,August 2001), in which he explored the
problems of “memory-driven” poetry—that is, all
poetry written since the great Romantics that deals
with, to put it crudely, stuff that happened to the
poet. The appeal of memory to the rememberer is
self-evident; but why a memory should appeal to
anyone else is another matter. Collins dared to say
what everybody already knows, that most contem-
porary poetry in the personal vein fails to reach “es-
cape velocity,” and never achieves lift-off into
“another, more capacious dimension.” The poem re-
mains a resume of stuff that happened to the poet,
tempting the guileless, and those who haven’t been
given a warning kick under the seminar table, to re-
spond with a Johnsonian So what? The missing link,
too often, is imagination, which would take the
poem “beyond the precincts of ordinary veracity.”
Collins is right, but there is more to the story
than getting the tinder of memory somehow to
light. Imagination also takes us beyond ordinary
language. It isn’t always the case with dull autobi-
ographical poems that the author is stuck in the world
of fact; sometimes he or she is stuck in the world
of prose. I don’t mean that the prose deck of words
should be shuffled and a new, more “interesting”
hand dealt, as if (to use a Collins example) “The
raspberries used to hang dark and moist / in our
neighbor’s woods” should become “Dark and moist
used they to hang, / The raspberries in our neigh-
bor’s woods”—though that is how much of the
boring poetry of the nineteenth century seems to
have been written. True lyricism, on the other hand,
language inspired with music, is as different from
merely formal sing-song as Bach is from a school
fight song. Collins’s moment of lift-off is when lan-
guage becomes lyrical, incandescent, when the fil-
ament stops being a piece of metal.
Real poetry makes something happen. Now, in
the moment of reading it. Lyricism is a kind of elec-
tricity that hums in the poem—humming being the
threshold, maybe, of music—and at the very least it
gives you a shock. “Lyric poetry” as a term, how-
ever, has become as stretched out of shape as an old
sweater. Contemporary American poetry may be a
“house of many rooms,” but “lyric” is always under-
foot, a term that gets stuck to poets at opposite ends
of the spectrum, like Dana Gioia and Carl Phillips.
Sometimes it seems lyric means merely “short”;
sometimes it’s just a mood (the brown study in the
house of many rooms); or it’s a reference to subject
matter—the poet’s corner in the heartbreak hotel.
All these poets have embraced—however
coldly or ambivalently—lyricism in some form. Carl
Phillips’s lyricism is elliptical, mellifluous, and in-
terrupted. His most recent collection begins, “What
we shall not perhaps get over, we / do get past”—a
pithy statement of the themes of loss and endurance.
This poem, “Luck,” has the dazed clarity of summer
afternoons; some men pitch horseshoes in a field
while another mows. But whereas William Carlos
Williams would have told you, “They were pitching
horseshoes!”, Phillips’s lyricism can be read either
as an encryption of the “facts” (a la Stevens), or as
a vision that pierces the everyday and reaches some
“more capacious” dimension:
How did I get here,
we ask one day, our gaze
relinquishing one space for the next
in which, not far from where
in the uncut grass we’re sitting
four men arc the unsaidThe LitanyThis bottled-up
suffering, when it finds
an opening, comes out
in a fierce jet. Death
is everywhere present,
as a desire for release
from the unendurable.”