Word: poemes
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...life -- his books include Silence, M, Empty Words and X -- Cage extended his compositional processes to include other media. To satisfy his love of words, he invented "mesostics," in which a given piece of writing (Finnegans Wake was a favorite) serves as the raw material for a poem derived by finding and capitalizing the letters of the subject's name (James Joyce) according to strict rules, arranging the results and reading down. Thus...
...Alone," Merrill had written in the early poem "Hourglass," "one can but toy with imagery": maybe the thin narrative here, of Kimon and Seldon and Claude and mother and father and Robert and others, is Merrill's effort at a kind of writing more social, and more transparent, than the elaborated imagery of even his clearest verse. The new clarity of Merrill's prose, unfortunately, often sounds like this: "Yet I couldn't help noticing, alone with Freddy at his visit's end, how much more freely my tongue wagged and my mind worked than they did with Claude...
...took down an anthology of American verse from the bookshelf in her family's home in Akron. After that, her otherwise strict parents made no attempt to censor what she read, and she read everything from Gone With the Wind to Sylvia Plath. "I remember reading ((Plath's)) poem Daddy, which ends, 'Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through,' " says Dove. "I realized that you don't have to be polite in poetry, and I couldn't get enough of it after that...
...first Dove's love affair with poems unfolded with little encouragement -- or interference -- from her teachers. That convinced her that poetry should be experienced, not talked -- or taught -- to death. "One of the major reasons why poetry has gotten a bad rap is that at school we had to read a poem and then answer questions about it," says Dove. "But I think that when a poem moves you, it moves you in a way that leaves you speechless. Poems, if they're really wonderful poems, have used the best possible words and in the best possible order, and anything...
...that Dove is aiming for the lowest common denominator. She believes poems can be too easy, too accessible to have lasting value. "There should be something to intrigue you, to hold you enough so that you're willing to live with it and work it out on your own," she says. "A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated, you carry it around with you, and it nourishes you when you need it." With Dove as poet laureate, Americans will get plenty of poetic sustenance...