Thanks to Jim's excellent review of The Jaguars Dream by John Kinsella, a wide selection of non-english poems chosen and translated by Kinsella, I followed Jim's link to Kinsella's website and came across a fantastic selection of Kinsella's essays all available to read online.
I've never got around to reading much of Kinsella but now I'd really like to pick up some of his work. You can read the essays here and the one's I've read so far have been varied and very interesting.
I particulary like his essay on Plath. It's common knowledge that admitting to being a fan of Plath can be to one's detriment if you want to be taken seriously as a poet but being a young, and specifically male poet, (when Kinsella recounts his youthful introduction to Plath) and admitting to liking Plath is an altogether further take on this strange phenomenon. Kinsella also writes well, I think, about Plath's 'problematic' imagery, the representation of the 'other' in her poems.
2 comments:
I had a look at a few of them too. The one on Language poetry was a bit disappointing. I keep looking for an Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Language Poem but haven’t found anything yet. I’ll probably have to write the damn thing myself. Have you had a look at Tracy Ryan’s poetry? She co-authored that article on Plath and apparently her poetry has been compared to hers. At least according to Wikipedia.
I came across a while back an excellent website on poetry movements with a great 'how to' section for writing poems in the various styles.If I manage to find it again I'll pass the link onto you.
I'm sure I've glanced at Ryan before but not paid much attention to her work. It's a telling quote on the wiki page: "the very mention of Plath's name shapes, and threatens to place limits on, the reader's experience of Ryan's poetry".
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