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Pastimes : A Poetry Corner
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To: Robert Douglas Hickey who started this subject12/22/2002 1:25:50 PM
From: Poet  Read Replies (1) of 1582
 
This one's for Dave Ellen, the extension of a poetry conversation which began on the GWB thread.

Here's a good little bio of Richard Hugo:

nortonpoets.com

And here's a wonderful essay he wrote about the Craft of writing poetry. It's so damn good, I've printed it and have in my poetics file.

ualr.edu

In another essay, he writes of "public poets" and 'private poets", aa diction he admits can be spurious, but I love what he says here about a poet's obsession with certain words. I've found myself drawn toward certain words over and over again, as though they were emotional leaping-off places. This is a good description of that tendency:

If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions. It doesn't bother me that the word "stone" appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that "wind" and "gray" appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn't use them that often I'd be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable. In fact, most poets write the same poem over and over. Wallace Stevens was honest enough not to try to hide it. Frost's statement that he tried to make every poem as different as possible from the last one is a way of saying that he knew it couldn't be.
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