The Secret of Poetry

by Mark Jarman

Overview

This first collection of literary essays by a founder and leading poet-critic of the New Narrative/New Formalist revival explores the relationship between poetry and religion, the legacies of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Robinson Jeffers, and Donald Justice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781586543594
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	03/15/2022
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Mark Jarman is the author of many books of poetry, including The Black Riviera, winner of the 1991 Poets’ Prize, and Questions for Ecclesiastes, winner of the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is Centennial Professor of English, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt Universityin Nashville, Tennessee.

Table of Contents

Part I	Essays
Chapter 1	"Poetry and Religion"	13
Chapter 2	"Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Possum: The Americanness of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot"	46
Chapter 3	"John & Randall, Randall & John"	66
Chapter 4	"In Memory of Orpheus: Three Elegies by Donald Justice"	83
Chapter 5	"Robinson, Frost, and Jeffers, and the New Narrative Poetry"	93
Chapter 6	"Aspects of Robinson"	105
Chapter 7	"Sheathed in Reality: The Fact of Clare Walker in Robinson Jeffers' 'The Loving Shepherdess'"	114
Chapter 8	"Letter from Leeds"	120
Part II	Reviews
Chapter 9	"Singers and Storytellers"	131
Chapter 10	"A Scale of Engagement, from Self to Form Itself"	146
Chapter 11	"The Pragmatic Imagination and the Secret of Poetry"	156
Chapter 12	"Narrative Beauty"	172
Chapter 13	"The Grammar of Glamour"	185
Chapter 14	"The Curse of Discursiveness"	198
Chapter 15	"Shifting Sands: The Columbia History of American Poetry"	208
Chapter 16	"Solving for X: The Collected Poetry and Prose of Wallace Stevens"	216

Editorial Reviews

American thinking is best summed up by William James's pragmatism, says prize-winning poet Jarman (Questions for Ecclesiastes; English, Vanderbilt Univ.). So, he argues, Modernist masters like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams tend to be pragmatic to the core, and such living poets as Charles Wright, C.K. Williams, and Philip Levine also give their readers "the fact of finitude, that sense of the nothingness beyond that [which] gives our lives dignity and meaning." All poetry hides something, in other words, but the secret in American poetry must always be revealed in "undeniable terms," as in poet Jon Anderson's assertion that "The secret of poetry is cruelty," a line Jarman praises as "bracing, honest, exact, and meant in its context to cut through stock responses to death and love." Among Jarman's favorite poets are those he calls "the three Rs": Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, and Robinson Jeffers, creators, respectively, of the short, medium, and long narrative poem on which today's narrative poets model their work. Half of his book is devoted to wide-ranging essays, while the rest consists of reviews containing startling insights into the work of such contemporaries as John Ashbery and Jorie Graham. There is also a wistful piece on his attempt to teach critical theory from Roland Barthes's Saussurean demythologizing of contemporary bourgeois myths to the "sublime baloney" of Stanley Fish's reader-response theory to working-class students to whom political freedom is more germane. Taking his own advice, Jarman is nothing if not specific in his writing and thinking. To him, the secret of good criticism is a sense of history and of context, of knowing where poems come from and how poets read each other. David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This volume of previously published commentary on poetry by Jarman (a poet, he teaches English at Vanderbilt U. in Nashville, Tennessee) contains essays on the relationship between poetry and religion, the legacies of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, E.A. Robinson, Robinson Jeffers; and critiques of current trends in poetry by Donald Justice, Jorie Graham, and others. Jarman's writing is both passionate and clearly expressed, making this a useful text for undergraduate courses and non-specialists, as well as other academics. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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