![Peter Gizzi’s Threshold Songs. Page 76. Fifth stanza.
[Photograph by W. Bleakney]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m48wq0kdye1ruq7elo1_1280.jpg)
Peter Gizzi’s Threshold Songs. Page 76. Fifth stanza.
[Photograph by W. Bleakney]
What I meant to say: we should take our poems out to the “Distance” and “Time Aloft” competitions & see how they fly.
After the poetry reading, a student asked Jennifer Clarvoe if she thought about her reader or readers while she was writing. The question sent her back through her poems and into Frost’s “The Most of It.” She explained how her call goes out into the world, hoping for response. How the response, its possibility, is received and built into the call. How this all aids a letting go. “Do you feel like you’re ever finished with your poems?” asked another student. She shook her head, feeling the question. “No, no,” her voice trailing. “A poem is never finished, only abandoned, as Valery says…” She was surrounded by large, colorful prints behind glass, lakes of glass, and in one a red phone was about to ring.
“[Oppen] tried, and it is not easy, to live ‘honorably’—his word—as an American poet: he never taught writing or served on any literary panels or juries or committees; he wrote only one extended book review; and he largely refused to give readings after he won, to everyone’s surprise, a Pulitzer. In his last years, there was a piece of paper pinned over his desk that read ‘Only one mistake, Ezra! You should have talked to women.’ The last public line he wrote was: ‘My happiness is the knowledge of all we do not know.’”
