My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.
Interpretation
Poetry requires a return to its basic elements to thrive.
James Fenton emphasizes the importance of foundational aspects in poetry, such as rhythm and rhyme, suggesting that without revisiting these core elements and universal themes like love, death, and war, poetry may lose its essence and vitality. He argues that to keep poetry alive and relevant, one must engage with its simplest, most fundamental characteristics.
In practice
In a poetry workshop, a teacher might use this quote to encourage students to focus on the basics of poetic composition.
If you're writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you're reading a poem that's written for the page, your eye can skip up and down. You can see the thing whole. But you're not going to see the thing whole in the song. You're going to hear it in series, and you can't skip back.
The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where "open form" or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term "heightened speech".
In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.
What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some published form so that, in principle, someone, somewhere, will be able to find it and read it. That is all I need, as a poet, and that is the beauty, the luxury of my position. My lyric is mine and remains mine. Nobody can ruin it.
'What is this', and 'How is this done?' are the first two questions to ask of any work of art. The second question immediately illuminates the first, but it often doesn't get asked. Perhaps it sounds too technical. Perhaps it sounds pedestrian.
I'm totally crazy, I know that. I don't say that to be a smartass, but I know that that's the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that's fine. I don't do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can't not do it.
The smile that flickers on a baby’s lips when he sleeps- does anyone know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumor that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning.
Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.
I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.
I believe it is in my nature to dance by virtue of the beat of my heart, the pulse of my blood and the music in my mind.
When I started to play with my fingernails, it was not just for volume. The most important thing was giving the guitar different colors in its voices.
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