Artwork: The Improvement by René Magritte
After taking a few PSNY Virtual Workshops here and there from 2022 to mid-2023, I decided to take the plunge and sign up for a Milk Press Intensive. I have never studied poetry formally, by that I mean, beyond high school. I was yearning for more insight into the Craft of poetry & also to know how the poems I’d been writing the past couple years, read to people who read poetry (no shade to my Mum and besties, your feedback has been great).
I got so much more than I bargained for. I discovered, Poetry is Magic.
The Summer Intensive was taught by the remarkable Jackie Braje. The reverence she holds for poetry allows her to hold space for everyone regardless of poetry experience but also to expect that we engage with the material and challenge our preconceived notions. Each week she curated thought-provoking readings and poems to initiate discussions. We workshopped our poems with these readings in mind.
Up until then, how I conducted myself in poetry had come from an intuitive place within me that was difficult to regale. The amazing part of getting into Theory was the discovery and affirmation that the craft of poetry does have this spiritual origin and operation to it that lives within and is executed by the Poet.
We spoke about Voice, Form, the Line and Method in Poetry and common to all of these devices is the imploration that these poetic tools lead you more than you lead them. You must be open to discovering the ecosystem that already exists, more than you are creating something that did not exist prior to your writing about it.
Barbara Guest challenges us to “[lose] the arrogance of dominion over the poem to an invisible hand” because while “the poet campaigns for a passage over which the poet has control..[the] unstableness of the poem is important. Also the frequent lapses of control.”
Alice Notley acknowledges that “there is no way not to impose yourself as an author on your material” but also that the Voice of the Poem “seems to have come into existence just a moment prior to the poem” and “is really only for the poem.” “The things that are said in poems are for poems - for the unity of the occasion of a poem, which is made by one poet only. In life one person blends with another, but rarely in poetry…each [poem] is a cosmos.”
As a poet, I am seeing myself more and more, not as a creator, but a conduit or a channel.
Anne Carson’s ‘Notes on Method’ distilled this epiphany to me with the inclusion of György Lukács’s philosophical statement “I do not want to be a windowless monad.” Carson speaks about the poem being reflective of “withness.” In these two concepts, I understand my role. A poem is two entities, a part of the poet’s ‘Self’ and the ‘cosmos’ they have discovered and positioned themselves ‘with’ in the container of the poem. I must allow the reader to look through a part of me, to see what scenery I have sought out and sat ‘with’ on the other side.
In short, Poetry is Magic.
Works Referenced:
Barbara Guest, Invisible Architecture
Alice Notley, ‘Voice’ from ‘Coming After’
Some Notes on Organic Form by Denise Levertov
On the Line by Stacy Szymaszek
Notes on Method by Anne Carson
Writer Bio
F.M Papaz is a Greek-Australian creative and writer who believes that there is space at the literary table for everyone and is excitedly setting up your cutlery. Her poems have appeared in Wild Roof Journal, Mantissa Poetry Review and The Victorian Writer. She does Editorial work for Tabula Rasa Review and Milk Press. Connect @fmpapaz or fmpapaz.com/ings to find her monthly newsletter about living a creative life.