I'm sort of annoyed that some very basic things about poetic forms were not conveyed to me in the various poetry courses I took over the years.
What does it mean to be a used white wife, a mother, a tragic girl writing poems? Sandra Simonds gets into these messy words and then tears them apart. Sometimes with the words of others. And sometimes with poems made from scratch. They aren't all bad, these words. But they aren't all good either. And that is where Mother was a Tragic Girl gets its power. You will at moments be laughing but then you will also at moments just as much be crying. If Antigone was alive and decided to write some poems about the nuclear family, she would write them like Sandra Simonds. These are tough.
I remember reading Paul Fussell my first year teaching at U of Hawai'i and being like, oh, it has a turn! Why didn't anyone tell me?
I was told over and over the poetry in forms was "conservative" but there was no analysis of why this was so.
Genre/forms are institutional questions mainly. Like matter to MFA programs in terms of which workshop you can teach.
