I guess my poems feel to me a bit like they are doing something in relation to experience, i.e. time.
It's a kind of de-familiarization in relation to the song: if she were to sing absolutely straight, right on the beat, because of the richness and intensity of her instrument - her voice - I think it could actually feel a little inhuman, too good somehow, separate from our concerns.
The speaker tentatively reaches out with that feeling and realizes that it's kind of absurd, or at least a dangerous consolation, which is what I think is discovered as that longish sentence at the end of the poem comes to its conclusion. But here I am interpreting my own poem, which is kind of like making out with one's own high school yearbook photo.
It may very well be that we have entered another time when most poets will feel compelled to use poetry to stop things from happening. Yet I believe that even if poetry did not do this, it would be vital to our survival.
I am intrigued and even moved by the idea of being right with the reader in the actuality that she or he is reading a poem. So the titles are an acknowledgment of the reality and value of that act in the world.
When I saw the sun bears at the Oakland Zoo, I immediately was drawn to them. Not to be ornery, but regarding what you said about the speaker identifying with the bear: I'm not sure it's exactly right to say that the speaker feels that the bear must share his sadness, or whatever else he is feeling. That would be classic pathetic fallacy, which is certainly generative for poetry, but here the speaker appears actually to be rejecting that idea.
Miroslav Holub seems to expect his readers to act like scientists, who are curious in every direction, take nothing for granted, and are willing to accept any truth, however unexpected.
I'm more than a little suspicious of humor in poems, because I think it can at times be a way of getting a reaction out of a reader, or an audience, that is something closer to relief: i.e., thank god this isn't poetry, but stand-up comedy. Some poets are really funny, but more often poets are fourth rate stand up comics at best. But they benefit from the sheer relief of the audience.
Keats's odes are among my favorite poems ever. As are Neruda's. So yes, I think my poems are odes, though I really just see those titles as ways of more or less orienting the poem. I've never thought about this until now, but I guess you could say that one effect of all the titles, their pervasiveness in the book, might be to once again, as so many other things do, put into question the meaning of the word "for," which I suppose is one of the great human questions: what is all this for? Why, and for whom, are we doing whatever we are doing?
Somewhere back a whiskey or so ago I wrote that thinking was a real thing in the world, just like anything else. I mean that very literally, materially. And it's true about poems, too.
The question does arise if how and why to write poetry in this time. It feels both completely essential and also quite difficult. But that's how writing poetry has felt to me my whole life. Everything seems to have just gotten immensely more mortal and tragic and scary, which makes it hard to concentrate, but also, if harnessed, can provide immense energy for making poems.
Music and songs have always been a constant part of my life, and still are. My brother Michael, who is a songwriter and composer, is the one who most fully inherited the musical legacy of our family, but I got some part of it - mostly the feel.
It's just interesting to me that the physical enactment of that mind moving has gradually changed for you in the last few years. It made me wonder if the change was deliberate in any sense, or procedural, like when A.R. Ammons stuck an adding machine roll into his typewriter to squeeze his verses into shorter lines.
That is a horrible thing in a way, but it is the one thing poets can bring back to experience, this intense focus on language, which activates words as a portal back into experience. It's a mysterious process that's very hard to articulate, because it's focused entirely on the material of language in a way, but in the interests not just of language itself whatever that would mean - that's the mistake, by the way, that so many so-called "experimental" poets make - but in service to human experience.
I don't think poetry needs to be "easily understandable." First of all, there are often complexities of syntax, form, unfamiliar absences, etc., that require a deeper concentration than is usually demanded of us. So that, right off the bat, is a little difficult. Then there is the deeper issue of what poetry is really asking of us. I feel it is asking us to read with great, even sacred, care and attention. That, too, is difficult. It requires discipline and the creation of a temporary zone of privacy, which is inimical to our current conditions of life.
It is funny, and also a bit sad, that poets are so often asked to justify our vocation. There seems to be something vaguely mystifying and even hilarious to people about being a poet, especially in these times. Why would anyone choose to do something so...useless?
I think it is our job as poets to refuse the terms that society so often sets for usefulness. That, for instance, is what Dickinson did: she refused to be a wife, a homemaker, a standard member of her community. She knew she had to in order to have the space and time to write her poems. Thank god she said no!
[My poems] of course, it's symbolic, in the way that things in a poem can be - that is, pointing to something beyond its mere ordinary meaning, while also retaining all the qualities of that ordinary meaning. In other words, it's a bear, but it's also suggesting something else, just by virtue of the attention to it. But it's not "symbolic" in that way we are taught to think about things in poems.
I just know from experience that reading a funny poem aloud, especially at the beginning of a public reading, can have a certain effect. Somehow narrowing the spectrum of possible emotional reactions. So while I like it when people laugh at my poems, and I definitely enjoy being funny in them, I don't really think that's the most important thing that's going on, at least not to me.
Of course I was drawn to the sun bears, they're fascinating. But so are tigers and lots of other animals at the zoo. Probably a big part of the reason I felt so connected to them was because of their name: SUN BEAR.
My own experience as a reader and writer has been that the more I read, and the more I live, the more different "types" of poetry I grow to love. I might not even believe anymore that there are "types" of poetry at all. I've come to love things I once would snootily have dismissed. Of course I still have my likes and dislikes, and there are things I think are just plain old bullshit, but more and more I am far more trusting of my loves than my dislikes.
I've noticed that there can be a visceral reaction to strong statements about poetry, as if anyone who has an opinion and expresses it is shutting people down. It's funny to see that expressed, and then to go back and read poetic statements by the great poets of the past: they are full of a passionate conviction! It is clearly possible to express strong feelings about poetry while also defending the absolute right of myriad approaches.
I was thinking a little bit about this very thing - poetry and music - the other day when I was listening to Lucinda Williams. The way she sings is very emotive, and there is a kind of drag to her articulation: she sings behind the beat, sort of like she's being pulled along by the song a little, or is in resistance to it.
That being said, some of my favorite poets are extremely funny. The aforementioned Matt Rohrer, for instance. Mary Ruefle. James Tate might be the best example of someone who is systematically misread because he can be hilarious. In his poems, as in all great funny poems, the humor is one very appealing version of the surprise and associative movement that is at the heart of all poetry.
I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned this, we need to be careful with drugs! They're not just all fun and games! And of course poetry would be immeasurably worse without humor.
