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Danielle Oviatt, Poet/Critic (pronunciation of respondent's name) Oh-Vee-Uht (city&state) Salt Lake City Utah, 84108 (e.mail address) d-o4530@wcslc.edu (publication credits) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lot's of local stuff: What There is: The Utah Crossroads Anthology, Shades (the University of Utah's under graduate lit. mag.), most notably One at least semi-nationally distributed magazine: Ellipsis --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (contemporary poets important to respondent) Mostly the poets I look up to are people from whom I've taken classes, or workshops. Some are significantly published, but not too well known, at least outside the literary community. (poets of yesteryear important to respondent) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- William Shakespeare (of course) E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson,Allen Ginsburg. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (tastes in poetry) I rarely write anything that rhymes, or scans reqularly. I admire those who can write in this manner, but I am hugely annoyed at those who feel that what I write isn't "real poetry" because it doesn't fit this narrow discription. I take issue as well with the statement that less formal poetry is somehow easier to write. I believe it's harder in some ways, despite my difficulties with rhyme and meter, because when one follows certain conventions he signifies that what he has written is a poem, outside the conventions, the image and word choice has to indicate that is a poem, not simply "jagged line prose". I'm becoming at this point more and more along the idea that poetry is about capturing satori and being somewhat like a photograph. As if you can't tell, I had an instructor that made her classes work in a lot of Japanese poetic forms e.g. haiku, senryu and Kata Uta, and it's heavily influenced me as a writer. You might think I was anti-rules in poetry, to! some extent I am, but I believe first you learn all the rules, then you break them as badly as you want, provided you have a reason, besides simply carelessness, to do so. I am very much turned off by poems that seem to pleased with their own cleverness, take that how you will, I can't describe it exactly, but I know it when I see it. (description of criticism) I wouldn't say I'm much of a critic, although I call myself one since as a student of poetry and a writer I spend a lot of time commenting on poetry, thus I don't have much of a critical philosophy at this point. I hold with Pound in saying poems shouldn't mean, but be, while repectfully adding people get upset what poems don't turn out to be what they think they mean. As a writer can't speculate on why a poet makes a choice in his work, having had the experience once to often of writing something only to have someone else see it and point out some great thing they think I was trying to do, when, while they're interpretation is really wonderful and I like it, I was not trying to do at all. I think once a poem leaves the poet's hands to some extent it lives its own life and picks up its own meanings. In essence maybe Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" is about both death and about stopping by the woods on a snowy evening both interpre! tations are valid, the poem is about what it evokes in it's rreader. This is why I really try not to explain my own poetry and why I have trouble to an extent doing criticism. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- In Memory With slim finger fold the crane out of gold paper, set it on the water, leave before morning. Commentary: I got the idea from a statue on campus at the University of Utah. It portrays a Japanese girl who contracted leukemia from being exposes to the Hiroshima bomb. Someone told her that if she made a certain number of cranes out of gold paper, she would be cured. I was touched by that, then one day I noticed that someone had folded a lot of paper cranes and left them at the base of the statue. This image continued to stick with me. As you can see the poem isn't really about that anymore, this evolution from one image to another never ceases to amaze me when I'm lucky enough to experience it, which is why I hesitate to speculate on why a writer makes a choice in his work. Click here to see two poems by Oviatt--with the author's commentaries. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Click here to go to read a poem by William Carlos Williams that Oviatt particularly likes--with her commentary on it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- |