Tell It Slant by Camille T. Dungy
Metadata
Highlights
- Like the best speculative fiction, good poems weird the truth, rearrange it, re-present it, cause us to re-envision the past, to rememory (to borrow Toni Morrison’s word) our own history. How do they do this? For one thing, they subvert our expectations and also reward them. These poems give us what we want, but they also give us what we don’t yet know we need. The transition from one to the next can be uncomfortable because it is simultaneously obvious and surprising.
- Create a pattern, reward that pattern, and disrupt that pattern—but rather than leaving the poem in that state of disruption, return to the pattern.
- We think we have an idea of where we are going. We had no idea where we were going.
- To attend to the world carefully is to attend to the world more slowly, more painstakingly, and without waste. Atwood’s little poem, like the others I’ve shared, changes the way we come to understand the world. That’s one of the most important things a poem can do.
New highlights added September 22, 2022 at 5:59 AM
- Czeslaw Milosz said, “To write a wise poem one must know more than what is expressed in it. Consciousness leaves every means of expression behind. Hence the regret that we will remain sillier in human memory than we were at the moments of our acutest comprehension.” Posterity will view us as silly, as strange, as uninformed, as undeveloped, as barbarous
title: “Tell It Slant by Camille T. Dungy”
author: “poetryfoundation.org”
url: ”https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70128/tell-it-slant”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
Tell It Slant by Camille T. Dungy
Metadata
Highlights
- Czeslaw Milosz said, “To write a wise poem one must know more than what is expressed in it. Consciousness leaves every means of expression behind. Hence the regret that we will remain sillier in human memory than we were at the moments of our acutest comprehension.” Posterity will view us as silly, as strange, as uninformed, as undeveloped, as barbarous
- Like the best speculative fiction, good poems weird the truth, rearrange it, re-present it, cause us to re-envision the past, to rememory (to borrow Toni Morrison’s word) our own history. How do they do this? For one thing, they subvert our expectations and also reward them. These poems give us what we want, but they also give us what we don’t yet know we need. The transition from one to the next can be uncomfortable because it is simultaneously obvious and surprising.
- Create a pattern, reward that pattern, and disrupt that pattern—but rather than leaving the poem in that state of disruption, return to the pattern.
- We think we have an idea of where we are going. We had no idea where we were going.
- To attend to the world carefully is to attend to the world more slowly, more painstakingly, and without waste. Atwood’s little poem, like the others I’ve shared, changes the way we come to understand the world. That’s one of the most important things a poem can do.