Rarity in Poetry

Most things we say in general about poetry turn out to be wrong. Nevertheless, I'd hazard to say that, in general, to make a good poem is a rare & intermittent thing, an occasional occasion. This holds true even (perhaps especially) for scriptomaniac obsessive versifiers like me.

Now why is this so? I began thinking about this today after looking over some recent parts of a work-in-progress, & realizing that they were stronger than some other adjacent parts. I was wondering what made them stronger... & in this particular case it seemed to me that the poem itself had meshed a certain theme & a certain way of expressing it, so that it began to resonate or sing in a way that seemed to overflow or surpass itself...

- here the immediate analogy for me is music : when you hear a passage in which the various threads that have been going on in their strenuous workaday way suddenly blend together into something surpassingly beautiful or moving, surprising... that is, the various directions in which the piece was secretly moving finally reach their crux or climax - the harmony toward which they were tending all along...

& another interesting aspect of this, to me anyway, is that these superlative strong passages often (perhaps always) involve an element of recollection. That is, the piece is beautiful because, somehow, it reminds you of something you already knew or felt or heard before. There's an echo of past music (or past poetry) or something in your own memory & experience which mysteriously returns, in this work that moves you - as if something came back from the past or the dead & was, by this new work, justified (or provided with a new sense). So harmony (in part) is about emotional & intellectual (& aesthetic) resolution.

Well, these high points or strong points or poems don't happen every day. & to experience them seems to reinforce the distance between actual, discrete, achieved works of art, and all the feverish vanity & seeking & triviality & philistine noisemongering of that pervasive self-enclosed salon-world fishbowl, where we chit-chat & squabble about poets & poetry & fame & pecking-orders & po-biz in general....