"I know I am in the grip of a true poem when I can hardly bear to read it calmly at first, so all-embracing and far-reaching is its instantaneous effect on me. I realise I am about to meet with psychic turbulence; undergo a vast excitation of mind, soul and body that will turn me outside in. This is not something I can face lightly. I need to adjust and acclimatise - cool down, in short - before I feel capable of responding adequately to the emotional, musical and verbal demands of the poem. I avert my eyes for a while, blink in dazzlement or take a short walk… Robert Frost describes the experience exactly: "The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken a mortal wound. That he will never get over it."
Dennis O'Driscoll inteview
Dennis O'Driscoll has a great, dead-right description of reading a poem that squeezes the breath out of your lungs because its words so directly and artfully speak what you intuited but never could express. There are moments in literary history where you similarly run across the article that so deftly brings together ideas that you can hardly stand to look at the page.
And it is not always on the first reading that you feel the delirious potion. Often it takes many tries, before the ax splits your head open, before the bullet finds your brain as you lie in bed 2:38 AM trying to read your way back to sleep, until the frenzy and amazement of the right poem makes you wish you never have to sleep again. Nothing like a good Irish poet to make me want to clutter my sentences up with ordinary words that describe the extra-ordinary, to make me identify with that ritually broken skull they dug out of a Viking grave near York.
Last time I felt that way was reading the first 100 pages of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin and then two nights ago reading Dennis O'Driscoll's "The Bottom Line."
O' Driscoll is fond of Brecht's poems but he goes out of his way not to read too much about him so that his admiration for his poetry is not spoiled by Brecht's politics (personal and otherwise). Poetry is sometimes more compelling, the less we know about the author.
You can find a fine sample of O'Driscoll and his comrades in an anthology entitled, Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry 1
O' Driscoll is fond of Brecht's poems but he goes out of his way not to read too much about him so that his admiration for his poetry is not spoiled by Brecht's politics (personal and otherwise). Poetry is sometimes more compelling, the less we know about the author.
You can find a fine sample of O'Driscoll and his comrades in an anthology entitled, Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry 1
You can hear McCann reading the opening to his novel after a nice five-minute introduction on this video:
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