CoolingtimeMy friend Ann sent me the book Cooling Time, An American Poetry Vigil by C.D. Wright about 4 or 5 years ago when I still lived in Redondo Beach, California. I couldn’t break into it. I got three pages in and then put it back on the shelf.

Then last fall I took a MOOC on Modern American Poetry and subsequently I read My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe. Learning to read through the pathways of fragments did the trick and I was able to then re-approach Cooling Time. In fact, I liked it better than My Emily Dickinson. It was more personal, more practical and the fragments and artwork felt more organic to me. Wright reviews poets, talks about the infighting between poetry "schools."

The book is also sprinkled with seemingly random theories about the art of poetry. Her vocabulary is challenging but not impenetrable.

This was one of those small books that took me forever to read because I had to take it slow, but enjoying it all the way. Deep thoughts for advanced poets.

Here is an excerpt about the experimental craft she describes in the work of Erin Mourē:

Punctuating to the max: she ironizes words and phrases with quotation marks, quotes directly; changes point sizes and font styles, shifts back and forth between French and English. Jarringly she capitalizes and de-caps, deploys ampersands, asterisks, footnotes; also numbers and fractions. Then distributes parenthetical remarks throughout as well as actual commentary on the text she is authoring. She anticipates critique and responds to it in advance…the marginalia insist on being key players in the action of the poem…strikes through lines.

The book also veers into publishing. Wright quotes Robert Creeley as surmising, “What is a young poet to do? Form a company.” And she says he means to “start an e-zine or a press, publish yourselves." Quoting Creeley again, “Each has his or her place in the procession.” She keeps coming back to discuss the infighting among poetry schools. I’ll be quoting her more on this topic in an upcoming essay.