Joseph Stroud
Our Review of Of This World: New and Selected Poems
Coming Soon.
Stroud's Reading of Of This World: New and Selected Poems
The Home-Crowd-Pleasing Event on 9 December 2008
Stroud taught poetry — what it feels like to read it and
what it feel like to create it — for four decades.
So, four decades of his students showed up to
swell the 100-plus audience to his reading at the birth of his
Of This World: New and Selected Poems.
The Capitola Book Café (site of the reading) sold out all its copies of Stroud's
new book before his reading began, and
they back-ordered copies to be autographed for the unlucky late-comers.
One of Stroud's most loyal poetry pals, Morton Marcus,
introduced Stroud as a poet
"driven not by ego but by praise, love, homage, reverence".
He advised us that Stroud is
"not just a lyric poet ... [and]
not just a nature poet ... But that he is a great poet".
Stroud, suavely dressed in poetic black,
read ten of his poems,
giving each a concise introduction to orient the listener and (sometimes)
to give us the context of his process.
The poems that he chose to read are:
- "During the Rains" [p. 155], which he introduced with remarks about entropy
and that "the purpose of poetry is to hold things together".
- "Against Surrealism" [p. 65], which he introduced with quotations of very
successful images from Lorca, James Wright, and other poets,
but warned that:
"too many of them in a poem and it's like watching a film of
special effects. ... [So I wrote this poem in] one unscrolling sentence
in the manner of surrealism, but not surreal".
- "Praxis" [p. 34], which he introduced by referring to a radio interview two days previously,
when his response to the question:
"why do you write poetry and what do you hope to accomplish by it"
sounded like a stunned dead-air gap.
The more helpful and explit answer is here, that such questions "diminishes what it [i.e. poetry] is ... but this
['Praxis'] tries to deal with that."
- "Lost Roads" [p. 224], which he prefaced by speaking of the need
"to deal with a horrifying experience in a way it doesn't overwhelm the poem.
... [which I was more able to do when]
I moved to third person and an omniscient narrator for distance ...
and to the prose poem for form".
- "Homage to the Water Ouzel" [for later publication?], which (if I have the title right) is not
in the index to the new collection.
Stroud prefaced tThis, one the finest poems he read,
by saying that it is one way for him to deal with chronic hip pain.
- "Letter to Robinson Jeffers" [p. 336], which he introduced by saying that Jeffers
was a "misanthrope ... a truth teller".
- "I Wanted to Paint Paradise" [p. 281],
which was in part a response to students that came to his office saying "I want to be a poet. ...
I want to write an epic".
- "Let Me Tell You"[for later publication?], which (if I have the title right) is not
in the index to the new collection. Stroud spoke of this poem as being in the style of the
Japanese haiga, being written quickly as if painted and unchangeable
in ink on silk — except that he lacks the painting that is the sine qua non
of the haiga and
"I don't write fast .. and I cheated a little bit — I go back [and make changes]"
- "Transcendental Meditation", an older poem and which (if I have the title right) is not
in the index to the new collection. This was a loving (if teasing) tribute to his pal, Morton Marcus.
- "Hovering" [for later publication?], which (if I have the title right) is not
in the index to the new collection. This was dedicated to "Tom Marshall, my mushroom guide".
Afterwards, a long long line of us
enjoyed having Stroud autograph our copies, sometimes ambiguously. I received:
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"To Joan — one of my sharpest critics — over the years."
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Back cover of Of This World: New and Selected Poems
"Joseph Stroud knows the value of taking one's proper time to write poems.
Across a fourty-year writing career, he has published four books
—
yet each has made a profound impact, earning critical praise and growing
admiration among poets and other readers.
Of This World
includes the best from Stroud's previous volumes as well as
potent selections of new poems and translations."
Country of Light
Read
Country of Light
by
Joseph Stroud.
Publisher:
Copper Canyon Press.
Among my favorites are his 6-line poems such as
The Executions on Píncipe Pío Hill (p.90) [also in his 2009
New and Selected], which contains:
"... I keep stepping back --
across an ocean, across time, backing away,
hoping it will focus into something I can bear."
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and the second part of On What Planet (p.43), which ends:
"... explorer's gentian
(Gentiana calycosa), summer's last flowers
Go on, kneel down, get up close, peer into one ...
It's like looking into a chalice flecked with stars
Then the mind will give a little nudge, and you are there,
inside the singing, in a luminous alien night."
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About Joseph Stroud
Sometimes Joseph Stroud lives near Santa Cruz, California,
sometimes he lives in hand-built cabin in the North American Sierra Nevada,
and sometimes (like Mr. Blake) he lives in Paradise.
He has been awarded the Witter Bynner Fellowship
from the Library of Congress.
His poems have been featured on National
Public Radio, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.
[Thanks for visiting.]
Highlights of Poetry.
