Versatile

One of the reasons to choose poetry is that it is a place in which all approaches, all strategies are welcomed and in fact it is a place in which wildly differing “ways to skin a cat” (as we say) might be tried and included in the same poem or book. O the various sorts of agonized, from a lyric sequence like “The Wasteland” or else in Tender Buttons or the Cantos (for instance), yowlings; o the delight of seeing someone like (as if there were ever someone “like”) (and of course there is, well sort of) Fernando Pessoa, making up poet-heteronyms for all his knives; o the joy (I tremble) of watching those contemporary poets who, restless, driven by a spirit of inquiry, keep finding out how to make the fur fly in new ways. O the amazing Canadians, “What are they smoking up there?” a graduate student asked in a seminar. Skin a cat, swing a cat, let the cat out of the bag (or philosopher’s box): was it the witches’ familiar or a whip (the sailor’s terror), an animal or an object at the origin of these worrisome phrases? Isn’t that always the question? Because nothing works (try again fail again), try anything and everything, remember that you contain or enact a multitude and you have (at least) nine lives. Going back and forth between sound and sense, public and private, nonsense and wisdom, poetry enacts dualities to complicate and blur them or to reveal the way they are entangled and engaged.