What makes a poem “good”?
You feel a poem is good if, having read it, you find yourself at its end a different person -- larger, more permeable, wilder, more awake, more informed, more saddened, more free. The specific flavor or quality of the change almost doesn’t matter, so long as the movement is toward increase rather than narrowing. Galway Kinnell once said, “The title of every good poem might be “Tenderness.” You can feel that in Whitman, in Dickinson, in Neruda, in Cavafy, in Bishop, in Basho -- read any of them, and you can’t help but feel your human fate and their human fates are shared ones. Good poems do this without simplifying our human particularity, range, and oddness. They are themselves singular, memorable, and as unmistakably real and consequential as any other event in a life.
Reading good poems, you feel yourself singular and also part of a common existence. “Common” is a word not usually thought of as praise. But one thing good poems do is take what seems ordinary and burnish it with the motions of paid attention, until its radiance and astonishment can again be seen. Doing dishes. Adding 2 + 2. Looking out a window. Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement. They are also, always, instruments of further discovery. They sieve from the air what isn’t yet knowable and can’t be held on a page, yet is ineradicable within us, once it’s been given.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/20/jane-hirshfield-poetry_n_6896864.html
You feel a poem is good if, having read it, you find yourself at its end a different person -- larger, more permeable, wilder, more awake, more informed, more saddened, more free. The specific flavor or quality of the change almost doesn’t matter, so long as the movement is toward increase rather than narrowing. Galway Kinnell once said, “The title of every good poem might be “Tenderness.” You can feel that in Whitman, in Dickinson, in Neruda, in Cavafy, in Bishop, in Basho -- read any of them, and you can’t help but feel your human fate and their human fates are shared ones. Good poems do this without simplifying our human particularity, range, and oddness. They are themselves singular, memorable, and as unmistakably real and consequential as any other event in a life.
Reading good poems, you feel yourself singular and also part of a common existence. “Common” is a word not usually thought of as praise. But one thing good poems do is take what seems ordinary and burnish it with the motions of paid attention, until its radiance and astonishment can again be seen. Doing dishes. Adding 2 + 2. Looking out a window. Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement. They are also, always, instruments of further discovery. They sieve from the air what isn’t yet knowable and can’t be held on a page, yet is ineradicable within us, once it’s been given.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/20/jane-hirshfield-poetry_n_6896864.html
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