James Longenbach presented a lecture titled “The Excess of Poetry” at the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers this morning. Here’s a few of the notes I wrote:
- The act of writing is itself an excess.
- What matters in the Pisan Cantos is not the information provided but the tone.
- Our minds are strategically selective. We manage excess by focusing on some things while ignoring others.
- The Pisan Cantos are organized by tone: elegiac, colloquial, haranguing and reverence.
- What writer does not compose him/herself out of nothing?
There are more notes I wrote, but they are a bit scramble. Longenbach presented poems by Keats, Dickinson and Pound as way to explore the “fine excess” of poetry.
Coffeehouse Junkie 
Sounds fascinating. What did the lecturer mean by “an excess?” An excess of what?
Good questions. The lecture is still percolating through my mind, but Mr. Longenbach built his lecture around a quote by the poet Keats:
“Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.”
The use of the wording “fine excess” is the central theme of the lecture. “Fine” (from the Latin, meaning “limit” or “boundary”) and “excess” (also from the Latin, meaning “projection” or “beyond”) are the crux of the lecture in which Longenbach presents the idea that poetry reaches beyond (i.e. excess) the limit (i.e. fine) of the page and poet.
I hope that answers your questions. Thanks for leaving a comment!
That sounds a lot better than the way I was interpreting it. Excess usually has negative connotations, so I thought he was somehow saying that poetry shouldn’t be written because it’s excessive by nature. Sounds like he is more commenting on the importance of selection of experience and the possibility of using that experience in the best way to connect with readers?
Yeah, Jessica, the connotative and denotative context of a word is tricky business. The experiential selection does seem important (Longenbach spent quite a bit of time on the context of Pound’s Pisan Cantos), but the Dickinson selection is more cerebral than experiential. Longenbach’s lecture plays at a poet’s desire for immortality through lyric verse. He concluded his lecture by reciting the death dates of the poets he mentioned in his lecture: Dickinson, Keats and Pound.
One of the thoughts I had after the lecture was to recite Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti LXXV. The speaker of the poem writes his lover’s name in the sand and the lover replies, “Vain man… that doest in vain assay,/ A mortal thing so to immortalize…” And the lover replies, “My verse, your virtues rare shall eternize,/ And in the heavens write your glorious name.” A poet tries to immortalize an experience or idea from one’s mortal mind upon finite paper (or server farmer) in hopes that the craft is accepted as “a fine excess… a remembrance.”