Poetry
Poetry is the attempt to bring something new into the language, and thereby into thought and feeling. If a poem succeeds—if reading it grants access to its lyric moment—it is the green bud on the outreaching tip of experience. The word "articulation" carries in its origins the sense of branches and joints. To articulate experience in language is to investigate the releations among parts and the precise ways in which they fit together. This is why writing is not merely an act of recording, but a process of discovery. And because each new poem is a complex word, enacting new accuracies, poems are written against the resistance of language-as-given. It's like forcing electricity through a tungsten filament, a process that throws off heat and light. The technical side of poetry involves attending to every expressive aspect of language. Technique, as Ezra Pound said, is the sign of an artist's sincerity. But technique is means, not end; the end is connection.
In Progress:
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Robert Schultz's poetry has been published in periodicals such as The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Northwest Review, Subtropics, New York Quarterly, and Iron (England), and has been anthologized in Acquainted With the Night: Poems of Insomnia and Retellings: A Thematic Anthology of Literature. He has received the Emily Clark Balch Poetry Prize from The Virginia Quarterly Review, which recognizes the best poem published in that journal in a given year. His two books are Vein Along the Fault and Winter in Eden. Ancestral Altars, a work in progress, grows out of his collaboration with visual artist, Binh Danh.
Three poems from WINTER IN EDEN
(Audio Clip) Robert Schultz reads from his poems