The Sun<\/a>.<\/p>\nTonino<\/strong>:<\/span>\u00a0As you\u2019ve described it, the Greek view seems particularly fitting for a poet. I like the idea of poets as people writing from the brink, with the clarity and intensity of the about-to-die. It makes me think of the Zen Buddhist tradition in which a master often writes a final poem on his deathbed.<\/p>\nMason<\/strong>:<\/span>\u00a0That happens in the Western tradition as well. Many poets write their own epitaphs. Take Robert Frost\u2019s: \u201cI had a lover\u2019s quarrel with the world.\u201d That\u2019s just a beautiful idea. We\u2019re always a little at odds with the world, always wrestling with it, fighting it, beating our head against it. But we also love it very much. Elsewhere Frost says, \u201cEarth\u2019s the right place for love: \/ I don\u2019t know where it\u2019s likely to go better.\u201d You\u2019ve got a body, and the body can love as well as suffer. Sometimes love\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0suffering, right?<\/p>\nI think poets as a group often do have an essentially Greek view of existence. I don\u2019t mean they are all influenced by the Greeks. There are obviously Christian poets and Buddhist poets and many others with different theological standpoints. But the awareness of death seems common to all. It\u2019s almost the nature of poetry.<\/p>\n
Tonino<\/strong>:<\/span>\u00a0But obviously poetry doesn\u2019t have to be\u00a0only<\/em>\u00a0about loss, grief, and death.<\/p>\nMason<\/strong>:<\/span>\u00a0Right. There\u2019s a spectrum. Sometimes it\u2019s about transforming loss. We are all transformed by grief. We change in the way a tree struck by lightning changes. Artists try to capture that in a poem or a minuet or a painting or a sculpture.<\/p>\nA student was asking me just today: Why is it so hard to write about happiness? I replied that it\u2019s hard to write well about anything \u2014 it\u2019s just damn hard to get the words down right \u2014 but it\u2019s especially hard to convey the joyful aspects of life without becoming sentimental. Sadness, too, can be maudlin, but it\u2019s particularly true of happiness.<\/p>\n
And yet there are happy works of art out there, works that are brimming with\u00a0gaiety<\/em>, to use W.B. Yeats\u2019s word. Even the tragedies often crackle with a kind of life energy. You feel revitalized by partaking in them. Somebody once speculated that the writer Flannery O\u2019Connor must be a cynical person, because her short stories are so dark. Her answer, which I\u2019m paraphrasing, was that no completely cynical or nihilistic person can write fiction. In a sense, the very act of creation is fundamentally an acknowledgment of life.<\/p>\nI read a lot of contemporary poetry and often find myself feeling that there\u2019s no vitality to it. It\u2019s as if the author were dead inside, or just writing for professors. There\u2019s no human pulse there. The poem doesn\u2019t beat like a heart. All the best literature has that pulse. It makes you feel alive to read it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thoughtful words, both by and about US poet David Mason, now resident in Tasmania. Siham Karami reviews Mason’s Pacific Light (Forty South Publishing, Sept 2022)…. In this collection, we sense …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[103,92,2,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews","category-mason-david","category-poetry","category-poetry-collections","entry entry-center"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1099"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1121,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099\/revisions\/1121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}