Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

The poem begins with an invocation to forget, a powerful directive aimed at the poet's students, urging them to momentarily set aside their personal histories and traumas. Blumenthal addresses the quintessential experiences that mark the human condition—loss, heartbreak, loneliness, and existential angst. These experiences, deeply etched into the psyche, often become the wellspring from which poetry flows. Yet, Blumenthal suggests that the act of writing poetry requires a temporary amnesia, a suspension of these personal narratives to reach a state of tabula rasa from which new creation can emerge.

The specificity of the images—“the blond boy whose father jumped from the bridge,” “the broken-hearted, the cuckolded,” “the girl of the godless cry”—serves to universalize the experience of suffering. Everyone carries their own version of these stories, making the advice to forget a unifying call to poets to transcend their individual pain. This call to forget is paradoxical, as it acknowledges that these experiences are unforgettable, yet it is precisely in the effort to transcend them that one can find the words for a new expression.

The poem then shifts to a more mystical tone, invoking the "untamed wind" and the "peroration of the ravishing air" as sources of inspiration. These elements suggest a turning away from the self towards the external world, a world teeming with unexplored words and concepts—“omelette, investiture, Prokofiev, stars.” The choice of words spans the mundane to the celestial, the culinary to the musical, illustrating the boundless possibilities of poetic inspiration. This list is a liberation from the confines of personal grief into the vast expanse of the unknown.

Blumenthal’s directive to call out “into the beckoning light, the names of everything you have never known” is a metaphor for the act of poetic creation itself. It is an exploration, a fearless naming of the new and uncharted. This act of naming can be seen as a form of creation, reminiscent of the biblical account of Adam naming the animals, imbuing the poet with a god-like power to bring into being that which was previously unarticulated.

The poem concludes with a return to the theme of forgetting, but this time it is the forgetting of one’s “own ravenous body” and the immersion into a state of pure creativity. The final images—“flesh and blood, stone and interlude, marmalade and owl”—are evocative of a world reborn, where the poet’s new language and vision give life to a “clear and forgotten life.” This is the life rejuvenated by poetry, where the act of writing becomes a means of transcending the personal to reach a state of universal understanding and connection.

"Advice to My Students: How to Write a Poem" is thus not merely a poem about poetry; it is a profound meditation on the nature of creativity, healing, and rebirth. Through the act of forgetting and then re-naming the world around them, Blumenthal’s students—and, by extension, all poets—are invited to discover the transformative power of poetry. This piece serves as a beacon, guiding poets to find beauty and inspiration in the vast, uncharted territories of their own untapped potential, urging them to write from a place of newfound purity and freedom.

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