The Odeon: Essays on Poetry by Daniel Tobin
MFA poetry faculty Daniel Tobin’s book of essays, The Odeon: Essays on Poetry, was published in August by Louisiana State University Press. Read an excerpt below.
The Odeon: Or, Singing and Sensibility
Talk about the marginality of poetry, of whether poetry matters, or of poets appearing on public broadcasting stations or reading inaugural poems, carries little of real value unless it eventually turns to questions of intention for the art. I mean intention beyond public recognition and prevailing trends, the readiness of the audience and critical receptivity. I mean poetry’s relation to some vision of reality and the degree to which the poet pursues that connection, however fitfully, adversely but intentionally in the work. Such an encompassing pursuit, one expects, grows only over time and with a deepening of a poet’s dedication to the art. This kind of fully engaged imaginative enterprise becomes more difficult where there is nothing like any shared underlying nexus of agreement within the “the Odeon” of practice as it fares in the present cultural moment. The name Odeon comes from the Greek Oideion, which means literally “the singing place,” itself from the Greek verb aeido, “I sing.” I love that built-in elision inside the word from public to private and back again, though in ancient Greece and Rome the citizenry built an Odeon for musical exercises and poetry competitions. Yet even in our own time, often on the margins, the origin of poetry in the singing “I” affirms its ghostlier demarcations in the deep registers beyond circumstance and status and state. Still, how can the “I” sing as richly as it might in a cacophony of contrary voices, equivocal choirs, or merely in a vacuum?
