Als, Hilton (b. 1960)

Frank Bidart's Poetry of Saying the Unsaid

September 11, 2017

"It was 'The Cantos of Ezra Pound' that showed Bidart what a poem could be: unlimited in scope, mind-blowing in its dance with the mind."

One means of escape for Bidart was school. Enrolling at the University of California at Riverside, in 1957, he thought he would be an actor or a director, before settling into English. At Riverside, he fell under the spell of T. S. Eliot and other modernist poets. It was "The Cantos of Ezra Pound" that showed Bidart what a poem could be: unlimited in scope, mind-blowing in its dance with the mind. "'The Cantos' are very brilliant and they're also very frustrating," he told the poet Mark Halliday in 1983. "But they were tremendously liberating in the way that they say that anything can be gotten into a poem ... if you can create a structure that is large enough or strong enough, anything can retain its own identity and find its place there."

Motion::Dance

Reading

Hilton Als, "Frank Bidart's Poetry of Saying the Unsaid," The New Yorker (September 11, 2017). <>

09/08/2017