Toward an Impure Poetry [Roberto Ascalon]

In “Toward an Impure Poetry,” Pablo Neruda wrote, “A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior.” Some say that the body and the poem are one and the same. How must we poets reconcile what we are with what we create? How can we craft poems that arise out of the richness of blood, bone, and gristle? We will read and write visceral poems that revel in the stuff of the body.