Frank Bidart, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, explores this “need to make” in the twenty-part poem “Advice to the Players.” Yes, that’s right: twenty parts. He’s known for psychological complexity and paradoxical observations, and this poem provides both. For example, he writes, “Horrible is the fate of the advice-giver” and “I abjure advice-giver.” But what’s the title of the poem? Hmmm . . . Is he undercutting his own advice on the topic of the “need to make”? Why would he do that? Is he in fact giving advice? Is he warning us? Or creating chaos?
Bidart, Frank. “Advice to the Players.” Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2017, p.346-9.