In recent issues of The Raintown Review, associate editor Quincy Lehr makes claims about the state of contemporary poetry and publishing that are rather negative, sprawlingly broad, and mostly unsupported by specific examples. The claims need some sort of answer, if only to demonstrate that somebody’s reading. The essay I’ll focus on is “Down with ‘Good Poetry’!” (Vol. 8, issue 2). The claims seem to be these: A lot of what gets published in poetry journals is well-crafted, predictable, and risk-free, while too little of it has “darkness” or “danger” and almost none of it “strives for greatness” or tries to say things that are “interesting or, indeed, profound.” Too little of it counts. Too little of it matters. It will be ob- vious to most readers already that I’m going to take issue with these enormous and undefined terms. For the sake of fairness, let me admit that negative statements like Lehr’s are theoretically impossible to prove, and that I give my- self an advantage by going at their positive opposites. Another unfair advantage is that one doesn’t make friends by pointing a specifying finger at a bad poem or a wimpy journal, which might be why Lehr hasn’t. But a critic who is going to call for greater daring will have to be daring enough to point. I’m going to try to do that, and to supply the specifics to back up my positive and negative claims. What do we mean by “greatness”? Poets are encouraged, in Lehr’s essay, to go for more “great- ness.” There seem to be two meanings for “greatness” in the essay, as I gather from the two positive examples he praises: David Mason’s “The Collector’s Tale” (thirty-three seven-line stanzas of rhymed iambic pentameter) and Ray Pospisil’s “Insomnia,” (144 lines of iam- bic pentameter). One meaning is ambitious length and/or innovation in technique. The other is moral and political forthrightness: Mason’s narrator decides not to turn in an Indian who has committed murder; the poem studies middle-class complicity in past evils. Pospisil’s poem takes off on several variations of the ugly, oppressive qualities of American political media. On the subject of innovation in technique, well, there formal- ism will be at a disadvantage on Lehr’s very terms. Using a received form means that one doesn’t stray too far from it, assuming one is trying to appeal to the readers for whom it’s a value to stick to the form. So I concede one point: let’s invent more forms and tech- niques, like Pospisil’s echo-repetition. But what I glean from Lehr’s writings in other places is that by “greatness” he most essentially means ambitious scope—of the “expansive poetry” sort—and the making of a Major Cultural State- ment. There are two elements to address, then: Does it really make sense to Supersize your poetry order? and are morality and politics really the right tools for getting at greatness? The length thing Yes, there should be some big poems. Verse novels are ter- rific—David Mason’s Ludlow is both moving and a page-turner; Vi- kram Seth’s The Golden Gate is an effervescent delight. Urging poets to dream big dreams sounds grand, and it places one in the camp of the great Hall. It may be worth remembering, though, that Hall’s famous essay on ambition was first published in 1983, a year when home computing was a marvelous new invention involving the Commodore 64 and games with huge pixels and four colors. We no longer live in that world, and a notion of greatness that depends on the old models needs updating. As the major publishers turn more and more away from poet- ry, and as poetry publication turns more and more to digital versions, the chance for large works to be published on paper decreases. Are long works really read on the Web or on digital devices? The received opinion among IT professionals is that human beings do not read Web pages; they scan them. (If you want this claim substantiated, read almost anything by Jakob Nielsen. Or read Letting Go of the Words by Janice Redish.) The first-generation Kindle and other digital-book devices made a hash of poetry, mucking up the line breaks when type size was changed. The second generation’s cure is to allow the screen to be turned landscape; there’s still no guarantee that the poet’s deci- sion about the linebreaks will be respected. Speaking of screens in general, screen reading is twenty-five percent slower and far more tiring than page reading. Length does not play well with the screen. And it might be worthwhile to remem- ber that the long poem, as an initial concept, was meant to be heard, in the days when the court audience had little else to do in the eve- nings. If one writes poems in order to be read, surely the advice should not simply be “Think big” but “Plan works that will stand screen presentation.” And those will necessarily be in small chunks. A more practical way to urge bigger thinking might be this: Start earlier to conceive of collections rather than of individual poems. The moral-content thing The point I want most to contest is the point about the role of cultural and political statement in poems—the apparent claim that there is too little of that in contemporary poetry. Suppose for the moment that it’s true. Say that contemporary poets, formal and not, do make too much use of domestic material, the material of family and interpersonal relations. There is a very good reason for sticking to that material: It lasts. First of all, the material of the family is the material of myth and the depths of the psyche. Check out A.E. Stallings’s poem with the refrain, “All, all of the stories are about going to bed.” Or Bruno Bettelheim’s important book The Uses of Enchantment. The canon is not just a collection of nice old stories; it’s the ugly underside of our minds. Moreover, that personal material remains powerful through the centuries without the need for footnotes, while material that has to do with today’s politics and power and oppressors and oppressed will need, as years pass, more and more explanation about who did what to whom. That obscurity blunts the force of the poetry. Let’s look at a specific example: the poems of the trouba- dours, the Old Occitan poems that inaugurated the genre of courtly love. The troubadour poems that have to do with sex appeal are translated over and over again and never lose their pull on audiences. By contrast, the political/satirical poems, the ones in the sirventès genre, get far less attention. As I’ve found in struggling to translate some of them, it’s difficult to make them appealing to modern read- ers. Bertran de Born, for one, lived and wrote mostly in the 1100s, and what he wrote was still a live issue when Dante composed the Commedia—and put Bertran in hell for fomenting discord. But nine hundred years have made the politics obscure. In Bertran’s sirventès compositions, nearly every line needs a note. Who was Henry of Aquitaine? How is it that his son was also in line to be king of Eng- land? What was Bertran’s role in all this? And why did Bertran want one of Henry’s sons to rebel against him? These are not exactly mat- ters that stir us now. How do we know our red-hot political struggles will have any greater staying power? The lesson seems to be that if you want a really long life for your poems, politics is not the way to go. If the goal is to “reach for greatness more often than we do,” or to “count” or to “matter,” I am not persuaded that sweeping social and moral pronouncements are the best tools. They’re among the possible tools, and what they’re best for is not endurance, but immediate impact. They are, in fact, used a lot. I’ve used them. For just a few examples of grand moral and cultural statements, see Geoffrey Brock’s “John Brown’s Body” or many of the poems in Adam Kirsch’s Invasions. I have just plucked one maga- zine from my shelves, the 2006 issue of Margie, and I can find moral and political content there just about anywhere I look: Jane Lane’s “The Water Baby,” about newborns abandoned in restrooms; Ste- phen Gibson’s “Domenico Ghirlandaio’s The Massacre of the Innocents” about war; Sharon Cumberland’s “Recipe,” about racial inequality; and many others. (Yes, Margie mixes free and formal; if Lehr meant to exclude such journals from his statements, that wasn’t specified.) Surely the existence of The New Verse News and protestpoems.org demonstrates that poets are not shying away from political state- ments. It also demonstrates that there is no intrinsic greatness about poems that arise from political statement. What do we mean by “danger”? Whatever a poet’s firmly held political views, they may even- tually get laughed at. That risk might be the “dangerous” element that Lehr is referring to. Mostly, poets on both ends of the political spectrum are avoiding danger by submitting risky poems to journals they know will be sympathetic. “Traditional values” poems (formal or not) go to First Things, The National Review, The New Criterion, and others. Gay and lesbian poems have their own journals; so do overtly religious poems (and if you think those poems are “safe,” spend more time reading the statements in Poet’s Market about what editors don’t want to see). The take-a-stand poems are less likely to get sent to the general journals than are the softish poems. That explains why that kind of danger is less likely to be in the Raintown’s slush pile. But I question the claim that too few people are writing such poems at all. But perhaps—and I glean this from his discussion of the Co- lumbia strike and the bourgeois accoutrements of leather side-satchel and suit—what Lehr means by “dangerous” is bohemian, outlaw, beyond the pale of the suburban middle-class lifestyle. I have to ask, does it make sense to claim that such material is dangerous? It’s the nightly fare of prime time broadcast television and checkout line tab- loid journalism. It’s consumed by mass audiences all over the West. Dangerous? Only in the sense that many poets don’t live that life and may feel morally estopped from writing about it, a point Lehr himself brings up. But enough people are not so estopped. As an example of someone who has the moral right to deal with such material, see the poems about domestic abuse shelters in Anna Meek’s Acts of Contor- tion—not formalist, but not evasive either—or more recently, Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet, on the direct experience of the Iraq war. What do we mean by “darkness”? So no, we don’t all have access to “dangerous” non-middle- class living. And yes, there’s a limited shelf life to political statements. Those are both reasons that contemporary poets, formal and other- wise, cleave to the personal. But another reason they do is that there really is not such a bright line between the personal and the political. And where the personal bleeds into the political, or the sociologi- cal, the stains are pretty dark. I have no doubt that Lehr knows and agrees, given the dark lines he has written himself about the discrimi- nation encountered by his German immigrant great-grandparents. I almost used the old slogan “The personal is political,” but that has too many associations specifically with feminist causes. Let me say instead, “The personal stories of a large enough number of persons are the stuff of sociology and politics.” Consider Rhina Espaillat’s “Song,” about her mother’s dementia and loss of language, and David Mason’s New Yorker poem about helping his father use the toilet. Those poems speak to more than each poet’s personal pain. They’re popular and resonant because of demographics: the huge number of middle-aged children now watching over the disintegra- tion and death of parents in the “greatest generation.” Alan Shapiro’s “Country Western Song” (published in Best American Poetry 2007) resonates because so many people have felt, or watched, destruction by alcohol. And is there a more cutting satire on commercial speech than R.S. Gwynn’s “Among Philistines”? More examples of the inner and outer darkness include Julie Kane’s poems about the destruction of New Orleans after Katrina. They include David Mason’s Ludlow, ambitious doubly because of its verse-novel length and because of its exploration of a government attack on union miners. (Granted, Lud- low is outside the universe of “poems published in journals.”) They include the very dark poems in Joshua Mehigan’s The Optimist. They include the explorations of an adoptee’s experience and of family se- crets in Ned Balbo’s The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems. Today, as I write, Jehanne Dubrow’s “Recess” is on Verse Daily; it’s about a child being brutally beaten in the schoolyard. Why on earth would these not count as works that “observe the world that confronts us, in both its miraculous beauty and mind-numbing horror”? Plenty of personal-cum-social darkness is there on the surface of those poems; even more is just underneath. To complain about the absence of darkness in poems is to miss the role of the reader in the creation of the poem. Sometimes the social and politi- cal element is the ghost of the poem rather than its visible body; sometimes it’s present more in the background knowledge the reader brings to the piece than in the poem’s words. Ray Pospisil’s “Little Eye,” about killing a mouse indoors, isn’t about pest control and kitchen sanitation; it’s about cruelty and power and regret at having to use them, all explosively packaged in that last line: “mute/submission as I lifted up my boot.” Rhina Espaillat has a body of poems about her father’s dictum that only Spanish was to be spoken at home. Those poems have to be read with knowledge of the reasons people fled the Dominican Republic in the 1930s—their political ostracism, and their dreams of return, which never became real. Those facts are not spelled out in the poems, but they are not absent from them. The darkness is reader-supplied. So what sort of poetry are we putting down? Yes, many poems aim low. The brief and well-crafted insight is all many readers want from poems, and many will not give the poem time for more—especially not the on-screen poem. Witness the standard format of The Writer’s Almanac as well as of Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, 3 Quarks Daily, Swindle, and so on, in which the poem is expected to get about the same concentration as an online cartoon. And yes, there are whole journals that eschew the political; The Lyric, for example, makes plain in its submission guidelines that its editors want to read about “grief but not grievances.” Nevertheless, I can find a lot of memorable poems that, while brief, are sharp and dark. I see plenty of material that makes strong statements about matters personal and social—that counts, that matters, and that has the greatness of a lasting effect on me, at any rate. If the claim is that readers of poetry journals on the whole get “very little darkness and almost no danger,” then I find myself mut- tering, “Huh?” If the claim is something else, we’re owed a clarifica- tion. So are we looking at different universes? I look at what is already published in anthologies, books and journals, formal and not- so-formal, and see plenty of darkness, a reasonable amount of dan- ger and risk (maybe not of the type Lehr favors), and a not-bad bal- ance between comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Is Lehr being over-influenced by novice poets, and by the Raintown’s submissions pile, and by poems that don’t get published, even though he talks about “decorous dreck” in journals of all stripes? Or is he remembering too well the bulk of what he dislikes, while I am more efficient at forgetting it? Or am I, with other readers, valuing things in this poetry that he’s dismissing? Whatever the reason, I have to say that the contemporary poetry universe looks different to me. —Maryann Corbett St Paul, MN |
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