Those who follow this magazine might (in a particularly kind moment) recall a piece I wrote for the summer issue entitled “This Is Not a Manifesto,”in which,among other things,I asserted that a great deal of what gets published in the metrical poetry journals is decorous dreck. As a consequence, some months ago, Mike Burch over at The Hypertexts asked me to write an article about what poets should be doing. I responded with a polite version of, “Not a chance!”There is a tendency for such articles to devolve into the ravings of a fiftysome- thing minor poet and adjunct professor with a hatred of slant rhyme if one is not careful, after all. And even in the best cases, the “do as I do, or at least think I do”factor can get a bit much. So in lieu of talk- ing about how you should all buy corduroy jackets, take up smoking, start drinking inordinate quantities of middling Australian pinot noir, and move to Brooklyn, I’m going to try to answer his question in terms that won’t stymie the emergence of anything good. The first rule for the critic, as for the doctor, is to do no harm, to be willing to be surprised by something that may draw on influ- ences or subject matter the critic had not expected before he or she stumbled across the work in question. And often, given the way that American poetry is divided into a multitude of schools, each with its own often absurdly specific agenda, we fail to have that necessary openness.New Formalists are quick to take on board the rather sweet, rather pretty, rather insipid stress-counter with her ducks in a row, the sort of poet who, as Rose Kelleher put it, “never says fuck you.” Meanwhile, the avant-gardists flock around the Joshua Clovers of the world, callow types who show their “political”stripes by getting out to a demo every now and then, but whose work, between its ironic detachment and glib reference to the sort of Francophile theory that even the French are sick of, is more posture than substance. Of course, such high, if glib weariness at least has the dubi- ous virtue of a footnote attached to it. On the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, Fence editor Rebecca Wolff noted that while sorting through mounds of manuscripts, the apparent trend among younger poets in that part of the poetry universe: …is toward a quite direct mode of speech, plainspeech, and with- I’ll just forego further comment on this one. in that a lot of expression of anxiety about being involved in “the poetry world.”Programs, conferences, teaching, publishing. Lines like (I’m making these up) “I hate being a poet./ Poets stink./ Who judges these contests?/ I just want to fry potatoes without fear.” In all these cases, whether through glib weariness in the case of the fashionistas, despairing solipsism in the case of the young pro- gram pod people, or preciousness in the case of the New Formalists (and we could go on in this vein), we get very little darkness and almost no danger, but rather a series of dull templates that can be set against one another in the hope of causing some controversy. It’s not that we need darkness and danger all the time, lest the poetry journals start reading like a script for Mission: Impossible, but we need more. And this is where critics and editors come in. Garbage doesn’t walk by itself. It is the job of magazines like this one to know the difference between the placeholder and the genuine, if perhaps more disconcert- ing, talent—to discover it, nurture it, and promote it. And, frankly, we’ve been doing a piss-poor job. But to return to Mike’s request—what do I suggest? Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? My advice to any aspiring poet is pretty simple—read a lot, learn the craft, try not to be boring, and try not to suck. That’s simple enough advice to give. Past that, it gets tricky. At the start, try to engage with the world as you find it, includ- ing the nasty bits and the bits that have to do with things like politics and oppression. I do not here intend to pull that routine where some critic whose work, on balance, revolves around his children, his own childhood, and his ex-wife, lambastes other American (or other Western) poets for having no personal experience of having shrapnel surgically removed from their legs. Western poets are from the West, after all, and acting as if we were from civil war-torn regions of the world would, in most cases, be risible. Indeed, with the political spec- trum as narrow as it is and popular struggle at a low ebb in the U.S., as is the case in much of the West, directly political poetry is damn difficult to render convincingly. From any perspective. Without it sounding like a talking point. This is simply a problem of our period, where the range of public debate is narrow, and the sense that you can do something about it seems farcical. It doesn’t mean that you can’t write a poem about a contemporary strike, say. You can. Allow me a personal anec- dote. I’ve been on strike. More than once. As a graduate student employee at Columbia University. I sure as hell couldn’t make it sound like Harlan County, though. Let’s face it, all of us walking that picket line between trips to the table stocked with bagels, coffee, and cream cheese were not going to be in grad school forever. Hell, most of us had leather side-satchels.I was probably wearing a suit at least half the time. Indeed, most of us, possibly all of us, have moved on. The police, gendarmes of the foul bourgeois imperialist state that they are, looked bored. Even the inflatable rat the union brought along looked tired. As strikes go, it was a bit crap. The leadership called off the thing as soon as then-Senate minority leader (and current New York State governor) David Paterson asked them to, resulting in a meeting between union and administration that then resulted in squat. We all filed back onto campus, and things remained much as they were. Could I get a poem out of it? Perhaps. It wouldn’t be an easy poem to write, though, and certainly would not carry an especially hopeful message. The point is that the answer isn’t simply writing about “the strug- gle,”whatever that might mean nowadays. What one can do, however, is observe the world that confronts us, in both its miraculous beauty and mind-numbing horror, as well as, naturally, all the gray and fecal-brown shades that blend into one another between those poles. This period of history is, in many ways, an unfortunate one, but it is not without its contradictions and possibilities. Whatever one’s take on the period, though, it is an abdication of intellectual responsibility not to have some take on where the world outside one’s suburban block, urban garret, or wherever it might be that one lives. The writing of poems is, in fact, an intellectual activity. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that the abstruse poem that requires diction- aries in three languages, a complete set of The Encyclopedia Britannica, and a Ph.D. in astrophysics to figure out is necessarily a good one, it does mean that there’s more to the exercise than crafting some pretty sounds in lines that make sense in a given order. We have a responsi- bility to try to say things that are interesting and, indeed, profound— not all the time, perhaps, but more than most of us do. This isn’t easy, so in the name of Jesus, apple pie, your mother, and anything else one may hold sacred, don’t be too afraid of screw- ing up. The problem with ducks-in-a-row poetry isn’t that it’s bad. Quite the contrary. It’s just doesn’t go anywhere. And we are awash in perfectly good poetry. There is, in fact, a deluge of it. And it’s getting tedious, with mounds of unchallenging stuff piling up in the slush piles of a thousand literary journals and frequently making it into their pages. It’s not just the sheer volume of it, but the sameness of it—the expected techniques (depending on the school—they all have them), the typical subject matter, the deft movements from point A to point B that all seem to trace the same route. What Donald Hall called the McPoem has spawned the McMetric, the Language Nugget, and Flarf Fries. One knows precisely what to expect; it’s filling without exactly being satisfying, and it’s starting to have a bad effect on my digestion as each supersized literary journal lands in the mailbox. Craft isn’t enough! The poems that count are rare enough, both with- in a given poet’s work and as a proportion of what gets published,and we (editors as well as poets per se) are too rarely willing to insist on the higher standard of something mattering. But if one doesn’t try, it prob- ably won’t happen. It hasn’t happened very much of late. While one can think of many very good poems in the New Formalist canon, the number that have a reasonable shot at greatness is quite low. David Mason’s “The Collector’s Tale”jumps out for not only its narrative and prosodic skill, but also its moral complexity and generally high level of intelli- gence. One can, perhaps, think of a few others. But even among the “leading”authors who have emerged since the 1970s, certainly among the metricists, there’s rather little that pushes its way through a sea of good to really force itself into the reader’s consciousness. Under the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that most of the work that really aspires to something more than… well, particularly poised adequacy with which we as readers are bombarded has emerged from relatively marginal figures as far as grants, kudos, and conference readings are concerned. I would be hard-pressed to think of a recent poem from the American Establishment that comes near the sheer emotional firepower of Ray Pospisil’s “Insomnia.” The poem, which is at once humorous and harrowing, strange and struc- tured, could easily have gone completely haywire. Its main conceit, after all, involves disembodied heads hovering above the narrator’s bed, berating him for myriad perceived inadequacies before they dis- solve, leaving the narrator: to mute the echoes with a cable show It could have failed, but it didn’t, and while the West Chester Poetry on offshore drilling, drilling through the sea to punch a hole into the crust of earth. I wondered why the ocean doesn’t all run down the hole into the molten core and turn to steam, and rise up through the cracks in streets and cellar floors. We’ll heat our homes while cars with little vacuum cleaners suck it up to move their pistons. Power plants could draw it through their turbine blades to spin all day. We’ll never have to drill again. We’ll never have to drill a rolling sea arrayed before the light when everyone is warm and all the wars have ended, all the pretty sea is warm and all the fish are thriving, and we never have to drill again while everyone is warm and all the fish arrayed before us shine, and all the turbines turn and all the cars run on in silence through the pretty sea where all the fish are rolling and the wars are done. Conference and the 92nd Street Y never asked Pospisil to read for them, he wrote “Insomnia”and pulled it off… and none of the rest of us did. But we should try. We actually need to reach for greatness more often than we do. Sod what’s popular with the graduate seminars, with the nabobs and contest judges, with the creative writing professors, or even with editors of journals like this one. Go on, surprise us. We need to be surprised more often. And maybe I’ll get around to that poem on the Columbia graduate student strikes at some point. by Quincy R. Lehr |
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