Tasty

The September 2007 issue of Poetry has an essay by Brian Phillips on "Poetry and the Problem of Taste." It's a good piece, but like many other articles about the culture of contemporary American poetry, it puts too much emphasis on the extreme factions. I got so worked up about it I wrote a letter to the editor. Who knows whether they'll print it, but I will, right here and now:

Dear Editor,

I appreciated Brian Phillips’ exploration of taste and beauty in the context of contemporary poetry (“Poetry and the Problem of Taste,” Sep. 2007). Mr. Phillips’ careful articulation of this inherently abstract issue is especially praiseworthy. It’s one of the few essays I’ve read recently that made me think about a much-belabored subject (the problem of poetry, call it) in a new way.

However, I wish that Mr. Phillips had more steadfastly resisted the pull of the prevailing narrative about the American poetry community, which insists on dividing its members into two neatly oppositional camps; in his words, the “poetry activists” and the “anti-activists.” I understand that he embraces this structure in part for the sake of argument, in part because that’s how everybody else talks about it, and in part to save time. But like so much other rhetoric that relies on rigid binary relationships for its foundation – “red states and blue states,” “you’re either with us or against us,” and so on – the end result is oversimplification.

I think it’s fair to say that, in real life, most poets, poetry critics, and poetry readers are somewhere in the reasonable middle, watching the volleys arc far overhead with bewilderment. They don’t really care which side you’re on, just whether or not you’re writing good poems. That takes me back to the issue of taste and the central question of Mr. Phillips’ essay: how and if anyone can make such a judgment. Well, to paraphrase the late Justice Potter Stewart on the challenge of defining pornography, those of us in the middle may not always be able to articulate what a good poem is, but we know it when we see it.

Sincerely,
David Keeling

Restrain Yourselves

This morning I re-read W.D. Snodgrass' masterful essay on poetry, "Tact and the Poet's Force," which he wrote just under half a century ago (and which is included in a book I've raved about before, Claims for Poetry). In it, he states that, "it is a poet's business to say something interesting.... He always says something we have not heard before; he always suggests possibilities," and explores the three ways poets create something "worth stopping for":

1. Through a new idea
2. Through new details or facts within old ideas
3. Through a new style

What I find most compelling about the essay, however, is Snodgrass' exposition on the critical role of tact and restraint in poetry, and the necessity of restraint in order to write effectively about the extraordinary and difficult truths that characterize human history. He makes the case that poets must be ambitious in what they write about; discussing Randall Jarrell's poem about the holocaust, "Protocols," he writes, "Such subjects become almost impossible to write about--during the war, in fact, Auden said they were impossible. Yet, if you cannot write about these, almost the key subjects to our civilization, why would anyone go to the terribly hard work that writing is?" It's a great piece -- a reminder of what poetry is all about and how poets can approach even the largest looming subjects.

More Fists Fly Over the Poetry Foundation

In the ongoing saga of The Poetry Foundation Is Ruining Everything, Everything!, John Casteen unloads on David Orr in the Virginia Quarterly Review (for attacking Dana Goodyear in the New York Times Book Review, for besmearing Poetry in The New Yorker). This is getting complicated.

Luckily, Casteen's essay is not. The gist of it is basically that Poetry doesn't know what the hell it's doing or what proper poetry criticism looks like: Thank you Dana Goodyear for pointing out what all the rest of us were so worried about; shame on you David Orr for questioning the prevailing wisdom of the poetry community (that Poetry is running amok, sinking fast, a bajillion-dollar disaster, a disgrace to its own history and poets everywhere). Or something like that.

I continue to be a bit befuddled by all the hand-wringing and righteousness, but the spectacle is entertaining. Who will step up in David Orr's defense? Stay tuned as there are certain to be more rounds to come.

Real Sofistikated

It's been a while since I've raved about a particular book, but Tony Hoagland's essay collection Real Sofistikashun deserves a few cheers. In it he does an exceptionally good job representing a centrist perspective on poetry, keenly assessing contemporary trends while modestly advocating for poems that resonate with human experience. His essay "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment" contains one of the most insightful and balanced explanations for the tendency of contemporary poets to reject meaning and narrative that I've read yet -- as well as a persuasive argument for poets to be cautious in following that impulse:

"One can understand how disassociative poetry has become fashionable, celebrated, taught, and learned--it is a poetry equal, in its velocity, to the speed and disruptions of contemporary culture. It responds to the postmodern situation with a joyful crookedness. And one can also see why poetics that assert sensible order (which, admittedly, can be predictable and reductive) have fallen a bit from fashion: after all, the pretense of order is, in some way, laughable. Art has to play, it has to break rules, to turn against its obligations, to be irresponsible, to recast convention. Some wildness is essential to its freedom. Yet every style has its shadowy limitation, its blind eye, its narcissistic cul-de-sac. There is a moment when a charming enactment of disorientation becomes an homage to dissociation. And there is a moment when the poetic pleasure of elusiveness, inadvertently, commits itself to triviality."

Hear, hear! If you're looking for a smart, humble exploration of American poetry today, check out this book.

Tony Hoagland on Loftiness

From Tony Hoagland's essay collection Real Sofistikashun:

"And here is one explanation for the lack of rhetorical experiment in much contemporary work: we are constrained by our own belief in the precious individuality of the poet, and by our conviction that poetry equals sincerity. We are oddly ready to become poets by getting down and dirty with the details of our private lives, but oddly unwilling to get lofty and public in our speech."

This impulse towards rhetoric and public speech in poetry is one I've felt keenly over the last several months. What's interesting to me is the task of reclaiming that hilltop for poetry while engaging in the kind of personal exploration that can so powerfully propel a poem along. As usual, I want it both ways.

Reading Keats, Considering Comix

I'm reading Keats' poems and selected letters at the moment, both of which have proved inspiring except for when I recall how much he was able to accomplish in so little time. Then it's almost overwhelmingly humbling. The contradictory responses I have when reading this kind of poetry are alarming in their extremity; one part of me clamors to write poems that are just as good while another asks why even bother trying? Fortunately (for me, if no one else) the clamor usually prevails. "Try again. Fail again. Fail better," right?

On an entirely different note, I've also been considering what form a new kind of poetry, befitting a culture of assemblages, collage and remixes, might take. I've envisioned something that draws on and adds to the shape and force of other writers' work: the poem as symbiont, perhaps literally attached to its host. I think of the telescoping tangents and intricacies of Chris Ware's graphic novels. Words inspiring additional reflection or reaction. The poem as a small system of planets orbiting a central star. Well, it sounds interesting in theory. I'll let you know how things turn out in practice.

Who's Ready for a Trust Fall?

Reading William Logan's 1999 essay "Four or Five Motions Toward a Poetics" this morning, I was struck by his discussion of the "trust" between reader and poem. "Trust," he writes, "... is the poem's ability to proceed without distracting the reader with clumsiness of technique, while offering benefit to the reader's imagination equal to or exceeding the energy expended in reading." Essentially, he characterizes "trust" as that which keeps the reader going when she or he has no idea what the poet is talking about. The reader continues in good faith, with the assumption that some illumination will come later. Readers whose trust is rewarded, he suggests, will tolerate increasingly greater risks.

For many, Logan is a controversial (some would say reviled) figure in poetry, but I think the contract between poet and reader is worth keeping in mind. I think it provides at least some explanation for why contemporary poetry is not more widely read; readers, whose trust has been betrayed by poems that lead them into labyrinths and funhouses, can hardly be expected to follow without hesitation. That's not to say that poems must avoid labyrinths and funhouses completely, only that, eventually, they have to show the reader the way out.

Against E-Z Poetry

Speaking of Robert Pinsky, the former poet laureate has published an interesting article on Slate.com, "In Praise of Difficult Poetry." "The issue of difficulty in art is far from new," he writes, "though people may like to refer to some unspecified good old days, when stuff was easier." A fine point to keep in mind, especially since both sides in the argument of "difficult" vs. "accessible" poetry have summoned armies of straw men and flotillas of cliche to fight for their respective causes. But such is rhetoric.

I'd prefer to be neutral in this little war, but I'll admit that I side with the forces of accessibility when drawn into its skirmishes. Still, what I like about Pinsky's article is its suggestion that difficulty can be something we enjoy rather than resist, as well as the way he inveighs against our tendency to view poems as puzzles to be solved, a bad habit most of us learned in high school. That said, I'd suggest not that all poems should be simple or easy to understand (complexity and uncertainty being some of the hallmarks of great poetry), but that complexity and obscurity alone are insufficient to propel a poem beyond its creator.

Which brings us back to extremes. When I write that, I envision the kind of linguistically-occupied poems that are baffling and, frankly, a bore to even educated readers, just as Pinsky envisions the "genial, simple, and folksy... work of Edgar Guest [whose book] Heap o' Livin' sold more than a million copies" in the first half of the twentieth century. Both are over-simplifications. I am confident that most of those arguing for "accessibility" do not hope to bring about another Edgar Guest. Conversely, I am also sure that poets like Pinsky are not eager to see the rise of ludicrously obtuse verse. It's a false dialectic, like red states and blue states. In reality, most of us are somewhere in the reasonable middle, shaking our heads.

Irritable Reaching

Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952.

"A painter like Pollock," John Ashbery writes in his essay The Invisible Avant-Garde, "... was gambling everything on the fact that he was the greatest painter in America, for if he wasn't, he was nothing, and the drips would turn out to be random splashes from the brush of a careless housepainter. It must often have occurred to Pollock that there was just a possibility that he wasn't an artist at all, that he had spent his life 'toiling up the wrong road to art' as Flaubert said of Zola."

No one wants to spend life "toiling up the wrong road." So the question becomes, how do you overcome those doubts? How do you know if you're the real thing or a sham? What separates the amateur (in the least derogatory sense of the word) from the artist?

Lately, as has consistently been my bad habit in poetry as well as in life, I have been jumping ahead of myself and thinking about what will happen at the end of A Writing Year. I can't help but dwell on what's next. Does writing become just another hobby, something to do at night or whenever I can find a few quiet moments? Do I cease writing poems altogether, having had my year to make it work and failed to find that elusive, undefinable proof that I Am A Poet And The Struggle Is All Worthwhile?

Keats would say these are all symptoms of weakness in Negative Capability, "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." What is so insidious about these questions and that "irritable reaching" is the way they infect the mind. The question, "is this poem really any good?" spawns others: "Do I know what a good poem really is?" "Do I have the passion and strength to create good poems?" "Is a 'good' poem really enough?" "Why continue when so many others can do better?" Each one adds its small white ribbon until they form a kind of mental straitjacket.

I recognize that all art requires a kind of faith. As Ashbery continues about Pollock's work, "It is a gamble against terrific odds. Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing." I agree with Ashberry that a degree of recklessness is necessary. But finding the confidence to be reckless (or again, call it faith) isn't easy. I worry I may not be reckless enough. I worry I may not be reckless at all.

Just an Update

Still working on defining my own guiding principles for poetry, and of course on continued revisions. I hope this week proves to be more productive than last, though a business trip on Thursday / Friday threatens to foul things up a bit. Airport poem, anyone?

I'm also looking toward my next submission, with the hope of getting another one out before April. Given that this week may be a little frantic, that will probably happen over the weekend instead. I've found that using the weekends to prepare submissions and do research (e.g., additions to my reading list, literary magazines, poetry events) is a good way to keep up my momentum while also giving myself a break. It also allows me more time during the week to devote to the poems themselves.

Speaking of reading, Fagles' translation of The Iliad has been incredible. At the end of Book 6, which I just completed this morning, there is a lovely and agonizing moment when Hector, having briefly returned from the battlefield to visit his wife and infant son, prepares to leave them again. Despite his assurances, his wife Andromache fears he will be killed. As Hector reaches down to touch his son--possibly for the last time--the boy cries out and recoils, afraid of his father's helmet and armor. It's an unexpectedly bittersweet and human moment in an epic that otherwise occupies itself largely with armies, heroes and gods, and it's the kind of moment to which I think poets ought to gravitate.

Trouble Focusing

For the most part, this dividing my time between writing and work has gone smoothly. But this week the work half has been chaotic, with a major grant deadline looming and too little time to get everything done. The stress has made it hard to concentrate in the mornings and left me feeling unbalanced. I often feel that I need to achieve a kind of serenity to write well, and all the anxiety of work is making that difficult -- during the time I'm supposed to be writing, I can't help but think of the emails stacking up and my lengthening to-do list. Consequently I'm spending more time revising poems this week and practicing my focus when it comes to starting new ones.

Speaking of my mind wandering, yesterday it occurred to me that although I've written a lot about other poets' and critics' claims for poetry (and hopefully said something in the process about my own values and ideas), I haven't really enunciated my own thoughts about what makes it worthwhile or what I believe it should accomplish. So over the next week or two I hope to come up with some Most Excellent Universal Guiding Principles for Poetry. I think this will help in orienting my writing instincts at times like this, when it's hard to focus, and to establish some compass points for the kind of poems I hope to write in general. Plus, everyone else will start writing just the way I want them to. Killer plan, no? Stay tuned for all the excitement.

Revisions and Confusions

More revisions today as I try to prepare another set of poems for sending out. A mix of older and newer drafts, this time. This week I've been enjoying looking back on some of the poems I did five or six years ago and allowing myself to edit them aggressively. The intervening years provide the necessary distance to be merciless with those cherished lines and images.

Meanwhile, Gioia, Mason and Schoerke's Twentieth-Century American Poetics has been excellent so far, though I'm only a few poets in. This morning I read Robinson Jeffers' "Poetry, Gongorism and a Thousand Years," which was published in 1948 but retains much of its relevancy. In it he describes the intentions and methods of a hypothetical "great poet." Among the passages I find striking:

"... to put the matter more fundamentally, I believe that our man would turn away from the self-consciousness and naive learnedness, the undergraduate irony, unnatural metaphors, hiatuses and labored obscurity that are too prevalent in contemporary verse. His poetry would be natural and direct. He would have something new and important to say, and just for that reason he would wish to say it clearly. He would be seeking to express the spirit of his time (as well as all times), but it is not necessary, because an epoch is confused, that its poet should share its confusions."

David Orr: Drawn to Heat and Conflict

Whether you agree or disagree with John Barr's tract on The State of Poetry Today (which, however rickety it may have first appeared, increasingly seems to have achieved near-earth orbit alongside similarly shouted-about essays like Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?"), you have to give him credit for igniting a large and lively discussion.

David Orr, resident poetry critic for The New York Times, is the latest to weigh in, with an essay in yesterday's paper ("Annals of Poetry") that assesses Dana Goodyear's assessment of the brouhaha. Orr is kind of like the Predator of the poetry community, attracted to areas of conflict where he can prowl among the combatants and maybe do a little hunting of his own. A few years ago, for example, he wittily chronicled August Kleinzahler's attack on Garrison Keillor's anthology Good Poems. He is also known for very neatly skewering Jorie Graham.

In this latest piece, Orr questions Goodyear's article and calls The New Yorker to task for pimping poems for the sake of its literary reputation in the magazine market. I personally am glad that The New Yorker continues to print poetry, but I agree with Orr's point that its efforts to straddle several different readerships means that it sometimes makes questionable decisions about what it purveys ("bad poems by excellent poets," he says).

More to the point, I agree with his moderate take on Barr's essay and the Poetry Foundation's efforts to coax American poetry out of its cloister. It captures my own views better than anything else I've read yet.

More from Rilke

"Praise the world to the angel, not what can't be talked about.
You can't impress him with your grand emotions. In the cosmos
where he so intently feels, you're just a novice. So show
him some simple thing shaped for generation after generation
until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it's ours."

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, from "The Ninth Elegy"

Sound advice for a poet, I think. But what a challenge it is to find "some simple thing" that can last more than a few minutes, much less generations. How did William Carlos Williams know so much depended on a red wheelbarrow? Writing something worthwhile requires so much instinct, discipline and patience, and the chances of success are so unlikely. Then again, why bother at all if that's not the goal, making something that will endure?

Poetry Under the Monocle

I'm a little tardy getting to this, but The New Yorker's Dana Goodyear has a nice piece in the February 19 & 26 double issue on Ruth Lilly's jackpot gift to Poetry magazine. In it she explores the recent dust-up over Poetry Foundation president John Barr's essay "American Poetry in the New Century," which I previously wrote about here. Goodyear is clearly skeptical about Barr's background (among other things, she repeatedly and colorfully references his personal wealth) but her article is more open to his ideas about poetry in America than the raised-eyebrow paragraphs that introduce it. She also provides an interesting account of the little-mentioned lawsuits that emerged with Lilly's gift.

Goodyear's description of the controversy following the publication of Barr's essay wryly captures the shocked-and-appalledness of many in the poetry community ("The poet Robert Wrigley... wrote a letter, which, in twenty rhetorical questions, performed back flips of outrage and stuck a landing on the single-word sentence 'Bullshit,'" she writes in one part). Many of these critics have valid points and concerns, but sadly the picture of the poetry world that emerges is an ugly one: sneering, defensive, elitist and entitled.

Which brings me back to what I first wrote about Barr's essay and the scorching response. What's everybody so afraid about? It occurs to me that much of the passion may stem from the fact that poets are, more often than not, the starved dogs of the cultural community, quick to snap at those who near their small territories or eye their picked-over bones. And with Lilly's gift, the Poetry Foundation is suddenly a big dog to contend with. Ergo, hackles.

What remains to be seen is how Barr and the Poetry Foundation handle their newfound strength and bulk. I, for one, don't see anything wrong with the initial steps they've taken to bolster the prominence of poetry in American culture. I wouldn't want to see every poem become a Billy Collins poem, but trying to encourage poetry that appeals to the widest possible spectrum of readers seems laudable enough. Poets and poetry critics often seem surprisingly dualistic and unambitious in their conception of what poetry can be; accessibility and innovation, they presume, are fundamentally incompatible. Yet in his time, Robert Frost wrote poems that not only commanded large audiences but also daringly advanced poetry as an art form. Why shouldn't we strive for the same?

Another Skirmish in the Poetry Wars

Speaking of MFA programs, John Barr of the Poetry Foundation certainly has knotted some knickers with his essay "American Poetry in the New Century," which appeared in the September 2006 issue of Poetry. In it, he argues that, "American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now," and though he is careful to say that, "the malaise that lies over poetry today has no single cause," he does call out MFA programs for their part in creating "a climate of careerism." As an alternative, he urges poets to "live broadly, then write boldly."

Not surprisingly, all manner of apologists emerged, rhetoric-ablazing. In the November issue, the reaction ranges from disgusted disbelief (et tu, Poetry?) to self-righteous scorn (Poetry as entertainment? Preposterous! Sacrilege!). From Stephen Yenser to Sidney Wade, they lay it on thick.

Now, I don't agree with all of Barr's ideas, but I'm disturbed by the mocking, absolutist response. It seems to me that the surest sign that an art (or a business, a field of study, a country) is in trouble is when its leaders cannot entertain conflicting ideas or philosophies. At the same time, I agree with several of the angry-letter writers that, judging from the many essays and general hand-wringing that takes place over it, American poetry is perpetually on the brink. Of course there is exaggeration and short-sightedness in such claims, and we are within our rights to roll our eyes at them.

But is it so impossible even to admit, like honest addicts, that we have a problem? That even some of the blame for the public's lack of interest in contemporary poetry lies with its practitioners? That academe, as the chief builder and supporter of poets today, is at least somewhat responsible? Poetry is the province of uncertainty, exploration and question. Why then do so many purport to know the answer so surely?

In her response to Barr's essay, Sidney Wade of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs declares, with the assurance of someone who sleeps well at night, that, "public neglect for poetry is not the fault of MFA programs." I suspect, however, that she, like Barr, is only partially correct. In my opinion, MFA programs and universities are at least partly to blame because they have created a kind of echo chamber for poetry that is written, reviewed, studied, published and promoted by people who share a highly sophisticated understanding of the art. No, they're not all writing the same thing, the same kind of poetry, or exclusively for one another, but they do share a similar, university-influenced perspective. It's hardly unreasonable to suggest, as Barr does, that poets who reflect a diversity of backgrounds, experiences and occupations would be healthier for the art form.

American culture has indeed changed, and changed in a way that discourages quiet, time-intensive pleasures such as reading poetry. But poetry, too, has changed. Much of it has moved away from the wide avenues of human experience and into the attics and machine rooms of language. So much of poetry today seems the product of hobbyists -- elusive, intricate, fixated on minutae. Some of this is great art, and expands the limits of poetry as we have known it. More of it is drivel. This is not to say that demanding, forward-looking poetry should not be written, taught, supported or appreciated -- only that we should be aware that there is a cost to our indulgences. In this case, that cost may be a non-specialist reader's patience (or respect).

The challenge for poets writing today is not to dumb down their work, but to be mindful that a core purpose of poetry is the communication of ideas, emotion and experience. Making poetry appealing to a broader audience doesn't entail using smaller words, but embracing bigger issues. It also requires some acknowledgement of the truth in Barr's assertion that, "Poetry... must meet a standard of pleasure as well as profundity if it is to recover its place in American culture." That line reminds me of an exchange about jazz and black culture between Bleek Gilliam (Denzel Washington) and Shadow Henderson (Wesley Snipes) in Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues:

• Bleek: ".... It incenses me that our own people don't realize our own heritage, our own culture, this is our music, man."
• Shadow Henderson: "That's bullshit."
• Bleek: "Why?"
• Shadow Henderson: "...Everything, everything you just said is bullshit.... That's right, the people don't come because you grandiose motherfuckers don't play shit that they like. If you played the shit that they like, then people would come, simple as that."

Simple as that.