Toliet Paper on Shoe

Well, it looks like some odd poetry fringe people have found me via the Joan thing.  It's too amusing to take down really.  One of the reasons I wanted to blog quasi-anonymously was to avoid this group until I had a head of steam up. 

A small history of where these people come from and why they’re focused on me:

Back in ’98 I was asked to edit/moderate one of the larger (and older) internet publications.  Much of the site’s activity turned on a discussion board that regularly drew in several hundred at-least-weekly posters, and a much larger body of silent readers.  I may be understating the volume, it's had a million and a half hits since May, 98.  And I know the counter was broken for weeks on end.  Poetry - who knew?  In any event, in keeping with the general ethos of the publication, and as it was on the edge of such already, we made a conscious decision to push the discussion board towards becoming a top-line yet publicly accessible internet poetry workshop, which was informally dubbed “The Shark Tank.”  We were largely successful – providing what was more or less a graduate level workshop from 98-2003.  This would not have been possible without a core group of regulars, many of whom exceeded the focus of the Shark Tank and left to form their own boards elsewhere – to our most advanced poets the demands of the Tank were often very trying. 

Because we actively wanted to foster younger writers (not simply have esoteric discussions amongst developed writers), it was important to keep restating basic mainstream poetics in our critiques.  We wanted our younger writers to actualize (on a craft-level) an understanding of the basic “building blocks” of contemporary poetics (e.g., sonics, the functions of the line-break, precision v ambiguity, concretism v abstraction, the effects of titles, clichés, scope, telling v showing).  After you have internalized these building blocks, I’ll admit it’s pretty draining to argue, via written critique, for literally the 60th time, that *as a general point* in poetics it is usually better to “show” a reader an argument and let them engage it on their own, than to “tell” the reader what side of an argument they ought to come down on.  Gold stars to those who spent literally years doing so, prodding the talented but inexperienced along. 

We did have our successes, some of which translated into mainstream academic acceptance.  For example, one young man with a science background spent a year on the board and basically on the strength of his writing (which changed quite a bit) got himself accepted to one of the better MFA programs in the country.  For those who were interested in publishing, we had a number of poets start to climb the ladder – I can think of many offhand who racked up over 50 solid publication credits in three years (in the poetry world that’s damn good).  And then there’s the fact (most gratifying to me) that a large number of poets simply began to understand things that they had not understood before – they took control of these elements in their writing and made conscious decisions about what they would value and pursue; they began to teach themselves.

However, we also had our failures.  Poetry requires something of a “knack”.  And to develop your poetry past a certain point, I believe you need to possess certain characteristics – among other traits, you have to have a modicum of intelligence, curiosity, a willingness to suspend your own way of doing things and explore other ways, and, in general, a love of words. 

Poetry, as I’ve said before, operates under a huge burden of cultural assumptions, one of which is that poetry is the unmediated expression of one’s inmost self, a spontaneous overflow of unaltered and unshaped feeling to be judged on its genuineness and affective power over the reader – thus, the above statements doubtless will raise many hackles.  However if I said that good music or acting or painting or sculpture requires a “knack” developed by years of training, I doubt anyone would blink.  If I said that a composer might coldly alter one musical phrase to something else because he thought it would be more emotionally moving to an audience, I doubt anyone would have a problem with that either.  Not so with poetry; there’s a constant push to equate poems and poets, to infantilize poets.

Because poetry is seen as demanding less “skill” than any of the other arts it attracts a goodly number of poseurs.  We could divide them into two rough groups for purposes of this blog entry – the feelers and the thinkers.  The feelers are generally people who want affirmation of their emotional reactions to the world via their poetry.  (To paraphrase Jarrell– “They have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have suffered everything else.”)  They are not interested in craft-issues.  The thinkers view poetry from sort of a meta-level – meaning they’re largely interested in the effect of poetry, not the poems themselves.  Thinkers will often go on at great length on what poetry is, what poetry does, but will seldom quote individual lines, and don’t seem to love individual poems.  They think in terms of aesthetic movements or poet-personas.  They, also, are not interested in craft-issues.  Many of the aggressive and antagonistic poseurs on poetry boards fall into the Thinker orbit – they’ll resist concrete analysis and alternative conceptions of what any given sequence could do, holding out for a blurb-laden discussion on what their poetry is like, or what their poetry “says,” or just who in the workshop “loved it.”  Oddly enough, feelers want the exact same thing, but are often more passive-aggressive, stating how (valid) criticism of their work has hurt them as a person.  Like mother-birds, they view the criticism as a threat and try to interpose themselves between the predator and their young.

While emotional validation is important to the working artist and can be a huge boon, the overt mission (restated daily at times) of the Tank was to provide a high level craft-centered workshop which followed (roughly) the mainstream poetics of our time.  There was plenty of room for discussing issues, but we tried to draw the line at modes of thought that completely invalidated the premise of the workshop on the grounds that they were distracting and a waste of breath.  For example, we’d try to shut down “first word, best word” conversations – for if one honestly believed that workshops were useless and that writing was more or less automatic, why would one then post in a workshop and solicit feedback at all?   It’s as though you’ve hired some retried pros and semi-pros, put up a sign on a local gym that says “Free Basketball Lessons!”, and then have to deal with people who have no arms, or are complaining loudly that no one is addressing their needs as water-polo players. 

We also discouraged people from posting poems that were composed in aesthetics that weren’t appropriate to workshop (e.g., surrealism, certain kinds of elliptical poetry, first word – best word). 

We told some that even though they were interested in lyric-narrative or some other mode of poetry that a workshop could critically engage in and provide potentially useful feedback to, they (as poets) simply weren’t developed enough to warrant our attention.  One guy in particular was our “heavy” for years – he’d recommend Mary Oliver’s poetry primer to people and tell them to come back once they’d gotten a handle on the most basic of the elements of the craft.

We hounded people to provide exact analysis and not emotional reaction.  Sometime this involved posting one of your own poems and then critiquing any the blindly-approving/ingratiating reactions to your work.  (The workshop goal is that it’s OK to like/dislike something on an emotional level, but you have to articulate why you like/dislike it with reference to discrete elements within the poem.)  Effective, but something that can easily alienate people.

As you might guess, this general stance provoked a lot of people who simply wanted validation and community (or a reading group).  Again, these are worthy ends, but were easily found elsewhere on the web in groups put together for more or less that purpose. 

What we were doing was different, profoundly radical, and had little or no support from many of the mainstream writers who made their livelihood privately teaching our very public lessons.  I mean, think about it – in what other profession can log onto a free website and post your work to receive detailed responses designed to foster your growth as an artist?   The critiquers of your work donate literally hundreds of hours a year reading and responding to your work.  They encourage you to develop your own critical skills by mandating that you respond to others work.  They post their own work up so you can examine it as you would your own. (And anyone who thinks that this motive, the garnering of often painfully bad feedback on your poems from fledgling writers who often barely know what they are doing, was the primary one for our elite “core” group of critiquers engaging with younger writers – well, you’re just out of your head.)  It was truly something special, and I’m happy to have played a role in it.

Hence, the irony of our being constantly called fascists, stomping out creativity with our jackbooted “rules” of poetry, hounding the innocent poets off our site, and in general trying to take over the poetry world by brainwashing the ignorant masses on the site. 

I think there were at least 3 “hate” boards/communities that sprang primarily in reaction to the Shark Tank.  And by this I mean groups of writers who obsessed over what we said and did, who spent a large portion of their time complaining about our project, who initiated largely reactive projects against us.  I’d distinguish this from the 4 boards (there may have been more) manned by poets (often emeritus “core” poets from the Tank) who simply outgrew the Tank, who had put in their time and were finally weary of it.

Eventually I also grew weary of the Tank – although my departure was hastened by internal politics.  I had never had any illusions about what I was doing, but the petty sniping and the discouragement of any personality-cults becomes more of a burden with time. 

The Tank still continues and has a good number of competent and talented poets associated with it.  While it still gives good advice and offers a high level of critique, the noise to signal ratio is wider than it used to be – there’s a lot of idle chat, a lot of opinion masquerading as analysis.  Personally, I feel that it has lost some critical rigor over the past few years, which is more from general drifting off of a number of older members more than anything specifically to do with my departure.  Something as large as the Tank goes through cycles though, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it rise up to the fore again.  It’s not all that far from it now.  It’s still free and it still remains one of the best places to get excellent feedback on poetry.