Combined Airy Poetics Posts

This is a consolidated post which contains the various Airy Poetics Posts.  A rambling Airs Poetica, it started in response to some quesitons Seth had on the sociology of poetry and wandered off from there.  I may go back over these posts and attempt to tie them into an essay, but for the moment, I offer them as I offer everything else here, including my poetry - in the hope that someone, somewhere, will find this useful.  I make no apologies for poor spelling, vague wording, and flacid intellectualism.  Read at your own peril, dear reader, for this is a shaky construction built largely for the pleasure of building it.  I have set the posted time to 12-31-05, to move it back in the blog a bit.  The posts were actually written in early January.

Airy Poetics Part One

I’m tempted to respond to Seth’s lengthy post on poetry and sociology (or the sociology of poetry) with something equally as broad; there are so many interesting topics there that I’m afraid we’d be up into the thirty page range for a comprehensive engagement.  Ron Silliman made an initial response here. The long and short of it is that I don’t agree with Seth.  I think you *can* meaningfully analyze the contemporary poetry landscape – and that there are clearly discernible aesthetic patterns and small communities of poets.  I think I should do this in parts, but I’m not sure if I should begin with a thumbnail survey of Contemporary American Poetry as I see it, or what makes “a poet.”  The two are, of course, intertwined.  I'll try to keep this at a level that might appeal to the casual reader.

Poets Make Poetry, Poetry Makes Poets

Well, I’ll begin with what a poem is and what a poet is.  I think most authorities worth listening to (Milton, Emerson, to tap two) have made an effort to distinguish Poetry from verse, and, in a way, Poets from those who can occasionally pen a poem. 

Since there are a number of contradictory cultural assumptions about poets, I’ll immediately launch into a metaphor in hopes of gaining some distance while more clearly sketching the structural forces at work here.  For example, I don’t think anyone would argue that merely being able to carry a tune makes you “a musician” – there’s a kind of professionalism that’s implicit in “musician.”  Similarly, while one can easily and validly say that barely in-tune whistling is “music,” I don’t think anyone would argue that it’s quite the same thing as being able to compose (or play) a complex song requiring multiple instruments.  (Although here we see the metaphor break down, for musicians can “merely” play another’s music, where poets must compose and perform their own work.)  But as far as it goes, rhyme alone does not make a poem, and penning the odd piece of verse does not make you a poet. 

Poets should have a broad competence in the field of poetry – again, let’s turn to the  music analogy.  To be a good violinist, you probably ought to know the major violinists, both of your era, and earlier eras.  You probably also want to have a good idea of the different theories of playing, and the different styles that are possible.  You should be able to categorically analyze your own playing and to push it in different directions.  You (ideally) ought to be able to see the strengths of every approach, but at the same time be able to dismiss some approaches (both by individuals and schools) as fundamentally uninteresting to you, given your evolving aesthetic core.  That sounds pretty reasonable (as a fuzzy analogy), yes?   So too with poets. 

Now there is the pervasive myth of divine inspiration/the self-taught poet/the “native” poet.  I think that this strand arises from a concern with Subject rather than Form.  For if poetry is both Sound and Sense, then there is something to be said for the “return” to a primordial perspective, or a transcendent/ecstatic vision as pushing at the frontiers the Sense/Experience/Subject spectrum.  Meaning that we, as humans, want to hear what the unsocialized (ha!) poet thinks, or the ecstatic poet feels; they both stand outside the normal run of our perceptions and have encoded their Sense in some kind of Form or Sound.  Coleridge, Rumi, Li Po; these poets were praised for their “channeling” of visions, their “ease” in artistic production.  For the aspiring poet, this is enticing.  Do enough drugs, get “in touch” enough with your inner being/the cosmos, and you’re bound to produce good poetry, yes?  However, when one peels back the myth, one often finds that the ecstatic poets, no matter how rebellious their Sense or Form (Hopkins, Whitman), possess a strong and systematized understanding of both their poetics, and the aesthetic environment that their poetics exist in.  Sorry to dash the very 19th century idea (or Brave New World idea) of getting the educated-enough savage to tell us something about ourselves.

I don’t want to suggest my prior paragraph is there to strip the spiritual or the inspired out of poetry – rather, I wish to acknowledge it as *an* element, one as necessary as formal mastery.   

So – thusfar, we have a professional-level (or journeyman-level) knowledge of the scope of the craft both in a how-to sense and an academic/analytical sense (systematized knowledge).  I'm sorry, but you don't get to pick up the pen and write, any more than you get to simply pick up the guitar and play (unless you're a guitarist.)

How the poet acquires such skills and knowledge might be interesting to consider.  It is possible to simply read deeply and widely, to absorb the dialogs on poetry, and to practice (under an older poet’s guidance or no) writing until one develops as a poet and begins to produce a poetry that is not merely derivative,  but distinct to that poet.  At that point the poet should also be able to hold their own in many poetic conversations, perhaps teach a bit to those who have not make their particular kind of study.  As with most human endeavors, it’s useful to have the feedback of other people who love what you both do; and it’s very useful to have a strong mentor who won’t warp your development by narrowing your horizons unduly.  So you can get groups of poets working together (Riding and Graves’ set/Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth), or schools of poets who are not quite bosom buddies, but who exchange ideas or develop an aesthetic that moves beyond an immediate circle – say the Images school, or the Language Poets.   In all these cases, you have the poets (on some level) assessing the other types and schools of poetry that are out there and consciously trying to define themselves in relation to that broad field.  In fact, it’s rather rare to have a poet “develop” in isolation from other poets. Writing poetry, for all that’s it’s a solitary activity, tends to draw other poets in – there’s a fertile (or hostile!) exchange of ideas.  A recent development is the MFA program, which is kind of a codified school or gathering of poets along broad aesthetic lines.  The MFA program is much vilified, or praised, depending.  Not to beat a dead horse, I’m content with noting for the moment that it brings experienced poets together with younger developing poets in a formalized setting that is nominally designed to impart both compositional skills and a poetic literacy.

I think the above works well enough as a sketch; the poet, at the end of the day, is an artist who knows something significant about many (the majority?) aspects of both the craft and the history of the craft; an artist that is capable of consistently (as opposed to accidental) unique expression within the form.  The ways to reach this point are multiple, but usually involve other poets.   We ought to leave it at that.

**

So, what ought our non-poets (or poets) out there, know about the current state of American Poetry?

1. There is no single overarching aesthetic in Contemporary American Poetry and many of our current poets embrace theories which categorically exclude or devalue other types of poetry.
1a. There is no single “conversation” about CAP.  Instead, you have multiple conversations based on completely different paradigms. 

2. The serious audience for contemporary poetry is very limited as compared to novel or play or film. 
2a. The subset of this audience that will spend cash to acquire poetry books or CDs is smaller still.

3. Given that there’s not a ready market for exclusive poetic production (assume a living wage of 30K, assume book profits of $3 (per hardcover) book, sales would have to be 10K units a year, which, my friends, does not happen for the rank and file) and that poet’s actual writing time can be stretched by a) supplemental grants, or b) teaching with summers off, and that these two resources are scarce, then you have an easy explanation for the academic and critical dogfights among the various schools - limited resources. 

**

With that in mind, to launch into Seth’s rant:

I think the idea of “career” in poetry is misplaced (see point number 3).  Certainly the idea that every poet can or should follow the “academic” path of many of the 60-80 year old poets is simply misplaced. 

On one level, a career in poetry is dead simple – you write the best fucking poems you can.  Sorry if that does not sound mystic.  But there it is.  You have humility before the craft (if no one else) and you work to grow within it and feel and labor your ideas and patterns into something that’s *infused* language.  You’ll disagree with other poets as to how you can best do that, but you do it none-the-less.  You write the best fucking poems you can.

The hard fact of the matter is that publication has nothing to do with the quality of your writing.  Mere publication (of any sort) does not validate what you’re doing.  (I distinguish that from having a poet/editor that you know and trust appraise your work and decide to invest in it by endorsing it.)  In fact, writing *for* publication might be a detriment.  I also think that you should, if given the chance by god or the devil, opt for writing something beautiful and praiseworthy at a high level, even if no one will read it or appreciate it;  the opposite choice, writing shallow tripe but being publicly lauded (Maya Angelou) is something that indicates that the person really isn’t aiming at poetry as their primary end, that poetry is a mere vehicle for some kind of validation. 

More soon.

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Posted on 12/28/05

Airy Poetica - or Gewin ta Skewl (Part Two)

To continue on, Seth basically asks, Who/What is Ron Silliman, and Why should we care? Seth’s been clear that he is using Silliman as a foil, but I think that can only go so far.  Given that there’s a goodly number of conflicting contemporary schools of poetry (noted in part one) and that many poets stay within the critical and aesthetics orbits of their schools, one valid way of responding to some of Seth’s concerns is to take Franz Wright’s basic tack (but less harshly) and simply say, “Silliman is a Language Poet.  The end.”  (Personal kudos to Silliman for putting up Franz’s letter on his blog – I admire that.) 

Once we understand “where Silliman is coming from,” I think a lot of his ideas and the place he occupies on the blogosphere become more easily recognized and understood.  This is, in some ways, the beginnings of a sociology of poetry.   

Seth wrote:

The study of sociology is the study of how groups of people operate and, to a lesser extent, how individuals operate upon and are operated upon by the systems in which they move.

I was serious when I said I wanted to take a look at the sociology of poetry, though I'm not sure folks reading the post are taking that intention precisely the way it was articulated, or in the technical sense I had envisioned it. Simply put, when you look at the sociology of a system, you are by the very nature of that inquiry going to focus on the people and the institutions and the assumptions which govern the system in which those people operate. So this was never going to be even primarily a post about what Art is, though I think the matter of what Art is certainly informs many of the patterns commented upon above.

And I think poets self-identifying with the various strands/schools of poetical thought and theory is one of the most fruitful ways of beginning to look at this question.  Leaving aside the question of how the “school consciousness” sets certain limits on our conception of the landscape of contemporary American poetry, labeling Silliman in such a way should tell you a lot about Silliman’s aesthetics, critical concerns and politics.  It’s crucial that we be able to understand on some level what Silliman thinks Art is (insofar as he critically expresses his thoughts on Art/Poetry, and insofar as we can characterize what Silliman produces as Art/Poetry from both his perspective and the perspective of other schools/institutions/individuals.)  Silliman’s identification as a Language poet should tell you (roughly) what he thinks poetry is and how he views the poetic landscape (as well as how certain other points in that landscape view him).  Further, for this level of discussion, I think it’s pretty fair to put Silliman within the Langpo orbit, given his self-identification with the school and the bulk of his previous production. 

**
So, what is Language Poetry, as I see it? A rough thumbnail sketch of Langpo; it consciously subverted the expected narrative expectations in poetry by foregrounding the language itself in an effort to create a mode of expression which by its very nature would critique the conventions of bourgeois society, rather than using the traditional poetic modes to mobilize various substantive arguments against elements of that society.  More broadly, such writings were seen as challenging and undermining the traditional western conception of communication as a speaker communicating an (often written) message to a listener through a neutral and apolitical medium (language); the language poets would argue that in actuality a large number of assumptions and social conventions entered into the process to shape our understanding.  By consciously undermining these assumptions, Langpo was thought subvert the hierarchy of the (meaning controlling) writer and the passive (influenced) reader, not through a metaphysical act of “making the poem/communicating a message/destroying meaning”, but by challenging/frustrating the reader’s assumptions about how language and narrative works, how meaning is generated.)

Two quick caveats:

I don’t think that I understand all the nuances of Language poetry (and I enjoy discussing them), but I think I know enough to be able to determine that it’s not a fruitful enough road for me to walk down, either as a committed reader of the school, or a practicing poet within it.

I’d also like to make clear that I don’t personally dislike language poets (I have the greatest personal admiration for some) – and I often take exception to ridiculous critiques or responses to language poetry.  Despite my reservations regarding the efficacy of Language poetry, I think it ought to be discussed, and that the terms under which it is produced ought to be critiqued, not merely shifted.

**

So, back to Silliman, the Language Poet.

There was a time when I was introduced to Silliman’s work by Forest Gander, who was very enthusiastic about it.  As an impressionable college sophomore, I spent a good deal of time (3 years) with Silliman’s work (and other language poets) before deciding that it was bound by certain conventions that I just didn’t agree with.  Within those bounds, he’s a good poet. 

Silliman is far from a king-maker (if, indeed, anyone is a king-maker) rather, Silliman is just there in the blogging landscape.  He makes his statements and people respond.  (More on the sociology of the poetry blogging community as opposed to other poetic communities, later?)  As to whether those statements have much interest or value. . .well, I think they do, insofar as we remember where Silliman is coming from – the basic perspective of a language poet. 

Take, for example, “The School of Quietude.”  That’s a phrase that I first encountered on-line.  It popped up on blogs here and there, and I figured it was some kind of recent label for “mainstream” poetry – a label applied in the hopes of somehow shifting the aesthetic baseline so that one would view “mainstream” poetry not as a kind of naturally occurring centerpoint in a spectrum of poetics, but rather a somewhat arbitrary set of characteristics subject to critique. 

Now, that’s not a bad strategy – and I’m all for looking hard at *what we’re actually doing.*  However, as a serious critical proposition it’s pretty lame. It's hard not to agree with Franz's impulse to simply dismiss it, as one wants to have the impulse simply to dismiss many of the flawed arguments/lies that come out of the Bush camp; this is because merely *engaging* the idea validates it to some degree (though I hasten to note the Langpo camp has always been far left, not far right). However, I think that the process of rational discussion is a good and thus I'll take a quick trot trough this idea and try to relate it to Language poetry in general to show that there is not "chaos" out there, but an idea advanced from an individual within a school that lies within that schools poetical orbit and both furthers the prestige of the school by association and provides a critiquing/exclusion tool for poets who do not subscribe to that group's idea.  Think of nation-states or tribes or political parties and you're on the right track.

If you’re curious about Silliman’s idea of the SoQ it’s here:

To strip the idea of its form in the post, the School of Quitetude: “could be said to be any poetry that looks to the establishmentarian traditions mostly in the U.K., but also on the continent, for validation, and who seek an American verse that largely is clone of European sophistication.”

(Which is not a bad idea, presuming:

1. there are easily identifiable establishmentarian traditions
2. these traditions are somehow isolate in that they’re not drawn so broadly to be useless
3. we can accurately identify which poets/poems “look to” these traditions in the sense that they significantly ape and/or echo them.

Silliman's examples of the SoQ: Jones Verys, Robert Silliman Hillyers, The Knickerbockers, Louis Simpson, Norman Podhoretz, ML Rosenthal, Lowell, Berryman, Plath, Roethke, James Tate, New Formalism, Dana Gioia, Wendell Berry, Phil Levine, Marilyn Hacker, Franz Wright.

(We should already be seeing a problem from this list, and the next will prove more suspect.)

Silliman's examples of Non-SoQers: Edgar Allen Poe, Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, Melville, Basil Bunting, Tom Raworth, Douglas Oliver, Most of the French poets of the past half century, The earlier experimental tradition in Russia, The Young Americans, Whitman, Pound, Stein, Williams & all the Objectivists, Modernism in general, Jack Kerouac & the Beats, Ginsberg, Pierre Joris, Bly, Merwin, Wright, Rich, Hall, Ron Padgett, Shakespeare

So – from a sociological perspective we might want to ask just who is Silliman aligning himself and the other language poets with (as "desirable"), and just who is he excluding (as "undesirable")?   No, let’s ask it another way – what does the “bad” school look like?  To me, it looks like a bunch of dead academic names, conservative for their time, and a bunch of contemporaries that lie outside Silliman’s orbit.  On the other hand we have poets which, in some cases, were radical for their day, but in many cases, form part of the closed tradition.  There does not seem to be a strong connection within his lists between anti-establishmentarianism (Wordsworth and Eliot weren’t “establishment”? Cripes, one was the PL, the other controlled most of the critical direction in the academy and in English poetry publishing for over a decade) and radical expression within acknowledged formal convention (Poe was very formal in convention, for all he was not establishment – as was Plath.)  Let’s leave aside the logical question of how “most” of the French poets of the last half century, or Modernism, can be said to *not* be an establishmentarian tradition. Further, if I had a quarter for every wanna-be Beat poet that I’ve run across. . .

But basically, what we have here is a typical Langpo way of looking at things: school conception, ignoring the outliers, fuzzy quasi-Marxian meta-analysis, focus on social acceptance/power which begs certain questions, etc.  It’s also one of those typical “survey” revisions, not limited to Langpo, where the contemporary poet/school tries to pull in all the poets they admire into a school or a tradition or whatnot, in an attempt to validate the current project via association.  (“Shakespeare wasn’t SoQ, Ron isn’t SoQ, but Franz Wright IS!  Bad Franz, especially because your dad defected out of the SoQ.”)  As an aside, I’m not saying that Ron can’t validly critique Wright’s work on a number of levels, but the creation of the SoQ as a negative label is both pretty intellectually lame and unsurprisingly provocative.  It's also not surprising (again from a tribal-validation perspective) that every significant dead poet somehow aligns with Langpo/Experimental writing (the "living heirs" who correctly understand/embody the tradition), while the non-Langpo/Experimental living poets are made to align with completely fringe and marginal literary figures that compose a shadowy "establishment."  That's the basic message here.

So, take it for what it is.  SoQ is not a useful or meaningful literary distinction to make.  It may get us talking about who controls the resources, which is a good thing.  It may get us talking about which aesthetics are paired with those resources and how far those aesthetics diverge from (running ahead of?) the main contemporary readership of the times.  However, it's not something poets should take *seriously* (and that should be obvious just from the lists he's drawn and the susupect divisions he's leaning on).  In some ways it's just a rehash of the Avant (the one thing that never changes) trying to rope off everything else and thus increase their own importance in an Us v. Them argument.  (As opposed to being only one of many schools with different ideas.)

**

But, back to the idea of the SoQ in the context of Langpo: Silliman seems to want to separate form and context – he writes “Thus Phil Levine writes of workers & Marilyn Hacker is an articulate feminist, tho both produce work that reinforces the most conservative literary traditions in America,” and this type of separation is, basically, the problem with the language poets in a nutshell.  They have (generally, IMOP) admirable politics – however they confuse the efficacy of new writing (form) which lies outside the established literary tradition, with the efficacy of saying something contemporarily pertinent within the established literary tradition. Basically, they view that tradition as a millstone the society drags about with it. 

However, by choosing to disregard those conventions in such a radical way (producing language poems) what Langpo has practically done is to create a small intellectual cadre of poets who write in a privileged language – one which you need an advanced aesthetic training to parse and judge.  Now the theory that one must merely be exposed to the presence of language poetry is rather similar to that of the symbolist poets – and like the symbolists, language poetry often simply produces confusion in the reader, not enlightenment. 

I’d argue this is because the linguistic understanding that the language poets rely on is flawed – that instead of the reader reacting along (thumbnail) Marxist lines and questioning the departure from traditional forms of expression, then applying that gap to their own lives to critique how language and culture and cultural expression both define and restrain their actions (aesthetic and political), the reader is simply confused.  The reader attempts to apply those traditional types of understanding which have served them in the past.  They look at the disjointed poem and say, “Ha, I like that third image, the one with the guy doing X; I often do X and the poem caught that really well.”  But for the reader to actually begin the critique which the language poets would have them begin, that reader must possess (pre formed) a critical vocabulary and understanding which lies outside of the poem.  That’s a very important point.  For the poems themselves are then not capable of liberating the individual reader – they only serve as examples for what the reader *already* understands (or rejects) on a theoretical level.  At best, Language poetry might be able to produce *random* understandings (much like surrealism) – and while I appreciate that, it seems too little a gain, a gain easily made elsewhere, already made elsewhere.

So the question is whether the track the language poets have consciously chosen goes anywhere –  does it, in fact, *work* as the language poets though it would work?

I think the short answer is “no.”

Which is kind of tragic – you get very bright articulate poets essentially “checking out” in the sense that they’ll never dip into the mainstream, never win a mind, never open a heart.  Instead, they refine students (mostly) who are already on the left.  Which isn’t a bad thing.  But it could be much more *presuming* the desire to write language poetry is grounded in a desire to, in the words of their own project, resist the conservative literary tradition and not a desire to merely join a small freehold of intellectuals speaking their own particular cant.   

Some of this begs the question of what the poet (or artist, to make this a broader problem) ought to be doing.  And it may initially sound somewhat chickenshit that my poetics is simply to write the best poems I can.   But let’s look a bit deeper at that idea. 

It rests with my conception of the human person, society and language.  Like the language poets, I believe that art can be transformative – that it can shape individuals (individuals are not static.)  Poetry is not exclusively a reflection of what we have previously thought (which, I’d argue, language poetry is, hence the irony) yet there are recurring emotional themes and questions that humans have dealt with since the dawn of time.  A most basic survey of these would include – Who am I?, Why do I feel the way I do?, How should I treat my child/parents/lovers?, What happens after death?.   In essence, the sex/death (or life/death) spectrum which makes for the  old joke of poetry only having two subjects.  I think poetry ought to explore these questions from a contemporary perspective – that each generation needs to make its own sense of these fundamental questions.    This invites a a struggle between timelessness and contemporariness.  How new ought those bottles to be, how old must the wine be?  I’m not for an exclusively contemporary poetry, in the sense that the poems would fade as quickly as presidencies, nor am I for a poetry that does not examine anything closer to us than the 1960s. 

How do to this?  That’s the trickier part.  I think you have to write the best damn poems you can.  That means being greedy – putting aside time to read and write and apply what you’ve read and written.  It means experimental writing in the true sense – that you try different things (pursuing an idea) then *examine* how those attempts succeed or fail for the purpose of *applying* the results of those experiments to future writing.  While we all do this on some level (certainly the level of learned skills, if not the level of psychological understanding) I think the practicing poet ought to do it more consciously than most.  The standard I propose is a relative one.  Necessarily.  I'm not proscriptively assessing how poetry ought to look - rather I have a functional approach centered on how a poetry can most effectively communicate its thematic concerns given its structural concerns (which are most easily described as "sound" - but that stands in for a host of language patterning that also produces effects in the readers.)

Poetry is also, often, quite socially radicalizing in that to respond to these deep questions of who we are and how we ought to live, it takes a good hard look at how things are.  It may be that writing your poetry causes you to abandon ideas you once held (that the US is a meritocratically run society) or that your own conduct ought to be changed (you must let person X pass out of your live as your love for them is purely selfish.)  It may be that foreign policies which secure manufacturing jobs ought to be abandoned, for those jobs are not worth the cost in human suffering.  It may be that people should be healthily fed and given medicines, if our society can do so.  The rich can still go scuba-diving somewhere, should they need to feel different.

So, as the above probably makes clear, I believe in a humanistic poetry that examines, at some small and easily bridgeable (artistic) level of formal and metaphorical remove, those kinds of timeless questions. Now, I don’t mean to suggest this ought to be the *exclusive* aim of all poetry, nor do I mean to suggest it’s *my* exclusive aim (for I am as weak and fickle as the next poet), but I consider it my touchstone.

More, again, later. 

Lay of the Land (Airy Poetics Part Three)

In the previous Airy Poetics posts, I’ve:

1) Put forth the idea that poetry is an art that requires some expertise to make well and consistently.  This expertise can come from a variety of sources, but the most common is a community of poets, a series of either structured or informal exchanges centered on both poetry, broadly, and the budding poet’s individual works.

2) Pointed out that there is no single overarching aesthetic in Contemporary American Poetry (CAP) and many of our current poets embrace theories which categorically exclude or devalue other types of poetry.  Poets group themselves into movements or schools within which the members generally share the same poetics.

3) That limited audiences (and hence limited funds) mean a competition for resources among these competing and exclusionary schools and philosophies.

I think the above are more “lay of the land,” while the points below deal with implications of the above points:

4) That the idea of a “career” in poetry, in the sense that one might have a career in medicine, or plumbing, is misplaced given the above.  Surely, one might primarily self-identify as “a poet” – but there is no single institutionalized path that one might follow which pretty much guarantees acceptance, publication, critical validation, etc.

5) That Ron Silliman is an example of a “Language Poet” and that this school-based approach to analyzing poetic activities (I primarily looked at Ron’s criticism, but I think the extension to poetic output is easy enough for the interested reader to make) is perhaps the most fruitful way of discussing the landscape of CAP, at least in terms of analyzing the motivations that underlie any given analysis. 

6) That my analysis of Ron’s formulation of “the School of Quietude” is a good example of how to use a school-based understanding to make these kinds of poetic statements less absolute and more relative (or school-bound).

7) I closed with some brief discussion of my own poetics, my own “school,” if you will, which I summarized as: “I believe in a humanistic poetry that examines, at some small and easily bridgeable (artistic) level of formal and metaphorical remove, those kinds of timeless questions.

In this rather long post I’d like to push this forward a bit:

First, I’d like to talk about the “school” approach to discussing poetry and how that’s to an extent useful. 

Then I’d like to give the rundown of my poetics as they developed from a kind of unarticulated song-lyricism, through the heady intellectualism of Langpo and cutting edge poetics, then went through a period of retrenchment and consolidation before finding their current state.  The best way to do that is a narrative of how I’ve developed as a poet.  I hope that this narrative will be able to touch on “career” ideas, and “publishing” ideas.   It will also let me discuss the MFA in Creative Writing.

I’d like to close by looking at Seth’s scheme for categorizing poets, the idea of “writing for publication” and hopefully provide a reflexive kind of gloss through the narrative that might flesh out the implications of the “fighting schools” conception of poetry.

Whew.   To do all this, I’ll be repeating some things I’ve already said on the blog (particularly in the development narrative), but hopefully, it’ll work.

**
Schools and the Limitations of School-based Analysis

I really do think that to attempt a sociological analysis (or even gloss) of CAP, one must pay attention to the idea of schools of poetry.  It’s not that individual poets carry cards that announce what they’re doing, and it’s not as though poets *must* always adhere to the tenants of a given school.  Rather, if you use it properly, a school based analysis can be used (only) as a useful shorthand to begin to group poets by their poetics (by which I mean the set of aesthetic principles or theories dealing with the nature, composition or criticism of poetry). 

In some ways the problem of labeling poets by schools is the same as the problem of talking about “Poets” in general.  By that I mean to say that if one looks at a “poet” like James Wright, you see several distinct stages of poetic output, each displaying a different poetics (in the sense of how a poem “ought” to be).  It’s then rather meaningless to talk about “James Wright” being a “Such and Such Poet” opposed to a “Stitch and Sack Poet” since his total body of work neatly encompassed both.  Pushing this back to discussions of “the early Wright” or “the middle Wright” or “the late Wright,” might limit some of ramifications of the conceptual error, but, still, we’re stuck with the idea that the poet often simply does not fit into “a neat box” of a particular poetics.  Even poets that might seem to embody a movement might have many “outliers” in their total works; for example, Anne Sexton embodied “Confessionalism” and helped to define that “kind” of poetry – however Sexton’s work contained many poems which could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be deemed “confessional,” rather than something else.

So – a “school” based analysis might not be a tight fitting definition, but it *can* be used to helpfully group poets, especially when those poets self-identify with a school, or have overtly articulated their poetics. 

A good way to look at this is to consider that sometime these “schools” are modes of poetry.  For example, “haiku” is a type of poetry which has a whole range of ideas about what the poem “ought” to do (and in this way is different than a more malleable form), and some poets might choose to write almost exclusively in haiku.  I suppose there might be “haiku” poets out there (most likely there are poets who sometimes adopt the poetics required to write haiku).  But on the other hand there are Neo-Formalists and Language poets, any member of which must identify (critically and via the actual poems they craft) to some large extent with the poetics of those “schools” in order to be labeled such.  Dana Gioia is pretty clearly a Neo-Formalist.  Ron Silliman is pretty clearly a Language Poet (or Post Avant, if he prefers.)  Each makes formal poems and language poems like our “haiku poet” makes haiku.   Each is ‘on record’ about what they’re doing.  And as far as that goes, I’m comfortable with fuzzily designating them as such, keeping in mind that some schools have a tighter constraint than others. 

I think it’s useful to remember that we have to separate form and ethos: for example, a “mainstream” poet, like Stephen Dobyns or Mark Doty, will write primarily in Free Verse, but might produce a specific kind of free verse that is unique to that poet (in the sense that it routinely does or favors certain things).  However, these “mainstream” poet might go on to write, say, 15% of their poems in a received form of some kind.  This wouldn’t make them a Neo-Formalist since neo-formalism holds that the only kind of poetry one really ought to be writing is in received form.   As a more personal example, I write formal poems, and I’m certainly *not* a Neo-Formalist (I disagree with almost all of their aspirational statements.)

Some Schools or Modes a CAP might write within (though some are on the wane):

Iowa-Workshop/Mainstream (first person lyric narrative with epiphany)
Surrealist poetry
Language/Eliptical/Post-Avant poetry
New York School (Conversationlist/Genteel/Decorative poetry - see Karr’s “Against Decoration”)
Beat poetry
Deep Image
Identity poetry (Sexual Orientation/Race/Ethnicity/Culture/Religion)
Intellectual Movements (outside of poetics – e.g., Feminism, Marxism, etc.)
Neo-Formalism
Hypertext poetry
Imagism/Vorticism
Objectivism
Confessionalism
Black Mountain School
The Movement

Some of the above, like “Beat” poetry, or The Movement, could be said to be past, in the sense that the original practitioners are gone, although the aesthetic lives on in some younger poets.  But this is not intended as a definitive list – rather it’s a way of looking at how poets make and discuss what they’ve made.

While Seth provides an interesting way of looking how poets might acquire their craft knowledge, I think you have to deepen that starting point with the realization that you could get an “academic” poet that goes through the Sarah Lawrence/Warren Wilson/New England College node, and that this “academic” poet might have little in common with someone who goes through the Naropa (sorta Beat) node – and that an “untaught” poet (i.e., a poet who does not go though a formalized program?) might align more with one or the other. Or that untaught poet might attach themselves to the West Chester (Neo Formalist) node and thus might have less in common with other “untaught” poets than they would an academic in the West Chester node.

The implications of this in light of the limited resources argument is that you’re going to side with those “like” you when dispensing goodies so that those “like” you will be more likely in the future to have goodies to dispense to you and your friends.  Thus, a NeoFormalist who gets a grant to set up a publication will probably set up a “NeoFormalist” publication that favors NeoFormalist poems (overtly or not).  These patterns of aesthetic favoritism (or school favoritism) are behind the argument that radical poetics are “frozen out” of the mainstream circuit of teaching positions, publications, reading tours, etc.; any plum will simply be given to a poet who is more “under” a controlling school’s umbrella than not.  Some of those umbrellas are pretty big, and there are some big-hearted poets who routinely go outside their own aesthetic when praising poetry or promoting other poets.  But there are some who don’t – thus the recent disintegration of the Yale Younger Poets prize, the confusion over the Best American Poetry collection, and the whole impetus behind School of Quietude argument. 

**

My Own Story

What I’d like to do now is talk a bit about who I am, where I come from (poetically), and how those inform my current poetics.   This is probably going to be a bit lengthy and will have a bunch of digressions in it.  I’ve covered a lot of this on the blog already, but I’ll modify, expand, and excise some bits.

Pre-College

I was educated in an excellent public school system in New England where I had access to first rate faculty, no lack of textbooks, and the good fortune to study English literature at the honors level.   Poetry was taught, along with other types of literature, in chronological format;  you began with some “old” poetry, Wordsworth and Coleridge, say, and memorized the brief social and literary  sketch that the poems “fit into”.   Next came the Americans- again, Whitman, Thoreau, some William Carlos Williams, all given their little slot, with no suggestion that the poems might be valuable as poems.  Rather they became summaries of an age, sort of an archeological or anthropological curiosity;  ah, Mr. Whitman you see, believed in Democracy – where in the poem might we see this?  Of course, rote learning of this sort quickly bores students.  . . Then, at the end of the semester, the High Moderns- Eliot and company.   Due to the above mentioned academic allusion in much of the poetry, classes inevitably devolved to trying to “understand what the poet was saying”.   Poetry, in this environment, became a code language of imagery that had to be cracked and understood.  It was hard work, serious stuff, nobody read it, and it was not for me;  I saw Yeats primarily as a tangle of Irish political history and confusing early 20th century mysticism.

Offsetting this was music.  I, like most other teenagers, would scribble down lyrics from my favorite songs, but never thought to overtly connect them with poetry;  songs were preformed, poetry was read, songs were democratic (why, I might write a song like this one day), and poetry was obviously an educated pursuit for men and women trying to either sum up the important philosophical and historical issues of their day, or engage in a philosophical battle over the nature of art – neither of which interested (or interests) me. 

But music on the other hand, was everywhere: walkman during the paper-route, stereo at home, tapes copies and passed back and forth among friends.  It not only helped define and articulate identity, but it spoke for me to issues I didn’t have eloquence to speak to.  Who hasn’t shared or referred a song or album with someone because it affected them?   The thought that I might do this with poetry was foreign to me.  I was very much a child of the 80’s;  the world which I became aware of was grim – the clear threat of nuclear annihilation (which younger generations don’t seem overly worried about), pollutants, economic depression, the crumbling of the nuclear family. . .if there was poetry that shared any of my concerns, it was news to me.  But, of course, music did.

Well, of course, I wrote, as many people do, in a diary, jotted down thoughts, etc. and perhaps if I thought they might someday work their way into a Public thing- then it would assuredly be as a novel, or a short story, or a movie script, or song lyrics, or perhaps a play.   I did also write some poems, cramped into rhyming couplets, personal things- but those were not the same as Poetry, which you might read in a book. . .at this point, under Seth’s Scheme – I might be classed as a self-taught poet of some kind.  That changed when I went to a Medium-sized Liberal Arts College for my undergraduate degree (English Lit). 

Undergrad

I’m not really sure how my conception of poetry as a vibrant, living, contemporary art-form came to be.  I know that it happened sometime around my 18th year, and it was probably due to a mandatory English composition class I took my first year of college.  The professor, who would later become my poetic mentor, used accessible contemporary poetry as examples in his lessons – Olds, Bly, Neruda, Ai, Wright.  I started to show this professor, someone best described as an “experimental” poet, what I was writing, and he encouraged me.  Over the next three years, I cut my poetic teeth, blending lyricism, narrative, fragment, and various Post-Modern approaches to poetry. Under this poet’s tutelage, I worked on all kinds of crazy shit, from straight up lyrics (for a band) to blank verse to language poetry, sonnets, sestinas, odes. Each new thing I discovered I wanted to try out myself, although I was pretty much writing inside the Language Poetry orbit.  I read all over the map as well; although I particularly loved the work of Frank Stanford, Yeats, Sexton, Milton, Gilbert, Crane, Thomas, and Hopkins. I also studied with/under a tremendous and completely obscure poet in Scotland (I don’t know if she even has a single book published) and a brilliant language poet.   

Unfortunately, I also drifted into reading “through” the poem towards ideas, and to reading poems silently on the page.   That wasn’t really my mentor’s fault, but I don’t think he particularly saw it as a problem either.   I had a number of other projects bubbling at the time – some Neruda translations, a growing disenchantment with PM Literary theory, etc.   

PhD Program

When I graduated I applied to a number of doctoral programs in English – the thought was that I’d basically be able to write about poetics, teach (brain-stimulation and basic self-drilling in the fundamentals, which we all can always use), and have enough free time to write creatively.  I imagine this was a pretty common idea: you look at your professors and think, “Good gig; I can do that.”  I passed on the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo as I was beginning to be a bit disaffected with Language Poetry, which, as Bly cogently noted, was “long on theory.”  Long and short; it had started to bore me.  Instead I chose to go to a Large State School, for a PhD, for which I was planning to write on poetics.  While there I studied poetry with a noted Formalist – actually a mainstream writer, this poet has produced collections of largely formal verse.

While I was there I had sort of a poetry/academic (not mental) breakdown. I realized that I’d been going about things all wrong and left the program. 

Poetically, I realized I had been taking a “English Major” approach. While I had always written poetry (on some level), and while I had always distained elitist art (on some level), I’d always approached READING poetry via my academic background- that is, I read poetry as a code to be cracked, a riddle to be solved and discarded.  Once you had figured out what “The Second Coming” meant, why bother to go back to the poem?  It’s warped I know, but that’s what I’d been trained to do; go into a poem with hammer and tweezers and analyze.   I was, and am (when I choose to do that sort of thing), good at it.  I’d actually, in the process of conception and composition, think about how the poem would “be read” by someone with a commensurate level of training.  The poems were, in a sense, symbolist – they had become stand-in for critical ideas, a mere means to an end, and I was attempting to have a conversation about those ideas *through* the poems.  It was too dense, too intellectual, too obtuse, too Langpo.  My fellow students (and professors) there just didn’t “get” what I was doing, and yet I knew that my previous peers and instructors had.  I realized that I was too far afield from the common readership, which was something I’d always despised about Modernism – these were intelligent well-read people who loved ideas and words, yet they had to grimly struggle with what I was doing poetically.

I’ve tried to publicly explain this before and a few yahoos thought this meant I’d some kind of “conversion” and that now I hated “theory” or “analysis”, which is most certainly not the case.  Rather I came to a realization that the composition of poetry differs greatly from the analysis of poetry.  The point of this is that the working poet needs a different type of criticism from the exegetic criticism that we all grew up with (even in grade school).

Academically, I just realized that I didn’t want to spend my life discussing other writers.  I wanted to write.  I realize there are a slew of arguments about writing while pursuing a PhD, etc.  but none of them hit home for me.  I had to write, on my own – that just had to be my primary creative and mental focus.  It was essential to my being in a way that talking about Milton’s politics wasn’t.  I knew I was more or less throwing my academic “career” away – and that was just fine with me.  I realized it was highly unlikely, unless I went back and got another professional degree (ha!) that I’d be able to teach creative writing without years of slavery in that academic system that I’d just left.  The MFA only route into academic teaching was narrowing, sharply, so a career in the academy would depend on a doctorate. 

I never really confused that with my “career” as a poet though. There was no “career” as a poet – you couldn’t make money off just writing poetry, and any professional kudos would mean. . .what exactly?  Although it’s an “ends”  approach, I just couldn’t see the difference between working as an academic and writing poetry and working as a whatever and writing poetry.  This is because, despite the human penchant for it, there is no “ranking” of poets based on what they do *as poets*.  Sure, Heaney’s a great poet, the guy on the street corner is not. . .or is he. . .and how good was Heaney’s last book, anyway?  Now – I want to quickly say there’s a rough correlation between broad acclaim and skill (Heaney *is* a great poet), but that there’s still a lot of randomness *AND* we’re in an exclusionary school environment.  I can name a handful of poets who have tenured academic positions which I think rest on absolute crap (completely pointless poems of the emperor’s-no-clothes variety, and equally vapid criticism), and I can also name a handful of non-academic poets who I think are much better writers and teachers of writing.  And isn’t this just confusing the issue right there – confusing academic employment with poetic merit?  So where does that leave us?

Boston - Regrouping

Leaving that PhD program was probably one of the smartest things I’d ever done, though it really felt awfully like chickening out at the time.  I moved to Boston and spent some time reading and studying on my own.  With the exception of 3 poems, I burnt all my old work – several hundred pages worth.  They weren’t what I wanted and there was no sense holding onto the past.   I spent my evenings (mostly) reading poetry aloud (Paradise Lost sucked up a lot of that time, as did Yeats and Stevens).  I wanted to come to a more, eh, I guess you could say “organic” understanding of poetry – specifically I wanted to work on the disparity between my “page” understanding, my “scansion” understanding and my “aural/oral” understanding.   

I was still writing both Free Verse and “in Form” – although I pretty much gave up on language poetry and most of the post-modern project.   I also started increasingly fooling around various “slant” forms – sonnets which used alliterative lines but kept the volta, syllabic count and total length, cinquains that rhymed, ballads in slant rhyme – that sort of thing.  Most of them weren’t very good at all, but they taught me a lot.   I tried to focus on the “essential” as I defined it, by asking what each poet was “trying to do” when they wrote any given poem, trying to chart the point where poems lapsed from profound and necessary mystery into mere obscurity.  I was developing a balancing approach to composing, although I didn’t know it at the time.  I published a few pieces in small journals here and there, but I didn’t have a burning ambition to “publish” – I knew I had a long way to go.

I think at this point I had a rather good proto-understanding of the various schools of poetry, although the landscape was changing and there wasn’t (gasp-horrors) the ease of the internet for research. Which is to say there was stuff on-line, but with my dialup modem and limited computer time, I was regulated to the libraries; anthologies, some essays, some journals.  It was hard to get an overall picture of contemporary poetics from them alone, and I realized that even though I’d been given an exposure to major contemporary poets through my undergrad program, and could spot patterns and types of poems, I hadn’t systematized that knowledge into a mental “map” of poetry. 

MFA

When I felt I had some idea about what I wanted out of an academic program, I returned to a Small Liberal Arts College to get my MFA in writing. Probably also one of the smartest things I’d ever done. I worked predominantly in Free Verse, although I worked on some translations (Li Po, Anglo-Saxon verse) and in a few forms.  While I read and wrote more than I ever had before (and that’s saying something) I felt that my writing had congealed, that I was able to aggregate and use all of my experiences and fragmentary skills in a more unified way.

I’m going to do a bit of digressing here, talking about the MFA program structure, my poetics during my MFA years and immediate post MFA years (which are largely the same as they are now), and a few thoughts on how I go about writing a poem.  After that I’ll talk a bit about what  I chose to do, post MFA, and how that relates to publishing and so forth.

MFA Program Structure

I’d like to talk a bit about the MFA program in general – it’s often vilified.   I went to one of the better regarded programs in the country (I didn’t apply to Iowa, since the poets I most wanted to study with were at my small MFA program).   Like most programs, it ran for 2 years. 

Each semester you had a workshop; this was a group of 10 or so of your fellow students, led by an instructor who was an established poet.  The workshops met twice a week for several hours.  Each week you submitted copies a new poem (or two) to all the workshop members who would then review it in preparation for a round robin discussion which excluded the author of the poem in question (“gag-rule”) Workshops were centered on crafting to whichever end the poet had in mind, not discussing those ends in depth. There was a feeling that if a small body of like minded, skilled and educated poets *had* to try and parse out the "meaning" of a poem, the poem was simply not sufficiently well crafted so as to be self-evident.  Personally, in the student workshops, I'd have had enjoyed slightly more debate on subject and philosophy, but that's something (for a great number of reasons) I generally regard as appropriate for discussion outside of poems or reviews of finished poems but not appropriate for critique of works in progress.  Thinking back, in over two years there, I don't think I discussed even one poem where the meter, rhythm and sonic elements were *not* attended to. Perhaps because poems were read aloud, in full, prior to any kind of discussion, a practice I still find crucial. 

The program also called for first year students to take two semester long "craft" courses, which are simply courses that take a structural approach to poetry. Classes in the courses included meter, rhyme, rhetoric, etc. *as evidenced* by a broad range of poetry, much of which was in inherited form.

During the second year, you took two Thesis classes, where you met weekly with your thesis advisor to work on your final body of work. 

All though this time you also had an individual mentor whom you’d meet with to discuss how things were going in the program, where you were mentally/emotionally, etc.  In short, all of the “non-poetry” concerns that you had.  It was a good system. 


MFA and Post MFA Poetics

I studied with a whole range of poets and visiting writers there, including people who were predominantly formal writers and several members of what is loosely called the Iowa School, which more or less dominates contemporary poetics.

Personal Poetics – School Designation and Oral/Auralism:
The Iowa School is characterized by first person free verse narrative lyrics focused on local (often domestic) issues. Generally the poems are judged as successful by how much they resist this local focus insofar as they set up metaphoric resonance to “larger” subjects and thus transcend mere anecdote. There’s a lot of rhetoric involved in crafting the poems, particularly when considering epiphanic disclosure as it resists overt confessionalism (which is generally disparaged among poets of my generation as being a bit cheap and easy).

I’d place myself loosely within the orbit of the Iowa school, although some would (and have, actually) contest this. In particular, I tend to write free verse forms, and favor the first person narrative lyric to some degree.  Like the Iowa school often does, I’ll favor tangible things over ideas – largely because the universal is always and only embodied in the concrete.

However, I tend to use persona/mask elements in my first person writing, and often write from the omniscient perspective. My poems usually subvert the epiphanic elements in favor of soft-sell conclusions (I don’t like spelling things out past a certain point). I sometimes drift into the parablesque, or hyperbolic. Plus I’m a bit sonic heavy, a bit too structure heavy (refrains, mostly).

If I’m asked to identify myself within a school, I’ll usually (depending) say that I’m an Oralist/Auralist: I’m probably best known for my sense of sound, and I view poems on the page much as I do plays or music on the page – either a record of what happened, or a template of what could happen, but not “the poem itself.”

Personal Poetics – Philosophy:
Someone asked me not that long ago, “What I thought made a poet?” I think a poet (as opposed to a lyricist, or someone who writes verse, or does poetry now and then, et. al.) has to have complete humility (absolute and complete humility) before the word.

That means, for example, the poet understands there’s no such thing as a synonym. The poet says it “just so” – and when saying, balances all levels of the poem equally. The poet fully understands Wilde’s half joke about spending all day considering whether or not to put a comma in a line. There is nothing so small in the language that the poet does not love it, dwell on it. You should be able to distract a poet for a good ten minutes by asking, “What is the best verb for ‘umbrellural plum’.”  For a poem is Sound AND Sense, Form AND Idea, and that in a well-made poem each and every syllable, each and every phoneme, pulls “double duty” as it contributes to a sonic pattern and an ideational pattern (or thematic pattern, or narrative, if you prefer). The poem must, like our experience in the world, be at once abstract and concrete – it must faithfully present the sensorial world of ducks and dander, while at the same time inviting the abstractions of delicacies and danger. Also, most difficultly, the poem must harness or yoke the one to the other – the sonic patterning must reinforce the themes of the poem, and the themes of the poem, the ideas they present, must ground themselves into the sonic pattern.

Personal Poetics – Free Verse
A quick aside on how I approach Free Verse:  Free Verse is something of a misnomer. It’s not really free. It’s full of all kinds of subtle constraints. Perhaps the best way to look at it is this – in the smaller more radical poetics, there are usually a few overtly stated (or unstated but prevalent) “rules.” For example, Formalism demands that you write in form – meaning, for most, inherited European forms with a strict meter/rhyme scheme. In these poetics the form (in the broadest sense) is privileged over the content, the “rule” is privileged over the unique merits of any particular poem.  Free Verse turns that on its head. In FV, the content is primary and the form is secondary. This means that you’re “free” to use any poetic device at any time. You’re “free” to vary your line lengths, to establish non-classical rhythms and cadences (or classical ones, for that matter), to use or not use rhyme, to employ or not employ just about anything you please.

But here’s the catch. FV demands that you consider all of these (and more) categories in light of the content. Another way to express this is that each FV poem, given its content, themes, tones, etc., has an “ideal shape” or “perfect form.” Each poem is a unique and individual construct (although one can still group “types” of FV poems broadly). In Free Verse you are *not* free to ignore the effects of line breaks. You are *not* free to use random words. You are *not* free to write willy-nilly. In short, you are *not* free to make poor choices. Granted, the poet (or would be poet) is free as an individual to do these things, but will nearly always (one of a few thousand poems might be the exception) produce deeply flawed poems.  This makes Free Verse one of the most demanding, wide-ranging, and subtle art forms.

Personal Poetics – Sonics and Oral/Auralism
I started toying with an interwoven “phonemic string” structure sometime around ‘98.  Most poems which avail themselves of any kind of sonic theory base their strategies on traditional “foot” metrics; which is to say they’re centered on the syllabic unit and are often deaf to syllabic duration and the actual spoken patterns of stress and pause. Dissatisfied with foot metrics, I experimented with syllabics, whole word counting and various consonantal/assonantal schemes; in the end, I worked down to the phonemic level.

I try to not only match phonemes exactly, but to take advantage of what might be called “slant phonemes” or the grouping of phonemes by pronunciation type – e.g., t/d, k/g, p/b.   I was interested in creating “links” of sympathetic phonemes between words and along phrases for the purposes of both reinforcing narrative and connecting different tropes via sonic parallels.   A series of these links could be viewed as a chain or strand; one or more might braid their way through any given passage.

The rhythm arises from the syntax and the cadence of the poems is controlled by the very natural pauses of our spoken language; the full stop after a sentence, the pauses between phrases, become the rhythmic skeletons of the poem.  The words which bracket these pauses become natural nodes for stress – anchors for these sonic chains.

When you’re dealing with phonemic strings across lines, it’s important to remember that you can have several strings running concurrently – and this is nearly impossible to manipulate without constant oral/aural “checking-in” as your options are considered. 

The phonemes themselves have rough emotional correlation – one does not make harsh K and G sounds at a child when trying to soothe them. In fact, the word “soothe” with its soft S, its open and languid OO, and breathy close, is more the thing you’d be looking for.  Extreme torsion in pronunciation aside, imagine whispering “Cat-gut” over and over to a crying child.  Then imagine whispering “Soothe” over and over.   

Manipulating these sounds across time (so as to produce sympathetic rhythms) and across the more traditional formal structures of, say, assonantal lines) is one of the larger components of the sound element (of sound/sense) for poetry, and in that way, is one of the important ways a poet “speaks” to people, in a manner that a novelist or prose writer seldom can.  In our “Cat-gut” v. “Soothe” example – the pause between the short duration words/syllables of “Cat-gut” (two syllables) creates a kind of staccato effect – “Cat-gut, Cat-gut, Cat-gut” (say it aloud to hear it fully).  On the other hand, “Soothe, Soothe, Soothe, Soothe” produces a softer more soothing and regular rhythm – the single syllable is of much longer duration. 

Sometimes you tend to get perverse and arrogant as a poet (in fact, it’s almost impossible not to be at times) and you try to work against these natural correlations or at least bring them into conflict with each other.  So one poem I wrote was a love poem built on the sharp “I” sound of “lift/within,” and the “s” sound of “hiss/swell,” although toward the end I turn to more open sounds “hollows/bodies/foxing”, in the hopes that general sonic "arc" of the poem parallels the emotional arc of the narrator:

In poetry (a kind of meta-dialogue the poems engage in) silence is pretty much equated with the pause – which produces the rhythms and cadences of the poem.  In fact, you can view a poem “negatively” as a bunch of pauses of varying length, interrupted by noises of varying lengths and intensities.  Silence, both in an abstract compositional sense, and in a more thematic way, is one of most important elements in poetry.

There’s an idea in music (often attributed to Duke Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie): "It isn't knowing which notes to play. It's knowing which notes not to play."  In poetry, you have to know what not to say, and how not to say it.  You have to get the reader to ask the question you want them to ask without too much prompting.  In this case it's doubled since the "silence" of the poems is in fact silence itself, with all its varied symbolic applicability. 

Personal Poetics - The Making of a Poem
I’m not a mystic in the sense that I believe, as some poets do, that the poem exists “out there” in the ether, fully formed, and that I have been chosen (from among all humans) to receive that poem, to let it pass through me into the world. I believe poems are made. Generally made by one person, laboring alone, shaped by all their subjective understandings, limited or freed by their skills, constrained or opened by their chosen “bent” as people.

Now as to what makes us create – that’s the interesting thing, the very subjective thing. I’m fairly good at a number of making things, regardless of my current technical levels of skill. I used to draw well, sculpt better. I can make bicycles and passable furniture (ah! for a real wood-shop!). I can cook (some things) well. However, I’m best in the narrative arts. Poetry, essays, plays, graphic scripts – that’s where I’m at. Now the odd thing is that I’m compelled to do almost none of these. Poetry though – I get itchy if I don’t write. The words buzz around in my brain and I must, must get them out.

So where does the base impulse come from? Who knows? I can’t answer it, and I think it’s often dangerous for a practicing artist to try. What if you come up with the wrong answer? What if you come up with the right one?

Individual poems are easier to trace – they have their seeds: a word, a phrase, an image, an idea, the vague shape of a poem, a color, a mood, an anecdote, a taste, a moment, an awareness, a dream. . .all these and more. In a way that’s the easy part. Ask me about any poem and I can usually tell you where it comes “from” – which may have little or no connection to the poem’s final shape (or should we say “shape of the final poem,” implying more than one poem arises from each seed.)

When I start the poem, I enter a “hot” period, when the muse is with me, when things are malleable. A quick word on the muse – she’s sometimes in the background, sometimes knocking on my eyelids; one does not attempt to describe the spirit of inspiration (ha!) more closely than this. To do so is to court disaster, much as inquiring into the ultimate roots of things. One may come up with a dozen plausible explanations as to the driving spiritual or psychological forces behind each, and, indeed, dozens more plausible (and documented) results of grappling with either or engaging either – but to settle on one! Well, now that would be sacrilege.  Generally, that lasts for an hour or so, or until the poem finds it’s “basic shape”. I don’t subscribe to Ginsberg’s “first word, best word” idea – when the poem is hot I’ll draft and redraft, consider and discard lines and images, generally rework the poem entirely.

I work aloud – which means I “speak” the poem over and over as I compose it, from the earliest draft outward.  Sometimes I’ll only concentrate on part of the poem when drafting, but I certainly have to “taste” each possible phrase at least once.  I put the quotes around “speak” because sometimes this process takes place in my head – but even so I have to rely on the mouth-ear connection often to clarify the silent pronunciation of the poem.  Even when I’m composing “silently” I’ll “say” the words in my head at reading speed and with full inflection. That wasn’t an easy thing to learn.

You just can’t fully appreciate all the factors any given poem balances until you read it aloud and let it rattle around in your ear - and no surprise there as the physical ear (not the eye) is the organ that actually processes sound. “Necessary” changes to the sonic structure impact form, which impacts content. “Necessary” changes to content (even the addition or exclusion of a single word) change the rhythm of that line, which changes the cadence, which impacts form (and overall sonics). Basically, as you go, you surrender your freedom to the poem and let the poem write itself. To put it less mushily, once you establish the matrix of the poem (or think of it as a complex equation) your choices, given that matrix, become limited. In a place where you have the choice between, say, 4 options, only one of them might resonate on all the levels of the poem. Thus, it’s your only choice.

When I write I spend it all – one of the “tricks” (like reading aloud – it seems so easy, so obvious, but so few actually do it). I don’t hold anything back. If the poem can hold whatever it is I’m thinking about, well, that’s another matter. But I ladle everything into the poem at hand. I’d rather have some kind of secondary thing working deep in the poem than sit on an idea or a phrase or a movement in hopes it might find a home later.

Some people keep notebooks full of images, thoughts, lines from failed poems: things to spark them. I don’t. If I can’t hold it in my head, I figure it’s not that important – mere decoration or exoticia. (I don’t memorize my own poetry – part of me just thinks that’s arrogant, part of me is afraid that I’ll get locked into patterns if I start doing so.)  I don’t keep a notebook anymore – I largely work on a few sheets of white typing paper I’ll stuff in my pocket if I’m headed out for awhile and want to write/draft a poem.   But in terms of keeping odd facts, ideas for poems, interesting words, good lines from other poems, well, that happens in my head.  I like keeping the composing area of my brain clean.

It does not matter where or when I write. I can write outside or inside, in any season, with pen, paper, keyboard, or what have you. I don’t have to be drunk or sober or anything in particular. It’s in that way a very flexible art. Speaking of sobriety – I do all my best work stone cold sober. Although – and this is again something you’d never say to a student, I’m a firm believer in mixing things up, in deliberately deranging your senses. I’ve written blindfolded, I’ve written naked, I’ve written in the water, I’ve written in trees, I’ve written only what I could hold in my head on a long bike ride, I’ve written drunk, I’ve written in the center of a crowd, I’ve written alone. Patterns, for me, are to be avoided.

Post MFA – The Internet Years

The year I left my MFA program (and began working for a mortgage company) 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 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. 

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. 

In terms of how this affected my poetics, it’s hard to say – it gave me the opportunity to articulate (over and over again) and modify the way I’d present them.  It also gave me the opportunity to apply them to literarily thousands of poem.

In terms of how it affected my “career,” that’s also hard to say; it helped to do while I was writing poems, and although the criticisms I received weren’t up to the standard of the MFA community, they were focused and for the most part, sincere. 

**
Applying the Narrative -- Schools

So, let’s look at the above in terms of a School analysis, or, in other words, what kind of poetics I was embracing at any given time. I began by having not much of a poetics – or a “beginners/unarticulated/unsystematized poetics.”  When I was exposed to an experimental poet/mentor, I pretty much was all over the map, as many young poets are.  Then I settled into writing Language Poetry (mostly).  When moved to a new environment, I decided to consciously change my poetics and went through another period of experimentation. Lastly, I settled into a kind of centrist, humanitarian, auralist poetics – you could say that I have no fundamental problems with the Iowa school.  There’s also a strong populist element.

This should tell you a number of things about possible “career” items.  There’s a short list of publications that will accept my writing – Fence wouldn’t look at me.  There’s a short list of contest judges that would favor my aesthetic – Ashbery would never select any of my work for anything, ditto CD Wright, ditto Bernstein, ditto Heather McHugh.  Also, when I was an undergrad, I’d have never been accepted for study at Iowa, nor could I have gotten into Columbia.

So what does it say that these doors are closed?  Does it tell you anything about the poetry, per se – that at one point Iowa would have rejected me, but Bernstein might have embraced me, then, five years later the reverse would hold true?  And that’s one of the very real problems if you look at the “careers” of people within poetry without taking the various conflicting aesthetics into account.

**
Applying the Narrative -- Seth’s scheme

Seth's Three Pathways:

Self-taught
Mentored
Academic

I suppose I’d have started as a self-taught poet, then moved into a mentored relationship in undergrad – although there was an academic component, much of that mentoring/reading/study took place with a few friends (similar level of development) and outside of the classroom. However, the breadth of my study was of poets and poetry (Crit Theory, Restoration poetry, Milton, Chaucer, Modern Brits, my undergrad thesis on Sexton and Confessionalism.)  It’s hard to say if that’s self-teaching (reading texts as an English Major and applying my observations to my own writing), or academic, given that it clearly focused on poetry. 

Clearly when I entered the MFA program, I’d be an Academic poet – given that my academic education was overtly focused on my writing, in a very direct way.  Or is it a kind of very structured mentorship?

In short, I very much doubt that you can have only one of the above to the exclusion of others (with the possible exception of the purely self-taught poet).  One always self-teaches, one nearly always collaborates with other poets, one nearly always avails oneself of a class or course or program. . .it becomes a question of degree.  What of the poet who reads a lot, takes a few college classes on Modern poetry, but never takes a workshop?

Seth's Three Skillsets:

Academic: employed in-field --> identifiable career --> is accomplished in the craft
Professional: employed out-of-field --> identifiable career --> is/is not accomplished in the craft
Aesthetic: employed out-of-field --> no identifiable career --> is accomplished in the craft

Hmm. I suppose that I’m an Aesthetic. . .but I’m begging a few points here. To begin with, I think that “in-field” is a misnomer.  What is “in-field” for a poet?  Only a handful of poets are employed *as poets* in the academy.  Most poets are employed as academics - a crucial difference that has little to do with craft accomplishment (for it’s possible to go to a great undergrad, pick up an MFA from a minor school, get a PhD, write crap poems and still be hired by an English department somewhere on the basis of your PhD with the understanding that you might teach the one poetry workshop that’s offered each year).  But what if you’re an editor of some kind who will look at poetry now and again?  Or if you’re employed in actually publishing poetry?  That seems just as “in field” as many of the academics. . .

I’m also still having problems with the idea of a “career” in poetry. 

Seth would like there to be a kind of vertically organized scheme for tracking the careers of poets.  Basically, he postulates that there’s a degree of exclusivity to journals, MFA programs, anthologies, etc.  Therefore, we ought to see a kind of meritocratic alignment that has predictive value – meaning that if one is “good” enough to get into the top MFA program, one ought to expect to garnish publication in the top journals, etc. , and if the results seem random (Ashbery slamming the Iowa program) we’re faced with chaos.

The problem with this approach is the competing school model I’ve outlined.  It makes perfect sense that Ashbery (New York School) will not advance anything to do with the Iowa school, given that no NYS poem/collection/associated poet will ever win a prize given out by Iowa grads, and vice versa.  (Actually, there is some overlap, but basically it’s that simple.) 

You see – if we look at a single school, it might be possible to have a “career” within it, in that you can, say, befriend neo-formalists, go to West Chester, workshop on Eratosphere, review neo-formalists, write neoformal poems, get published in neoformal journals, get a book or two out, teach a private seminar, go to coffee with Dana Gioia. . .and. . .and. . .yeah.  That’s it.   You may not write poems that anyone reads, you may never do anything truly original that affects another human in the broader society outside your small community.  And it’s these larger questions that ought to occupy our attention, whether or not we write in form. 

More later.

**

Writing for Publication

I’m not sure how much Seth is addressing me in his latest post, but since I’m the only “Academic Aesthetic” poet he named, I’ll respond to his comments about “Writing for Publication.”

Basically, Writing for Publication is derivative risk-adverse writing that hews to a common standard.  It’s not hard to do in the micro-form.  You look at a bunch of journals and figure out what their editor likes.  You take your poem that’s closest to it, make sure it looks like it will “fit” the journal through some judicious editing, then send it out.  Or you write one that seems close to the “style” preferred by the editor.  People do this all the time – sometimes they come up with a filler poem that the editor takes. 

It’s also not hard to see the implications in a macro form - you don’t write poems that are 300 lines long because the odds of any journal publishing that poem are slim (you think, based on what journals publish).  Nor do your lines exceed that 14 syllable limit; nor do you write about subjects you don’t think an editor would find interesting; nor do you waste your time on a project that you *know* no one will publish (just for the joy of it, unless you can some how learn from that and use that knowledge to make other publishable poems). 

Or you write in a manner that *does* get you published, so you stick with it, writing “the same poem” over and over. . .

Do I know people that do this?  Absolutely.  Do I know people who (similar) use these approaches to “Write for a workshop?”  Absolutely.

I think it’s pretty fucking clear what type of poetry you have to write if you want to get into Fence, or into the Formalist, or into the New Yorker.   Just as it’s pretty clear which poems will “go over well” in the various on-line workshops.

I think that this pattern of writing ultimately does lessen the art – that it is artistically disingenuous and ultimately weakens dialogue. . .but more on that another day.

Mentoring/Audience

Julie’s comments below prompted this.

I think she’s absolutely right to distinguish “publication” and “approval” – I think the second is more difficult to break from because it involves a cycle of work and praise, sweat and validation.  I know I stuck with my then-poetics far too long in undergrad because I had a small audience of like-minded readers who kept me on the path I  was on.    I think it’s difficult (as with all human activities) to know when something crosses the line from being supportive of a unique/worthwhile but obscure effort, to being a kind of small claque of self-justifying behavior.  Not that it’s either/or.  You *do* learn from good mentors and peers.  It *is* useful, perhaps *necessary,* to write derivatively in the presence of others, to walk in the footsteps of the great poems, to step through them line by line, word by word, syllable by syllable, phoneme by phoneme. 

Personally, what I should have done was “check in” with myself and realize that my problems with elitist art were being tabled for what I was doing in my small pond.  I should have also “checked in” with the average reader from time to time: I should have read publicly, talked to non-poets about what I was doing, and tried to pay attention to what the general readership liked/didn’t like.  I confused who I wanted to write for, and that constrained both *what* I said and *how* I said it.

Of course, eventually, one must break free of a mentor/peer group.  I think Moore and Bishop provide a great anecdotal example – Bishop had sent her work to Moore for years.  One day she sent off a poem, which Moore returned, as usual, marked up and full of changes.  For the second draft, Moore received the *exact* same poem from Bishop with “Lizzie knows best” written in the margin.  At some point you have to go it alone, in an essential way (which does not mean you cease to listen or grow poetically, just that you’re calling the shots on a deep level.)

It’s all a difficult balancing act, which is replicated in all arts, and in the individual act of making; on one hand you want to have integrity, while on the other you want accessibility (or at least, I want these things).  It’s hard, damn hard, to reconcile “going your own way” with crafting something that might speak to another human being, given that you have all these fine examples of poems (older poems) that *work.*  I think it’s inside that margin of integrity and accessibility where the great poems reside: “Songs are thoughts, sung out with the breath when people are moved by great forces and ordinary speech no longer suffices” (Orpingalik – Inuit Poet).  Great poems can be complex and accessible, well-crafted and honest, challenging and reaffirming – we’ve read them.

Regardless of the form we use, to be a poet is to attempt to make these tricky verbal artifacts *infused* with the breath of the great forces: (God/deepest self/universal spirit/collective soul/most base of natures) which I half-deprecatingly, for sanity’s sake, call “the muse.”  It would call it writing “inspired” poetry, but for all the baggage that word carries with it – even Wordsworth, when talking about the spontaneous overflow of emotion immediately fought a distinguishing and limiting action to make clear these forces are immediately yoked by craft and intellect and discipline.

When I wrote earlier in the post about poetry being transformative, humanistic, speaking to ourselves, it was this that was lurking beneath the surface of my statements.  And I do believe that “this” is not served by (nor is the poet is not served by, the reader served by), a poet, in the act of composition, consciously or unconsciously shaping the poem to appeal to an editor or a mentor. It’s subtle, perhaps impossibly so, but one must write *only* the poem, and for that to occur, I believe that one, on some level, must excise the publisher/mentor from your thought.  I believe it is the proper goal of the poet to want to write something that crystallizes, or captures, or hints at, or embodies these elements, *even if* one risks writing a poem that might make the average editor a bit uncomfortable. In short (and roughly) if the muse came to you and offered you the choice, you ought to want to write “the best” poetry, rather than merely good poems which achieve recognition.  Or, to propose a more accurate and realistic bargain, if the muse came to you and said – “There’s a long path to writing the kinds of poems you love to read (most deeply and secretly love to read), would you be willing to spend 5 years sweating out poems that you know (I’m telling you now) will never get any kind of external validation, which invite criticism, which (you will ask) don’t seem to “work”?  Or would you rather just find “the right community” for what you’re doing now?”

(Aside - One would think that the editors would naturally select “the best” poems, and often they do, but editors are not outside the “conflicting school” model I mentioned earlier, nor are they outside personal biases; to swerve into a legal analogy for a second – no one really thinks the Supreme Court picks (always) the “best” argument before it, instead the Court is often influenced by it’s collective political ethos which gives weight to one of several equally plausible/valid arguments.)

Ultimately I’m a “different strokes for different folks” kind of guy – I’d never try to *make* any poet conform to any of this.  Nor would I proscribe just *what* the subject, themes, shape, style, form, or bias one of those “good” poems ought to have.  However I do think a lot of poetry is esoteric, derivative, unambitious, defensive, and thus, for the reader, somewhat worthless.  In reality, it’s more complex than that, given the educational and experiential arc of both readers and poets, but I’d like to close by saying that I’m not attempting a proscriptive project, but that I am not afraid to draw lines.  While "at the end of the day" there are a number of valid paths in terms of one's personhood within the craft, at the same time the weight of history argues that not all poems are equal.

Airy Poetics (Part Four)

 

What are we talking about and why are we talking about it?  For that matter, who the hell are “we”?

First off, I want to thank Seth for getting the ball rolling on so many topics poetical.  His latest post of his Toward a Sociology of Poetry series (which mine run roughly parallel to), contains very useful narratives that explain his proposed categories.  Highly worth reading. 

I still think it begs some question of homogeny (in terms of what “employment in the Academy *as poets*” means, and “established publications” are) and if these in fact can be “scaled” in a meritocratic sense that centers on a single aesthetic – or, as I feel, if we need to adopt the idea that his categories exist within several aesthetic/social strands (schools), each of which has a different cachet and command of resources.  But I do think that his scheme is growing into a promising way of getting your mind around the different “types” of poets that are out there.

But I wonder if we’re asking all the right questions  to come to an understanding of the sociology of poetry.  Perhaps we should also ask: Who is asking these questions?  Where are they being asked?  Who is responding to them?  Who is not responding to them?  What are people saying?

**

Well, these questions are mostly in the Contemporary American Poetry (CAP) blogosphere.  The CAP blogosphere is interesting and someone should certainly survey it.  Seth? Jeff?  Someone with high traffic could make a simple questionnaire and total the results.  I’d be happy to help.

I’d like to know how many bloggers have had: a formalized course of study re: poetry, a formalized course of study re: poetry composition, if they read criticism, if they participate (or how many years they participated in) live or virtual workshops, if they self-identify with any kind of school, their top 10 poets, their top 10 living poets, their age, race, gender, income (class), publication outlets, types of prior publications, poetic contact with living poets, average number of poems read per week, etc.  Basically, what kind of poets are most commonly found in the CAP Blogosphere? 

As an *off the cuff* guess, I’d guess that the CAP Blogosphere is populated (mostly) by poets who have not made a formalized study of poetry in an institution.  Basically, few MFAs, few professors, few PhDs.  Granted, there are notable exceptions.  To further stir the pot – most of the bloggers are white middle class Americans.  I’ve no idea how many have undergraduate degrees, but I’m sure it’s probably a significant number.  The average age (again, wild guess) would probably be “younger poets” – in the 30s or 40s, writing for 10 years or less? - not in the 50s or 60s, writing for 20 years? (what we tend think of as poets who have fully come into their powers). 

Now, establishing the factors would be interesting to me – it should indicate where much of the debate is “coming” from, what intellectual traditions it’s drawing on, etc.

I’d think the technology gap is one reason why we don’t seem to have a lot of CAP minority bloggers, or a lot of older bloggers.  Some people of the current “peaking” poetry generation just don’t like computers – and if they do, simply don’t have time or energy to read blogs.  I think this is a shame in several senses, but not in others. On one hand, while the internet does spread the audience for poetry radically, and enables people interested in reading and writing poetry to have an exchange that’s more personal than simply reading (very expensive) books, the internet is a structurally limited mode of communication.   I’d like both older and marginalized poets to participate in this exchange, since I think it’s an influential one on the current readership.  On the other hand, established poets often already *have* poetic communities that take up all their time and energy (granted these communities are often privileged ones – not everyone can afford to go to college, let alone pursue an MFA; the costs are simply too exhorbitant.)  But I say all this to remind us that we’re far reaching, but not *entirely* far reaching.  And that there’s a very powerful set of voices and ideas which do not enter into our debates and formulations.

I’m also willing to bet that most of the CAP Bloggers have some experience with on-line workshopping.  Which isn’t surprising because the Workshop is the dominant contemporary mode of poetic education – be it privately or in an academic setting.  It’s where poets pick up their skills and their assumptions about what poetry ought to be.  It’s also, in my mind, both gloriously democratic and accessible but extremely flawed.  The Workshop is second only to the MFA program in the hostility it garners from the left and right of the poetry world.

**
Structure of this Post (Part 4)

With the above in mind, I thought I’d offer the following cascade of thoughts, some on topic, some there just to flesh out the ideas/concepts (and perhaps nip certain counter arguments in the bud). Like the last post, I’ll be pulling on old posts and letters that I wrote, so don’t look for entirely seamless prose.  ((Unlike Seth, he of the rocky fingernails, I lack the digitial fortitude to do all this from scratch.  (I’m bitterly jealous of his ability.)) 

I’ll begin by looking at the workshop as the dominant mode of poetic education – be it privately or in an academic setting.  I’ll do this simply because it’s important to have some understanding of the conditions under which people begin to learn to formulate criticism and shape their poetry.  (For few grow without challenge, and one can view the workshop as providing the most intense yet structured kind of “challenge” to the work at hand.)

Then I’ll talk a bit about the project I mentioned earlier – the creation of the free Internet workshops and what they do and don’t do for poetry. 

Then I’ll try to hook that into the rise of the Blogs and the many problems people have with blogs (as opposed to Workshops.)  I probably won't have enough steam for that though. 

**

A Short History of “The Workshop”

The idea of the workshop in poetry is an old one.   As far as the modern workshop goes, in England, Phillip Hobsbaum is considered the father of the modern workshop.  At Cambridge in the ’50 he headed up a workshop called The Group which was heavily influenced by the ideas of F.R.Leavis.  It included Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Peter Porter, Edward Lucie-Smith, and Hobsbaum himself.    Hobsbaum later headed up Groups in Belfast and Glasgow.  The Belfast group included Heaney, Mahon and Muldoon.  To be a fly on that wall. . .

In the States, the modern workshop can be traced a bit further back, to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which is still nominally considered to be “the best” educational workshop. The following is excerpted from their website:

The Iowa Writers' Workshop had its beginnings in the progressive attitudes of The University of Iowa faculty. In 1922, Carl Seashore, dean of the Graduate College, set a national precedent by announcing that creative work would be acceptable as theses for advanced degrees. As a consequence Norman Foerster, director of the School of Letters, began to offer regular courses in writing in which selected students were tutored by resident and visiting writers. The Workshop, as an entity, began in 1936, with the gathering together of poets and fiction writers under the direction of Wilbur Schramm. From the outset the program enjoyed a series of distinguished visitors, among them Robert Frost, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Robert Penn Warren, who would lecture and stay for several weeks to discuss students' work. In addition, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and others came to teach for a full year.
One of the first students to receive an M.A. in creative writing was Paul Engle. He offered as his dissertation a collection of poems, Worn Earth, which had won him the Yale Younger Poets prize. Paul Engle assumed the directorship of the Workshop in 1941 and held it for 25 years, a period which saw it flourish and become a significant force in American letters. During World War II enrollment was no more than a dozen students, but immediately thereafter it grew, attaining in a few years a strength of over a hundred students, and dividing into the fiction and poetry segments which exist today.
The Program in Creative Writing is known informally as the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and these two titles suggest the duality of our purpose and function. As a "program" we offer the Master of Fine Arts in English, a terminal degree qualifying the holder to teach creative writing at the college level. As a "workshop" we provide an opportunity for the talented writer to work and learn with established poets and prose writers. Though we agree in part with the popular insistence that writing cannot be taught, we exist and proceed on the assumption that talent can be developed, and we see our possibilities and limitations as a school in that light. If one can "learn" to play the violin or to paint, one can "learn" to write, though no processes of externally induced training can ensure that one will do it well. Accordingly, the fact that the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent poets, novelists, and short story writers is, we believe, more the result of what they brought here than of what they gained from us. We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country, in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged.

I trust you’ll notice the caveats in their history: that writing accomplished poetry is not a democratic skill or art, available to all the individuals on the planet.   Yet the counterpoint is that writing skills in general can be taught.   Nearly anyone can expand their vocabulary, nearly anyone can learn to apply logical thought to the process of creating metaphors, nearly anyone can learn to train their ear to be more perceptive of nuance and rhythm.   Then again, nearly anyone can learn to play the guitar, and nearly anyone can be taught to sing.   Often, desire and practice can mine a narrow vein of talent. Granted, everyone won’t be a master guitarist, but you can improve your guitar playing skills.

However, it’s a mistake to think of the writing workshop as an isolated product of the 20th century, although the 20th century workshops might take a more moderated approach in regards to identifying topics (imagery, meter, metaphor, rhetoric) and applying them to all poems under consideration by the group.   There were 20th century writing groups (aka workshops) which took a less pedagogical approach:  Tolkien, Lewis, Williams and Hugo Dyson formed the “Inklings” at Oxford.  Graves, Riding and their students on Mallorca. There were Yeat’s playwrights and poets at the Abbey.  For that matter, the War Poets (Sasson, Graves, Owen) corresponded and actively shaped each other’s work with criticisms.

Also, think of the Lake Poets with their frequent meetings comparing their work, suggesting revisions, making changes at the level of the line -  or Byron, Shelly, Mary Shelly and John Polidari working on their writings in Geneva.   The Transcendentalist Club in Boston with Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller and Parker.  The literary salons of the Augustan writers and poets:  Congreve, Addison, Pope.   The Connecticut Wits.  The Restoration Court writers.  The Metaphysical Poets. 

It is, in fact, very rare for a writer of any caliber to work completely alone, to form their work in isolation without a community of peers.   In any event, once published, the contemporary literary community’s opinion  makes itself known via reviews and commentary. Throughout history individual lines are cited as examples of what to do and what not to do (see the Dueling Johnson and Coleridge on the merits of Shakespeare).   Works in progress are shaped by one opinion or another – usually actively solicited by the writer.  Think of the famous examples of Johnson and Shakespeare’s companionship, of Coleridge and Wordsworth shaping each other’s work, of Pound rewriting The Waste Land for Eliot, or Sexton and Kumin reading (and changing and shaping) their poems back and forth on hours-long phone conversations. Of course, these kinds of “peer” influences shade in and out of “mentor” influences.  Moore mentored Bishop, Warren and Tate mentored Jarrell who mentored Lowell who mentored Plath who was married to Hughes. 

There’s a lot of “teaching” and “learning” going on in the above examples.  However it’s crucial to note that these are “live” face to face workshops with either an acknowledged “leader” who is going to articulate the “baseline” poetics, or a gathering of peers who are doing to try to define what they’re doing and bolster each other’s work.  That differs somewhat from on-line workshopping.

Again, I may be shooting in the dark, but I’d say the majority of CAP Bloggers have not functioned in this live-workshopping environment for an extended period of time – instead, they’re used to Virtual Workshopping.  I’ll try to contrast the differences below because, again, it’s useful to see under what conditions many of our younger poets have developed their initial sensibilities.

Some Thoughts on the Virtual Poetry Workshop

So, without delving *too* deeply into the history of the poetry workshop as it exists today and its various antecedents in writing groups, retreats, and correspondence, we can say that the workshop is defined by its utility.  Unlike poetry reading groups, social gatherings of poets, etc. the purpose of the workshop is to provide the poet with a structured and objective response to a specific poem in progress.

To get some quick perspective: In Social Institutions, be they poetry reading clubs, gathering of friends, or one on one correspondences via any medium, it’s permissible and even expected to use the poetry at hand as a means of communicating with one’s fellow listeners and the author.   One observes “Why yes, Stanley, I did like that poem by the third reader, the one that mentioned sheepdogs. Didn’t you raise sheepdogs?”   to the response of “Yes, Marianne, when I was living in Ohio.”    The poems become the social grease of the interactions.   In this kind of setting “the personal response” is valued because it helps group bonding.  For example, David says that Kelly’s poem about sheepdogs is compelling because he grew up on a farm.  Kelly responds she was inspired to write it during a religious retreat to a convent that still keeps sheep.   David finds he writes the best after nights of lucid dreaming – did Kelly dream at the convent?.   Yes, she responds– but normally after a full day of writing her dreams are mundane.   We now know something more of David and Kelly, and perhaps something more of how David and Kelly function as poets.   But we know little about the poem, per se.   Generally, we can say that the process is one of socialization.

In Reviewer Texts, the reviewer’s job is to ostensibly, either recommend a finished poem (rarely) or, far more often, a volume of finished poems to a reader. Given that the reviewer must paint with broad strokes, they often fall into the trap of talking of “poets” or “books” as if they were a seamless artwork. . .a foible that’s carried to all kinds of forums, as we discussed earlier.   In the course of their review, a reviewer might attempt to compare and contrast the poetry at hand with other poetry with which the reader might be familiar, in the hopes of establishing a shared context, a shared reference against which to deploy her comments.  Often reviewers are noted for particular “views” of the poetry world.   Bloom, Logan and Vendler each have particular “takes” on “what makes a good poem”. The reviewer’s process (at least most contemporary reviewers) is fundamentally one of division and categorization – poems X,Y, and Z fail to clear this invisible bar of (formal aesthetics/politics/philosophy/tone/etc.) and are so judged as falling into small discrete “camps” of relative worth.   

In poetry workshops, another standard applies.   The poetry workshop is a gathering defined by function – the workshopping of poems.   Think on that for a minute.    It is a place where poets post up or present “poems in progress” for the sake of soliciting feedback, advice, reaction and general commentary on the poem at hand.   Responses can range from the broad to the minute – but all comments are ostensibly to help the poem at hand (and perhaps the poet’s skill in general) deepen and mature.   

It’s important to quickly note two obvious exceptions to these – in a critiquing community there will be certain critics which have latitude to render their opinions “short hand”.  This latitude stems from the fact that they make numerous postings and are referring to well-circulated ideas and concepts.  The other being when either “social” or “reviewer” responses are yoked to the poem and put in the service of an audience.  For example saying, “I liked your poem specifically because the final image is an excellent example of the confusion a young mother often faces – I feel readers will react positively to that” is a far cry from “I liked your poem.  I’m a young mother, too.”   So also, “Your poem reminds me of some of Billy Collins’ early work, specifically because the passages regarding the impending death from cancer have an ironic bittersweet air, irony in the sense that the reader feels the poet is balancing two contradictory emotions successfully” is a far cry from “Sounds like Billy Collins.  I like it.”   While each offers “opinion”, it offers specific opinion grounded in the actual poem.  It gives a reason for the opinion and in doing such also offers the opportunity for the poet to judge those comments instead of just thinking “Well, Harry liked this one.  How nice.”

While critiquing poems is the Workshop’s primary purpose, we should note that both physical and virtual workshops serve many other purposes. They function as general teaching environments, where you can expand your knowledge of poetry, even if you are not actively workshopping.  They serve also as a social environment, where cultural and political views are exchanged either overtly or (ugh) via the critiquing process.  The workshops function as a meeting place for poets – a place to network, shop-talk.   They can also serve as a form of exposure or publication;  the poet presents their work to a small audience of skilled readers, seeking a favorable response.  They also serve as a clearinghouse for information; in particular the virtual workshop.  On-line it is easy to quickly link to a vast body of poems, essays and books which have bearing on the discussions at hand. While some of the above functions, such as the exchange of poetical information and ideas, tend to foster an environment which encourages the workshop’s utility, other functions, mostly social and political, can often derail the workshop, shifting its attention from the poem at hand to other things. 

The virtual poetry workshop differs substantially from the traditional face-to-face poetry workshop largely due to its medium (electronic text); however, it is firmly based on the physical workshop and operates using many of its principles.   Virtual workshops have a variety of different formats and cater to different types of writers. For purposes of this post, I will assume a “discussion board” based format for the virtual poetry workshop – e-mail workshops function analogously.   I will also assume that the board is “public” in the sense that anyone registered in the workshop might log in at any time to critique any poem.  While there might be a private virtual workshops with a fixed membership of under 15 individuals who “meet” on-line at a specific time for a specific duration, I can honestly say that I’ve never seen or heard of such a thing.  I will assume also that I’m dealing with a relatively “advanced” workshop – that the majority of the members have workshopping experience and have been writing poetry (with critical reflection and reading) for at least a year or two. 

Both the virtual workshop and the physical workshop are similar in that they both have a procedure for poets to “submit” poems to the group.  Physical workshops often use photocopies and readings, virtual workshops use a posting board reserved for poems and criticism.  Both workshops encourage “blind reading” – in the physical workshop the poet is not allowed to speak while the members critique, while in the virtual workshop the poet is discouraged from posting apologia.  Both workshops follow the same pattern of discussion allowing for both emotional and structural critical responses – yet both frown on using a poem at hand to discuss abstract topics, personal issues, etc. 

And yet differences abound, mostly because of the divergent mediums which lead to different mechanisms.  Given my choice of the two, I tend to prefer the physical workshop – most of the differences I’ll be presenting constitute shortcomings on the virtual workshop’s part when compared to a physical workshop.  I do think that virtual poetry workshops are useful, indeed greatly beneficial in some cases, but a comparison of the two should leave us with a better conception of the strengths and weaknesses of the virtual workshop.

For example, in a point which absolutely cannot be understated, the focus in the virtual poetry workshop is on the text of the poems – there is often little sonic consideration.  Although technology exists for the poet to record a poem and post it to the workshop, it is (at this point in time) severely under-utilized.  You could even go so far to say that the virtual workshop can loosely be divided into the “hear” and “hear-not” groups, with the “hear-nots” missing a crucial element of the poems under consideration.  Often, the simple act of reading a poem aloud several times, in several voices, will illustrate just as much to the poet and critiquers as would a 20 paged typed exposition. I wonder how many would-be poets, physically isolated from other poets, turning in good faith to the internet as their primary community, are horribly short-changed, one could even say “stunted”, by their lack of sonic understanding.

In a physical workshop, one knows just who “is there” and it is expected that everyone will respond to every poem.   Generally there is a strong moderator (or moderators) who will try to steer the discussion and keep it focused on the poem at hand.  Disagreements tend to be amicable, with both parties able to state their views on the matter fully.  The workshop as a whole relies on “body language” to make itself aware of the current tone, direction, and state of the individual members.  Since the discussion occurs in “real time” any point can be quickly polled by any critiquer; for example, it only takes a moment to ask a group of 10 people if they feel the title should be changed.  Group consensus on any given issue is generally easier to achieve in the physical workshop.  Dissenting opinion is also easily teased out, especially if the workshop has a good moderator.

When a poem is posted in a virtual workshop, there is no telling who “is there” – the poem might be read by 2 people or it might be read (in larger public workshops) by 70 people.   However, there is no guarantee that anyone will respond to any given poem (in general both the most challenging and the least interesting poems tend to receive the fewest responses).  In the virtual workshop, there is often no “moderator” who steers the discussion of each and every poem under consideration. Instead, the moderators respond “after the fact” to postings and at best can hope to set the tone for future discussions.  In the virtual workshop there is less immediate social ordering, in the sense that a group of people via body language and behavior might suggest to a person on a soapbox that he has gone on for too long, or that a certain response or train of thought should be encouraged or sustained; the virtual workshop misses all of those ordering factors (i.e. both “general social” and “workshop moderator” structures).  Often, this alone can lead to polarization on an issue or a poem, and flaming is not uncommon.  Repeated conflicts give rise to factionalism in general, another problem endemic to virtual workshops.

The physical workshop exists in “real time,” and its narrative dynamic can best be envisioned in the standard way; the virtual workshop’s narrative dynamic is somewhat different.  When a posting is made to the board, it is visible to the whole workshop.  Responses come in at all hours, often quite independently of each other.  Responses to those responses also come in at all hours, with the result that several “conversations” regarding the poem might be evolving concurrently.  On one hand it’s as if a number of people were randomly walking in and out of a physical workshop, talking among themselves and shouting to the group while 10 poems were “on the table”.   But that presents a picture that’s far too chaotic.  There is also, running concurrently with all this group activity, a sense of “one on one” discussion that you might be engaged in.   The individual critiquer, sitting in their chair, is focusing on one poem at a time, reading one thread at a time, which lends the illusion that a “group discussion” exists.

There is, to be sure, a “community” in a virtual workshop, but it is a community of letters – meaning there is always a tension between the written voice used to address an individual and the written voice used to address “the group” (anyone who might be reading the thread and would wish to chime in with their own response.)   This kind of “one on one” undercurrent produces interesting effects – it’s probably incorrect to say that the speed of responses in a virtual workshop is faster, for each critiquer must type out their response and illustrate points “longhand.”  The responses are typed independently and thus several may repeat moderately important points at length while ignore something more crucial and more troublesome to articulate (leaving it to “someone else”) which can give a “skewed” response to a poem. Often in the virtual workshop reservations will remain unspoken and one does not know if a given critiquer has not read a poem, feels they have nothing useful to add, or is remaining quiet for fear of rocking the boat or getting into a prolonged discussion.

There is also something of a “back channel” community, where individuals privately e-mail each other regarding workshop dynamics or poems – the equivalent of whispering in someone’s ear.  In my experience, most of the back channel conversations reveal a greater sensibility and a more accurate perception than many of the public postings to the workshop.  Take that for what it’s worth.

The virtual workshop does have its advantages.  It is possible to get literally dozens of responses in the span of several hours, a volume not possible in smaller workshops.  In terms of blind reading, a critiquer can read the poem, skip the other comments and post genuine first impressions, unaffected by other criticism.  (In the physical workshop someone must always begin the responses to the poem and might color subsequent responses.)   The written record makes it easy to refer to what anyone has said about any given poem – a detail mentioned in passing (which might be lost in a physical workshop) can be teased out by another interested party and expanded on.  There is also no real urgency in terms of time - the virtual workshop has a greater convenience: the workshop members can respond when they please, from wherever they please and discussions last as long as they need to. Reference materials are only a link away.  It is possible to workshop poetry with people from all over the globe, none of whom need to leave promptly at 9pm to make an appointment.  Membership is fluid, allowing the constant addition of new voices with varying degrees of experience. 

Traditionally, virtual public workshops have tended, over time, to develop something of a specialized focus and “level of writing/critiquing” which in various from site to cite.  For example, certain workshops might, through the natural inclination to their most influential and prolific members, began to more or less specialize in free verse, or in formal verse, or haiku, or they cater to beginning poets, or expect the degree of experience equivalent to a collegiate poetry workshop.  In any given virtual workshop, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to integrate a new member if their basic poetics differ significantly from the workshop’s prevailing poetics.  The most common problem would be a relatively inexperienced poet attempting to post poems and commentary on a relatively advanced site -- indeed, situation is so common at several standard response patterns have emerged.  The new member posts, is told their poem needs much work to be considered even marginally successful, there is the defensive back-and-forth conversation cumulating, often, in the outraged “Well fine, I am going then, you soul trammeling brutes” post. 

In fact, I’d speculate that the integration of an unskilled new poet is generally the most difficult thing for the virtual workshop to carry off, and is probably the root cause of many of the subsequent social dynamics that tend to cause the workshop to drift.  Very often the unskilled new poet comes from a small pond – a high school, a local writing club, a college, etc.  I assume anyone reading this essay is conversant with the wide range “beginners” mistakes made by such poets – ranging from the sad aping of a major poet to adopting a hostile stance to the audience to deliberate obfuscation in the hopes that it will be confused with Genius (The “I’ve-just-read-Finnegan’s-Wake” Syndrome.)   In any event, given the lack of a “real time” moderator, the new poet begins posting and critiquing and soon encounters a storm of “harsh” criticism.  Does he not know that we can simply read Wallace Stevens?  Does he not know that we as readers are under no obligation to spend hours on his poem?  Does he not know that we’re allowed to say “This is nonsense?”  Often this kind of reception leads to hard feelings, the cultivation of grudges, and the tendency to “cling” to the one or two people who have offered more moderate and sympathetic responses.  Hence the groundwork is laid for cliques and factionalism.

In one sense, the overarching problem for the virtual public workshop tends to be the formation of cliques and factions.  A number of articles have been written on Internet posting behavior and psychology which would be applicable – the exaggeration or distortion of one’s “real” personality, the protection the internet allows for us to “act out”, etc.  Again, in the poetry workshop, the lack of physical interaction, the absence of a moderator, the tendency to misread, and the desire to cultivate friends and allies all play into a workshop Balkanizing.  There's no need to go into excessive detail in regards to the social mechanisms employed -- in fact, I'm sure that anyone who remembers their third-grade recess period will have a firm grasp of the situation. 

Structurally though, I’d like to point out that the medium exacerbates this in the larger workshops – again, the absence of a moderating figure, and the completely arbitrary patterns of responses tends to encourage groups which “stick together”, saying nice and encouraging things about each other’s poetry.   Often an unspoken agreement exists where the members of the small group will tend to “defend” their poems against outsider’s criticism, or at least, spend their time pointing out only the “good” portions of any poem under consideration.  (Again, the social concerns override poetic concerns.) Sometimes this dynamic is prompted by two radically different poetics in the same workshop, sometimes it pits “advanced” poets against those who are still ignorant of basic poetic terminology, but generally, in my observation, its mostly lazy habit. 

For someone new to poetry, or someone who is trying to expand their knowledge of poetry, these conflicting points of view can be confusing, certain debunked arguments can be seductive – and that potential for a novice absorbing know-nothing opinion is the most dangerous part of an open workshop.   For, it does not all boil down to aesthetic opinion – there are matters of fact (at least as far as we have them) about how language operates, how narratives function, how human beings perceive. There are also matters of fact about the history of poetry – what any individual’s articulated poetics were, what they strove for in that system, what they accomplished, and the historical reaction to that accomplishment.   One can argue about the utility of various poetics, but the “basic idea” of what, say, “a metaphor” is, or what “iambic verse” is, don’t really boil down to “opinion”.   Also outside the realm of “opinion” are the somewhat fuzzy bodies of writings about different types of poems and poetics: either Johnson did or did not approve of Shakespeare’s metaphors for X reason – therefore we can abstract and apply X reason to a variety of different works to see how it shapes our understanding of their metaphors.   I realize many people in the on-line workshopping community see this as “tyranny” but from that point of view, the various “laws” and “rules” that we apply to make music and harmony are also “tyrannical”.    Woe the tyranny of the e-chord!  My opinion is that any chord can be an e-chord, it’s all how you look at it!   So, yes, an iamb does contain one unstressed and one stressed syllable.   And so, yes, in most of the great poems, there is an absence of “passive language”.   And so, yes, the vast majority of poems published in the 21st century have thus far been in free verse. And so, yes, the surrealist manifestos were concerned with properly accessing a “higher reality” via art, and were not the expression of an “its all good” relativistic credo.   We can draw different conclusions about all of those things, but the facts themselves remain.  Tyranny. Cruel Tyranny. 

**

A Sketch of an Ideal Virtual Workshop

With these observations in mind, I’d like to turn to ways in which a public and virtual poetry workshop might structure itself to best complete it’s mission of providing the poet with a structured and objective response to a specific poem in progress. 

What follows them, he is not so much a strict set of rules or unbreakable commandments, for there will always be individual exceptions.  Rather, it is a list of guidelines which might be used to help shape the tenor of the ideal board.

Moderation -- completely unmoderated boards have been tried.  Generally, they have been resounding failures.  Moderated workshops can be carved into the Aristotelian categories of too much, not enough, and just right.

Too much moderation discourages posting by constraining content and often detracts from the quality of posts that are made. Too little moderation allows the board to drift away from its purpose.  Often the social concerns of the board begin to take precedence over the political concerns of the workshop -- conversation replaces critique.

The ideally moderated workshop should be unambiguous in its expectations and equitable in its enforcement.  While it would be possible to draft documents suggesting specific conduct, in reality the tenor of each workshop is established only overtime. 

It would seem obvious that the moderators (after the fact virtual moderators) would not be able to guide the conversation of each poem. Therefore the question is how they should respond to posts which have already been made, which exist and have been read by the members. Traditionally, on many boards, grossly offensive or irrelevant posts are either flagged for a warning or are deleted.  There is a vast difference of opinion as to the mechanisms involved;  some favor public warnings to help set the tone of the board, others favor private warnings for the individuals involved in making the posts.  Personally, I think impartial public warnings and reminders would make the workshop’s expectations more transparent.

Generally speaking, I would think that (in the workshop area of a board) posts which have nothing to do with the poem at hand or are grossly offensive should be removed.  It seems simple enough – it is a workshop, the posts should workshop the poem at hand. 

Conversely, if the virtual workshop has an area reserved for “general chat” or conversation, a looser standard should be employed – yet the moderators should not completely abandon their moderating function.   Public flame wars, long diatribes, catty exchanges, etc. should be discouraged, if not locked or deleted.  Granted there will be great disagreement as to what is considered offensive;  for example, if one points out that a particular conversational point is “foolish”, is it the same as calling it’s poster “a fool”?   

In the dynamic of the public workshop, these are not easily resolved questions.   It would seem that a certain amount of self-analysis is useful for a workshop – a periodic re-examination of the workshop’s basic dynamic, patterns of posting, standard of critiquing, etc.   This would allow workshop members to bluntly express their conceptions of what the more social elements workshop should do, what kind tone ought to be encouraged, etc.   Oddly enough, this kind of examination is “hard wired” into the physical workshop, but must be actively sought after in the virtual workshop.  Also, since the social signals are largely absent from the virtual workshop, the members of the workshop should be diligent in writing in to the moderators (or the board in general) if something bothers them or if they feel some kind of practice is deserving of praise.   

Structure - when considering how the workshop should structured itself, we must always, always, return to the idea of utility.  We must always ask if we are providing objective, detailed, and informed criticisms of individual poems.

Given that certain “social” patterns of posting and certain “critical” patterns of posting are diametrically opposed, it makes sense to separate the overall virtual poetry workshop into discrete areas to best accomplish it’s ends.  There should probably be at least three basic divisions:

First, there should be a “Workshop” section, where nothing occurs but the workshopping of poems.  This should, by default, be the most important area on the overall board, and the success of the overall board as a workshop can be directly measured by the quantity and quality of the postings in the workshop section.

Second, there should be a “social area” where the workshop members can kick off their shoes and engage in all those secondary functions a workshop can provide – social interaction, networking, general chit-chat, discussion of the news, etc.

I would consider breaking down the social section somewhat (and have done so on several boards I moderated) – perhaps a separate area for announcements, or shop (publication) talk.  Whatever divisions of this are most used would depend on the interests of the membership. I would also add an “Theory/Poetics” section, for poetical issues raised in poems that might otherwise detract from the workshop, derail the examination of the poem at hand.  It’s hard to say whether this “Theory” section should be considered part of the workshop proper, since it has the greatest chance to most immediately impact the poems under consideration, or whether it should be considered “social.”

Third, there should be a separate, open “administrative” area where members could discuss changes to the workshop itself, examine basic approaches, moderation policy, etc.  While this also is somewhat of a “social” function, it also falls outside the purely social sphere, since it structures the poetical/social interaction of the site.

**

The On-Line Community in Practice

There was a time when I had hoped, in all my leftist glory, that an on-line project might expand poetry’s readership while educate those readers so that they might appreciate diverse types of poetry. 

The idea, was, in many ways, simple.  All one would have to do is set up an archive of accessible poetry which segued out of the majority of reader’s skills (meaning, nothing too esoteric, nothing too reliant on specialized understandings and advanced skills), and couple this archive with a discussion on the poems.  Obviously, the best way to do this would be to adapt a workshop model so that burgeoning poets could a) discuss poetry, b) have good examples near to hand, c) be tutored by more established poets, d) grow as technicians and poets themselves. (I believe that anyone can be taught the principles of writing poetry, that such principles will be good for them to learn (in that they foster critical thought and accuracy in expression), and that regardless of the kind or level of poetry that’s being written, there’s no “harm” in such for either poets or poetry.)  So – we’d need: a) archive of poetry, b) poets willing to donate time to workshop/guide burgeoning poets, c) a public forum for such so that readers of all types could learn something about the craft.

This idea went both right and horribly wrong.   I touched on it in my personal poetics narrative in the third part of this series of posts.

The whole point of the open workshop was to draw in and educate interested budding poets and reader (who did not have to actively participate in the site).  However, 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 workshop 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. 

I’ve detailed the other shortcomings (mostly structural) above. 

OK – more in a bit, particularly how this ties into the Blogosphere.

Airy Poetics (Part Five)

Well, this has been interesting for me to do, if it hasn’t for otherwise loyal readers, I apologize. 

Were this an essay, I’d be beating it into shape, pruning, folding whatever seemed odd back into the main body of the work.   Since I’ve been going off on so many tangents (for anyone curious about such things) I thought I should revisit that “main body” quickly. 

Basically, what I’d like to do in this series of posts is provide some kind of key or map to contemporary American poetics, to explain how I, as a practicing poet, view things.  My perspective on the matter is colored by my experiences, of course, but I think it’s not so idiosyncratic as to be un-useful. 

My conception of CAP is largely school-based (a very conventional approach); I view CAP as engaging multiple strong and exclusionary poetics – Mainstream (Iowa), Language Poetry/Post Avant, NeoFormalism, et al.  I tend to stick with these three since it provides a kind of nice “traditional/contemporary/cutting-edge” spread, but there are other subsets both within and across these schools, and other schools entirely which are still viable, such as Surrealism, Hypertext, Genteel, and New York School.  The practical consequence of this is to divide the poetry world into many camps – even within “Mainstream” writing, you’d have poets like Bly (Deep Image/Men’s Poetry) and Merrill (Genteel) who are essentially at odds with each other on nearly every significant aesthetic point of poetry.  The school-based approach is useful in an ex post way to group poetics – i.e., to *generally* say which poets are more like each other as opposed to those who are more divergent from each other.

The school based approach is also useful in an ex ante way to predict social interaction, into which I’ll temporarily fold “publishing.”  So, in our limited resources model, let’s assume that I contact my old undergrad mentor (Experimental/Southern Lyrical schools) and say that I have a new book coming out (Auralist).  Now my old mentor is a nice guy, and he was *very* careful not to force his style or aesthetic onto any of his students over the years, which I think speaks well of him as a poet and an educator.  While I don’t think he’d be *hostile* to my work, I doubt if it would find a place in the largely Experimental school/community to which he belongs.  That means he wouldn’t use the book in his classes, nor would he have me over to read in front of his students or the general campus, nor would he use his contacts with the local poetry press to print up broadsheets announcing a reading held at a neutral venue, etc.  Perhaps I misjudge him – who knows.  But I *can* safely say that if I didn’t know the man and had no significant ties to the city/school in which he’s currently located, it would never cross my mind to contact him.  He’s not doing “similar things.”  It’s not just “who you know.”

However, there is a personal/professional connection between poets that cannot be denied; there are poets whom I’ve known for years, both through random encounter and educational venue, and these poets always get a kind of “warmer embrace” from me.  Meaning that even if I don’t “do what they do” and might write against that poetics, generally, I’d still encourage their work and would (have) use their poetry as examples of different types of writing for my students, read their poems before my own at readings, etc.  I think that while there’s a school based kind of factionalism, there’s still a sense that we’re *all* poets, and that, god knows, it’s at time a thankless enough art. Another case in point – I’ve written letters of recommendation (not you, A.) for someone whom I didn’t really enjoy any very strong overlap of aesthetics.  But I liked the guy – he was sincere, earnest, loved words, thought about what he did.  That’s enough to overcome some kinds of school-bias. 

And this is to say nothing of the strongly and purely personal connection.  I’ve had dinner, played softball, attended parties, gone to readings, spent hours talking about any number of things, etc. with poets whom I’d *never* emulate, nor would I *ever* listen to, in terms of specific poetics.   That’s stating it a bit strongly, but think of an Impressionist Painter and a Cubist Painter. . .  Anyway, I enjoy warm friendships with some poets who work in completely different schools.   

However, where school-bias strongly kicks in is in the realm of publication.   Publication.  It all turns on Publication. 

I’ve talked a bit about publication here and there in my postings, and there are many different ways to view publication.  In one sense, the poem is always written for an audience of one.  That would be the poet themselves.  It is “published,” brought forth into the world, in the very act of writing.  But for poetry to transcend the immediately personal (I’ve argued one as well might “simply think” if you never want to transcend the personal) and engage other intelligences, other souls, it needs to be presented to others. 

The workshop, or classroom, or immediate mentor, or circle of friends, or lover, or family, can serve as a secondary tier of publication, as can open public readings (either the poet alone or with others), and represents a sharing of a poem or a poem that is currently being built. 

Beyond that, should you desire the poem reach broader audiences, there’s internet publication (text and audio), periodic print publications, larger public readings (usually at universities or local poetry clubs/associations), and the relatively rare radio and television appearances.   

Of those broader publication venues, the internet is the most cost free and provides the broadest exposure to readers – one can self publish via a blog, or via internet publications at the cost of coding and hosting time, the first of which is often donated by poetry lovers, the second of which can be less than $100 a year.  Entry into this venue is relatively easy in relation to the other venues, and the internet is exciting in that it pretty much supposes that any good poetry *can* reach a “non-immediate” or broad audience – that there are no effective “gatekeepers” preventing someone in the rural SW of the country from reading your work.  Unfortunately, there is little or no material recompense.

For a quick word on those “gatekeepers” – I’m now talking about people that control the significant resources necessary for what was, traditionally, the broadest spread of exposure via publication.  These would be print publishers/editors, college professors, and other attendants one thinks of as “the poetry elite.”  I except smaller presses, etc., to talk about the “big guns.”  You have to understand that historically, poetry dissemination was controlled by a small group of elites,  and that these elites chose poetry which reflected their particular aesthetics or schools. 

Of course, you had concurrent publication, with various poetics entering into the fold.  Meaning, that you had Poetry publishing the High Moderns and Black Sparrow doing it’s own thing.  I don’t think you *ever* had a situation where one publication would relatively weigh the different then-contemporary aesthetics and selected “the best” from among them to create a comprehensive survey of what all American poets were doing at any given time.   While it’s theoretically possible to imagine such a publication (say, a well-endowed publication with a chief editor relying on the taste of various sub-editors, each in charge of selecting the “best” poetry as exemplars of all  the different then-extant schools) it’s never existed.  Paper costs money. Editors have favorite likes and dislikes.  Yeats, for example, famously excluded Wilfred Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg  from the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935 and, regarding Owen’s case, wrote, “There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. . . .”.

Theoretically it’s possible to have anthologies that pick up most of the “major” figures, i.e., poets that have already been published, vetted, enough to obtain a school’s endorsement.  Say, an anthology which publishes an example of all poets who pass certain prior-publication bars – but that just pushes the question back to who has the money to publish and what schools they align with.  I’m sure someone has written a history of poetry publishing in America, tracing just which “flagship” publications published which schools, which types of verse, etc.  I’m sure it’s somewhat interesting reading, but the bottom line is that publication patterns reflects a) school-mentality b) limited resources. 

Hence, it’s naive to think (as many self/internet-educated poets do) that one can simply write the best poems one can and then send out those poems to almost any contest, judged by almost any judge, and hope to win a first book publication contest.  (Foetry is predicated on this misunderstanding.)  Now, it’s absolutely possible for a self-taught/internet-taught poet to write excellent poems (in whatever vein) and find editors who will publish them by intelligently (or luckily) matching what they’re doing to editors/judges of similar aesthetics.  (It’s easiest to do this in schools with low volume, high resources, and relatively clear poetics – like NeoFormalism.)  It’s also possible for an “academic” – a MFA graduate, say, to write excellent poems and continually send them to the wrong editors/judges (meaning editors/judges who embrace a different poetics.  Or to write excellent poems that have no or few editors or judges who would choose them *over* other poems written closer to those editors/judges aesthetics.

This cuts both ways.  It is, then, in one sense, possible to write almost anything and get it published somewhere.  You can write crap, and if you find a bunch of people who also write crap and want to put out a crap journal, you’re in luck. 

It is also (thankfully) possible to write something quite good but obscure and eventually get it published somewhere (writing outside of school sensibility). 

Let’s explore that for a second.  Even in what we think of as Mainstream Free Verse publications, there’s often considerable editorial variation.  One editor rejects, another accepts.  (I think almost any editor will tell you that they reject far more than they accept.)  In the end it turns on “minor” things – whether one is didactic within the poems, whether one effectively uses metaphors, what one *says* in the poem, etc.  I put the quotes around “minor” because from one perspective these are “major” things – the differences that we use to value one poem over another.  Often they’re “craft-matters” – the poem is not as well wrought as the editor thinks it could be, given the scope and subject, or the scope and subject are of no interest to the editor.  Publication is a matter of *hitting the aesthetic target* which is, in most cases a single editor. 

When I see a guy like Billy Collins publish his poems to such acclaim, well, that tells me something.  While it’s fashionable to bash Collins (one of the reasons why I chose him) as a slight, jokey writer, I see someone who has been doing what he’s doing for a long time, someone who has paid his dues and tweaked his craft and scope and subject enough so that it’s quite popular.   In one sense he’s followed a clear progression within his work.  In another sense, he’s adopted a set of poetics that makes his work very appealing to (first) poetry promoters (editors/radio show hosts/et. al.) AND to the audience which those poetry promoters address.   Collins gets new people reading poetry – I think that’s a good thing.  Collins however, lies outside of many poet’s aesthetics (especially in areas of scope and subject) while absorbing resources  - hence the hostility.

On the other hand, one of my peers at my MFA program was working on a Sci-Fi poem series, recently published.  In this sense, she was not “writing for” publication, in that she had selected to work on something that most periodical editors and most “poetry press” editors would not be interested in.  It wasn’t in anyone’s “school” – it was hard to “sell” as being of a piece with other publications a press might put out.   If she had wanted to maximize her chances, she could have changed the subjects of her poems (the emotional themes and craft of which were top-notch, i.e. – well within the orbit of mainstream publishers.)

Economics of Poetry

Well, lets talk for a second about books and so forth.  It’s not possible to support yourself only *writing poetry*.  There’s not enough of a market for poetry.  Or, rather, no one has yet figured a way to effectively tap that market in a way that produces enough revenue to support both publishers and poets above the poverty line.

It may be possible to support yourself *as a poet* employed in various secondary fields: most of the resources that allow you time to talk about writing and to write about writing and to simply write “creatively” are tied to the major publishing houses (distributed through book advances) and the universities (teaching positions). There’s also a living to be made through non-university teaching (either to people who pay for university-like private instruction or though writer’s conferences and conventions and the like.)  There’s a tiny subset of poetry editors out there as well, but that’s about it for jobs that on some level “require” the specialized knowledge of the trained and accomplished poet.  And, obviously, none of those are for *writing* poetry, although they *may* be dependent on *having written* some good poetry – good enough, again, to be “vetted” by those major print publishers.  Some of them may hinge on one’s excellence in *teaching* creative writing principles, but again, that’s not quite the same as being “a good poet” – there are many only-adequate poets who can run an effective workshop and have intelligent things to say about metaphor.

Since a lot of the print publication world (again, excepting small presses) is about a concentration of resources (resources often simply grossly subsidizing poetry publication – state taxes funding state university presses, private donations, NEA grants, etc.)  the gatekeepers of that world have a certain prestige.  And it makes sense to the people who distribute those resources to concentrate that power in the hands of the local “noted poet” or poetry professor or whatnot. Thus we have Harold Bloom (pardon – Harold Fucking Bloom) editing poetry anthologies. 

We could call this the University-Poetry-Publishing Complex.  To publish one must come from the university MFA/PhD (or have your poems evidence a poetics identical to that of the established judges, etc.), to get a university post one must have published via an established press, etc. Chicken egg.  Conspiracy Theories.  SoQ.  Hoarders.  All that. (Although clearly, anyone entering a MFA program today knows that there are not enough tenured academic positions for all the graduates. Or even some large minority of the graduates.) 

But Again, *given* that there are competing, mutually-exclusive aesthetics AND limited resources, this makes perfect sense.  Think on it: you have enough dollars to hire one guy to teach poetry, or to print one book of poetry – what are you going to choose?  Clearly something that is “closely akin” to the to type and mode of poetry you love above all others. 

I very much doubt that other kinds of factors will always trump poetic excellence within a school when it comes to publishing/judging poems – believe me, I’d love to discover the next great poet in my aesthetic no matter where they came from, or where my personal loyalties lay to other poets.  However, the question really is how narrowly you construe those schools.  It may well be that a lot of the bitterness (and obsession with) validation through publishing comes from the fact that a lot of self/internet taught poets are producing decent poems, but they’re poems which lack some elements that are more common in, say, graduates of the Iowa MFA program.  Even something as subtle as a penchant for a certain tone might come in. 

Of course, when we’re talking about individual poems these differences are minimized, but when looking at two or three or 50, these small differences may well be the difference almost every time. So I’m thinking that when Seth is drawing his lines between academic and non-academic poets, he’s really drawing more of a “school” line than he thinks he is – he’s just lumping all of the (multiple) school aesthetics with print resources on one side of the line, instead of seeing, say, 30-50 islands of different presses, contests, that have clustered aesthetics, with some fuzzy edges and solid cores.  It’s no surprise that the same poets turn up in the same publications.  It’s no surprise that the same presses will publish the same poets (and their friends and students). 

Again, for a negative example, touch back on the example of my undergrad mentor – he’s a great guy, we’re both “academically” trained, we have similar opinions on some things, but there’s just no chance he’d ever consider me for a teaching post, or publish a chapbook (unless I wrote a bunch of good poems in a vein he approved of, i.e., the vein/school he spends his own time and energy in) – and that’s just absolutely fine. 

Poetics, Learning Your School

OK – so, one of the assumptions that lies aslant of this conception is that of poetics as a chosen form.  A lot of poets don’t examine what they do but (I’m here to break it to you) *everyone* writes within a poetics.  You may define your own, you may change it, but you always write within it *for any given poem.*   And it’s that poetics, articulated by the actual poems, that is what we’re talking about here.  Poetics is also an abstract set of compositional principles, but for the purposes of assessing other’s poems it’s very in-your-face. It’s a sonnet about flowers.  It’s another Language Poem.  It’s a free verse lyric narrative that closes with an epiphany. 

Layered over that is craft mastery, inspiration, the “goodness” of the poem, its excellence, sensitivity, its subject, scope, etc.  Which is also poetics, more or less. 

And, like I’ve touched on here and there, these poetics are not predicated on your doing any particular thing.  Self-teach yourself from books and guides, Learn with a few friends, Learn on-line in one of the various communities there, Learn in a university program, Learn in an MFA program, or through a combination of any or all of these – it makes no difference how you obtain your skills.   Of course, some skills are best obtained though particular routes.  If you want to learn to write Iowa School style, go to Iowa.  If you want to learn NeoFormalism, go to West Chester and hang out on Eratosphere.  But don’t think that MFA programs are one size fit all.  (The program I went to was famously (yes, famously) a) non-competitive and b) encouraging of diverse writing styles and crossing genres.  So we may have been somewhat of an exception.  If anyone is curious about it, I’ll be happy to tell you what I can about it and about my experiences there.)

It is, in a sense, possible to learn many poetics, and to write within them.  I say “many poetics” because on some level, one cannot deeply believe in both the principals of Language Poetry and NeoFormalism to the extent that one turns out one unfettered Language poem and one unfettered sonnet every day.  Certainly it is possible to create your own poetics (and everyone does this anyway) in the sense that you have a kind of “ideal style” unique to yourself. 

Like everything else, it involves making choices, sacrificing opportunities.  If you really believe in one set of poetics, it will exclude others.  In fact, whatever you do end up writing it will not appeal to all camps and schools (see above) although it may appeal to many, if its done well enough (for whatever it is). 

As a general public service announcement, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to complain about this state of affairs, but I don’t think that resource shifting arguments have much validity to them.  In one sense, you’re just saying “we’d like the cookies now please.”  If you want to redraw the system and honor poets of divergent styles and modes, then do so with my blessing (in fact, there are many of us who do).  If you want to start a press, you again have my blessing.  If you want to publish poets you like on-line, please do.   If you want to radically re-envision how the major publishing houses go about their business, or how poetry is reviewed (or not reviewed), then yes, do so.  If you want to point out the relative standards that are used in the publishing/academic world, that’s fair game also.  But, frankly, I’m just tired of the “my style gets no respect” screed. 

**
Some Interesting Reading

I have a short list of essays and books that I normally refer to my students.  Some are kind of centrist, and many attack other positions within contemporary writing.  Others are classic “standards” which have influenced how we tend to react to creative writing and our assumptions about creativity, poetry, poets and “the craft”.

Here’s that short list:

Aristotle – Poetics
Horace - “Airs Poetica” (selections)
Sturlson - The Prose Edda
both Sidney’s and Shelley’s Defenses of Poetry
Coleridge - “Bibliographia Literaria” (selections)
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
Keat’s letters
Hopkins’s letters to Bridges
Pound - ABC’s of Reading, the imagist manifesto
Auden - essays (including The Poet and The City)
Eliot - “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Moore - “Idiosyncrasy and Technique”
Stevens - “The Noble Rider”
cumming’s prose (including Six Nomenclatures)
Olson - “Projective Verse”,
Lorca - “The Duende: Theory and Divertissement”
Dylan Thomas - “Notes on the Art of Poetry”
Frost - “Figure a Poem Makes” and “Sentence Sounds”
Cleanth Brooks - "What Does Poetry Communicate?"
The Reaper Essays
Brendan Galvin – “Mumblings of a Young Werther”
Mary Karr – “Against Decoration”
Stephen Dobyns - “First Word Best Word” (book)
Denise Levertov - “On the Function of the Line”
Steve Kowit - The Mystique of the Difficult Poem”
William Matthew - “Dull Subjects”

**

Why the hell am I writing any of this?

That’s a good question – and like Paul, I probably should choose discretion as the better part.  However, the motivation that initially caused me to work with the on-line workshops remains unchanged.  I’d like to offer what I think is a kind of centrist, common-sense view of what’s going on in contemporary poetics.  There are other more specialized venues and blogs (some listed on the right under “poets” that deal with more esoteric topics in great depth, but every now and then I like to post up something that I think a novice, or someone who is just curious about these things, can follow. 

I think that I was personally lead down a dead end, though my own vanity and the general and prevalent assumption that literature always has a cutting edge vanguard that is then enshrined as the center in a kind of dialectical process of assimilation.   I’d like to spare young poets that particular grief if I could.  I also wonder what would have happened if I had access to the internet at age 16 – i.e., access to a kind of poetry community and exposure to accessible and affecting poems.  Did I have to wait so long to find poetry?  (Well, yes, I did, but that does not mean that others have to.)

Also, I find it interesting to muse on these things.

A Brief and Superficial Aside into Politics and Conservative Thought (necessary for later Airy Poetics Posts on Poetry and Politics

Hmm.  As if my coffee wasn’t acidic enough, I was referred to this article by AI.  It’s remarkable in that it contains (amid the carefully placed misstatements, spleen and non sequiturs) a veritable smorgasbord of both “conservative thought” and cherry-picked premises that underlie and justify conservative thought.  It’s really a wonderful example. Instead of launching into a critique of the article, I thought I’d talk a bit about how my perceptions of society have changed over time. Hopefully, readers might find something akin in their own thought, or, better, challenge their own conceptions of things.   

I think back to when I was 18.  Like many Americans, while I wasn’t a blind patriot, and while I’ve been on the left side of the ideological spectrum out of a basic humanistic impulse, I never really had the tools to concretely articulate my problems with the legal and social structure of the country.  However, even though I strongly felt that an argument which ultimately left the poor and mentally ill to starve on the street was in some great measure obviously wrong, and diminished our shared humanity, I still held certain premises that made it difficult for me to square what I thought ought to happen with the bedrock vision of what America is and how things work.  I think these premises often interfere with political debate, insofar as they tend to shift entire debates “to the right.”

I think my time at GULC has helped me gain a better vocabulary, and certainly a different perspective on issues.  Granted the perspective articulated by some of my professors may not always closely align with my *own* views, but it’s helped (forced) me to articulate some of mine in ways I ordinarily wouldn’t. 

Like the poetics posts, I’ll try to keep my terms general, non-technical, probably (hopefully) entirely remedial for many law school peeps.  But, again, hopefully a good overview for those who might be interested in such, say, a cousin of mine who is 18.

**
So – a kind of “common-sensical” mindset:

Politics:

Democracy (rather than "judicial activism") is the most equitable way to solve society's ills.  It’s simply fair.  We all think and vote and the best arguments “win.”  If you don’t win you ought to be graceful and “support” the country in that you don’t try to undermine the winners.

In America, there are two basic wings, the left and the right.  To find a center point on an issue, all you have to do was look at the common ground between the two. 

Society:

Racism is an overt “state of mind” existing in one individual that results in discrete “actions” – basically racism was a "bad thing" that someone did to a minority based on the minority’s race.  For example, a mortgage officer might deny an applicant only because they were black. 

This kind of prejudice is played out in the exact same way for different minorities, or, if you will, people who possess different "undesired" characteristics – their religion, race, ethnicity, physical appearance, handicaps, age – you name it.  But it always follows the pattern above - one uneducated or jerk individual with a problem does something bad.

Things really have changed since the 1960s.  There’s not much racism or sexism any more.  I mean, when was the last time you heard of someone getting fired just because of their race?

There’s a level-playing field – the idea that, absent any of the impediments described above (racism, ageism, etc.), one could do nearly anything one wanted to.  This was borne up by the many individual examples of people who had “made it” – i.e., climbed the class/economic/educational ladders.  (Note the vertical metaphor). These individuals seemed to be personally responsible – they took charge of their lives on some level.  There’s also a cut-off point between the haves and have-nots (basically, once you’re over the poverty line you ought to be able to do things like put your kids through college if you’re thrifty and responsible enough)

Society ought not to “pay” for anything that a) encourages people to irresponsible, b) that it’s not “responsible for.”  I.e., society shouldn’t be a safety-net for people screwing up because it penalizes those of us who haven’t screwed up and rewards those who do; that's fundamentally unfair.  People should lie in the beds that they make.  If individuals or churches want to help out with charity, that’s just fine (noble actually) – we certainly shouldn’t hinder this as we don't want to be mean, just fair.

If every individual were to change their behavior for the better (simply stop doing drugs and get jobs) society would radically improve, overnight.

We know this is not happening because affirmative action programs carve out a large chunk of resources for minorities to use.  In fact, in some cases it’s an advantage to be a minority since spots are put aside for them.

Law:

Social problems are different from legal problems – this rests on the idea that the law is something that most people don’t have to deal with on a daily basis.  One would only consult a (very expensive) lawyer in the face of extreme misfortune (blind fate lands you in a car wreck, etc.)

The law is simply the “neutral arbiter” of the game of life, interested in making things fair and correcting “gross fouls” – like those overt acts of racism.  It’s what makes the playing ground neutral, and what allows those disciplined individuals to succeed.

**

OK – I admit I’m being a bit disingenuous.  I didn’t really believe all those things, even when I was 18.  My experiences argued against them in ways both subtle and profound.  However, they were hard to dismiss.  I mean, the country did seem, to an extent to be progressing – cleaner environment, less racism (of the overt kind), easier access to material goods, and many other positive examples of things “moving forward” toward a more humanistic and equitable society.  Sure, we had the Regan/Bush years (today, Clinton seems like a small island) but things really did seem to be better than they were in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, etc. 

Not only were they hard to dismiss on a “nagging doubt” level (for they just seem to be more or less fair, – don’t they?), but these ideas frequently came up in political rhetoric and discourse, sometimes overtly, sometimes as assumptions in the background.  They seemed part of the landscape, part of the dialog about who we were and what was going on.   And for that reason alone, their pervasive “there-ness,” seemed hard to dismiss.

**

There are many sophisticated critiques of that mindset that I’ve rather lazily sketched above, but I’m going to offer an equally lazy sketch

So - to offer a slightly different view to the above:

Politics:

Democracy (rather than "judicial activism") is the most equitable way to solve society's ills.  It’s simply fair.  We all think and vote and the best arguments “win.”  If you don’t win you ought to be graceful and “support” the country in that you don’t try to undermine the winners.

Our democratic process is a actually a winner-take-all republican system.  That means we elect representatives to make decisions for us, and while we might inform the decisions of those representatives through making our opinion known via polls, etc. we don’t vote directly on issues.

Some implications:
If there was a 5 or 10 or 20 percent minority (in a given voting district), that minority could unite on all issues and behind one candidate, wave all the banners they wanted to, and their candidate would *never* get elected if the majority held different points of view.  Hence the views of that minority could be courted by a political party, or they could be ignored by both parties (in a dual party system.)
When the minority is both physically or socially identifiable and isolated from the political system (think, for example, migrant Latino workers in a small southern town, a Jewish enclave in a city) the majority could easily become prejudiced against them and enact unfavorable laws, zoning, etc. against that minority. Or they could enact laws that seemed neutral, but in practice favored themselves at the expense of the minority. 

In America, there are two basic wings, the left and the right.  To find a center point on an issue, all you had to do was look at the common ground between the two. 

The above works in an ideological sense as well – excluding ideas (environmentalism).  Basically, the point is that not *all* ideas are heard, nor are *all* voices heard.  Often, elections can be won by only paying attention to the issues that the majority favor.  Everything else is off the radar.

Society:

Racism is an overt “state of mind” existing in one individual that results in discrete “actions” – basically racism was a "bad thing" that someone did to a minority based on the minority’s race.  For example, a mortgage officer might deny an applicant only because they were black. 

Racism can in fact be systemic.  That means we could envision it as a series of small bumps which add up to a rough ride.  Or we could view it as a cascade effect, where one half-step back and another and another add up to being severely disadvantaged in some ways.  This results in their being not one “equal” field where we only have to look out for “bad” individuals taking a swipe at someone for overtly prejudicial reasons.

For example, it may be that the mortgage officer in the above example would be dealing with a black would-be home owner who went to schools that have a slightly worse reputation than local majority-white schools, and/or that this would-be home owner was then able to only secure employment (add college in there or not) at a slightly lower wage than a white contemporary that went to a better school – on paper they’re just going to be a slightly worse risk than the “comparable” white candidate, and they "happen" to be black. 

Personally, I’ve seen this kind of thing happen often – insurance rates in particular are good examples of “neutral” processes that systemically disfavor certain communities and provide another bump in the road (how much harder is it for someone in a high-crime/low-income area to beautify their house, when their marginal income is sucked up in keeping their car on the road). 

There’s also huge social dimensions to racism – who you go to church with, whose kids you want socializing with your kids, etc.  But that’s an immense and broad force I’ll leave for another day.  (I feel like I’ve only addressed the path of a single pebble in an avalanche - in fact it makes me feel the whole post is just missing the point, but you have to start somewhere).

This kind of prejudice is played out in the exact same way for different minorities, or, if you will, people who possess different "undesired" characteristics – their religion, race, ethnicity, physical appearance, handicaps, age – you name it.  But it always follows the pattern above - one uneducated or jerk individual with a problem does something bad.

You can transplant the systemic argument to any other characteristic which is undesirable by the majority.  Although no one will say to you that they’re not hiring you for an entry level position when you’re 50, it’s still *awfully* hard to get one.  Although its not overtly *because* your a woman that you, like the vast majority of women in the country, are, on average, earning less than your peers.  Not a level playing field. 

Things really have changed since the 1960s.  There’s not much racism or sexism any more.  I mean, when was the last time you heard of someone getting fired just because of their race?  There’s a level-playing field – the idea that, absent any of the impediments described above (racism, ageism, etc.), one could do nearly anything one wanted to.  This was borne up by the many individual examples of people who had “made it” – i.e., climbed the class/economic/educational ladders.  (Note the vertical metaphor). These individuals seemed to be personally responsible – they took charge of their lives on some level.  There’s also a cut-off point between the haves and have-nots (basically, once you’re over the poverty line you ought to be able to do things like put your kids through college if you’re thrifty and responsible enough)

Again, racism, sexism, any of the prejudicial –isms is not best characterized by someone on the street corner, shouting epitaphs. Instead it’s found in the patterns of what actually happens - the basic facts that minorities more often go to substandard schools (as compared to majority schools), then have a lower proportional college attendance, prestigious job placement, access to medical care, etc.  Housing.  Cars.  Cultural and social mobility.  You name it. 

Look at it this way, from a straight up "class" perspective – your parents have a certain income, so they live in the best neighborhood they can afford.  You attend a not-so-great school, and do OK.  Sure, you wish you paid attention a bit more, but you were a teen-ager for chirst’s sake, and you kept your nose clean and did reasonably well. You apply to the best college you can get into, which is a not-so-great school; what with tuition costs and the moderate loan aid you receive - there's simply no place for that additional money to come from.  You don’t even apply to a big-name school (where would the money come from?)   Which lands you a not-so-great job, post-graduation.  Which means you can get a house in the same kind of neighborhood your parents got.  You’re kind of “capped” at every level, even though you might be a straight shooter and a hard worker and fully capable of doing well at a better college/job. 

Now switch that to someone whose parents have resources – the ability to send you to private schools, to let you take time off and get your head together, to let you socialize and associate with people whose social patterns occupy the upper echelons of society, to pay the premium to get you into a college with a “name,” which lands you a better job, higher up the “ladder,” regardless of how well you did there.

Those are systemic problems – the playing field is not level (and we’re not even getting into social prejudices, or the fact that due to a complex interchange of many “small bumps,” the under-resourced are disproportionately minorities).  Further, programs that try to address those problems by opening up universities and institutions to the under-resourced are often attacked (ironically) for tilting the playing field.

Now I’m not saying things haven’t improved in many areas – clearly they have if we look at individual examples.  But if we look at the broad spread, the country is far from a meritocracy, where, proportionally, any given segment of society is equally well represented in the political process, in material goods, in access to services.    

Society ought not to “pay” for anything that a) encourages people to irresponsible, b) that it’s not “responsible for.”  I.e., society shouldn’t be a safety-net for people screwing up because it penalizes those of us who haven’t screwed up and rewards those who do; that's fundamentally unfair.  People should lie in the beds that they make.  If individuals or churches want to help out with charity, that’s just fine (noble actually) – we certainly shouldn’t hinder this as we don't want to be mean, just fair.

If every individual were to change their behavior for the better (simply stop doing drugs and get jobs) society would radically improve, overnight.

We know this is not happening because affirmative action programs carve out a large chunk of resources for minorities to use.  In fact, in some cases it’s an advantage to be a minority since spots are put aside for them.

Again, this rests on the level playing field idea.  But given the fact that minorities are often not represented in the political system, and that there’s systemic stratification keeping people largely where their families are, it seems wrong to view what we have as a meritocracy, which is the only possible justification for those statements above.

To put it another way, if a society said, “We’re going to effectively relegate a certain percentage of our populace to poverty by denying the poor access to equal (or hell, just empowering) education, capital, and imposing additional costs on them (say, sucking up time with inefficient public transportation, or locating affordable housing a great distance from the desirable and concentrated jobs),” well, we have to then ask – is it “fair” to impose additional costs, to say, “well, even though we’ve done all this, we’re still kind of embarrassed to see “your kind” congregating in the public places in our nation – and we’d like to now criminalize loitering, pan-handling, homelessness, etc.”  I mean, what’s the message here?   

Tie that into the democratic/political problem above - suppose that the majority thinks that the homeless ought to be excluded from one place, then another, then another.  It's not like the interest of the minority (homeless) is going to enter into the political debate in a significant way, unless they're championed by someone. 

Law:

Social problems are different from legal problems – this rests on the idea that the law is something that most people don’t have to deal with on a daily basis.  One would only consult a (very expensive) lawyer in the face of extreme misfortune (blind fate lands you in a car wreck, etc.)

The law is simply the “neutral arbiter” of the game of life, interested in making things fair and correcting “gross fouls” – like those overt acts of racism.  It’s what makes the playing ground neutral, and what allows those disciplined individuals to succeed.

Well, this basically cuts to what I’m doing here at GULC.  The strong prey on the weak, someone always feels entitled to grab more, to dismiss the weak for being weak.  See above.

The law often simply keeps the non-neutral playing field as it is. Meaning the law reinforces that tilt both by overt rulings and by presuming (promulgating) that it’s simply being fair, that this is simply “the way things are.” 

So, for example, if the law decides that sexual harassment is not a crime (i.e., you can't sue someone for pawing at your genitals in exchange for a favorable job review), it implicitly prevents individuals from taking action on their own - you wouldn't be able to bad mouth (slander) the individual who did such a thing to you, nor could you hit them (assault), and they could just fire you anyway (employment at will) no matter how many years you put into the company.  For straight men who are having problems with this, and other concepts like a "hostile work environment," imagine your boss is a lecherous homosexual with a few open sores on his lips and a penchant for backing you into a corner and talking about dildos. 

This kind of "the law is going to privilege something or not" argument runs through everything.  So, for a more subtle example, if you're under-resourced, you can't take those resources, or force someone to give them to you, or strike out on your own and farm some land somewhere. It seems so obvious that we don't think of such things. 

If, as MacDonald argues, one wonders why train commuters should have less choice about sharing space with the “homeless,” it should be obvious that she's already missing the point - that train commuters have an impact on the political process that the homeless (sans representation) do not.  Train commuters might well support, or remain silent on the issue of homeless people spending rainy afternoons in Union Station - they might even approve, either in an out of mind out of sight way, or because they're miserable human beings who want to exclude those not like them and not be reminded of the realities of the society they live in. 

Or, in other words, assuming such neutral (but effectively) anti-homeless laws are passed, it's not in that Democratic "we all vote and debate" paradigm. 

Nor is it made in a society where those homeless people all had "an equal chance" to "excel" or what not. 

It's made in a society where by design (conscious or not) we choose to have a certain amount of homeless by not a) providing even educational and economic chances, b) accessible medical (physical and mental) treatment to all, c) distributing our resources to make sure everyone has a home. 

(So, to tie this back to MacDonald's screed - she's assuming a kind of America that only exists on paper, not in reality.  If that America existed, her arguments might make more sense - as our country exists today, they don't.  Although I agree with her that there is a marginal class of people who need legal services and advice which do not receive them - and it would benefit our society if they did.)

More, perhaps, later.

Airy Poetics Part Six - Poetry and Politics

Well with the Gore speech today, it seems appropriate to address Poetry and Politics, which I had already wanted to do on several levels.  It’s pretty obvious from my quick remedial political sketch that I think there’s a kind of false-consciousness (or false/limited dialogue) that is detrimentally limiting our ability to, as a society, decide how we want to behave, how we ought to allocate our resources. 

What has this to do with poetry?  Well, the long and short of it is that I think some poetry can provide a window into a truer way of looking at the world.  Of course, it can also provide or reinforce a false view, so I’m not talking about something that’s found in *all* poetry. 

While it’s been pointed out by many people that poetry and politics don’t often mix well in the polemic poem, it seems that poetry is littered with poems that do mix the two overtly and well: The Mask of Anarchy, Easter 1916, so on, so forth.  And there is a kind of contemporary non-polemic poem that uses metaphor and allegory to address political situations, e.g.,  Lux’s “The People of the Other Village,” or Dobyns’ “White Pig.”  These poems do require some kind of extra-poetical knowledge (as, when we get down to it, do the polemical poems) to inform us that the poet says the poem (writes the poem) in response to something, in the face of something, because of something.

The “Hidden” Political Poem

There’s also another very broad class of poem, and I’d like to talk primarily about it in relation to politics and society.  That class would be the common, “well-wrought” poem.  This poem can be made to almost any poetics, any school, and address almost any subject. 

All internally-consistent or realized poems profoundly articulate “what is,” and these poems are Adamaic, or Naming poems.  They overtly or implicitly engage that creative, classifying, humanizing, (often-anthropomorphizing) impulse to order our perception the world.   

They’re politically/socially important in that they articulate a perception that stands for against “what is commonly thought to be.” The poem posits a god, or the God, or no god.  It says life is nasty brutish and short.  It says that we can be redeemed through good works.  It says prisoners ought to be punished.  Or rehabilitated. Etc. Etc.  These statements or implications have profound political ramifications, even more so when they’re persuasive (or invidious) as part and parcel of an artistically made thing.  Thus this class of poem constitutes the most common (if not intended to be or often thought of as) political poem.

The Mechanics of Naming – or saying “how it is”

In terms of structure, how a poem says something (regardless of specific content) contains certain ideas about who we are, how language works, and what kinds of discourses and ideas we value.  It also says something about who we expect to read the poem and what their cultural and poetical capital is.  Whenever poets avail themselves of certain established language and forms and diction and images, they carry a cultural/literary/rhetorical weight with them into the poems. 

This kind of naming works on both the level of structure and subject, and from the political perspective, often blurs the two. 

For example, in terms of form/sound most sonnets sound similar – there’s heavy metrical presence, end rhyme, etc.  And thus sonnets, unless consciously striving against the “main weight” of other sonnets, will sound like “sonnets.”  Sonnets are often about, well, flowers and love and things.  This effectively means that sonnets about love and flowers carry some kind of self-justification – a relationship between form and content.  It’s debatable how much of this “weight” a given poem possesses, or if it’s effectively used or undercut (by dealing with “unsonnet-like” subjects in sonnets, as Edwin Morgan does in the Glasgow Sonnets).  But the point is that it’s there, and that sonnets which stray outside the orbit of say, “the sonnet,” in terms of scope and tone, etc. are noticeable insofar as they do. 

I’d argue that Free Verse has a number of “subject-forms” as well. These would be poems that tend to fall into the same patterns while addressing similar subjects – say, an address to an unborn child, or a poem which muses on a non-English phrase and connects it to the speaker’s ancestry and current sense of self-identity.  Again, there’s a validity and a weight to following certain patterns. (I distinguish this from a kind of universal human emotion or reaction, which I will touch on below.)  Another example is the well established “stream of thought” narrative that’s actually not at all like we (or I) think. But it’s a literary device with enough conventions for many different writers to emulate, and now has a certain cultural weight as actually being a good example of “stream of thought.”  Which it’s not. 

Additionally, at one point American poetry as a whole did (still does to some extent) carry a set of assumptions about subject and scope – as evidenced by the shock and hostility of large portions of the literary community when Anne Sexton and the other Confessionals wrote about such “taboo” subjects as abortions, mental illness, and menstruation.  It’s one thing to have a god rape a virgin or two in classical literature, it’s another to shine the light on contemporary issues and facts which challenge our public/private art/life boundaries. 

Once we further shade into subject/content, even a passing allusion to Shakespeare is a weight that informs the idea of love and human nature.  The poet/poem is of course free to manipulate these ideas and literary conventions (as Shakespeare himself did overtly in Sonnet 130 - “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun”).  However, they are, at that point, “on the table.”  Thus poems that engage a kind of conservative field of thought which embraces particular ideas of “true love,” and “heroism,” and “sacrifice” are working in somewhat defined areas. 

Another way to look at this “weight” is to view it as a connective tissue of assumptions that we bring with us into any given poem and which we use to “fill in the gaps” of our understanding.  Since many writers leave gaps, it’s appropriate to do so to an extent.  However, we never fill our “subject gaps” with connective tissue from another poetics.  No one reads Haiku and tries to connect things with an understanding of what “language poets” are trying to do, nor do people try to connect things in a Language poem via their understanding of Haiku convention.  (There’s actually a very subtle argument to be made here that that’s what Language poems in fact ask people to do. . .but lets table that for now.) 

We can apply this weight/tissue understanding to entire poetics as well:

The Language Poets can be seen as “left” given that they predicate their poetics on a critique of Western Consumer Culture, to the point at which they want to reject traditional narrative structures, focus on the language, and force the reader to come to grips with the lack of traditional elements.  Granted, there’s a point of attenuation beyond which ideas get lost, and I often think Langpo falls into this trap; their proper audience is a college-educated poetically savvy audience who can “follow” the leads the poetry opens up, basically it often sounds like leftist grad-students trying to impress each other and their professors.  In that sense it’s leftist elitist writing, regardless of the content of individual poems.

On the other hand, the NeoFormalists can be seen as “right” (though this is a harder tag to make stick for some in that camp) given that they tend to overtly adopt and allude to classical themes and modes, which reinforce (given my previous political thumbnail), those kind of “established” assumptions about “how things are” that might not hold true.  I’d like to point out that those kinds of assumptions aren’t limited to NeoFormalists, nor do all NeoFormalists embrace them; however one of the better examples of poetry kind of blindly “going along” with culture would be the early jingoistic poems of WWI, which were full of “noble warriors,” “leading the charge,” “fighting for what is right,” “smiting the enemy,” and so forth. Interestingly this kind of rhetoric is alive and well in the blogosphere, while the later poems of Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon, often seem not to be.  McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" is often trotted out at the start of many contemporary conflicts, even though (or rather *because*) the ideas that inform and animate the poem are a profoundly distorted and naieve way of looking at war. 

Now, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere in these posts, this isn’t a simple left/right dichotomy – each school or cluster of poetics will embrace (structurally) certain ideas about language, self, reality, scope, subject, treatment, and yes, acceptable stances to take on issues. While there might be overlap among schools (depending on how abstract we make the category) there are still clear contrasts among them.  For example, “craft-intensive” poetry says something about what poetry ought to be, what people ought to make and read, while “first word/best word or ‘raw’” poetry says something very different about how we should approach perception and art.

In terms of compositional poetics, this understanding can often create a kind of anxiety – for which I can offer no apology and only slight commiseration.

**

OK – to tie this in to the politics post, well-wrought poems inevitably take a stand – they say things (often overtly) about the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical worlds.   

Now, poems don’t often deal with things with complete factual accuracy (there’s of course a necessary editorial function that’s engaged in the service of art) and poets are just as fallible and political and partisan and as unknowingly biased as anybody else (even the poets who profess to have no politics).  So we end up with poems that can embody a variety of false consciousness both in form and content – or to say it another way, the literary world (or narratives from the greater culture as often codified in literature) often contains approximate ideas of how things are.

However, some poems and writers use the very same devices to get closer to a common human understanding, a shared sense humanity that can bridge time and culture and language.  I’d submit this is why Sappho and Li Po and Whitman are so fresh and relevant – they tell it how it is on the level of "content."  While they may lean toward an aspirational or metaphoric or positive telling, they remain true to human experience in the way that the mainstream dialogue about ourselves is often not true – thus the poetry arrests us with its immediacy, its sensitivity, for the sense that the narrator suffers and loves as we suffer and love.  This was what Dickinson was talking about when she wrote:

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

For she was emphaticly not talking about her ability to recognize *verse.*   Or when Phillip Larkin wrote that : Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are. 

An old friend (and fine poet) jokingly refers to this as “the human business” – a phrase that borders on overuse in some MFA programs, one that might sound like a euphemism for going to the bathroom.  However, (and he’d agree) we are lucky in that we have many contemporary poets who are unafraid to explore the human heart as they see it, to resist the pull of those meta narratives, or to skillfully work within them.

Politics (aka “Subject”) in the Workshop (as the primary mode of poetry “instruction”)

Speaking of that old friend, and our fine contemporaries, we're also, oddly, also a bit handicapped in a pedagogical sense, in that it’s not very common for this kind of discussion of subject, of politics, to happen within either real or virtual workshops; one of the guiding maxims is (since it’s so often fractious when we discuss “subject”) that we only ought to discuss “form” and “craft” – to make the poem be a better poem regardless of the poem’s “argument.”  But as much as we’d like to pretend we can separate form from content, we really can’t.

In normal workshop mode, we often do what we can to hold our opinion of “what the poem says” in check and focus on trying to help perfect the poem in a “technical” sense, by which I mean, we try to read the poem generously, then help restructure the poem so it more cleanly reaches our idealized understanding of what the poem “intended to say.” But the catch is that this process calls on us to try to perfect the poem’s argument (if it seems fuzzy) whether we agree or disagree with it - for without this target we can’t really start to suggest how the poem ought to be changed.

However there are some poems which have fundamentally repugnant *arguments*, arguments that really can’t be perfected, as they’re simply offensive to the reader. (Well, I suppose we could work on making them more offensive, but that’s not an exercise that I’ve the inclination to undertake at this point in my life.)  While one could point out the overwhelming problems caused by the logical pitfalls of the thoughts/ideas displayed within the poem, that too is often frowned upon by the workshop.

It may be the sentiments expressed in the poem have nothing to do with the poet personally - that they may be written in persona, or as an experiment, or have, through some process, accidentally come out not-as-the-author intended, but younger poets are often (surprisingly) *not* discussing the *what* of what they’re writing.

At it’s Best

I’d like to quote an entire post from Amy Unsworth over at Small Branches because I think it directly addresses the issues that I was working toward in my post, and because I’m nearly out of gas.  (Entirely serendipitous happenstance.)  She writes:

I spend quite a bit of time thinking about poetry and wondering why it has so fully captured my attention. I also ask myself if it is a worthy vocation. Will it make any difference? Does it need to make a difference? Is reading or writing or thinking about poetry a valuable way to spend one's time? I find I am often quite conflicted in my answers. I wonder why I didn't fall in love with Bio-Chemistry or Agriculture or some other field with empirical, measurable, tangible outcomes. But poetry it is.

Here is the start of a list of what I think poetry (and literature) does that is worth valuing:
 
1. Pays attention to the world and encourages us to pay attention as well.
2. Praises & celebrates life
3. Acts as a witness
4. Portrays different perspectives
5. Challenges us to think deeply
6. Plays with language in a way that can be entertaining and delightful

I think Amy’s exactly right to view poetry as a vocation rather than a career, in that poetry often calls us to pursue it – not for money or fame or satiation, but in a way that is challenging and rewarding.  I think she’s also right to question its utility as far as social activism goes, but I would argue that poetry is capable of profoundly arguing for *the human* in the ways that Sappho and Li Po did – and that this bridge that poetry creates, this immediacy of one voice speaking to another is of extreme humanizing importance (as Borges wrote, it’s almost accidental that he is the writer of the verse and that the reader didn’t themselves make the poem).  It should go almost without saying that while I think such a poetry would probably be eminently publishable, it’s not something that I think can be achieved by “writing for publication” – even insofar as one might dwell on “the popularity” of forms and ideas and language as one writes.

I think Amy’s list is also an excellent start for apprehending what poetry can do at its best.  Poetry often captures our attention because it leads us more deeply into an awareness of who and what we are – it, as she points out, challenges us to think deeply, to adopt other perspectives on issues.  We can, of course, read it critically, which is not to say joylessly, and thus work against any kind of false-consciousness that a poem might embody.

I’d like to say something more along those lines the next time I write.  However I wanted this post to at least address “what’s at stake” when we write.

More Poetry and Politics (Airy Poetics Part Seven)

Where we are in this Ramble:

While I’ve been constructing this poetics on the fly, and without recourse to a planned outline, I think I’ve been pretty clear about my vision of how the CAP environment is currently populated:

Limiting our discussion to poets which crest over a “threshold” level of individual skill and general poetics knowledge, we’re faced with many overlapping sets of competing poetics (schools) vying for limited resources in terms of a) traditional publication and b) “literary/educational” employment which allows for the production or promotion of one’s own work and school. 

School-based analysis has a number of drawbacks, including the fact that individual poets can write specific poems which embrace different poetics.  Also poets can “cross” schools in the production/promotion sphere by championing the work of poets outside their own school, but this is becoming rarer.

I used my own story as an example, and spent a bit of time on the primary contemporary device for poets acquiring skills/poetics (the workshop) and it’s shortcomings (which influence poetics). 

Poetics and politics are to a degree linked and both are inescapable when considering a) any specific poem, b) the main thrust of a poet’s work (or any discrete subsection of the poet’s overall work).  All kinds of poetry *via their form* say something (to an extent) about the nature of language, the expected audience, the poet’s political stance, and the nature of art/aesthetics/communication.  The poem’s form interacts with to undercut (rarely) or reinforce (often) the overt subject of the poem, which, in much the same way, is *always* political/social.

Further, I believe that a “false-consciousness” permeates the way many people think about society and politics in America, and that this false consciousness is embodied in poems of all types and forms. However, I think that some poetry manages an arresting strangeness/familiarity which results in a personal/emotional/moral/intellectual/spiritual/psychological exchange between the reader and the poem that resonates across their shared humanity.  The poetry that does this draws from a number of different schools and techniques – it is not predicated on any one narrow poetics, but I will argue that such affecting poetry could loosely be labeled as its own poetics and thus precludes certain strategies and devices.   

So – onward to Additional Points/Examples/Thoughts:

**

“Spectrum” of Poetics and the "Center-Point"

While we could construct a “centerpoint” for poetry in terms of a median point for published poetry (again, over a certain threshold level).

Another way to look at our half-mythical “centerpoint” is to imagine it as the center of a ven diagram of overlapping poetics.  Or, if we were to draw ven diagrams for the majority of “issues” that poetics address, weighing those poetics for their relative popularity, we would select the combination of characteristics that capture the centerpoint in a variety of issues.

Caveats: Please note, as with politics above, I don’t think this centerpoint represents a balanced or rational or irrational approach to poetics – it’s just a handy tool for what well be talking about.  It’s important to understand that this centerpoint (as poetry generally lacks the approbation of society at large) has no rock solid claim on being the best or only way to write, but poets who write closer to the center may well enjoy a greater number of venues for traditional publication and literary/educational employment, hence there’s a kind of self-validation/reinforcement to any given point on the spectrum. It’s entirely possible that this “centerpoint” often produces poetry written to a kind of “false-consciousness.”  It’s also entirely possible that the “vanguard” is moving in the wrong direction, and/or that the traditionalists are outdated and out of touch.  More on this later, but I just wanted to note that we’re not dealing with any inevitable conclusions based on relative structure of poems or where schools (often self-consciously) locate themselves on the spectrum.  I also don’t want to suggest that this centerpoint is in any way prescriptively normative.

To indulge in a quick analogy, consider one of the problems in discussing the overlapping poetry/politics problem as being rather like accents; there is no such thing as “Unaccented English.”  One always speaks with an accent, and what we think of as “unaccented” (Midwestern/radio/TV) English is just one accent among many that many of us have overtly or implicitly agreed to view as “unaccented” or “base” English.  (Yet to a Kiwi, it’s obviously an American accent.) The accent one chooses/uses says something about where you come from and mobalizes many cultural assumptions about how things are (both incorrect stereotypical values attributed to the speaker and more-often-than-not-correct “factual” values, such as country/culture of origin (which in itself might not be useful as a predictor of any one thing about the individual.)  Think of meeting someone with a deep Southern accent, a Boston accent, an Australian accent, an Oxfordshire accent, a BSE “accent,” and Irish accent.  (Let’s leave aside the accent/dialect debate for the moment.) ))

**

Telling the Reader What to Think

In contemporary workshops, didactic poetry is often, and for good reason, frowned on.  As readers, as people, we generally like to make up our own minds about things.  Thus, the injunction is that it’s often better to “show” and not “tell” – meaning you present the reader with a poem that invites them, based on the “evidence” the poem puts forward, to come to conclusions on their own, conclusions which will hopefully resonate with what the poet thinks ought to be.  The poet’s job, in some sense, is to convince the reader of “what is” in such a profound way that the reader does not abandon that understanding on the second or third read of the poem.  (Coleridge articulated this idea when he wrote that that “not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.”)  There’s another argument for showing rather than telling – namely that to show something effectively you must first understand it in a nuanced way – for example, nuanced enough to use emblematic detail in an organic way.  Thus the injunction to show is an injunction to know. 

Sometimes, regardless of the level of understanding, it’s easy to approach established topics and subjects via established forms and tropes, which add structural power to the poem’s “argument” due to their familiarity.  To reach the broadest audience, we could write about non-alarming things, in a non-alarming manner, in a way that gently leads the reader to understand something they more or less always understood? (but have not overtly thought on?)  You could switch “alarming” with “challenging” to make a slightly different argument, both of which are fairly common. 

Depending on one’s poetical/political views, this traditionally leads in two different directions:  Poets may try to do the above in an effort to win readers, regardless if this reinforces a false consciousness or not.  Poets may also choose radical ideas and forms in an effort to promote a consciousness that is more “true” to what they think society is and ought to be.

This is an almost impossible area to survey for sheer volume.  But via a quick list, one can see how various combinations of form/subject might work:

1. Accepted/Understood Subject in an Accepted/Understood Mode
2. Challenging Subject in an Accepted/Understood Mode
3. Accepted/Understood subject in a Challenging Mode
4. Challenging Subject in a Challenging Mode

I think the above, top to bottom, *generally* represent literary acceptance at the “centerpoint.”  Or you could switch 2 and 3.  Keep in mind these are *relative* things – it may be that a mildly challenging poem is in fact “accepted/understood” as giving some small pleasure in stretching our boundries, but that “mildly challenging subject” might categorically exclude serious examinations of race, class, gender, or, often worst of all, human love and motivations.  On the bottom of the scale – something that’s technically challenging to read/parse and employs subtle distinctions on esoteric topics might well not enjoy breadth of readership. 

This kind of scale can be plugged into my “writing for publication” argument above – to enjoy the broadest chance of periodic publication, one ought to locate one’s poetics closely to the poetics evidenced by those publications.  As I pointed out, this often results in not writing toward the bottom of the scale.   

We can also particularize that scale and apply it *within* a shared or individual poetics, meaning that an individual can write “easier” or “harder.”   Formalists looking for acclaim by other formalists might then want to break some but not too many rules.  Avant writers might want to include certain “hooks” that makes their writing attractive to their peers – attractive enough to warrant it being referred to other poets.

The scale, of course, depends on one’s conception of audience – if you’re writing for an educated academic white middle-and-upper class leftist audience, you’re going to produce a certain valence of poem, regardless of poetics. 

So, with the conception of multiple audiences, it does not always follow that politically and socially conservative writers will hew to trite subjects in established forms, or that liberal activist writers will attempt to challenge society by producing consciousness-shifting works, *although* that may seem to be the case from the centerpoint. 

But let’s step back to the centerpoint and assume that general truism for a moment; the question (for me) then becomes what’s the difference between “Accepted/Challenging” and “Boring/Just way out there?”  At a certain point I think you can fall off a communicative map into a solipsistic void.  At the other end of the scale, I think you can end up with Hallmark Verse.   Lots of writers have talked about this kind of scale.  In the reading list I threw out above, Mary Karr, in her essay, Against Decoration, argues in part that there’s a genteel poetry, like that written by the late James Merrill, located toward the conservative end of my scale.  Brendan Galvin takes mushy neo-surrealism to task in Mumblings of a Young Werther.  Steve Kowit does something a bit different, going after “the difficult” poem of obscurist modernism and its heirs; he argues in part that there’s a “mystique” to reading “difficult” poetry.  I’d locate that kind of poetry toward the end of the spectrum Galvin does such a good job of flogging, but distinguish it in its technical mastery and actual (though impossibly dense) encoding of sophisticated ideas; but the point is that people often confuse “good” poetry with “difficult” poetry.

I think it’s crucial to return to the reader here.   

Consider the different kinds of readerships – the poet, friends of the poet, students of the poet, other poets, people who read X kind of poetry on-line, people who read all kinds of poetry, etc.  and consider that these readers, whatever their structural relationship to the poet’s work (in the sense that they encounter it somewhere), have their *own poetic preferences.*  (Few read “poetry” as few read “the novel” – in all it’s varied forms.) 

Lets assume that you want to write what I call “Mandala Poetry” – this would be poetry that sets up a field of loosely connected images and thoughts, which the reader is free to negotiate and muse on (and often write out of themselves).  Presuming readers of Mandala poetry exist (they do), then one can write easy or challenging Mandala poetry.  No harm, no foul, no fuss?  Similarly, if you’re writing for rich socialites who want to have their view of the world largely confirmed, you can pen pretty little sonnets about how spring follows winter, with no hint of social reprobation whatsoever.  No harm, foul, fuss? 

Perhaps.  The answer depends on what you think is going on with society.  Personally, as I said, I think it’s pretty clear that we have a false-consciousness regarding a number of things, or, at least, a public dialogue which employs terms and positions that have very little ability to accurate show “how things are.”  Thus, writing poetry that reinforces this dialogue, is, in many ways, deeply problematic for me. Similarly, writing poetry that falls off the map for it’s esoteric or abstruse nature is ineffectual, and similarly reinforces that false consciousness by relegating what might be plausible or better alternatives to the a select few who most likely already understand those ideas.

If you think readers are going to group to schools, then you might have an argument that you’re simply choosing your side in things and slogging forward, whipping up the converted. 

But there are at least two problems with this view: first new readers come to poetry every day as they grow (up?) into it through the educational system.  Creating a new “school” to entice new readers is possible.  Second, readers can cross poetry camps – I’ve done it as a poet.  I’d also propose a kind of readership out there which I’ll dub Potential Readership; these are people of ordinary intelligence, average (finished) education, and some normal level of curiosity about the world.  I’d like to think they can read (types) poetry.

Skill in the Service of?

So if I was going to propose a socially/politically responsible poetry which could pull in new readers, cross readers, I’d characterize it as a poetry that’s complex (and offers the solaces of that complexity), but is easy to understand/parse, and shows the world from a more accurate understanding of “how things are.”  I’m not saying this proposed poetry must be polemic;  the poems can be from my third category of “everyday” political poems.

As far as the form goes, we’d want something that does not rely on formal devices that are not easy for new readers to pick up.  It seems to me that the best bet is straight-up free verse sonics – which create patterns discernable to readers without being off putting and without drawing on the socializing and legitimizing force of inherited forms. However, this would not preclude some inherited forms.

As far as Subject goes, well, there’s a whole can of worms distinguishing between subject, topic, theme, etc.  Suffice to say that the subject probably shouldn’t be “the form” (as one can write meaningless but gorgeous runs of sound, formal and free.)  Subject should honestly articulate that “humanistic” understanding I spoke about and strive for that  personal connection to a reader.  That one can never reach all humans on the planet shouldn’t preclude this from being a goal of socially/politically responsible poetry.

In other words, you'd want to avoid writing poems that:

1. Are too difficult to understand/parse through esotericness or obtuseness (subject)
2. Positively reinforce false-consciousness (subject)
3. Are too formally esoteric (aesthetic appreciation requires specialized knowledge )
4. Are too aesthetically flaccid (i.e., may as well be an essay)

In favor of poems that:

1. Are easy to understand/parse (subject)
2. Positively work to reinforce true consciousness
3. Are easy to appreciate and give the consolation of a well made thing

I’m not going to work them all out, but you can put together several combinations of these that seem useful.  Please keep in mind that there are other categories we could use, and that we’re looking at this from a kind of fictional centralist Contemporary American perspective:
Difficult Parse, False Consciousness, Formally Esoteric/Flacid –Pound, Milton, Ted Hughes, Yeats, Black Mountain School
Difficult Parse, False Consciousness, Easy Aesthetics – Eliot, Spencer, Maya Angelou, Muldoon, Surrealism, Ashbery, Stevens
Difficult Parse, True Consciousness, Formally Esoteric/Flacid – Langpo, Lowell, Shakespeare, Metaphysicals, Jorie Graham, Dickinson, Hopkins.
Difficult Parse, True Consciousness, Easy Aesthetics – Crane, Lorde, H.D., Gilbert, Levis
Easy Parse, False Consciousness, Formally Esoteric/Flacid – Plath, most NeoFormalism, Amy Lowell, Pope
Easy Parse, False Consciousness, Easy Aesthetics – Merrill, P. Larkin, New Sincerity (tough), Bukowski, W Matthews, Some Identity Writing, Bly, Sexton, O’Hara, Kooser, Olds, Kippling
Easy Parse, True Consciousness, Formally Esoteric/Flacid – Hayden, Langston Hughes, Ginsberg, Basho, Owen, Seamus Heaney, Auden, Bishop, Sandberg (flaccid)
Easy Parse, True Consciousness, Easy Aesthetics – Doty, Dobyns, Lux, Collins, Nelson, Van Jordan, Li Po, Some Identity Writing, Szymborska, ee cummings, Bishop, Basho, Clifton, Creeley, Whitman, Levine, Paz, WCW, Wright (late)

This is **a toy** and you can make easy arguments both for and against “true and false consciousness” for many of these poets based on certain poems.  For example, Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” is moderately hard to parse, but is what I’d call true consciousness, and easy aesthetics.  Lowell’s sonnets get a strike on all three.  It’s not like we’re dealing with Enlightened Beings v. Demons here.  (This exercise runs afoul of my argument about the shortcomings of looking at Poets instead of Poems, but we’ll succumb for a bit and use it ass a quick shorthand.)   It’s fun to see where some of these come out. Where the hell would you put Neruda?

I’ll look at dealing with necessarily “difficult” poetry in bit and “dumbing down” poetry.

**
I think we have a number of poems that meet this criteria – and what’s not odd at all is that many of them appear in the “best loved” poetry projects that are out there.

I think I’d like to look at these ideas in the field of individual poems.  So that’s what I’ll do next. 

Airy Poetics Part 8 - Poems

Difficulty v. Dumbing Down in light of True Consciousness

So – the obvious tension in the toy above is this: if you deal with challenging/difficult subjects that may advance True Consciousness, might you actually be displaying False Consciousness by going too far afield into esoterica?  Or to look at it the other way, how can you write accessible poetry *without* drawing on the common literary tradition and thus reinforcing False Consciousness.  Framed that way, it seems like the choice is between Language poetry (good politics, hard to understand/read, elitist) and Kooser (who is completely folksy, and easy to get, but who’s poetry is largely fine with the underlying false consciousness.) 

I don’t want to pick on Ted, for he seems to be a guy who I’d trust with my wallet, but his poetry tends to often rely on certain “folksy” understandings of how things are.  It’s not really significantly challenging the social/political structure which leads “the status quo” even if it may disapprove of certain results of the status quo.  If you skim back up to my political thumbnail, Kooser’s poems seem the type that would (rightly) decry overt instances of racism, but not question why he lives in a largely white state, or why those jobs are flowing out of the heartland, or why his lonely protags own their middle class homes.  There are also deeper issues of clichéd psychology so forth, which I’d like to explore (next post, I loosely promise) in the field of actual poems. 

I just want to be clear that I’m not proscribing a narrow set of political choices that constitute “True Consciousness” – for there are many areas within it where reasonable people can differ after examining and understanding the issues.   Nor am I saying that anyone who wrote prior to 1970 can’t evidence “True Consciousness” because, for example, they didn’t have a post-Feminist consciousness (or access to that vocabulary.)  Nor do I want to suggest that TC is something that is best done by turning completely away from the topical and embracing “Timeless” themes, which are to some extent expected and don’t really push the ball forward in any way. 

True Consciousness is best seen as a relative thing – it’s not like we’ve got everything figured out at this moment.  But because of that relativity, TC is difficult to model.  A good thumbnail of True Consciousness would be “open eyed poetry” not poetry which “willfully sees.”  I’m not really sorry I can’t approach it more closely than that – some things are best left open and relative. 

Incidentally, this is why new poetry is always necessary, not because we need to put “old wine in new bottles” but because our understandings about things change over time, even though the set of human emotions remains constant across cultures and times. 

I don’t think that there’s a mutual exclusivity between accessibly displaying true consciousness within a poem, and having that true consciousness be challenging and provoking.  Take, for example, Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo – we can say that the poem is about a moment where a speaker encounters a broken statue but realizes the aesthetic power that lies within the broken form, and that this aesthetic power makes him think about his own life, his own attempts at making things, or valuing things that appear to be “whole” and not “defaced” and that in the face of this power, he concludes he must change (consciously) how he sees and values things.  It’s a wonderful moment, deeply humanistic, best experienced by reading the poem itself.  It’s “deep” in an authentic way, it’s complex in that multiple readings reveal new tensions and nuances, and it’s accessible in that one does not need specialized training to understand what is going on or what the poet is “trying to say.”  In terms of true consciousness, we can say that the poem confines itself to one speaker apprehending a cultural legacy – and that the kind of thinking/perception evidenced by the poem’s speaker is on some level fundamentally honest, and is not distorted by certain kinds of false consciousnesses.   I hate to keep saying “more later,” but more later.

**
Tweaking the Toy

Lyco pointed out that the analytical toy I’d constructed would be better served (as a general analytical device) with additional categories, if I didn’t want to put up the ven diagrams (we’d really need several).  I thought instead I’d throw in a few more quick categories: this is a slightly better way (as opposed to the school based approach) to look at what people are writing, not what they’re purporting to be.

Caveats: Not culturally relative (X may have been “true consciousness” in his day and age); Poets have divergent output and cross schools; we’re going to quibble on what is/is not a set of difficult aesthetics.

Also, please keep in mind that I originally constructed the toy to roughly sketch out where, from my fictional CAP centrist perspective, certain poets might be located.  What I’ll do now is try to push it toward a more analytical tool for grouping and  characterizing schools/movements, and refine the toy a bit further with the following binaries.

True Consciousness v False Consciousness: True Consciousness would be poetry that has a relatively accurate approach to how social patterns unfold, one that does not advance or reinforce cultural “myths.” On the other hand, False Consciousness can be all over the map, either Eliot’s morbid depression, royalism, and anti-Semitism, or Yeats occultism.  Given that this is so hard to define/achieve *within the poems,* perhaps the best way to qualify for “True Consciousness” is to crest into it now and again by directly speaking to human beings as I suggested the best poems do.  We could also lump someone into False Consciousness (for purposes of the toy) if their work consistently displays an element.  But let’s divide False Consciousness into Assertive or Passive.   

Easy Parse v Difficult Parse: An Easy Parse would be poems that are “understandable” on the first read through – poems that have a surface that “make sense” to the reader.  This does not preclude depth in the initial or subsequent read.  A Difficult Parse is a poem which, either accidentally or by design, resists the average reader’s understanding it to an uncomfortable level.  The poem could be simply symbolic or obtuse, Or the poem could also demand a specialized knowledge.  Surrealism would be, by definition, a difficult parse, as would poetry that significantly depends on allusions not available to our centrist audience.  So lets subdivide the Difficult Parse into poems which are difficult via Structural mandate (e.g., Surrealism) and poems that are difficult via Subject (some Wallace Steven’s abstract philosophical poems, or Eliot’s). 

Easy Aesthetics v. Formally Esoteric/Flaccid: an Easy Aesthetic is a poem which displays artistry as a made thing without that artistry creating a barrier to understanding or importing structural False Consciousness.  So, a formal poem in the service of True Consciousness might be an Easy Aesthetic, but a free verse poem which is impenetrable (parsing) but is in the service of true consciousness would be Formally Esoteric.  Formally Flaccid poems are poems that lose their sense of poetic artistry to the extent that they might as well be a political essay or pamphlet – while there aren’t many, I think Sandberg comes up to this line.  Perhaps some WCW. 

Politically Left/Right: there might only be a few more distinctions to be made by lumping in any poems articulated political stance, but this might distinguish some rightist poets who deny the social/political myths.  There’d be a strong corollary between Left and True Consciousness and Right and False Consciousness. 

Open/Elitist Readership: Again, just to make finer distinctions along the aesthetics/subject lines. 

This gives us:

True Consciousness v Assertive False Consciousness or Passive False Consciousness
Easy Parse v Difficult Chosen Subject Parse or Difficult/Impossible Structural Subject Parse
Easy Aesthetics v. Formally Esoteric or Formally Flacid
Politically Left v Politically Right
Open Readership v. Elitist Readership

So, let’s finally look at some poems in light of school poetics:

For that task I’d like to adopt a “blind” approach.  This works well enough in baseball if you’re comparing player trends or individual years – you strip off the names and just look at the stats.  Often, you’re surprised at the results; one under the radar player will seem better than another, etc. 

Here, the goal would be to look at the poems, not the poets or the schools.  I doubt this is going to work for most of the poetry blogosphere, since I suspect many of you have read the pomes, but it might age well.  If you don’t want the blind analysis spoiled, please DO NOT follow the links in this paragraph, until you’ve finished the post. 

Recently K. Silem Mohammed has taken up Thomas Basbøll’s challenge to compare and contrast two poems, A and B, which have appeared in the past 5 years.   (No link following kids, I’ll reveal the poem’s authors at the end of the post.) 

It’s an interesting challenge because the poems are written out of (or allude to, depending on your point of view in these matters) two different and opposing schools.  Yet they’re of similar length, employ similar themes, and have other parallel characteristics which might be illustrative of how different schools might approach the same “thing.” I think Kasey does a good job with the line reading and I agree with some of his analytical points.  I’d like to use his comments and add some of my own to further illustrate the poetics matrix that I’ve been posting about.  I will change all of his references to the poets and poems in the his posting to [A] and [B], [Poet A] and [Poet B] (my own references will not use the [ ] marks).  I will also try to keep my comments on his analysis broad so that you don’t need to read it before reading mine – yet you’ll be able to turn to his after this and decide if I’m out of my skull. 

A v. B

“Poem A
By Poet A”

What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside—
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.

No, it’s all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles—
each a different height—
are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt—
frog at the edge of a pond—
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.

“Poem B
By Poet B”

Lit by the light
of one lamp,
with clarinet backdrop
& ashtray,
you pitch safety
and comfortable Futures.
Your neighborhood shows
as you trace the map,
ruffle the bills
and conjure up scarcity.
Everybody’s doing it, you say,
Hopeful.
Take your big dreams, I say
through the back door,
no one here can sing fate
or pick up that dime, anymore.
We left crossroads back there
with compromise, one nation
two hundred miseries
and all that commotion.
Your dreams are just words
like table salt.
Me I know
this year’s moment
will be 2 a.m., my life savings
and one train ticket
down the fault line.

On a first reading of the two poems we can pick up on a few structural/stylistic tags that serve to nudge them slightly toward schools. 

A quick list:

Poem A

Free Verse
Employs short stanzas that don’t exceed @10 lines and seem to regularly divide the poem down the page.
Each stanza is a single sentence.
Lines normally range from 5 to 15 syllables.
First person, addressing either the reader or an unnamed “you”
A uses a number of dashes as parenthetical markers
A has modest sonics, nothing strongly noticeable.

Poem B

Free Verse
One singe stanza.
Lines are relatively smaller than A’s lines (including several 3 syllable lines).
First person, overtly addressing a “you” which may be the reader
B uses an & instead of the word “and”, once, and uses “and” elsewhere in the poem.
B capitalizes two abstract nouns: Futures, Hopeful.
B also does not use a comma between Me I in L23.
B has modest sonics, nothing strongly noticeable.

Right now, the poems don’t display anything all that unusual, and both are fairly centrist with B showing some small traits which characterize any number of schools – normally those less Iowa/Centrist and more Beat/AG/Lanpo, whatever might be ever so slightly more disdainful of conventional punctuation.  Yet these are so small they only serve to put me on the slightest of notices that A might be more centrist than B, B more radical than A.   

But really, they’re very similar from a structural point of view. It’s hard to tell them apart, as it were.  (We’re not comparing a sonnet with a random chunk of Silliman’s work.)

So, how to dig into the poems?  Let’s look at Kasey’s response first, then play with the toy afterward:

Kasey’s Big Picture

Certainly we who consider ourselves among the opposition would like to believe that the reason we oppose the mainstream in the first place is that its dominance fosters bad art, not just that we would like to have the brick buildings it inhabits for our own use. But that's exactly why it's important not to reduce the very real reasons for opposition to quibbles over superficial aspects of craft or craft-based "approaches." The real reason mainstream poetry is bad is because any art produced by a complacently "established" class of artists will inevitably reflect the vicious, chauvinistic, and insipid values of the interests that underwrite that class's position of "job security." This is a moral reason.

For the same reason, there is no formal style or technique that in and of itself absolutely resists or absolutely expresses such corrosive values. Disjunction and parataxis, for example, are not inherently more "radical" in the political sense than elegant iambics or epiphanic cadences. What matters is who is using them and in what cultural or historical context. That being said, it does periodically arise that powerful cultural regimes find it efficacious to use euphoniously dulcet instruments in the service of some oppressive agenda or other. This does not mean that those instruments are themselves oppressive. It means that euphony is pleasurable, and can be used opprobriously. Similarly, noise and dissonance often accompany resistant social action, but they also make for good dance parties. After a while, they may not be recognizable as noise or dissonance anymore.

I like much of this, but his analysis does not go nearly far enough. 

1)  While art produced by an “established” class of artists or school will reflect that classes or schools values, it does not follow that those values will be “vicious, chauvinistic, and insipid values.” For example, I’m not sure one could say that of Stanley Kunitz or Adrienne Rich, although they are surely a part of the “establishment” group of poets.  As I pointed out above, we’re dealing with many schools that make up “mainstream” poetry, in the sense that these schools have access to those limited resources.

2) I do agree that formal style and technique carries no inherent political sense (meaning, I take it) when viewed in isolation. However, these techniques and styles do not exist in isolation; they exist in, as Kasey alludes to, a “cultural or historical context.”  And while different styles and techniques can drift across the social/political spectrum over time (usually from radical to conservative), the question of the moment is “where are we now?” or “is there a social/political sense (or ‘weight’) carried in any given techniques or in the mode of expression itself?”  I would argue that there is, but not that it cleanly splits into: Established = Bad and Opposition = Good.

Thus when Kasey writes (and I quote this because I think it’s a common misconception):

For the poet who has not yet attained recognition in the wider literary community, there is a choice to be made: adopt that set of compositional practices which has been earmarked for mainstream use and thus identify oneself as in alignment with the dominant formation, or adopt practices that set one in symbolic opposition to that formation.

He’s engaging in hopelessly broad analysis.  It is true, in a theoretical sense, but in the field of actual poems, things quickly become a lot more subjective.  For example, if Kasey does choose to adopt this viewpoint, I’d be damned hard put to say just *what* the difference between Poem A and B is, beyond those minor drifts I noticed.  Can we really say that one poem (in terms of style and technique) is so different as to constitute a critique of the other?  It seems like an “established poet” who wrote either of these poems could write the other a few years later.

Further, it would seem that if one was doing something so radical as making an either/or choice in terms of “compositional practices” (not quite sure what that means in this context) then the final result of the poetry would reflect those practices in a meaningful way.  If the phrase “compositional practices” stands in for technique, the argument is equally weak. 

We’ve been just looking at the shapes of the poems, the devices they use, so let’s turn to content.    
Examining content (like poetics) assumes a field of understanding that the reader is attempting to integrate the poem with.  This will vary from reader to reader.  In Kasey’s case, we can see what he’s concerned with through how he reads the poems.  Basically, domesticity and security, bourgeois existence,

(BTW, I have to add Kasey has a Nice writing style, by which to say it’s academic; if you wanted to apply a poetics field test to our different posts, it should tell you something about where we’re coming from and who we’re hoping to address.)

I might approach the poems any number of ways.  For the purposes of this post, I’ll view Poem A as a meditation on place.  The speaker sits at a kitchen table, thinking about his compositional space and what happens outside it in the immediate and greater world.  The speaker concludes that the table is “all he needs” along with a few odds and ends to muse on.  The poem closes with a kind of harmonious moment of sensory reflection ending in an act of imagination. 

Poem B begins by apprehending a “you” – one way of reading the rather vague language of the first half of the poem is to say that “the you” is living in a well known neighborhood, concerned with safety and conformity.  The speaker then criticizes that “you” as having “big dreams” which are ultimately “just words like table salt.”  The poem then turns to the “I,” who informs us that “this year’s moment/will be 2 a.m., my life savings/and one train ticket/down the fault line.”

Of course, the tempting fun comes in where we might read B as critiquing A, and B was written later than A, so it’s entirely possible. 

But to leave that aside, I’d say what becomes immediately apparent is the difficulty that we have discerning B’s intent.  The language seems to be a code for us to decipher or “translate” into some more functional understanding so that we might on some level understand what’s going on. 
So:

Lit by the light
of one lamp,
with clarinet backdrop
& ashtray,
you pitch safety
and comfortable Futures.

Here “the you” is located indoors (apparently), listening to a clarinet and smoking, while “the you” pitches (sells, speaks for, tries to convince someone of) “safety and comfortable Futures.”  That last bit could either be general or a comment on day trading.  Or both.  Or Neither. 

Your neighborhood shows
as you trace the map,
ruffle the bills
and conjure up scarcity.

“The you” lives in a neighborhood that’s “on the map” (or just literally on a map).  “The you” is either ruffling money and coming up short or ruffling through bills (e.g. utility bills) and coming up short.  Or perhaps “conjure” means they’re not short after all.  Either way, it’s hard to see how “pitching safety” aligns with “conjuring up scarcity” – unless this is meant to say something about “the you”s psychology, that “the you” always thinks “the you” does not have enough.
One of the easier readings is to see “the you” as some kind of salesman, tracing the map after a day at work.  But that’s guesswork.

Everybody’s doing it, you say,
Hopeful.

Again, this is a bit difficult to parse.  I’m not sure what this phrase means since it usually is applied as a justification for common wrong-doing, like cheating on taxes. 

Take your big dreams, I say
through the back door,
no one here can sing fate
or pick up that dime, anymore.

The “I” becomes critical of “the you”’s life/activity?  I’m not sure what it means that no one can “sing fate” or pick up that dime. . . perhaps this means that the I does not think a belief in “fate” justifies the status quo, but I can’t really connect that to anything above – unless it’s meant to tie in to selling something that the “I” can no longer afford. 

We left crossroads back there
with compromise, one nation
two hundred miseries
and all that commotion.

Apparently some kind of compromise was not reached (or was reached) and now cannot be revisited.  I don’t know what the two hundred miseries are, or what “all that commotion” is.  Here, the poem seems to be at it’s lowest sensical ebb.  I’m also not quite sure who the “we” are – I assume it’s a general “we,” given the presence of “nation,” but it could refer to a specific point in the I and “the you”’s relationship.

Your dreams are just words
like table salt.

A return to critiquing “the you” – but I’m at a loss to know (should have mentioned this earlier) just what those “big dreams” are.  Perhaps the activity that “the you” is engaging in has an element of self delusion to it.  If so, it must be a different kind of self delusion, since “big dreams” sound aspirational.  Perhaps “the you” is some kind of salesman, comfortably well off, but still ambitious.

Me I know
this year’s moment
will be 2 a.m., my life savings
and one train ticket
down the fault line.

A turn to the I.  Apparently this year will have an (important?) moment.  That moment will involve “2 a.m., my life savings/and one train ticket/down the fault line.”  Given the grammatical structure, I’m led to believe that the I has already established such a moment for “the you,” but I can’t find such a moment in the poem.  Whatever it is, the moment will probably be significant since it involves “life savings” – and that relates to the mention of finances above.  One train ticket suggests single travel.  Fault line, literally, might be California’s or some other fault line, but could be entirely metaphorical; the speaker is traveling alone down a divide or split of some kind. To me, that suggests the dissolution of a relationship between the I and “the you.” 

Basically, my impulse to read the poem this way stems from my hope that the poem is written by someone with something important to convey to me, the audience.  I’d like it to be more than an overheard critique of some salesguy the I might know.  I’d like it to be something that could have personal resonance to me as a human being, even if it's only a lover's complaint. 

The most effective way to do that is to make a leap of my own and read the poem thusly:
I and You are in a relationship.  I imagines addressing or overtly address You about their impending split.  You is lit by the light of one lamp, engaged in contradictory behavior – smoking while talking about safety, ruffling bills but “conjuring” scarcity.  “The you” thinks everyone does or should live this way.  However the I thinks otherwise.  The I repudiates the arguments “the you” has given the I, fate, thriftiness, and reminds “the you” of a time when they could have chosen another path (crossroads) but instead compromised to make a union with each other characterized by many miseries and commotion. Now the I thinks the dreams of “the you” are just words, common and bitter as salt.  The I knows that the big thing that will happen this year is that “the I” will leave one morning, alone, with whatever “the I” can, saving, in some measure “the I”’s life.

Scoplaw makes a smug bow.   However, the problem (from my point of view) is that I have to “willfully” read the poem to get that kind of understanding out of it.  It’s as though the poet put a number of elements down on the page and said “go make a story out of it.”  Which means I’m merely being clever.

Poem A

Poem A on the other hand, is much easier to parse, so easy that this is almost redudant:

What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?

The I asks what scene (location, perhaps also implying this is all made up) he would rather be in than this one, sitting at the kitchen table, alone, ready to write (a poem?  This poem?  A letter?).  The “you” is somewhat rhetorical, perhaps “the reader” – certainly there is no actual other person being addressed in the sense that the “I” is addressing another character within the poem.

It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside—
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

The “I” reflects on things outside the house.

But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.

The “I” does not value romantic jobs or a fancy (real fancy) car above this moment.

No, it’s all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles—
each a different height—
are singing in perfect harmony.

The “I” appreciates what the “I” immediately apprehends – small creature comforts.

So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt—
frog at the edge of a pond—
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.

The “I” is unapologetic about listening to the world as it is, to listening to the I’s own heartbeat, and this results in an imaginative leap to either a different state of mind, or a vision of a place radically unlike the immediate one. 

Now, while this is an easy top level parse, there are deeper resonances here.  The difference between them and Poem B is that we have a fairly solid level of meaning to hang our speculations on.  For example, we could look at the frog on the edge of the pond and think of Basho’s frog, which adds some resonance to the close.  The province of empty sky and branches could be death, or winter, but it contrasts strongly with the warm oranges, the water glass, the flowered wallpaper.  I’m getting a bit tired, so I don’t want to dig all that much, but the crucial point is that I feel as though I could go in and *reinforce* the poem’s basic thrust at every juncture (for example, we could read the candles as the Norns, or the past, present and future, or Alto, Tenor, Bass candles and Yeat’s “music of what happens.”) 

So, back to what happened with Kasey -

Both engage the notion of an affluent bourgeois existence in which those domestic trappings confer a set of associations involving familiarity and comfort. Both also invoke a larger, unstable world outside this existence. Both, perhaps in keeping with their lyric status, contain references to singing. Both end with an allusion to some sort of egress or escape.

As apparent by my readings, I couldn’t agree less with the above.  While the speakers may be bourgeois, it’s possible that neither one is.  (Kasey might be conflating what he knows of the actual poets with the speakers in their poems.)  In any case, the speaker in B seems deeply uncomfortable with their current situation, while the speaker in A seems to transcend it, or deny wanting anything more than what could be a small apartment kitchen somewhere.

Now Kasey is an intelligent guy – and his argument is somewhat convincing *if* you read the poem as he does, via his political concerns.  Poem B is very malleable, and tends to allow for that kind of argumentation, while Poem A is a bit harder to stick.  When Kasey writes of poem A – Material desire is very clearly articulated in this poem, and describes a reality that, for the speaker at least, is entirely realistic and maybe even already realized.  Well, I’m not sure if it’s that or if it’s the speaker denying material desire and preferencing artistic creation.  This makes Poem A seem more vital, and poem B either sloppy or transitory or confused or obscure. 

I think Kasey is spot on when he writes:

Both poems are written in a prosaic, "casual" diction, but [Poet B]'s seems more oblique, sprinkled with phrases that sound idiomatic, but whose meaning is not utterly transparent: "your neighborhood shows," "no one here can sing fate," etc. Even the homey little simile "just words / like table salt" is at root irrational and arbitrary, though its general emotional sense comes through. Nothing in [Poet A]' poem invites excessive interpretive exertion. As fanciful as his trio of singing tapers may be, it is immediately intelligible as a routine figurative device.

But am not sure that this: The speaker melts into whimsical reverie in the inevitable consummation of his middle-class bliss, follows from that (beyond that it’s something Kasey is projecting into the poem.)

And Kasey’s close:

And it is ultimately this that signals the greatest difference between the two poems. One expresses a relatively conscious set of relations to life within the contradictions of late capitalism, and the other blithely shrugs the contradictions off and gloats. Form comes into the equation only as a necessary adjunct to the reigning emotional timbre of each poem: in the one case, an uneasy apprehension of one's tenuous position in a booby-trapped system, and in the other, a narcotized sugar-coating of bad faith, complete with anthropomorphic Disney candles.

Well, I don’t think that’s right at all.  Poem B might not be criticizing a “system” at all, and Poem A might have a valid approach to appreciatively living in the moment.

Granted, A might be argued to reinforce false consciousness by not critiquing the system that brought A to that point.  However, A isn’t displaying any of the behavior that is criticized in Poem B (in fact, one suspects that were “the you” to behave like the speaker in Poem A, then there wouldn’t be a problem, a reason, for poem B to exist.)

However, B might also be as complicit as anybody else – B might go on to find someone who did the same things but didn’t smoke or “conjure” scarcity.  The problem is really that Poem B is fundamentally unclear and can be made to hold too many types of baggage, should the reader bother to load anything into it. 

Perhaps I’m feeling generous, but I think that A’s “basic message” of only needing to imagine/write at a table cuts to a humanistic understanding of how we are.  (A could have been dissatisfied that A the people in A’s life aren’t acting as A would like them to.)  On the other hand, I think that B also evidences that understanding if I read the poem generously. 

Toying Around

To apply my toy, with new categories:

True Consciousness v Assertive False Consciousness or Passive False Consciousness
Easy Parse v Difficult Chosen Subject Parse or Difficult/Impossible Structural Subject Parse
Easy Aesthetics v. Formally Esoteric or Formally Flacid
Politically Left v Politically Right
Open Readership v. Elitist Readership

I’d say that Poem A is:
True Consciousness, Easy Parse, Easy Aesthetics, Open Readership, Politics Unknown
(Rough Contemps: Doty, Dobyns, Lux (late), Collins, Szymborska, Clifton, Creeley, James Wright (late))

We could make an argument for Passive False Consciousness, but I think the poem is more or less “open eyed” – even to the extent that the speaker realizes there will be detractors of this view (“So forgive me/if I lower my head now).

While Poem B is:
True Consciousness, Hard Parse, Easy Aesthetics, Elitist Readership, Politics Unknown
(Rough Contemps: Langpo, R. Lowell, Jorie Graham)

I’d characterize B as a kind of half structure/content difficultly parse.  It’s also kind of a “style” – few segues, all phrases turned a notch toward ambiguity via the desire to sound new/interesting/affecting, the odd and small leaps of logic required. When Kasey wrote that the diction was meant to sound casual but is in fact alogical, I believe he was picking up on this - a milder variety of the vapid neo surrealism that Galvin took to task in Mumblings of a Young Werther. 

On the other hand, I chose Elitist readership because to write in that style assumes a reader who is familiar enough with the conventions of that poetry to “fill in the gaps,” as the very educated Kasey quite easily did one way and as I quite easily did in another way. 

Even though the poem seems “open eyed,” it’s forceful in advancing it’s ambiguities, and relies on the reader to do a lot of work filling in the blanks to come up with their own understanding of “what is going on.”  Does that, overall, mean there’s a kind of False Consciousness being displayed with regards to politics, human understanding?  That whatever True Consciousness is being shown, it’s veiled by those stylistic choices which then render poem B, as a kind, *more* reinforcing (through near total irrelevance to the general readership) of a false consciousness than poem A?   Eh.  Tough call.

But we could also say:

Passive False Consciousness, Hard Parse, Easy Aesthetics, Elitist Readership, Unknown Politics (Muldoon, Surrealism, Ashbery)

To remove the veil:

Jennifer Moxley

Life Policy

Lit by the light
of one lamp,
with clarinet backdrop
& ashtray,
you pitch safety
and comfortable Futures.
Your neighborhood shows
as you trace the map,
ruffle the bills
and conjure up scarcity.
Everybody’s doing it, you say,
Hopeful.
Take your big dreams, I say
through the back door,
no one here can sing fate
or pick up that dime, anymore.
We left crossroads back there
with compromise, one nation
two hundred miseries
and all that commotion.
Your dreams are just words
like table salt.
Me I know
this year’s moment
will be 2 a.m., my life savings
and one train ticket
down the fault line.

(Imagination Verses, Tender Buttons, 1996; rpt. Salt Publishing, 2003)

Billy Collins

I Ask You

What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside—
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.

No, it’s all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles—
each a different height—
are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt—
frog at the edge of a pond—
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.

(Cortland Review 7, May, 1999).

The Why and How of Poetry

For the young poet (and by this I only mean those new to poetry, regardless of chronological age), poetry often begins as raw self-expression – either through the desire to name the world one finds oneself within, or to name that self.  Sometimes poetry will begin in mimicry of the loved (we write poetry because we’ve read poems, loved those poems, and wish to add to poetry or make something like that which we love; or we love something about a poet and think that writing poetry might help us “be like them”).  In either case it’s a rather *willful* act of shaping, be it deliberate or spontaneous. 

We can make another distinction in saying that we wish to name or make that which we love and admire, or we wish to be humans *capable* of doing so;  while the idea of training oneself into capability might work for mature individuals (who might have an analogous understanding via another artistic discipline), often people hope for a shorter and easier route, which is that the art form (poetry) will align with something essential about them, or that poetry will arise from them, in a kind of spontaneous way.  That having *felt* and loved, they will be able to project that feeling and love within a poem (or have those feelings called out of them by the act of writing.)  The short form of this is that Reading and Thinking/Feeling *equals* the ability to Write in a way that produces an equal kind of Thinking/Feeling in others. Adoption of this idea often leads to the fantasy of the poet as an enlightened being, or an elemental being, or a primal being – as though they were lighting rods for. . .ah, and here it gets tricky.  For I’m thinking of that which evokes poetry from us.  Not that which the poem is about, nor the way in which it’s made, but that very primal impulse.

I think it’s misleading to suggest that people love poems (love poems enough to attempt to become poets) *only* because they admire a poem’s subject, or the method (order) and means a poem uses to shape itself and distinguish itself from ordinary language.  There’s something else – the mysterious thing that evokes poetry, which we see shadowed in the poems themselves.  Something moved Li Po.  Something moved Rilke.  And given the various costs of poetry, it’s hard to imagine that something is a mere love of words, or a kind of chronic weakness, an addiction or predisposition to versify.   It’s that calling out of the human, that evocation, which truly bridges cultures in the ways that the longer narrative arts – like the novel, often cannot. 

So what is this thing? - this perhaps secret desire to be moved, to be called out, to be drawn into expression?  Can we pull back the veil and say that each poet creates their own psychology of making, their own myths and desires?  Or does that just push the question back a bit, reformulate it in such a way as to exclude certain avenues of thought?

While the making can be a mundane process of work (and indeed, poetry instructors will often over-empahsize the work, both out of a kind of inferiority complex vis a vis academic writing with it’s footnotes and air of objectivity, and out of a real understanding that young poets are most often just *sloppy*) the act of being called into making is something that all young poets seem to hunger for.  In fact, it’s what I’m most often asked about whenever I speak publicly about poetry (panel discussions, post-reading, etc.).  It seems that everyone is fascinated by the “why” of it, not the “how” of it.  Given that the “why” is subjective, and given that I’ve had my fill (up to my eyeballs) of well-turned out demi-poets blithely going on about writing as though they’ve culled their thoughts from various new age spirituality pamphlets and twelve-step programs, my usual response to such things is to try to immediately deflect the conversation into craft-issues, which while they do not directly address the act of creation, do at least shadow it by providing a concrete context (of what the act of creation has produced (a single poem) in a particular instance).

From all I’ve read and seen, the process of writing poetry generally varies considerably.  Even so, it’s tempting to instruct (as I have, and will) young poets to keep notebooks, abandon note books, work aloud, read widely, recite in front of others, and so forth – not because these things have intrinsic value, nor that even a majority of them are represented in the processes of mature poets, but because of the discipline and perspective they might  provide.  I think it would provide very little educational good for me to say to my students that in terms of process I tend to follow no fixed pattern of writing, although all my poems are characterized by working aloud and heavily drafting while the poem is “hot.”  But I do think it would do some good to have any beginning poet sit down and map out the basic phoneme sounds of English - not because the phoneme has a lot of contemporary scientific value as far as language mapping or acquisition theories, but rather because it’s a great way to get students to focus on the dominant and multiple sounds within words.

Thus there’s a set of glossy “intro poetry” anecdotes and terminology and poetics that we all tend to adopt, something that provides parameters, or aesthetic lode-stones, but a number of poets never seem to get beyond them.  They write a kind of formulaic and “acceptable” verse that steers itself though the wickets that are so blandly planted in the most basic discussions of poetry – call it McVerse or McPoetry if you will.  While I don’t think this type of verse is characteristic of our better contemporary poets, it does inform the broad “backdrop” of poems that are published and circulated because they’ve some topical interest and they’re “really not at all that bad” or “good enough.” 

In some cases, these formulaic poems have *vast* social importance, but generally fail on an artistic/aesthetic level if they’re read by someone who is already deeply sympathetic to their subject or arguments (or even their types of subjects or arguments.)  It’s a complex issue for me.  On one hand you have a kind of flood of mediocre poetry that’s potentially socially transformative (in that it broadens perspectives), and on the other hand, it’s mediocre poetry which, I’d argue, encodes particular kinds of false-consciousness (e.g., appeal to both inherited aesthetic authority via form, appeal to unbridled/spontaneous authenticity via assumptions about the art-form itself), even as it works against other kinds of false-consciousness (e.g., racism, sexism).

To arc back to my opening thoughts, I wonder if poets writing in formulaic verse ever transcend those initial impulses – if they’re still writing imitatively, or derivatively, or because they (tenure or no) have never learned to let go of that *willfulness* in shaping their poems. 

As an example of a non-formulaic poem, a poem that’s not *willful* in leading the reader to a pre-arranged conclusion, I’m reminded of a poem by Marylin Nelson Waniek called “The Chosen,” which imagines the relationship of two of her ancestors, one a slave owner, the other, his slave.  The poem closes with the lines: “And it wasn’t rape./In spite of her raw terror. And his whip.” 

The poem ends in a remarkable and unexpected way, one that offers a judgment of what happened, but also lays out obvious refutations of that judgment in a stark and effective way.  It’s possible that the ending will outrage readers, and thus I’d say the poem could not have been accomplished by imitative or derivative or “safe” writing strategy.  It requires a complex understanding of seemingly contradictory human emotions – regardless of how those understandings might be politically or socially exploited in the next breath.  And so, publishing poem is not only an act of courage, but the actual writing of the poem requires a fidelity to something greater than the social or academic standing of its author.   

It seems to me that the poet was obviously moved by something (in the act of writing this poem), as I mentioned earlier, something that transcends those initial, largely imitative, impulses to write.  Part of that something has to do with seeing or imagining the world cleanly (or as clean as one can) in the way that a photographer might do so. Not that this visioning is emotionless, or as universal as can be, or politically correct, or careful to account for all the different perspectives on it’s topic – but that it’s as unburdened from externals as it can be (i.e., it’s honest), that the poem “risks” it’s own complete and abject failure for departing from the staid and trying to present something that’s intrinsically valid and unforced.   No, I don’t have a laundry list of subjects for you.

I don’t want to suggest that the poem is non-formulaic merely because it’s edgy (and thus imply that anything socially edgy will be non-formulaic and hence good, affecting poetry).  If the poem we’re willfully edgy, we’d still have the same problem – the poet could come down on one side or another (say, the woman empowered herself by having a child with her master, or that it was simply coercive force used by the master on the noble slave) and we’d nod, and say “yep” and flip to the next page of the journal.  Instead though, we have something that’s clear and complex in an area where a lesser poet might feel pressured to “say something” instead of just “looking.”   

**

It might also be useful to consider young poets who don’t continue in the formulaic mode, but who die as poets – they begin to think that they can escape the other, the reader, loose themselves in uncontrolled ramble, and in so doing lose the ability to communicate – they begin to rate even their compositional thoughts against the great standards, and in so doing self-censor into the most crabbed and defensive thoughts and expressions – they don’t write out of an internal impulse, and hence simply stop writing when they fail to receive enough external validation (academic career) – they begin to write “through” poetry, and thus abandon it when they realize they should have simply been writing essays or philosophy all along.   I’d argue that each of these turnings away from poetry could be traced back to a false perception of what poetry is, or a dashed (or realized) hope of what poetry can do *for* them via the academic/social cachet of their being “a poet.”

As a thought-experiment – what if you, the young (or old) poet, were the last human being left alive on earth.  The plague (or a mysterious force, a la, “The Quiet Earth”) were to remove everyone else, leaving you with enough canned food, shelter, and creature comforts to live for decades, what would you do with your time?  Regardless of audience, true poets would continue to write poetry, both for the love of fashioning (the act of making) and the love of the thing made.  While there are many types of love (and while love is one of the most basic and common motivating forces in our lives), I think we often do things to help define ourselves in relation to others.  Perhaps that’s inescapable.  However, I do want to suggest that much verse is argument we have with others, argument in front of audience, argument designed to sway or change the audience’s perception of either an issue or the poet; whereas, as Yeats noted, poetry is argument we have with ourselves, argument which needs no others but which is so openly grounded in “the common human experience” that it very easily bridges times and cultures, leaving the author oddly behind.

From the poets who flame out or never quite get going (whose creative impulse, I think, to write is not so much *false* as entwined with a kind of essentialist or extra-poetical perspective) the poets who simply “no longer write,” I think we can draw some lessons.  One is that you must slay yourself and your theories every so often;  that too much insistence, too much vision of what you *want* the poems to ultimately look like, dooms the poems in their moment of conception.     

I may come back to this with some other lessons, but I wanted to say that while there are a thousand reasons not to write poetry, and no very great material lure to write poetry, we continue to have young poets creating unified bodies of work, each element of which is both unique and unmistakably part of a whole corpus: Mueske, Abramson, Guest, Fanning, Bauer – each has *voice* and presence.

 

For the young poet (and by this I only mean those new to poetry, regardless of chronological age), poetry often begins as raw self-expression – either through the desire to name the world one finds oneself within, or to name that self.  Sometimes poetry will begin in mimicry of the loved (we write poetry because we’ve read poems, loved those poems, and wish to add to poetry or make something like that which we love; or we love something about a poet and think that writing poetry might help us “be like them”).  In either case it’s a rather *willful* act of shaping, be it deliberate or spontaneous. 

We can make another distinction in saying that we wish to name or make that which we love and admire, or we wish to be humans *capable* of doing so;  while the idea of training oneself into capability might work for mature individuals (who might have an analogous understanding via another artistic discipline), often people hope for a shorter and easier route, which is that the art form (poetry) will align with something essential about them, or that poetry will arise from them, in a kind of spontaneous way.  That having *felt* and loved, they will be able to project that feeling and love within a poem (or have those feelings called out of them by the act of writing.)  The short form of this is that Reading and Thinking/Feeling *equals* the ability to Write in a way that produces an equal kind of Thinking/Feeling in others. Adoption of this idea often leads to the fantasy of the poet as an enlightened being, or an elemental being, or a primal being – as though they were lighting rods for. . .ah, and here it gets tricky.  For I’m thinking of that which evokes poetry from us.  Not that which the poem is about, nor the way in which it’s made, but that very primal impulse.

I think it’s misleading to suggest that people love poems (love poems enough to attempt to become poets) *only* because they admire a poem’s subject, or the method (order) and means a poem uses to shape itself and distinguish itself from ordinary language.  There’s something else – the mysterious thing that evokes poetry, which we see shadowed in the poems themselves.  Something moved Li Po.  Something moved Rilke.  And given the various costs of poetry, it’s hard to imagine that something is a mere love of words, or a kind of chronic weakness, an addiction or predisposition to versify.   It’s that calling out of the human, that evocation, which truly bridges cultures in the ways that the longer narrative arts – like the novel, often cannot. 

So what is this thing? - this perhaps secret desire to be moved, to be called out, to be drawn into expression?  Can we pull back the veil and say that each poet creates their own psychology of making, their own myths and desires?  Or does that just push the question back a bit, reformulate it in such a way as to exclude certain avenues of thought?

While the making can be a mundane process of work (and indeed, poetry instructors will often over-empahsize the work, both out of a kind of inferiority complex vis a vis academic writing with it’s footnotes and air of objectivity, and out of a real understanding that young poets are most often just *sloppy*) the act of being called into making is something that all young poets seem to hunger for.  In fact, it’s what I’m most often asked about whenever I speak publicly about poetry (panel discussions, post-reading, etc.).  It seems that everyone is fascinated by the “why” of it, not the “how” of it.  Given that the “why” is subjective, and given that I’ve had my fill (up to my eyeballs) of well-turned out demi-poets blithely going on about writing as though they’ve culled their thoughts from various new age spirituality pamphlets and twelve-step programs, my usual response to such things is to try to immediately deflect the conversation into craft-issues, which while they do not directly address the act of creation, do at least shadow it by providing a concrete context (of what the act of creation has produced (a single poem) in a particular instance).

From all I’ve read and seen, the process of writing poetry generally varies considerably.  Even so, it’s tempting to instruct (as I have, and will) young poets to keep notebooks, abandon note books, work aloud, read widely, recite in front of others, and so forth – not because these things have intrinsic value, nor that even a majority of them are represented in the processes of mature poets, but because of the discipline and perspective they might  provide.  I think it would provide very little educational good for me to say to my students that in terms of process I tend to follow no fixed pattern of writing, although all my poems are characterized by working aloud and heavily drafting while the poem is “hot.”  But I do think it would do some good to have any beginning poet sit down and map out the basic phoneme sounds of English - not because the phoneme has a lot of contemporary scientific value as far as language mapping or acquisition theories, but rather because it’s a great way to get students to focus on the dominant and multiple sounds within words.

Thus there’s a set of glossy “intro poetry” anecdotes and terminology and poetics that we all tend to adopt, something that provides parameters, or aesthetic lode-stones, but a number of poets never seem to get beyond them.  They write a kind of formulaic and “acceptable” verse that steers itself though the wickets that are so blandly planted in the most basic discussions of poetry – call it McVerse or McPoetry if you will.  While I don’t think this type of verse is characteristic of our better contemporary poets, it does inform the broad “backdrop” of poems that are published and circulated because they’ve some topical interest and they’re “really not at all that bad” or “good enough.” 

In some cases, these formulaic poems have *vast* social importance, but generally fail on an artistic/aesthetic level if they’re read by someone who is already deeply sympathetic to their subject or arguments (or even their types of subjects or arguments.)  It’s a complex issue for me.  On one hand you have a kind of flood of mediocre poetry that’s potentially socially transformative (in that it broadens perspectives), and on the other hand, it’s mediocre poetry which, I’d argue, encodes particular kinds of false-consciousness (e.g., appeal to both inherited aesthetic authority via form, appeal to unbridled/spontaneous authenticity via assumptions about the art-form itself), even as it works against other kinds of false-consciousness (e.g., racism, sexism).

To arc back to my opening thoughts, I wonder if poets writing in formulaic verse ever transcend those initial impulses – if they’re still writing imitatively, or derivatively, or because they (tenure or no) have never learned to let go of that *willfulness* in shaping their poems. 

As an example of a non-formulaic poem, a poem that’s not *willful* in leading the reader to a pre-arranged conclusion, I’m reminded of a poem by Marylin Nelson Waniek called “The Chosen,” which imagines the relationship of two of her ancestors, one a slave owner, the other, his slave.  The poem closes with the lines: “And it wasn’t rape./In spite of her raw terror. And his whip.” 

The poem ends in a remarkable and unexpected way, one that offers a judgment of what happened, but also lays out obvious refutations of that judgment in a stark and effective way.  It’s possible that the ending will outrage readers, and thus I’d say the poem could not have been accomplished by imitative or derivative or “safe” writing strategy.  It requires a complex understanding of seemingly contradictory human emotions – regardless of how those understandings might be politically or socially exploited in the next breath.  And so, publishing poem is not only an act of courage, but the actual writing of the poem requires a fidelity to something greater than the social or academic standing of its author.   

It seems to me that the poet was obviously moved by something (in the act of writing this poem), as I mentioned earlier, something that transcends those initial, largely imitative, impulses to write.  Part of that something has to do with seeing or imagining the world cleanly (or as clean as one can) in the way that a photographer might do so. Not that this visioning is emotionless, or as universal as can be, or politically correct, or careful to account for all the different perspectives on it’s topic – but that it’s as unburdened from externals as it can be (i.e., it’s honest), that the poem “risks” it’s own complete and abject failure for departing from the staid and trying to present something that’s intrinsically valid and unforced.   No, I don’t have a laundry list of subjects for you.

I don’t want to suggest that the poem is non-formulaic merely because it’s edgy (and thus imply that anything socially edgy will be non-formulaic and hence good, affecting poetry).  If the poem we’re willfully edgy, we’d still have the same problem – the poet could come down on one side or another (say, the woman empowered herself by having a child with her master, or that it was simply coercive force used by the master on the noble slave) and we’d nod, and say “yep” and flip to the next page of the journal.  Instead though, we have something that’s clear and complex in an area where a lesser poet might feel pressured to “say something” instead of just “looking.”   

**

It might also be useful to consider young poets who don’t continue in the formulaic mode, but who die as poets – they begin to think that they can escape the other, the reader, loose themselves in uncontrolled ramble, and in so doing lose the ability to communicate – they begin to rate even their compositional thoughts against the great standards, and in so doing self-censor into the most crabbed and defensive thoughts and expressions – they don’t write out of an internal impulse, and hence simply stop writing when they fail to receive enough external validation (academic career) – they begin to write “through” poetry, and thus abandon it when they realize they should have simply been writing essays or philosophy all along.   I’d argue that each of these turnings away from poetry could be traced back to a false perception of what poetry is, or a dashed (or realized) hope of what poetry can do *for* them via the academic/social cachet of their being “a poet.”

As a thought-experiment – what if you, the young (or old) poet, were the last human being left alive on earth.  The plague (or a mysterious force, a la, “The Quiet Earth”) were to remove everyone else, leaving you with enough canned food, shelter, and creature comforts to live for decades, what would you do with your time?  Regardless of audience, true poets would continue to write poetry, both for the love of fashioning (the act of making) and the love of the thing made.  While there are many types of love (and while love is one of the most basic and common motivating forces in our lives), I think we often do things to help define ourselves in relation to others.  Perhaps that’s inescapable.  However, I do want to suggest that much verse is argument we have with others, argument in front of audience, argument designed to sway or change the audience’s perception of either an issue or the poet; whereas, as Yeats noted, poetry is argument we have with ourselves, argument which needs no others but which is so openly grounded in “the common human experience” that it very easily bridges times and cultures, leaving the author oddly behind.

From the poets who flame out or never quite get going (whose creative impulse, I think, to write is not so much *false* as entwined with a kind of essentialist or extra-poetical perspective) the poets who simply “no longer write,” I think we can draw some lessons.  One is that you must slay yourself and your theories every so often;  that too much insistence, too much vision of what you *want* the poems to ultimately look like, dooms the poems in their moment of conception.     

I may come back to this with some other lessons, but I wanted to say that while there are a thousand reasons not to write poetry, and no very great material lure to write poetry, we continue to have young poets creating unified bodies of work, each element of which is both unique and unmistakably part of a whole corpus: Mueske, Abramson, Guest, Fanning, Bauer – each has *voice* and presence.

Comments

[Miriam]

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Miriam

http://www.craigslistposter.info