The Whole Thing About Poetry
At the Juniper Festival a few weeks ago there was a panel about The Future of Poetry. The panelists were Evie Shockley, Cathy Park Hong, Heather Christle and Rebecca Wolfe. It was good, cutting edge, perhaps too polite but definitely the sort of thing that is supposed to happen at panels.
Rebecca Wolff said poetry doesn’t matter and it sucks that poets, who are smart and engaged people, are wasting their lives on something cloistered and anonymous (my words) when they should become civil servants, business people, people who can make a difference. Essentially, the world is missing the poet’s perspective in areas where they are needed.
I could be paraphrasing this in an unacceptable way, just so you know. But that was the gist.
But today in Paper Cuts, Gregory Cowles responds to an essay by David Biespiel in Poetry, where Biespiel begins, “America’s poets have a minimal presence in American civic discourse and a minuscule public role in the life of American democracy. I find this condition perplexing and troubling—both for poetry and for democracy.”
Cowles’s response is that, well, it’s not just poets who have a minimal presence in civic stuff. “Shouldn’t everyone be more engaged?” he asks.
The stupid poets are the ones who sit around card tables at the local Peace Action and try to figure out their community. They’re great people, though. Don’t get me wrong. Great scholars of later Chomsky, perhaps, and certainly a powerful and relevant group for keeping WalMart the fuck out of their city center. On the poetry front they can handily outline Pound’s fascism and name you all the Brontes and probably they’re okay with whatever Ginsburg did with whoever in the shower.
But they’re serving two masters.
Kierkegaard said, “God does not exist. He is eternal.” What a shakeup! Try telling my mom that God doesn’t exist. People want God to exist but existence doesn’t matter to God.
Poetry doesn’t get involved with politics. Poets oughtn’t care about politics. It’s not their job. Politics are to poetry as existence is to God: not a thing.
Levinas said, “To know the good is already not to do the good.” What a shakeup! Try telling that to my ontologist. People always want to know the right thing to do so they can do it or not or whatever.
Poetry is the natural thing that is everything. I want to describe this prepositionally, like poetry is all around you, but that’s dumb. Poetry doesn’t exist (ink and paper does, but not poetry). I exist. I am all around. But instead of reading this read Emerson and sub in girl/woman as appropriate:
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality!
Read Byrne:
THAT OLD CHESTNUT ABOUT WHETHER
TO SAVE THE BABY OR THE PAINTING
FROM THE BURNING BUILDINGSilver tears
rained
from Charlene’s eyessending me
dashing to the bus
for a lost glovelosing my notebook
with a month’s workanswering that question
for myself after:Would you give your full notebook
for a found glovewith
Gladly! Gladly!
No thrill greater than the finding of it
on the floor beneath the very last seatexcept the triumph of my I Found It march maybe
& the open hand of Charlene
& Charlene’s eyes & smile.Poetry, my beloved secondary,
steps back for poetry.
Read Christle:
I suppose I want to say that everything feels awfully and equally auspicious. That’s the nature of prophecy and poetry, I think, that as soon as you look at a thing it swells up with meaning and significance. Or “lights up.” And that is also where the hurt comes in. That meaning is all in our heads, and the distance between the intensely physical belief in the significance of what we’ve seen and the wild meaninglessness of the world as it proceeds without regard for that belief seems designed for the specific purpose of heartbreak. To keep living (and writing) as if unaware of the wild meaninglessness is the saddest happiness on the planet.
Tags: Heather Christle, mairead byrne, Paper Cuts, rebecca wolff
“Poetry is the natural thing that is everything.” This would be all well and good if it were true, but poetry is neither God nor good in the sense that you mean (re: Levinas’s and Kierkegaard’s essentialism). Language is what is. And poetry is a potentiality within language. But unlike “good” and “God” it has to be made. You want to say poetry is natural, but that’s not quite right. You might say art is natural as well, but the same problem exists.
No, but it must be natural. It might not “come naturally,” as the saying goes, but in the theory I’m positing, what does not come naturally, or what is not essential, is either not poetry or — at most — it’s bad poetry. (Thus an Aristotelian problem arises: how bad can something be before it is not that thing.)
I take your point, though, that “Language is what is,” and that is prior to poetry. But, like Rodin or whoever who just found the sculpture in the rock, I think poetry is not the language but the other thing.
“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree.”
Does anyone else get frustrated by how Emerson seems to have already said everything they’re thinking? Every time I’m like “Oh damn, that’s a great idea!” I inevitably discover that Emerson went there already.
The Wolf comment is strange. Is there any reason those whom she mentions can’t read poetry, can’t write it in their spare time? And why does she assume that the creation of poetry does not “make a difference?”
it’s like an infinite loop: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for US than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole Cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”
Thanks for the thoughtful post. I’m assuming you’re glancing to Duncan “Poetry, a Natural Thing. “This beauty is an inner persistence/ toward the source/striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,/ a call we heard and answer/ in the lateness of the world…” Like a salmon, as Duncan would have it, the poet strives toward a source she does not know in advance (cf. Levinas), or possibly might not ever know, but guided by an impulse larger than herself.
Essentialism? Precisely the opposite. (see Levinas, Otherwise that Being, or Beyond Essence) The politically savvy salmon would act on his own rational, pre-established principals. He might make it, but he would be abandoning the abandonment– in the sense of both surrender AND going beyond”–that is poetry.”The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment.”-Emerson
Biespiel’s is asking poetry to do something other than what it does so well: opening to risk and possibility. That’s the unacknowledged legislation: the possibility that can’t reduced to an agenda. Politicians can’t bear the risk of poetry.
oops–that would be ‘principle’
By the way, Adam, the Franz Kline painting perfectly embodies your point!
Rebecca Wolff appears to suffer from the Ryan Adams Syndrome, i.e., someone who, as an artist, occasionally writes lid-popping lines but as a person is nauseating, unpleasant, and immature.
Seriously, one of those people I think, “I hope she never has childr–oh fuck. You’re kidding, right?”
i dunno man, anytime someone says “poetry is” this or can’t do this or what-have-you, i bristle. as far as the political thing goes, it’s a nice thought, but everything’s political at a certain level, especially the written world. a worldview is presented by a writer – not necessarily theirs, but a worldview nonetheless. that worldview is inherently political in what it values, talks about, ignores, etc. if you’re advocating that poets purposefully walk around unaware that their writing transmits political and social information, i don’t know that i can buy that.
aside from that, sure. but poetry is and can do whatever it fucking wants, as long as it does it well.
i like your talk jon.
“Poetry is the natural thing that is everything.” This would be all well and good if it were true, but poetry is neither God nor good in the sense that you mean (re: Levinas’s and Kierkegaard’s essentialism). Language is what is. And poetry is a potentiality within language. But unlike “good” and “God” it has to be made. You want to say poetry is natural, but that’s not quite right. You might say art is natural as well, but the same problem exists.
No, but it must be natural. It might not “come naturally,” as the saying goes, but in the theory I’m positing, what does not come naturally, or what is not essential, is either not poetry or — at most — it’s bad poetry. (Thus an Aristotelian problem arises: how bad can something be before it is not that thing.)
I take your point, though, that “Language is what is,” and that is prior to poetry. But, like Rodin or whoever who just found the sculpture in the rock, I think poetry is not the language but the other thing.
“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree.”
Does anyone else get frustrated by how Emerson seems to have already said everything they’re thinking? Every time I’m like “Oh damn, that’s a great idea!” I inevitably discover that Emerson went there already.
The Wolf comment is strange. Is there any reason those whom she mentions can’t read poetry, can’t write it in their spare time? And why does she assume that the creation of poetry does not “make a difference?”
it’s like an infinite loop: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for US than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole Cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”
Thanks for the thoughtful post. I’m assuming you’re glancing to Duncan “Poetry, a Natural Thing. “This beauty is an inner persistence/ toward the source/striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,/ a call we heard and answer/ in the lateness of the world…” Like a salmon, as Duncan would have it, the poet strives toward a source she does not know in advance (cf. Levinas), or possibly might not ever know, but guided by an impulse larger than herself.
Essentialism? Precisely the opposite. (see Levinas, Otherwise that Being, or Beyond Essence) The politically savvy salmon would act on his own rational, pre-established principals. He might make it, but he would be abandoning the abandonment– in the sense of both surrender AND going beyond”–that is poetry.”The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment.”-Emerson
Biespiel’s is asking poetry to do something other than what it does so well: opening to risk and possibility. That’s the unacknowledged legislation: the possibility that can’t reduced to an agenda. Politicians can’t bear the risk of poetry.
but, i think, that’s exactly what Adam said up there, just in different words, and focusing more on the political issues addressed. i may be drunk though, and using excessive commas.
oops–that would be ‘principle’
By the way, Adam, the Franz Kline painting perfectly embodies your point!
I like this discussion. And like you I’m happy it’s here. But your comment is a bit muddled. Not quite sure how one can believe in transcendence and not also have the foundation of that argument be essentialist (“Essentialism? Precisely the opposite.”) . . . essentialist doesn’t mean irrational. and you haven’t yet defined the opposite of essentialist. “the salmon will” . . . that doesn’t quite do it though . . . there’s a platonic ideal that undergirds both your and Adam’s position (and the position of the romantics/transcendentalists) that keeps essentialism at the base of your discussion regardless of that damn salmon. Levinas is interesting because he’s a transcendentalist attempting to use poststructuralism to divorce the Platonic foundation of transcendence and keep its potential (re: holocaust, slavery, genocide) at bay. That doesn’t mean he’s successful in doing so.
I’m not sure that I care what poetry is and what it does or doesn’t do, but to call it nature or say it’s all around us waiting to be unveiled by the poet that “sees things as they are” seems absurd to me. The poet sees. That’s about as far as I get. This “surrender and beyond” stuff is a bit aggrandizing though.
Folks want to talk about the transcendent/romantic nature of poetry, okay, but you can’t get the essential out of that mix, or its historical baggage. at heart it’s an argument about aesthetics that props up an elitist position (who gets to say what good/bad poetry is, blah blah).
this 19th century shit drives me batty.
agreed with the exception of the “well,” which seems beside the point. it does what it does no matter. I think I stop there.
ugh. that was supposed to be a reply to jon/jereme
Rebecca Wolff appears to suffer from the Ryan Adams Syndrome, i.e., someone who, as an artist, occasionally writes lid-popping lines but as a person is nauseating, unpleasant, and immature.
Seriously, one of those people I think, “I hope she never has childr–oh fuck. You’re kidding, right?”
i dunno man, anytime someone says “poetry is” this or can’t do this or what-have-you, i bristle. as far as the political thing goes, it’s a nice thought, but everything’s political at a certain level, especially the written world. a worldview is presented by a writer – not necessarily theirs, but a worldview nonetheless. that worldview is inherently political in what it values, talks about, ignores, etc. if you’re advocating that poets purposefully walk around unaware that their writing transmits political and social information, i don’t know that i can buy that.
aside from that, sure. but poetry is and can do whatever it fucking wants, as long as it does it well.
i like your talk jon.
but, i think, that’s exactly what Adam said up there, just in different words, and focusing more on the political issues addressed. i may be drunk though, and using excessive commas.
I like this discussion. And like you I’m happy it’s here. But your comment is a bit muddled. Not quite sure how one can believe in transcendence and not also have the foundation of that argument be essentialist (“Essentialism? Precisely the opposite.”) . . . essentialist doesn’t mean irrational. and you haven’t yet defined the opposite of essentialist. “the salmon will” . . . that doesn’t quite do it though . . . there’s a platonic ideal that undergirds both your and Adam’s position (and the position of the romantics/transcendentalists) that keeps essentialism at the base of your discussion regardless of that damn salmon. Levinas is interesting because he’s a transcendentalist attempting to use poststructuralism to divorce the Platonic foundation of transcendence and keep its potential (re: holocaust, slavery, genocide) at bay. That doesn’t mean he’s successful in doing so.
I’m not sure that I care what poetry is and what it does or doesn’t do, but to call it nature or say it’s all around us waiting to be unveiled by the poet that “sees things as they are” seems absurd to me. The poet sees. That’s about as far as I get. This “surrender and beyond” stuff is a bit aggrandizing though.
Folks want to talk about the transcendent/romantic nature of poetry, okay, but you can’t get the essential out of that mix, or its historical baggage. at heart it’s an argument about aesthetics that props up an elitist position (who gets to say what good/bad poetry is, blah blah).
this 19th century shit drives me batty.
agreed with the exception of the “well,” which seems beside the point. it does what it does no matter. I think I stop there.
ugh. that was supposed to be a reply to jon/jereme
Who cares what Poetry magazine has to say about the state of poetry? It’s responsible for sucking a good portion of life out of it—making the uninitiated think that Billy Collins verse is the top of the line. Also, next time you make witty remarks about Ginsberg (and dropping Kierkegaard knowledge), you might want to spell his name right. :)
Going by her comments, Rebecca Wolff sounds intolerable. Basically a version of a cranky old person complaining about loud music. Seems as if she’s been made into a cantankerous individual by being around poetry for so long—writing it, editing it—and is just burned out. Instead of going on to do something else that might make her more happy, she moans about much everything sucks, how useless it is and how stupid people are, poisoning the genre with her foul mood. Not only this, she liable to make irresponsible or hurtful claims.
As for what Christle says, all of that is just as true for fiction. Continuing to create even though it’s meaningless to a degree is the nature of all art. It’s frustrates me when people single poetry out as this futile pursuit.
agreed.
A lot of people who ought to be smarter tend to base their opinion of poetry on a few so called poets. Most people writing poetry are writing crap and they are better off lighting their pubes on fire and dancing around calling it art.
I downright hate most poetry but I write poetry – I like fistfights, guns, calling the other guy a cocksucker and pissing in the wind if need be – I like to drink, I used to do drugs that weren’t prescribed and so on – in other words I am not like one of the pussies writing their tinkly pretty shit. I write poetry mainly and consider it a life pursuit. I don’t write a lot of fiction because it is a lesser pursuit that uses a lesser language and only one of 18-21 basic plot lines. best said as – prose is putting the right word in the right order, poetry is putting the best words in their best order – I agree with this but of course I would.
I guess what I am trying to say here is simple – fuck you if you think I am inconsequential, fuck you if you don’t try harder to understand the language of poetry, fuck you if you think poetry is not necessary. without poetry there is no language or without poetry the language dies. I think fuck is a perfectly god expression used by a great number of intelligent men and women. One’s especially that check the spelling before they submit comment.
Who cares what Poetry magazine has to say about the state of poetry? It’s responsible for sucking a good portion of life out of it—making the uninitiated think that Billy Collins verse is the top of the line. Also, next time you make witty remarks about Ginsberg (and dropping Kierkegaard knowledge), you might want to spell his name right. :)
Going by her comments, Rebecca Wolff sounds intolerable. Basically a version of a cranky old person complaining about loud music. Seems as if she’s been made into a cantankerous individual by being around poetry for so long—writing it, editing it—and is just burned out. Instead of going on to do something else that might make her more happy, she moans about much everything sucks, how useless it is and how stupid people are, poisoning the genre with her foul mood. Not only this, she liable to make irresponsible or hurtful claims.
As for what Christle says, all of that is just as true for fiction. Continuing to create even though it’s meaningless to a degree is the nature of all art. It’s frustrates me when people single poetry out as this futile pursuit.
agreed.
A lot of people who ought to be smarter tend to base their opinion of poetry on a few so called poets. Most people writing poetry are writing crap and they are better off lighting their pubes on fire and dancing around calling it art.
I downright hate most poetry but I write poetry – I like fistfights, guns, calling the other guy a cocksucker and pissing in the wind if need be – I like to drink, I used to do drugs that weren’t prescribed and so on – in other words I am not like one of the pussies writing their tinkly pretty shit. I write poetry mainly and consider it a life pursuit. I don’t write a lot of fiction because it is a lesser pursuit that uses a lesser language and only one of 18-21 basic plot lines. best said as – prose is putting the right word in the right order, poetry is putting the best words in their best order – I agree with this but of course I would.
I guess what I am trying to say here is simple – fuck you if you think I am inconsequential, fuck you if you don’t try harder to understand the language of poetry, fuck you if you think poetry is not necessary. without poetry there is no language or without poetry the language dies. I think fuck is a perfectly god expression used by a great number of intelligent men and women. One’s especially that check the spelling before they submit comment.
cisum duol tuoba gninialpmoc nosrep dlo yknarc a
totally, got it.
Is it worth it? Let me work it.
I put my bang down, flip it and reverse it.
.ti esrever dna ti pilf ,nwod gnab ym tup I
.ti esrever dna ti pilf ,nwod gnab ym tup I
-Missy Elliott
cisum duol tuoba gninialpmoc nosrep dlo yknarc a
totally, got it.
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Is it worth it? Let me work it.
I put my bang down, flip it and reverse it.
.ti esrever dna ti pilf ,nwod gnab ym tup I
.ti esrever dna ti pilf ,nwod gnab ym tup I
-Missy Elliott
I did get the feeling after our panel that some kids thought I was suggesting that they shouldn’t write poetry anymore. Everyone looked so glum. This is not what I was suggesting. I’ll post the full extent of my comments on this site later so anyone who wants to can read them. Assholes who want to talk about my children can die immediately.
Rebecca Wolff
I did get the feeling after our panel that some kids thought I was suggesting that they shouldn’t write poetry anymore. Everyone looked so glum. This is not what I was suggesting. I’ll post the full extent of my comments on this site later so anyone who wants to can read them. Assholes who want to talk about my children can die immediately.
Rebecca Wolff
Here’s what I said at the Juniper Festival panel:
The Miseducation of Rebecca Wolff
Since this is a panel on the Future of Poetry, this assumes there is a past, which is a kind of history. So I’ll start with personal history.
I was an undergraduate student here, at UMass, having dropped out of Bennington, where I was a poetry major, which meant that I took poetry workshops. There were a few poetry seminars being offered but I had never heard of Rene Char and no one was able to convince me that it might be interesting to read about him and talk about him, etc. After two years in retail—a bookstore then a health-food store—I became a Massachusetts resident and moved to Northampton to conclude my education, or so I thought, in that at the time I had not heard of graduate school. I’m not kidding.
At UMass I took a Bachelor’s Degree with an Individual Concentration in Poetry and Self-Consciousness, a degree I made up myself, and which allowed me to take poetry workshops and to complement these with courses in Psychology, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy.
I went to Iowa because someone mentioned it to me—I applied only there, and it never occurred to me that I was going in preparation for a brilliant career in poetics or in the academy. I was going because they were going to pay me to write poetry for two years. At Iowa there were some seminars offered but again I really didn’t have any clue what they were talking about—Paul Celan, George Oppen, Michael Palmer—and so I just took workshops and a course in editing at the Iowa Review.
You could conclude from this brief and incomplete history that I have been exceedingly incurious, and that is one way of looking at it. I more like to see it that I was able to construe myself as a-historical. I was totally dedicated to writing poetry, and did so plentifully and with conviction, without any sense that this was something that I might do “for a living,” or, more importantly perhaps, that there was a poetry culture, or community, or telos or ethos of poetry. That I was nominally prepared for teaching by my MFA degree did not mean that I would enjoy teaching, or that it would come naturally to me. I continued to work in retail and service environments of various kinds until I started Fence.
Fence, then, has been my real education, and I guess you could say that it’s been a public education. In short, I was exceedingly unschooled in ideas, when I started Fence—all action, no talk—but have through it been exposed to most of the major historical/literary concepts and constructs which seem to persist (community, context, coterie, identity, subjectivity). I seem to be able to connect the dots. In addition, I have grown old, and attained a certain curmudgeonly perch.
The future of poetry: I see a lot of younger poets embracing historicity, and context, and also struggling with futility, as a theme and as a function of poetry. I also see a lot of poets exhibiting different approaches to dealing with what I will call “self-y-ness.” I concur with poetry’s futility, and wish to support it: Despite a growing self-congratulatory vibe amongst poets who feel that their projects, or their community involvements, represent a kind of trickling-down cloud of supercomputing intellectual progressivism, poetry is not activism, or at least not now it’s not. There have been times at which, contexts in which, poetry could be activism, but those times are gone for now in the United States of America, and to think otherwise is to engage in a gross relativism. Poets in the academy are in a position to do good in the abstract, but they would do much better to get teaching certificates and teach elementary school. Poets in the academy in general would do much better to disband and sign up for some community organizing for a year or two or three or four, or get a social work degree and help out with the infrastructure, or run for local government. Now that’s poetry.
Aside from what I see as the well-intentioned but misguided application of some of the best minds of our generation to materially irrelevant content, the proverbial fiddling while Rome is burning in the Emperor’s new clothes, on a day-to-day level as I continue to make Fence function I grow astonished at poetry’s self-seriousness, combined with its industriousness. I worry that poetry has become an obfuscating cloud, seeded with drops who would do well to condense, drop out, and soak in.
Lest I leave you thinking that I find nothing to applaud or encourage in the Future of Poetry for the next ten years, I want to leave you with at least a name-drop of a quartet of youngish poets, all of whom I publish: Khalil Huffman, Aaron Kunin, Ariana Reines, and Catherine Wagner. Each of these poets in different registers confronts or trumpets a complicated, implicated American selfhood; a haplessness of consciousness; and the language that yet comes upon us. Here’s a brief poem by Catherine Wagner. [followed by reading of poem from My New Job]
Here’s what I said at the Juniper Festival panel:
The Miseducation of Rebecca Wolff
Since this is a panel on the Future of Poetry, this assumes there is a past, which is a kind of history. So I’ll start with personal history.
I was an undergraduate student here, at UMass, having dropped out of Bennington, where I was a poetry major, which meant that I took poetry workshops. There were a few poetry seminars being offered but I had never heard of Rene Char and no one was able to convince me that it might be interesting to read about him and talk about him, etc. After two years in retail—a bookstore then a health-food store—I became a Massachusetts resident and moved to Northampton to conclude my education, or so I thought, in that at the time I had not heard of graduate school. I’m not kidding.
At UMass I took a Bachelor’s Degree with an Individual Concentration in Poetry and Self-Consciousness, a degree I made up myself, and which allowed me to take poetry workshops and to complement these with courses in Psychology, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy.
I went to Iowa because someone mentioned it to me—I applied only there, and it never occurred to me that I was going in preparation for a brilliant career in poetics or in the academy. I was going because they were going to pay me to write poetry for two years. At Iowa there were some seminars offered but again I really didn’t have any clue what they were talking about—Paul Celan, George Oppen, Michael Palmer—and so I just took workshops and a course in editing at the Iowa Review.
You could conclude from this brief and incomplete history that I have been exceedingly incurious, and that is one way of looking at it. I more like to see it that I was able to construe myself as a-historical. I was totally dedicated to writing poetry, and did so plentifully and with conviction, without any sense that this was something that I might do “for a living,” or, more importantly perhaps, that there was a poetry culture, or community, or telos or ethos of poetry. That I was nominally prepared for teaching by my MFA degree did not mean that I would enjoy teaching, or that it would come naturally to me. I continued to work in retail and service environments of various kinds until I started Fence.
Fence, then, has been my real education, and I guess you could say that it’s been a public education. In short, I was exceedingly unschooled in ideas, when I started Fence—all action, no talk—but have through it been exposed to most of the major historical/literary concepts and constructs which seem to persist (community, context, coterie, identity, subjectivity). I seem to be able to connect the dots. In addition, I have grown old, and attained a certain curmudgeonly perch.
The future of poetry: I see a lot of younger poets embracing historicity, and context, and also struggling with futility, as a theme and as a function of poetry. I also see a lot of poets exhibiting different approaches to dealing with what I will call “self-y-ness.” I concur with poetry’s futility, and wish to support it: Despite a growing self-congratulatory vibe amongst poets who feel that their projects, or their community involvements, represent a kind of trickling-down cloud of supercomputing intellectual progressivism, poetry is not activism, or at least not now it’s not. There have been times at which, contexts in which, poetry could be activism, but those times are gone for now in the United States of America, and to think otherwise is to engage in a gross relativism. Poets in the academy are in a position to do good in the abstract, but they would do much better to get teaching certificates and teach elementary school. Poets in the academy in general would do much better to disband and sign up for some community organizing for a year or two or three or four, or get a social work degree and help out with the infrastructure, or run for local government. Now that’s poetry.
Aside from what I see as the well-intentioned but misguided application of some of the best minds of our generation to materially irrelevant content, the proverbial fiddling while Rome is burning in the Emperor’s new clothes, on a day-to-day level as I continue to make Fence function I grow astonished at poetry’s self-seriousness, combined with its industriousness. I worry that poetry has become an obfuscating cloud, seeded with drops who would do well to condense, drop out, and soak in.
Lest I leave you thinking that I find nothing to applaud or encourage in the Future of Poetry for the next ten years, I want to leave you with at least a name-drop of a quartet of youngish poets, all of whom I publish: Khalil Huffman, Aaron Kunin, Ariana Reines, and Catherine Wagner. Each of these poets in different registers confronts or trumpets a complicated, implicated American selfhood; a haplessness of consciousness; and the language that yet comes upon us. Here’s a brief poem by Catherine Wagner. [followed by reading of poem from My New Job]
So good to see/remember what you actually said, Rebecca!
So good to see/remember what you actually said, Rebecca!
I guess that my paraphrase was not too far off base, though I may have missed the affection for poetry that is evident here.
I guess that my paraphrase was not too far off base, though I may have missed the affection for poetry that is evident here.