Category Archives: Insights

Against Defending Poetry

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"The Sack of Rome..." by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre

Along with poems entitled “Ars Poetica,” essays entitled, “In Defense of Poetry,” or some variation on that theme, have circulated for decades. It occurs to me that the idea that poetry needs defending is as much in error as the idea that the Earth needs saving. In truth, if we humans sully our revolving petri dish of a planet so as to make it uninhabitable, it is not the Earth that will pay the ultimate price. In a small matter of perhaps a few billion years, the planet is likely to recover from its unfortunate little human experiment. So, really, it is ourselves we save by taking care of our environment.

Likewise, I believe that poetry is the natural expression of a healthy society. So, it is not that we need to defend poetry to the society in which we find ourselves, but that we must strive to remember our society to poetry’s importance. And yet, as much as I know that poetry has, in fact, “saved” me in my life, I do not believe that it is poetry’s job to “save” the world in which I live.

I often wonder about the poets who lived in the end times of a civilization. Where are the Roman poets who wrote just before the empire’s corrupt system of taxation and conscription precipitated its demise? Or the Mayan priests who writ large the ancient lore while their intricate and untenable corn bureaucracies starved their people to death? These bards are conspicuously unremembered by history.

Yet, no doubt, they existed. And perhaps, in their way, they made equivalent efforts to bring their people back to an understanding of the beauty and power of using language to transcends language. Before the Visigoths incinerated their scrolls, or their stone inscriptions crumbled, they, too, may have found a kind of personal salvation in the way a well-made poem can embrace human contradiction. Though words alone may have been insufficient to defend them from hostilities within or without, I know poetry is at once an act of courage, and, as Keats said, “comes … as naturally as the leaves to a tree.”

It requires no justification, no explanation, no defense.

Trust in Poetry

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The currency of trust

The conversation of poetry takes many forms. The following three types of conversation are metaphors that illustrate some of the trust dynamics at play in contemporary poetry. See if you recognize them–both the actual conversations, and the experience of the conversation, transposed onto the experience of reading certain poems.

The first is a conversation with that friend who is always at the effect of some terrible circumstance. They tell you, in detail, the latest mishap, and with such conviction that it would be difficult not to feel sorry for them–if you were naive enough not to realize, after mishap after mishap, and tale after tale, that with them, the drama will never end. But the more you try to inure yourself to their tales, the more dramatic they become. In the end, you can’t help but feel emotionally manipulated. Even if this person believes their own story, it is hard to trust them not to tug excessively hard, fast, and often at your heart strings.

The second kind of conversation is one among acquaintances, perhaps a group of smart freshmen undergraduates getting to know themselves and each other in uncertain new circumstances. Here wit is the currency of the conversation, a constant repartee. In this atmosphere of intellectual one-upsmanship, conversation is designed to hold the others at emotional arms’ length, never risking anything intimate unless it is couched in a sarcastic tone. Any sense of trust in what is being said is constantly subverted by clever, fast-paced ripostes. I have often left such gatherings with a deep sense of alienation.
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Poetry as Anthropology

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We come in peace

I curled open the first pages of The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry expecting to find an introduction like so many others to this type of book–full of generic exuberance for the editors’ generation. Instead, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion (I assume the introduction was written by both) made the following observations in 1982, which still seem directionally interesting nearly thirty years on. They wrote that, “…as a way of making the familiar strange again, they [contemporary British poets] have exchanged the received idea of poet as the-person-next-door, or knowing insider, for the attitude of the anthropologist or alien invader or remembering exile.”

While the enthusiasm for Martian persona poetry by Craig Raine and Christopher Reid seems like a hyperbolic extension of this principle, the idea of poet-as-anthropologist I find not only fascinating, but useful in understanding contemporary poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. In particular, it seems to answer “what comes next?” after a glut of confessional writing. They address this, as well, directly:

This development has been antipathetic to the production of a candidly personal poetry. Most of the devices developed by young poets are designed to emphasize the gap between themselves and their subjects. The poets are–to borrow a phrase from Seamus Heaney’s ‘Exposure’–’inner emigrés’: not inhabitants of their own live so much as intrigued observers, not victims but onlookers, not poets working in a confessional white heat but dramatists and story-tellers.

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John Keats, Blogger?

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“His letters are not simply a wonderful adjunct to his poems, but a vital and valuable part of them: they often serve as testing grounds for his theories and ideas, and always blend spontaneity and calculation in a way which allows us to see him in the round.”

-Andrew Motion, Keats

There are many reasons why poets take up other forms of writing. Not the least is a practical aspect. John Ashbery once pointed out that he, like most poets, can only write poetry for an hour or so per day–and so what to do with the rest of the hours in a day? Poets often write prose simply for the love of writing.

Baudelaire instructs us to “Always be a poet, even in prose.” Writing prose can be for some poets what it is for a specialized athlete to visit the gym–a way to stay limber and fit. But there are other, deeper needs fulfilled by supplementing poetry with prose. Keats’s letter writing is analogous to the modern phenomenon of poet-bloggers. And clearly, there are some timeless impulses held in common between the two.

One is the need for directness. Andrew Motion points out that “in his poems Keats cultivates a language which is carefully distanced from normal discourse. In his letters he writes with brilliant directness.” The gap has closed in most modern poetry between the diction of poetry and the diction of direct address (and now some poets even experiment with Tweets or, like Paul Muldoon, craft poems in the form of text messages). Yet despite the plainspoken nature of contemporary poetry, the art of poem craft differs considerably from impromptu direct address. Poetry is inherently self-conscious in that it is word-conscious and form-conscious–even in free verse.
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Beyond Survival

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My grandmother’s glass cabin, perched high in the Sandia Mountain Range of New Mexico, is a place I would visit each summer of my childhood without fail. This is my first time back since I left home for college, and with it, left childhood. Everything seems, although familiar, smaller as well–the drive up the mountain shorter, the cabin diminished, the ponds shallower and grasses shorter even than they were in my late adolescence.

New Mexico represents a spiritual home to me much more than the barren Sonoran desert where I spent the remaining eleven months of each formative year. As such, I wanted to bring my wife here more than anywhere. And I brought my adult self, too, as a bemused observer, along with a paperback copy of Christian Wiman’s collection of essays entitled Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet.

This place is dense with evocative glimpses of earlier selves. I have been rifling through internal snapshots like an old-time flip book, hoping the rapid succession of annual impressions might create a trajectory of motion that I could identify as “my development.”
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Necessary Ignorance

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“To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question one rates the poem’s perfection; question two rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem’s greatness becomes a relatively simple matter.”

-J. Evans Pritchard, PhD., “Understanding Poetry”

A recent comment by a fellow poet on my post about negative capability got me thinking about the dance between the known and the unknown in the creative act. Alejandro Escude points out that some poets seem to “have something to say and say it” rather than adopting a “neither here nor there approach.” He mentions poets in either camp that share certain stylistic qualities with their comrades in the same camp. And while I agree that William Stafford writes a very different kind of poetry than Sharon Olds, I still believe that it is actually negative capability that makes both of them first-rate poets.

In an early scene of the film version of Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams encourages his students to rip out the introduction to their set-text poetry anthology written by the fictitious J. Evans Pritchard, PhD. Dr. Pritchard’s essay is a striking, if hyperbolic, example of how literary criticism can stray so far from the creative act as to reduce the experience of a poem to an exercise in mathematical graphs. The repeated use of the word “objective” in relation to poetry–its “importance,” and how “artfully” it is “rendered”–makes me laugh every time.

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The Power of Not Knowing

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“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.”

-John Keats

In my life, my writing, and my appreciation of literature, I strive for awareness and understanding. I have done so in my life through the disciplines of theology and philosophy, in my writing through the tutelage of other writers, and in my appreciation of literature through the study of literary criticism. I have engaged each discipline, formally and informally, throughout my life. And so, I am myself one common denominator among these fields.

That said, I also recognize a dynamic interrelationship: my life influences my writing, and my writing influences my appreciation of the written word; conversely, my appreciation of the written word influences my writing, and my writing influences my life. With this interconnection in mind, I am also beginning to discover, and attempt to articulate, an important principle held in common among the three.

It stems from a phrase coined by an eighteenth-century English poet named John Keats, who said:

…at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously–I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

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Christian Wiman’s Riven Verse

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“There are keener griefs than God. / They come quietly, and in plain daylight, / Leaving us with nothing, and the means to feel it.”

-Christian Wiman, “This Mind of Dying”

Though this year’s edition of Poetry International is packed with poetic delights, the portfolio section on Christian Wiman knocked me out. Though the name sounded familiar, I recalled little of Wiman, except I suspected that by admitting this publicly, I would be admitting a hefty dose of ignorance. (My instincts here were right; turns out he’s the editor of Poetry. I even quoted one of his essays in a post I wrote last year.)

But the upside of ignorance is an untainted first impression, and here is mine: that I found a poet unabashedly touching upon God with neither irony nor simple-mindedness, sounding out complex and compact verse with intoxicating musicality. Here, I thought, is a modern Gerard Manley Hopkins completely unafraid to strike his note.

Here also, I thought, in fact, are the kind of poems I might one day write myself if I knew I did not have much more time to live. With this strange thought fresh in mind, I Googled Wiman, mostly to see if I could pre-order his third book, Every Riven Thing. Instead I discovered an article in The American Scholar, wherein he describes how falling in love and, soon after, being diagnosed with a terminal disease led him back to the fierce new kind of poetry now resting in my lap.
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The Democratization of Poetry

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The Magna Carta

One of my poems, “Recipe for the Broken“, is a finalist for inclusion in the Goodreads July newsletter. The newsletter is sent by email to over two million members of this social networking website for book lovers. As far as I know, that is a far greater circulation than even the most popular literary journals in print can boast. Apart from the exciting opportunity to reach a wider audience, I also decided to submit a poem as a kind of participant-observer in my ongoing informal research into alternative modes of publishing.

The contest goes like this: poets submit a single poem on the website, and from scores of submissions an editorial team picks six finalists to go on to a round of open voting. You can read the finalist poems for this month here and vote here. You need to be a member of Goodreads and also the ¡POETRY! group on Goodreads in order to vote. Voting ends, in this case, at midnight on July 2nd. Only the first-place poem is published in the email newsletter.

This is one example of the ongoing democratization of poetry–not only because it involves voting, but because it involves more generally the dissolution of intermediaries between author and reader. Laura Miller has a compelling argument for why similar trends, like the rise of self-publishing, are not necessarily such a good thing. As the intermediary “gatekeepers”–editors and publishers–are increasingly circumvented, the burden of discovering good writing shifts to the already overwhelmed and distracted reader.
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Next to Nothing by Chris Agee

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In his most recent collection, Next to Nothing, Chris Agee fuses voracious verbal intelligence with well-tuned musicality. But this is not why I am compelled to re-read this book. Written in the years following the death of his four-year-old daughter, Agee’s elegies ring with veracity, transcending reportage of paternal grief even as it details, in quiet and careful ways, sentiments and sensibilities I know from my own experience of loss to be true beyond true beyond achingly true.

One poem in particular, from the “Heartscapes” series, stopped me on the page:

Your Face

swims
in the window
where I wave
at the childminder’s
new child

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If There is Something to Desire by Vera Pavlova

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“You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.”

-Alexander Nikonov

Sacred Love Versus Profane Love by Giovanni Baglione

I have Kit Stolz to thank for turning me on to Vera Pavlova. I devoured her first collection in English, aptly titled If There is Something to Desire. Keen, startling, and erotic–poems of such love and longing have not made as deep an impression on me as since I first discovered Pablo Neruda. And it occurred to me: I have been attending the erotic in poetry with shyness and apprehension. For example, although I love and support the Artists’ Union Gallery, each year when their erotic poetry fundraiser reading rolls around, there is always some good reason I cannot attend.

Toward the end of my study in the Pacific MFA program, the poet Marvin Bell suggested in one of his lectures that instead of writing so many elegies to the dead, we might do well to write more love poems to the living. It occurred to me in that moment that I could be rightly accused of giving too much attention to Thanatos, at the expense of Eros. My recent reading of Vera Pavlova only added evidence to the prosecution. In fact, she might be speaking directly to me when she writes, in poem 15, in her characteristically direct manner:

Do you know what you lacked?
That dose of contempt without which
you cannot flip a woman on her back
to make her flounder like a turtle,
to make the heartless fool realize:
she cannot flip back on her own.

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Blogging the End That is the Beginning

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Tonight Val and I got to spend some time with Ken Jones, a friend of ours who was also a fellow resident during the nearly four years I lived in the seminary. He is now receiving hospice care in his room, lovingly supported by his wife. When we entered the room, he was arranging a music play list for his memorial service from his hospital bed, his glowing MacBook Pro resting on the over-bed table. Ken has also been blogging about his journey with cancer, and what now seem likely to be his final days with us in this world.

Western writing often treats death in fiction, but rarely have I read the words of an author knowingly in their final stage of life. Yet there is a longstanding tradition in Zen, practiced by monks and samurai alike, of writing death poems. The best of these poems capture the essence of one’s life, turning an aesthetic and philosophical gaze upon the often taboo subject of death. It occurs to me that this is similar to what Ken is doing with his blog.

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