by Chris Gavaler

Tim Seibles cuts straight to the heart. When I met him at his hotel to walk him over to my wife’s poetry class, conversation leapt from “nice weather” to “parents with Alzheimer’s” in a single bound. He was giving a reading that night and—because his most recent book, Fast Animal, includes five poems about Blade the Vampire-Hunter—visiting my Superheroes class the next morning.

Seibles was in high school when Marvel launched the character in 1973. He’s not the first black superhero—Black Panther debuted in Fantastic Four in 1966 , the Falcon in Captain America in 1969, and Luke Cage in his own title in 1972—but he beat Brother Voodoo to newsstands by two months. The comic book market was slumping, so Marvel was desperately mixing its superhero formula with blaxploitation and horror. Shaft hit theaters in 1971, Super Fly and Blacula in 1972. Hammer Films had been pounding out low budget Dracula and Frankenstein flicks for over a decade, but the Comics Code prohibited “walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism” until 1971, provided the horror was “handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high caliber literary works.”

Marvel pounced with Werewolf by Night, Tomb of Dracula, The Monster of Frankenstein, and a half dozen other horror-tinged titles. He sounds like a pseudonym, but flesh-and-blood writer Marv Wolfman moved to Marvel at the same moment, and soon he and artist Gene Colan were adding a black “vampire killer” to their Dracula cast.  I’ll let Seibles introduce him:

“Years ago, a pregnant woman was bitten by a vampire and turned. Her son was born with the thirst but, being half-human, he could walk in sunlight unharmed. Though vampires quietly dominate the world, he fights them—in part to prove his allegiance to humanity, in part to avenge his long isolation, being neither human, nor vampire. Because of his deadly expertise and weapon of choice, they call him: BLADE, THE DAYWALKER”

It’s hard not to read the character as a racial metaphor. Barack Obama turned thirteen when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade that year, and though President Nixon made no public comment, White House tapes reveal his opposition to abortion, except when “necessary,” as “when you have a black and a white. Or a rape.” I read all vampires as rapists, so it follows the horror of our cultural logic that the first black half-vampire would have to take a vow of blood celibacy. Note all those unconscious blonde women draped in Dracula’s arms too. Blade’s skin makes explicit more than one coded fear.

Seibles told my class that he saw the character as an “emblem of alienation,” a metaphor for what it feels like to be black in the U.S., to feel “both American and not.” The night before they heard him read his poem “Allison Wolff,” set in 1972 when “Race was the elephant / sitting on everybody.” Seibles was born in 1955, the year Emmett Till was lynched, and that horror haunts the teenaged Tim the first time he kisses a white girl.

Fast Animal includes a high school photo of Seibles, “circa 1971,” long before he met Blade. The half-vampire lurked around Marvel’s black and white magazines for a few years, vanished for a decade or so, then reawakened in the 90s.  I showed my class the 1998 film, which opens with Blade’s vampire-assaulted mother bleeding out on a delivery room table. David S. Goyer penned the screenplay, which also explains Goyer’s rise to dominance in the DC film universe since both his Batman Begins and Man of Steel screenplays open with the bloody deaths of their heroes’ mothers. Seibles said the two sequels weren’t as good, and both the Spike TV and anime series were news to him.

Apparently Wesley Snipes has spent the last three years in prison for tax evasion. He last played Blade in 2004, about when Seibles started using the character in his poetry. Seibles said it was George Bush who turned him, that feeling of “a deep trouble taking over the country,” or, as his Blade explains: “it’s almost like I can’t / wake up, like I’m living // in a movie, a kind of dream: / action-packed thriller.”

Political essayist Jonathan Schell drew the same conclusion in 2004. Since 9/11 and the War on Terror, it seemed to Schell “history was being authored by a third-rate writer” compelled “to follow the plot of a bad comic book,” with the President turning “himself into a sort of real life action figure.”

The vampires in Fast Animal do have a Wolfowitz-neocon vibe: “the ones / who look in the mirror / and find nothing // but innocence   though they stand / in blood up to their knees.” But Seibles-Blade addresses a much larger audience, everyone watching “the war on TV” while not wanting “to see / what’s // really happening,” all of us living “in / the blood,” fighting for “The right to live / without memory,” to ignore “So many / centuries, so much / death.” Slavery, Seibles reminded my class, is a kind of vampirism too, one of many ways America has exploited the world. Of course Blade longs for “this country / before it was bitten,” even as he mourns: “I don’t know how // to save anybody from this.”

Seibles called Blade his “mask,” a perfect term for my Superheroes class. He used Blade to channel his rage, he said, likening the character’s name to a pencil: “Some days // I think, with the singing / of my blade, I can fix / everything.” That’s a poet’s superpower, to reveal through language, since “evil thrives best in the dark.” He even gave us his mission statement: to fight “inattentive dumbassery.”

Seibles also has a pair of poems in the new anthology Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (where my wife, Lesley Wheeler, and I do too). Swapping his vampire superhero mask for Natasha and Boris of the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, Seibles playfully critiques American capitalism, a theme one of my students asked him to expand on. Another asked how, if our leaders are as stupid as Seibles suggests, were they smart enough to come to power? But my favorite question came at the end of class: What would Blade do if there weren’t any more vampires to fight?

Superhero missions, like Batman’s quixotic “war on criminals,” guarantee never-ending battles. You never run out of bad guys. You never get to walk away. But instead of talking vampires, Seibles talked about his father. The idea of sitting in a room of white people and discussing race, his father couldn’t imagine such a thing. His father can’t believe there are white people who aren’t racists. Sure, at an intellectual level, of course he can, but the idea is meaningless at any emotional level.

I’m guess his father was born somewhere around 1930—a moment my class understands well in terms of American eugenics. We read excerpts of a standard high school biology textbook that explained the hierarchy of white supremacy and advocated the extermination of unfit gene pools. That’s not something you walk away from. That’s not a world that ever runs out of bad guys. Seibles described Blade’s life as a psychological and spiritual war—one his parents’ generation can never stop fighting.

The only hope, he said, is for Blade’s children.

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posted by R. T. Smith

 

BY MADDIE SCHAFFER

I’m lying on my stomach, starting to get that prickly needle feeling in my back from a lack of SPF.  The swarms of kids squealing and splashing are just white noise as I chew my way through yet another novel, It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover, that falls under the category “romance.” As it’s summer, and I still have a few weeks before my pleasure reading is replaced with mundane textbooks written by professors adorned with multiple PhD’s trying to make statistical analysis funny, this is my choice of literature.

I’m fairly certain that I am not the only one who enjoys an easy, fantastical read when lying poolside. One that lets you forget you’re not on your own secluded island being fanned by a well-sculpted pool boy. When I say “easy read” this is no slight against the piece itself, the opposite in fact. When a book is so well written that the words on the page transform into a motion picture in my head, I begin to think I may have found something worthwhile.

 

Unfortunately, the movie is interrupted when I find myself too preoccupied with hiding what I’m reading, than I am actually reading. I begin feeling uncomfortable, sprawling my hand across the page, and even tilting the book at ridiculous angles as though the person four lounge chairs next to me could read the same words I am.

 

Since when has the category “romance” been interchangeable with “soft porn”? If I missed that press release, please, let me know and I will take back this whole rant.

I find it so frustrating to be reading a fantastic story, one where I have become so invested in the character that I have no choice other than to finish it in one sitting, for reasons of sanity, and then feel like I am invading that character’s private life on a level I am not comfortable with. The author has made me a peeping tom as I’m reading the specifics of how John Doe is sticking his ding-dong into Jane Doe’s hoo-ha. Can I just get a rabbit euphemism or something, please? I am not naïve, and I am perfectly aware that with love and romance come sexual interactions. Why though, has it become necessary to interrupt the flow of the story with uncomfortably detailed and vivid scenes?

Of course, these scenes and depictions have their place, but the explicit displays of them are not needed in the true romance novel. There is something to be said for modesty, and a lot to be said for needing to say little.

The media promotes sex constantly, for the simple fact it sells. It’s use of celebrities in ads for makeup, movies, cars, even perfume commercials are so insane as to basically say, “wear this perfume and you’ll get laid.” For example, take the axe commercial that starts by panning over a woman, sparkling with perspiration, sporting simply a bra and underpants, performing a shot-put and a pole jump to launch herself through the window towards a man spraying axe. Entertaining…maybe. Necessary…probably not. Compare this with the Ralph Lauren ad for the scent “Romance” where a man and a woman gallivant around on white horses through lush fields, gorgeous locks flowing in the wind. The ads are like night and day, similar to the old romance versus the new.

The easy sell of sex is exemplified by the author of 50 Shades of Grey, El James, raking in a meager $95 million for her dominance trilogy[1]. I would place a hefty bet (not as hefty as Ms. James could place) to say this has influenced what writers are putting in their stories, and they are clearly feeling the pressure to appease the public. Why can’t there be a happy medium? One where writers allude to the sexual interactions, but leave it to the reader to play the rest out in their head? Keeping up with the times is one thing, but it can be done in a fashion that leaves room for some imagination on the reader’s part, which has the potential to be even more erotic than what can be put in words. I know I might be listening to Paul Simon in a time everyone is listening to Kanye, but hear me out.

Romance, by definition, according to Merriam-Webster, is:
1) A medieval tale based on legend, chivalric love and adventure, or the supernatural
2) A prose narrative treating imaginary characters involved in events remote in time or place and usually heroic, adventurous, or mysterious
3) A love story especially in the form of a novel

Chivalric love is in the definition, people! Books are where we go to find chivalry; a word linked to knights on horseback (knights…shining armor…sweeping off feet…see where I’m going here?). The one place where we think it can’t die since they can so easily take you back centuries into an entirely different era. What will people think of our generations’ love lives if hundreds of years from now they pick up 50 Shades of Grey? I have a feeling people won’t be looking at our literature and lusting over the romance like we do for stories like Romeo and Juliet. Instead, they’ll probably be thinking we should all be put in padded white rooms for even being able to conjure up something like The Red Room.

Can we go back to the time of Pride and Prejudice that follows the exciting and alluring courtship of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy and forget the ravenous, animalistic behavior we find in “romance” novels like 50 Shades of Grey? Kudos to the authors for their ability to create images and descriptions I could only hope to one day be able to do, but can’t it be describing the way he opens doors for her instead of her blouse? 50 might be a few shades too many.

I am more confused why books with such great, unique story lines, like Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, feel the need to dilute their important messages with these scenes when there are so many other ways to convey to the reader the attraction between characters. I don’t want to feel guilty for what I am reading, and I would also like my artistic license as a reader back, and have the author leave some things to the imagination.

 

By Maddie Schaffer

posted by R T Smith

It’s September in an election year, so while students in classrooms argue about poetry with surprising heat, my electronic screens are occupied by one political candidate jokingly suggesting the assassination of another. An African-American boy was shot and killed, this time in Columbus, while holding a BB gun that looked all too real. Bombs just exploded in Manhattan. There’s no refuge from violence and anxiety, not even on campus or in the nearby woods. Fawns leap past me on morning walks, but their babyish spots are fading fast.

So let me make a pitch for getting your news from poems, at least some of the time. Erika Meitner, a poet who’s especially good at braiding together strands of thought and feeling and information, will be reading at Washington and Lee University at 4:30 pm in the Hillel House on Wednesday, September 28^th. Meitner will also visit my poetry workshop, where we’re pondering her latest book, Copia. The title means something like “plenty,” especially, in rhetoric, an abundance of language. I heard Meitner at the 2016 Virginia Festival of the Book and was moved by her poetry’s eloquence about the too-muchness of contemporary life: big box stores, airports, suburban tract housing, urban decay. Meitner directs the graduate program in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech, just down the road from me, and location deepened the recognition I felt reading her work: her landscapes are not so different from mine.

Even before I’d read Copia, however, I knew Meitner’s work from Shenandoah. A year and a half ago, I assigned poems from volume 63, number 2 and asked students to identify their favorites. A few chose Meitner’s “Continuation”. The poem begins as if extending a long, difficult, but intimate conversation:

And the neighbor’s daughter shows my son
the way her father let her hold his gun,

with bullets in it.  She was on Adderall,
and now Ritalin, and they’re only in

Kindergarten but my son doesn’t much
like her—

Like many poems in Copia, “Continuation” establishes a sense of danger immediately, while observing, too, how danger coexists with daily life’s relentless trivia. The speaker, wearing pajamas and clutching a coffee mug, routinely waits with her son and his gun-brandishing classmate for the “wheezing” schoolbus. Once they climb aboard, the bus proceeds down a street called “Heartwood/ Crossing, though the sign says Xing// as the whole name won’t fit. This cross-/ hatch, this target…” Meitner’s a metonymic poet, proceeding by association, but risky intersections pervade her verse.

Contiguities, cycles, repetition: the speaker’s son, the one who waits for the bus, likes a TV show called “Finding Bigfoot” in which a team seeks but never conclusively finds Sasquatch, the so-called missing link. The program arrives over and over at a supremely tentative conclusion, “that bigfoot could definitely live in// ____________.  We live in blank.” Does that mean a) we’re like, really nowhere; b) all places are interchangeable; c) Sasquatch is immanent, the presiding spirit of American life; or d) all of the above? Like the news, this poem presents a range of disturbing problems without clear answers.

In the spirit of irresolution, “Continuation” also disobeys Chekhov’s precept. The gun, that is, that Meitner hangs on the wall of Act One never goes off. The two children in the first line, despite their frightening play with a parent’s weapon, remain whole. Perhaps the gun is fired elsewhere, injuring some other child. Well, we know it is.

“Continuations” is not a consoling poem. But there is good human company in watching Meitner make order out of colossally bad news. I may be safe today, but everyone’s neighbor is armed and medicated. We all live at a crossroads, a target, and Meitner stresses that, for ill and potentially for good, our alternate universes are continuous.

Lesley Wheeler’s most recent collection is Radioland.  Her poems and essays appear in Ecotone, Crazyhorse, Poetry and other magazines.  She teaches at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia and blogs at http://lesleywheeler.org/

[posted by R T Smith]

 

In her poem “Hashem,” Leah Green reminds us: “all there is to do is offer our own dust, / held together in the holding, / and, small lunged, / live our lives breathing.” With those words in mind, I feel confident in saying that my first few weeks as a graduate student in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University have been an exercise in breathing.

In many ways, my academic workload as an MFA student mirrors my academic workload as an English major and creative writing minor at Washington and Lee. I’m taking an English literature class; I’m interning for a highly selective literary magazine; I’m a teaching assistant for a large lecture course; and, oh yeah, I’m taking a poetry workshop. During the first week of classes, I re-entered my undergraduate, workaholic mindset. It was energizing to be back in an intellectually stimulating environment, to be moving at a fast pace again.

Then I had my first workshop. It was a Monday night. The cicadas were muted by an overzealous air conditioner. My ten classmates and I sat around a large, wooden table. A dual mood of anxiety masked by nonchalance saturated the room. I realized that I hadn’t been in a workshop in over a year, and my breath caught.

Then my professor, Gregory Donovan, started class, and I exhaled. We spent nearly three hours peeling back layers (and layers) of Norman Dubie’s “After Three Photographs of Brassai.” It was during that initial class, before even reading my peers’ work, that I noticed something significant about my graduate studies in creative writing: everyone in the room wanted to be there more than they wanted to be anywhere else. Everyone cared about poetry, a lot.

On top of enjoying our discussion, this realization about my classmates was more satisfying than the best adult beverage a graduate student can afford. It made me I remember why I’m getting my MFA. I’m here I to engage with my professors, my classmates, and the work of other skillful, experienced poets. And I’m here to write.

Whether you’re studying or creating it, poetry is an art of attention. In our discussion of the tension between lyric and narrative poetry during our second workshop, Professor Donovan quoted David Baker saying that the lyric is “a moment in time that arrests time.” Baker’s assertion captures what I believe makes poetry essential. Poetry is what makes me both radically present and radically connected to myself and others.

Now, every time I’ve felt swept up in the busyness of school, I’ve tried to slow down and recenter myself around poetry, around attentiveness–attention to detail and to the big picture. That reminder prompts me to ask myself: How can my time with students help me be a deeper thinker, feeler, and communicator? How can my paper on seventeenth-century colonial narratives make me a better observer and critic of the issues facing society today? How can reading Blackbird submissions help me become a more discerning reader and writer? How, in group discussions of those submissions, can I help put the important work of other writers out into the world?

A reminder to focus on poetry is a reminder to focus on what keeps me truly alive. I’m so grateful to be in a space where I can breathe easily.
by Annie Persons (posted by R T Smith)

Annie Persons is a first-year poet in Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA in Creative Writing program, where she works as a copyediting intern for Blackbird. She is also a 2015 graduate of Washington and Lee University, where she was proud to serve as the managing editor of Shenandoah. Originally from Atlanta, she still considers Lexington, VA to be her home.

 

Although I lack the commitment to neo-platonism and romanticism that leads readers and writers to believe that the poem on the page is inevitably (as Ben Lerner suggests in The Hatred of Poetry)   a failure, a lesser poem (you can’t say “thing” here) than the poem in the mind (which would provide the reader with a remarkable and sublime transcendent experience), I do believe the construction of a sound, engaging, vital poem involves a variety of ingredients, some semantic, some psychological, and it might be a few ticks short of life-transforming but still be an amazing and moving experience.  These ingredients include energy, concentration/ reflection, craft, timing, patience, passion and luck.  I know these categories are not an exclusive list and that there’s some overlap, but I don’t want to exhaust myself before I even get going.  I also realize that “luck” is the wild card here and might lead some to say that it’s the muse by another name or “divine inspiration/intervention,” maybe even the devil’s whisper.  For me, these other factors create a field of frisson that might just add up to inspiration, but I don’t believe that a poem is constructed in some theater of the mind where it is ideal and “genuine” (capable of transcendence), but sours and spoils and diminishes in the process of transcription.  It’s easy to see why I’m not of that party once you know that I don’t believe poems can “happen” and then be netted by a human before actually being composed, hammered, kissed and cussed out of the individual poet’s experiences and bag of tricks, or that they often “come to” the poet and are written down verbatim.  I reckon that poems are usually conjured touch by touch as each is tested, tasted, weighed, each word conversing with and  influencing the word that will follow and interrogating the ones that came before. No free lunch, as it were.  Is this ALL conscious?  Probably not, but much of it is.  Look at Moore’s earlier (1927) and then later, shorter versions of “Poetry” or Pound’s earlier version of “In the Station of the Metro.”  Hours in the making, most likely.

Lord, that was windy, but I do remember that even in Bede’s story of Caedmon, the herdsman adds to the poem he’s been given by someone ethereal (quidam) before he performs it for his tribe, so even the great early model of ex machina or ex divina is compromised, amended, sweated, edited.  This belief has caused me some trouble, as a close friend, A, used to insist that another friend, B, had the soul of a poet and would be a poet in the most important sense even if B never wrote a single poem.  Seems she had the soul of a poet, and I suspected that I was being told that B was a better writer than me, even without doing the work.  To that I always replied some version of “aw, skunk cabbage.”  Poets are people who make poems, and most of the time we’re revving our engines, trying to be active and receptive till our internal stick rubbing raises smoke, kindles a spark or two in the tinder, then flame.  You’ve heard the affable cocktail drinker who says, “I’m sure I have a good novel in me, if I just had the time.”  An ultrasound exam will reveal no such item in him.  The same for poems.  For many examples of writers giving some insight into the earthly process of making poems, I recommend Brian Brodeur’s blog How a poem happens.

So I believe poems don’t have to reflect some never-quite-seeable but desperately-striven-for ideal from out yonder.  Most writers (but perhaps not the wanna-be poetalking maneuverers) I know and read would claim more agency, more trial and error and less hocus pocus.  An impulse, some associations, consideration of possible forms or formats, a tune in the head, an attitude, whiz of an errant arrow passing, some dramatic decisions and plenty of more subtle ones – these all help the brain and fingers get some lines onto the page or the monitor.  And then rub those sticks together with wild patience.  They have to be worked, wrested, wrestled in different ways and degrees by different poets or by the same poet on different occasions.  I’m a believer that most of the good writing is rewriting, and a substantial amount of it is simple deletion.  For some, perhaps my view implies that the inspiration  and genuineness just happen more slowly than the idealist seems to suggest, that idealist whose disappointment at the worldly manifestation is at the heart of Lerner’s’s The Hatred of Poetry.  But I don’t think it’s that reducible.  After all, craft is notoriously slow to develop and luck as hard to recognize as it is to attract.

I’m not sure about “things that are important beyond all this fiddle,” to borrow from Moore’s 1927 version of “Poetry,” but I am certain that the poem below passes all my tests for the genuine and deserves better than this treatment as an “exhibit.”  “Pondycherry” rides a series of binaries – clarity and mystery, observation and imagination, the vernacular and the erudite.  It also tells a little story about the craft of the recent past and longer arc of history and sings a song with a formal feel, but no binding formality.  Stanza length, line length, accentual pattern, and the interplay between folk slang and standard vocabulary fortify this reliable, candid, yet bemused “mind at play.”  It’s not a political poem, but we can sense something of the narrator’s value system in his appreciation of skill, economy, “lovely” sensations, not to mention conservation and preservation.  It’s not a confessional poem, but the poet’s interplay of candor and mischief suggests he’s engaged in work that matters to him too much to be mere labor.  Furthermore, the pleasure of surprising and satisfying language accompanies any subtle element of wry sourness (which might “pucker you permanent”) in the stanzas.  And it’s a poem aware of and sensitive to mystery.

Pondycherry      by Brendan Galvin

The way some people sing for themselves
on the drive home, I kept repeating
“pondycherry” out loud, one of those
trivial chunks that pops up,
tangled with the mind’s sargassum,

and wondering where I got it, arrived at
a satiny red-brown wood that came
naturally hollowed from the mill, something
a craftsman might use in his furniture,

an elderly wood-turner and caner of chairs
who worked out of a storefront, its floor
lovely to the nostrils and eyes
with sawdust and woodcurl.

He’d be a local repository who still used
“honeywicket” for flicker, “timberdoodle”
for woodcock. He’d look at
a yard-sale chair, its seat busted
through like a basketball hoop, and say,

“That wood’s pondycherry, used to be
a stand of it the far side of Higgins Pond.
A pleasure to work with, but the fruit
would pucker you permanent.”

Pondicherry, the dictionary gives me,
a former province of French India.
But why should I choose between denotation
and the mind at play, or reject another
hint, from the depths under a word,
that I’ve lived other places, other lives?

(Habitat: New and Selected Poems (LSU, 2005)
National Book Award Finalist

The poem opens with an admission that some might find a little embarrassing – “I say this word over and over like a charm, even though it rose arbitrarily from the mind’s midden.”  It’s an earthy but tricky opening.  “Some people” might do X, I do the quirkier Y.  Yet the narrator shows himself to be kind to those “some,” though with a difference.  He’s using his combination of whim and necessity as an instrument of inquiry, and he employs it to conjure a pleasing fiction, which he sings not just for himself, but for readers, as it’s a fiction with a real life.  The “chunks” that “pop up” may sound inconsequential and messy, but Galvin allows them to do some elegant work, performance, bring to life the Emersonian assertion that words are fossils.

I’m not going to explicate this poem sniff by sniff, but I can’t resist pointing out the pleasure it both recognizes and delivers, the observed or invented  specifics that place us in the world of ponds, fruit, woodgrain, a craftsman, everything admirably local and mysteriously organized as a yard sale.

It’s hard to write a poem so confident and receptive and then shift at the end to nearly obscure information and a far-reaching speculation, but Galvin can do it because he doesn’t change keys, keeps that suggestion of a wink and a grin.  The appearance of “Pondicherry” to mesh with the earlier “pondycherry” creates just the kind of “feat of association” that Frost felt poetry depended upon, and there’s Emerson in that penultimate line and in that sentence the refusal to choose, perhaps between two roads “that equally lay.”

That magpie gathering and whim (which Emerson suggests we carve or paint on our lintels) lead to a serious question, the kind that should be savored rather than pursued for a reductive answer.  On one level, the question is not solved, the poem not resolved, but on others it hovers there before us, interrogating us back while not denying us “the fun in how you say a thing.”  Serious mischief and a sassy tongue.  Who can resist it?  But is it an ideal poem, transporting and rendering the receptive reader altogether changed?  That’s not even the discussion that attracts me.  Instead of being transported, I’d rather be more fiercely rooted to this authentic place underfoot.  So: “a record of a failure” in Lerner’s terms?  “Pondycherry” is an artfully made, surprising and provocative experience, and I’ll take that over either version of Ms. Moore’s “Poetry” most any day.  It haunts me, but does it elevate me to an ideal realm?  Let the philosophers have a go at that one, if they can take their eyes off that honeywicket.  I like this realm, invigorated, just fine.  Now I’m wavering and would not resist the suggestion that this poem is, among other things, sublime.

2. “I dwell in Possibility”

I’m most likely to feel animosity toward poetry when I’ve just spent some time with the New Yorker or a finalist for some national prize, and maybe envy is part of the equation, but not when I don’t have an eligible book (and, I admit) I never send poems to the New Yorker.  My hackles generally rise when I feel that the work in question is too inconsequential or cryptic, when the language or ideas seem flippant or the mischief isn’t serious.  Flannery O’Connor said that, due to time constraints (mortality, in her case), she couldn’t read everything that came before her, and her guiding principle was that she stopped reading when she felt she could do so without experiencing a sense of loss.  That test seems to me legitimate and fair, and I employ it in all my reading but student work.  Consequently, I see a lot more heads of poems than tails.

Maybe I’m also employing the ideas in Moore’s shorter version of “Poetry,” but I don’t think in terms of “perfect contempt,” and “genuine” seems too contested a category.  I keep going back to that earlier version with its imaginary gardens and real toads, partly because the metaphor does more for me than the position paper language of the later poem, and in such a compact package the shift from “I” to “one” suggests a kind of bloodless and unenthusiastic stance.  This, by the way, doesn’t mean that I don’t see how the two versions work as a pair in dialogue.

Frost said that, if it is a wild thing, it is a poem, and Williams wrote that poems are machines made of words.  When I apply these criteria as equally valuable for assessing a poem, my mind opens up, and I can read with some delight.  The machinery has more to do with craft, reason, convention, coherence, hospitality, while the wildness refers to the forces of resistance to these.  Left brain and right, lattice and honeysuckle vine,  poets who rely on the dynamic between the two make me feel invited back into the long conversation of poetry, with all its passionate understanding, formal accomplishment and serious mischief.

One of the mysteries of Lerner’s book (along with the aforementioned disclaimer near the end — see my first post on this subject) is his willingness to blame the unpopularity of poetry on a few species of poems (the mediocre poems written for inaugurations, slamfest poems which on the page look trite or melodramatic) which are doomed to  fall short once removed from the very specific audience and context of their immediate purpose.  And he attributes it, as well, to the “more than three hundred thousand websites devoted to poetry.”  He also has a go (via Mark Edmundson) at Baraka’s World Trade Center poem, but this does lead him to an important discovery, which would have made a great place to begin this book: “the haters should stop pretending any poem ever successfully spoke for everyone.”  If he had admitted this before he started writing the book, he could have saved himself and his readers plenty of slogging through slanted discussions of Plato, McGonagall’s bridge disaster, Caedmon’s epiphany.  This is the heart of the matter with poetry, as with omelets, pets, wedding dresses, vanity license tags and even translations of sacred texts: there are no poems that satisfy all readers, as we bring overlapping but still unique natures to the reading of them.  There’s no one “audience” for poetry but “audiences.”  I’ll admit that I’m not so certain that there aren’t poems which are universally disdained, but even McGonagall’s travesty probably doesn’t qualify.  The buffet nature of the canon is its saving grace.

If you have an axe to grind – whether because poetry seems too much like something made by mankind and not divine in origin, or because your beliefs about craft, gravity, levity, concreteness, figurative language, thrift, tonal modulation, erudition, vernacular and so on are not dominant in the broader poetry community (or, God help us, po-biz), I can say only “take heart.”  Despite his convictions about the inadequacies of poetry, Lerner seems to find poems which offer him significant satisfactions.  And so do I, when I search vigilantly.  I, too, dwell in possibility, if only because if you put 100 poets to work at 100 type writers for 100 years, something beautiful and new and supple, consequential and witty without being cute is sure to surface.  Even from 100 graduate workshops.  I can sustain my winged hope enough to accept the challenge and take up my pencil when something I see or think sparks up a phrase and the faint tones of a distant music (not “unheard,” but elusive, partial, beckoning) touch my imagination.  I take out my axe and knife, gouge, mallets, awl, chisels, rasp and begin to carve words from the silence, and the work, which can be Sisyphean, can also be rewarding.  (After all, Camus says one may imagine Sisyphus happy.)  True, my relationship with poetry, as reader and writer, resembles Twain’s position on smoking: easiest thing in the world to give it up, I’ve done it thousands of times.  And I, too, dislike it, but it refines my engagement with the world and my own many selves.  A good enough reason to get up most mornings.  As for the divine messenger, I keep an extra coffee cup in the cupboard, and an extra whisky tumbler, as well, but I’m not holding my breath.

The Hatred of Poetry: Ben Lerner’s book, in Two Posts

 

1. “I, too, dislike it”: Poems Doomed to Fail?

2. “I dwell in Possibility,” “the thing with feathers”

1.”I, too….”

[Before I begin to examine the exhibit under scrutiny, I should say that I’ve been writing and studying poems for over forty years and have found plenty that stimulate, provoke, surprise and nourish me every time I read them, but I add fewer poems to my private anthology every year because I find the new and newer new and newest new poems delightful and instructive less often than I used to.  Some of this is laziness, some is due to an inertia that can accompany my age, some my resistance to techniques (especially involving the newly holy fragment) and varieties of poems that have never thrilled me but which seem in our less patient world to run rampant.  Some of them are too easy, too feeble for my taste, and others are too demanding.  The result of this dissatisfaction has been almost devastating for me, so much that I spent a substantial part of the first decade of this century concentrating on writing fiction to escape the many unpalatable but loudly acclaimed poems of those years.  But in the end, I was not much soothed.  After all, I make my living as an editor and teacher, and I have to confront new directions daily.  I bite the bullet and occasionally get a surprising reward.  Although I have not given up writing verses to write fictional paragraphs, as a close friend of mine did five or six years ago, I keep thinking I should.  How’s that for a complicating notion to take to the writing desk when you’re trying to find a word with both the sound and the implications that you think a stanza needs or the key to make a closing line click shut with meaningful resonance?]

Ben Lerner fashions/assembles his 86-page essay/booklet The Hatred of Poetry (FSG, 2016) around the 1967 version of Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry,” which is a radically whittled down revision of a delightful but less aesthetically radical poem of the same name from 1927.  Both poems begin with the somewhat challenging, “I, too, dislike it,” and Lerner reaches back to Plato and beyond to explain that both those who know quite a lot about poetry and those who know very little are pretty much united in this hostile attitude.  The gist of it is that (if you believe Shelley, Spenser, Keats and others who value grandiose claims about poems translating the actual to the ideal and the reverse) a substantial old school claims that poetry is somehow outside the realm of human knowing.  It’s a feeling or light in the soul or mind, though no actual poems on a page live up to that goal.  From conception to execution they fade, which is a bad thing . . . though not for me, who believes that execution and conception are intertwined, a trellis and vine arrangement, if the trellis were also growing.  Poems, I think, I hope, come into being through careful cultivation – maybe fast, maybe slowly – but not in a magician’s or angel’s flash of light.  Like “the news from Tunis,” the mystery can be grasped.

From page to page Lerner discusses how much better the “unheard melodies” are than the shoddy human productions, and I think he goes badly (and willfully) astray and askew in prosecuting this case.  And so does he, sort of, for he admits, ten pages from the end of the essay, that the genre he’s been renouncing can “be funny or lovely or offer solace or courage or inspiration” and that the case he’s been making “doesn’t have much to say about good poems in all their variety.”  It’s almost as if he’s stamped in 48 pt. letters over the last page: OR NOT!

But Lerner is convinced that two other considerations are more important: the age-old case for the weakness of mimesis, and why the general population says that poetry is useless or indecipherable or not real work or just what’s left over after a mortal gets through clumsily fiddling with a divine model.  For him, “a poem is always a record of failure.”  But a poem is not a record; its conception is likely foggy and fragmented, volcanic magma, and it comes into being gradually, a phrase at a time, a word at a time.  When the writer in the process of revision feels the law of diminishing returns set in, s/he stops editing and asks what the poem is becoming, the nature of its semantic experience and the responses it invokes.  When he judges that the process is done, that it is a product, a crafted result of ideas, plans, surprises, shortcomings, s/he locks it in (though not always “for keeps”) and moves toward the further refinement of varnishing, which can also throw her back to an earlier stage.  It “begins in surprise and ends in delight” as some wag put it.  In that respect the making resembles a dance, a sculpture, even many other “products” which are not considered artistic.  This is the way most of the writers I know see a poem coming together and feed it.  It’s too much an organic and unpredictable process to be called a “record.”

Lerner is also convinced that looking hard and long at A) an admittedly terrible poem (William Topaz [!] McGonagall’s justly obscure “The Tay Bridge Disaster”) and B) a poem mostly written in prose (by Claudia Rankine) tell us more about what poems aspire to and how they fail than anything like a widely admired poem by Yeats or Donne, Bishop or Heaney.  He’s interested in Dickinson, but prefers the poems by her which explicitly address the kind of limitations he finds infecting all poems.  There’s one other aspect of his essay that I want to explore, and I’ll do it now because it seems the most obvious importantly wrong direction of the piece.

A significant source of Lerner’s conviction that Philistine Q. Public hates poetry is rooted in Lerner’s contact with people to whom he announces he’s a poet.  “Embarrassment, or suspicion, or anger” arise because, he believes, there are “tremendous social stakes.”  People expect those who claim the title of poet to be able to do very special things with words, to conjure phrases that go beyond the mundane realm.  But such cannot be delivered on demand, and the old poems are often linguistically too difficult for the speaker and hearer of contemporary American English-cum-textspeak, so resentment sets in quickly.  Jim Dickey used to talk about this, about the suspicion or scorn he received from men on planes when he said he was a poet.  But who brings this on?  Those writers who can’t resist claiming poet as an honor, who half believe that travelers will be impressed by the profession (?) of poetry.

But why not take control of the awkward situation and work toward an understanding?  Say, for instance, “I’m a teacher and a writer” (maybe an editor, too).  Then more specific questions follow: What do you write? Are you published?  How’s that work?  Does it pay well?  What led you to choose this path?   These questions are part of a more directed dialogue, one that can go both ways and opens the door to say, “I write poetry, too” without seeming to throw the gauntlet down.  To reveal to the “civilian” that you don’t claim poetry as a priestly or prophetic vocation is to seek common ground.  It opens the opportunity to explain how poetry fits with rather than conflicts with being a husband, a Unitarian, a Democrat, a daughter, a juggler, a forger, a fisherman.  The writer who hasn’t thought her/his way through this may just be an elitist who can’t wait to point to the laurel crown and desires the mantle as “remarkable,” badge of a “chosen one.”  But after all, poetry has arisen from the world’s disadvantaged, as well as the highly lettered and degreed ones.  Open the discussion with difference between the questioner and the writer, and you doom it to animosity.  Play a different card, and exchange and understanding may follow.  Just imagine the conversation that opens with this self-identification: “I’m a teacher who likes to fish, listen to jazz, write poems, play racket ball, visit art museums and read novels.  I wanted to be a potter, but I was a disaster.  An archeologist, but my undergrad college didn’t offer the major.”  That just might get a different response from, “Poetry, I hated that stuff in school.  Why can’t you guys just say what you mean?”  Or something like, “I’m a poet and don’t know it.”  When I was a callow/fallow young man, I asked Robert Penn Warren what subjects interested him as a poet, and he replied, “Why Rod, only those things which interest me as a man.”  He knew that, even if poetry is your most important calling, it doesn’t have to be on your business card or stitched onto your shirt pocket.  Maybe he also believed that poetry was a way to appreciate at least as much as a practice to be appreciated in itself.