Menu
 GotPoetry? Inside Community Forums Marketplace Reference Communication
User Info
Welcome Anonymous
 Membership:
 Latest: lexysman
 New Today: 2
 New Yesterday: 5
 Overall: 9901
People Online:
 Members: 3
 Visitors: 238
Bots: 3
 Staff: 1
Staff Online:01: John
Paid Membership
Buy a paid membership and get more out of GotPoetry!
Advertise on the GotPoetry Advertising Network.
Get Published
|
Serving Neither Master
Notes toward a new poetry
By Victor D. Infante
1.) The Roads More Traveled
The latest kerfuffle in the world of poetry was launched by Poetry Foundation president John Barr in the October 2006 issue of Poetry. In his essay American Poetry in the New Century, Barr writes:
“American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now. There is fatigue, something stagnant about the poetry being written today. If one could say that a characteristic of Romantic poetry was that there was way too much of it written once it became established (weekend versifiers to this day still write in Romantic modes), one could say the same of modern poetry. The manner of it has long been mastered. Modernism has passed into the DNA of the MFA programs. For all its schools and experiments, contemporary poetry is still written in the rain shadow thrown by Modernism. It is the engine that drives what is written today. And it is a tired engine.”
Barr’s castigation of the state of modern poetry, contemporary MFA programs and the overuse of the lyric narrative form seemed a slap in the face to a good many who have profited from these things.
For example, Sidney Wade, president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, responded, in a letter in the November 2006 issue of Poetry, “John Barr’s argument that writing programs have converted all MFA students into zombies of a housebroken and homogenous modernism is entirely laughable … In fact, poetry and the teaching of poetry had become largely ant-Modernist by the seventies.” In the same issue, MFA teacher Robert Wrigley rebukes Barr’s attack on MFA programs and their alleged emphasis on “careerism,” writing: “The only credential for a poet is the poems themselves. Students of the art of poetry are novitiates, whether they are matriculated or making their way on their own, and speculation about the source of the next messiah is a fool's game.”
Both Wade and Wrigley are correct, at least to a point: Modernism has long given way to Beat and Confessionalism as the underpinnings of generally-accepted contemporary poetic philosophy, and – as Wrigley astutely points out – holding a degree has no real bearing on one’s mastery of the art.
But what neither of Barr’s critics concedes is that it’s near impossible in this day and age to succeed within the traditional trappings of today’s poetry establishment without running the MFA gauntlet. Lack of said degree may not cripple a writer artistically, but it does limit one’s access to publishers with actual distribution, to inside tracks with writers who judge major awards, to editors of major literary journals and teaching positions where the pursuit and study of poetry is part of their job description, not something they have to pursue when the workday ends. Barr laments careerism in poetry, but denying the reality of its necessity seems counter-productive. No one is forcing the MFA path to the contemporary poet, but it’s undeniable that the poet will be hobbled without it.
As to whether this results in a homogenizing effect on contemporary poet, one need only look to the bulk of the material published in contemporary journals. Sure, it’s easy to point toward undeniable geniuses such as Charles Simic, Thomas Lux, Harryette Mullen or Yusef Komunyakaa as proof of poetry’s vitality and variety, but these are the exceptions, not the rule. Literary journals overflow with variations on the same, largely narrative structures, all building toward similar, epiphanic moments – as though Billy Collins had been cloned in some factory, degraded versions of his work let loose to flood the poetic marketplace. And Barr is correct: it is a marketplace. To say otherwise is disingenuous.
One of Barr’s few defenders in the November 2006 Poetry is performance poet Taylor Mali, who offers as an alternative the poetry slam, a popular performance poetry competition that was founded by poet Marc Smith in Chicago in 1984, which holds two nationwide competitions annually. Unfortunately, slam often proves as problematic a master as academia, its biggest flaw lying in its shift from being a parlor trick to lure an audience to see poetry to being a competition that people actually cared to win.
Over the course of its two-decade existence, slam has repositioned itself from being a vehicle for established poets working outside academia to being a breeding ground for poets with largely-identical rhetorical and stylistic ticks, ticks calibrated for an audience to respond to in the transitory moment of a poem’s performance: broad humor devoid of metaphor, facile politics that satisfy puerile political guilt but don’t resound beyond the merely intellectual level, nigh-identical explorations of individuality, be it race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality … or, sometimes in the case of many twentysomething white male poets, of someone else’s race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality.
While there are exceptions – there are always exceptions – the populist impulse of slam discourages innovation. The audience and judges respond to what they expect to hear, not to being challenged by something new. The artist with integrity would proceed despite this, but when faced with a large cash prizes and the prospect of a slot on Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, the temptation to play to win is enormous, and self-perpetuating.
What becomes self-evident is that both roads – academia and slam – are inherently flawed, and that while the tendency for many is to cling to them as if they were religion, the truth of the matter is that both are, in their way, a sort of trap. This isn’t to say that there aren’t lessons to be learned from both camps. Quite the contrary, actually: It’s simply that blind adherence to the conventions of either is inherently limiting. Both offer paths, but those paths – if followed too far – lead only to mediocrity.
Where then to look for Barr’s “new poetry,” if not matriculating through some MFA program somewhere or on the beer-stained stages of the poetry slam? Here’s where we find two flaws in Barr’s logic. That MFA programs themselves are not likely to lead the charge in new artistic directions seems a straightforward enough conclusion – artistic institutions are by-and-large conservative things that change slowly.
But to say that the champions of whatever shift is waiting in the metaphorical wings is unlikely to wield an MFA flies in the face of odds. More likely, new directions in poetry will be defined by poets who’ve spent time in both slam and academic waters, and who have learned to not let themselves be defined or limited by either – poetic heretics willing to shake off the artificial confines both camps impose.
The second mistake Barr makes is to assume that such a beast isn’t already under way. Surely, if the history of poetry has proven anything, it’s that change comes whether it’s desired or not, looked for or not. It seems likely that Barr’s hoped-for new poetry is already here, he just doesn’t know where to look.
But while slam itself is no longer the fresh and vital literary device it once was, a great deal has emerged from its humus and made the transition from the spoken to the written word, while retaining its vitality, its vigor and its ability to connect with the reader. Likewise, it has learned lessons from both performance and academic camps, and realized that divide is an artificial distinction. There are many poets working today who’ve both been honed on the performance stage – either in slam or the numerous poetry readings around the country – but whom also publish and teach, many of whom have acquired or are acquiring MFAs.
In short, the new poetry Barr seeks is Integrationist by nature – both honoring its immediate antecedents and shedding trappings that have lost their power or immediate use. Moreover, they’ve charted their own courses through the poetry world, paths that frequently border or even cross into the poetic establishment, but which are not defined by it.
2.) New Uses for Old Tools
Perhaps the current stagnation of American poetry is a product of the tools of the poet’s trade being confused with the poem itself. Certainly, this happens on a macro-scale: In his letter to Poetry, Wrigley denies that the possession of an MFA makes one a poet, but it’s doubtful many MFA graduates believe they aren’t and, as Barr points out, it’s easy to see how the process from graduation to entering the job and publication markets can be confused with the act of being a poet. Likewise, Slam is often considered by its participants to be a genre or a form, when in reality – like the MFA program – it is simply a process, a place to be – a tool to be utilized toward one’s growth as a writer. Neither is the poem itself.
So too are the tools the poet applies to the poem. To dictate that a poem needs narrative, or even line breaks, seems as anachronistic as to say it needs meter and rhyme, and yet even the latter beliefs persist in some quarters. But working from the assumption that it is not the rhyme, the narrative, the meter, the persona or even the metaphor that makes a poem, if it is none of these things, what is it? In all probability, it’s likely that the definition of what makes a poem gets reinterpreted and recast every time a new movement sprouts – which is why a poem that is important for historical reasons, such as The Iliad, would be utterly useless if written today. A publisher would look at The Iliad and ask why it’s not a novel. The vast majority of Shakespeare’s sonnets would be hard-pressed to find a publisher had they been written today. The literary culture is not at that place.
Indeed, the poem itself has drawn the short straw in the contemporary literary culture’s lottery. If anything, fiction is king … and fiction is very much defined by its narrative. The same holds true for the play in all its staged and screened varieties … all of which begs two questions: Is the pre-eminence of narrative in other literary form the reason for its ubiquity in poetry? And if narrative defines those other genres, shouldn’t poetry be used for a different function?
Let’s assume then, for a second, that fiction is about a character’s process of change. The protagonist starts in one state and ends in another. Would it be egregious then to posit that a contemporary poem captures a moment of change, as opposed to the entire process?
Not that the moment need necessarily be a simple thing. T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a complex poem, and the persona’s feelings at that moment equally so. But what the poem is not is the story of his life. We know little about Prufrock, save the smattering of images that evoke his facing (and succumbing to) his alienation.
So what we have at this moment is the subtext of a narrative. Prufrock has a story, to be certain. The despair of “Till human voices wake us, and we drown” would not be as palpable if he didn’t. But it’s irrelevant for the reader to know more, because Eliot gives us enough. The story is not the point – the emotion it evokes is.
Barr laments the omnipresence of Modernism in contemporary poetic thought, but here’s a place where he misses the mark. As the demand for narrative has grown, much of what’s new and fresh in poetry today comes from reaching back to this Modernistic tool of folding the subtext inside out, of letting it have top billing, while the narrative recedes into the framework, out of sight like good stitching.
Certainly, this is the case in two of the most innovative writers to emerge from the slam, Jeff McDaniel and Roger Bonair-Agard. In the anthology Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (2000, Manic D Press), each poet presents poems written in the first person that present the reader with a persona’s present-day self at a moment of coming to grips with whom they are and how they got there.
Bonair-Agard is the more straightforward of the two, casting Christian symbolism into personal recollection of his grandmother, Magdalene, in the poem “… Naming and Other Christian Things.”
“At 31 I learn that Lena is short for Magdalene/one of those enigmas of biblical lore/whore found religion.”
It’s significant that Bonair-Agard locks the poem in at this moment. In doing so, he allows himself to present a cascade of memories of his grandmother, framed and counter-pointed by the conventional, “helpless ‘weeping for the crucified’” depiction of the Biblical figure.
Writes Bonair-Agard: “at 4 I was beaten for disrespect of my grandfather/at 8 because I was satisfied with a 75 in Math/because she knew having fought battles based purely on conviction/that she was preparing a man for the holiest of crucifixions. …
“On that day I expect to see/standing at the foot of whatever urban cross they fashion/ all five-foot-ten of Lena/pointing one huge gnarled finger at me/the shining authority of her eyes/coming from the black forest of her flesh/the white electricity of her hair/lips trembling in rage/- Get down off that thing boy and fight!!/-What kind of man do you expect to become?!”
That last question – the last line of the poem – is the crux of Bonair-Agard’s poem, because, in a very real way, it’s not about her. It’s about him, and that moment of understanding his relationship to her. We learn little else of the persona’s story here, nor do we know exactly where he’s going from that point, or what exactly those battles are. It doesn’t much matter.
What’s remarkable here is the absence of bitterness. There’s an annoying tendency in contemporary poetry to wallow in past hardships. And perhaps that absence of nihilism – that inherent hopefulness – marks a significant shift from Modernism’s bleakness, using the same tools toward a different effect.
McDaniel’s poem, “Disasterology,” reveals even less narrative and makes more brash use of metaphor.
Writes McDaniel: “When I get bored, I call the cops, tell them/there’s a pervert peeking in my window! /then I slip on a flimsy nightgown, go outside,/press my face against the window and wait …/This makes me proud to be an American/where drunk drivers ought to wear necklaces/made from the spines of children they’ve run over.”
On the surface, these are radically different poems. Bonair-Agard pulls his metaphors from realism, only introducing the fantastical element – himself crucified on an urban cross – at the end. McDaniel’s poem is both funny and brutal, but its last stanza reveals that, like in Bonair-Agard’s poem, all this thought is compressed into one, singular moment: “Each morning I look in the mirror/and say promise me something/don’t do the things I’ve done.”
These poems are, in many ways, mirror images of one another. Bonair-Agard unfolds the poem from one moment – the learning of a name – whereas McDaniel folds the poem down into the image of looking himself in the mirror, the moment of giving himself that option to change.
Perhaps the most masterful use of narrative’s subtext comes in Daphne Gottlieb’s book, Final Girl (2003, Soft Skull Press). Here, Gottlieb presents an exploration of the clichéd image of the girl left alive at the end of a slasher film, taking something stereotypical and transforming it into something moving and powerful.
Writes Gottlieb, in the poem Gone to Static: “the whisky is open/the vcr is on./I'm running/the film backwards/and one by one/you come back to me,/all of you./your pulses/stutter to a begin/your eyes go from fixed to blink/the knives come out of your/chests, the chainsaws/roar out/from your legs/your wounds seal over/your t-cells multiply, your tumors shrink/the maniac killer/disappears.”
There is a great deal of bitterness here, at least on the persona’s part – and rightfully so. As Gottlieb writes, “it sounds better than it is,/this business of surviving.” And yet, even amid the fully-justified bitterness and despair, survival occurs, which is a far cry from Eliot’s “human voices wake us and we drown.”
Is this, then, a trope of the hypothetical new poetry emergent from the slam – this perspective that life is harsh, and yet one is compelled to move forward regardless? Even Gottlieb’s protagonist, trapped in a cycle of alcoholic despair, is disallowed complete isolation. She watches the movie backward, until it returns to the beginning, and the cycle begins again. The world repeatedly crashes on her head.
Gottlieb writes, in the poem Final Girl II: The Frame: “Here's how to survive:/Watch as everyone around you dies./Scream until your eyes work/They will work when you pick up a weapon./They will work when something changes:/Maybe the Native Americans are just like you./Maybe money, your father, is the great tyrant./Pick up a weapon and gain sight./You will fight back or die./You will fight back./You will become a girl who is a boy.”
The earlier nihilism and despair is reputed, the gender-specific stereotype of the victim washed away and transformed into something else, given traits that are frequently not associated with the pretty, female victim who is allowed to live at the end of the film. Ultimately, the persona is not defined by her survival. She is defined by her willingness to fight, recalling Bonair-Agard’s question, “What kind of man do you intend to be?”
Although Gottlieb acknowledges life’s harshness, and acknowledges that there is no true place of isolation from the cascade of life’s hardships, she ultimately repudiates despair.
What’s fascinating, however, is that in order to make her point, Gottlieb switches between poems from the first to the second person, giving herself the ability to separate herself from the her personas’ points of view. The switch gives the author’s voice a sense of objectivity, of authority.
Rachel McKibbens, likewise, eschews the first-person narrative in her poem, After a Magazine Named Elizabeth Smart One of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World, published in the Autumn 2006 issue of The November 3rd Club.
Writes McKibbens, “Never mind Keisha with the mud in her mouth,/or Sarah, face-down in the pond. Forget the man/who chose his daughter’s coffin dress, or the woman/who sank to the floor as they closed the lid./Though you came home changed,
wearing your body like a picked lock,/face, plump as a newlywed, your tongue smothered
in survival and strange prayer—/it was good enough.”
There are obvious inverses here from Gottlieb’s Gone to Static. McKibbens’ subject is real, not fictional, and the point of view she works from is the ostensibly objective third person, not the first. And yet, the poem remains personal – casting a frame on females enduring inhuman, unthinkable hardship.
But whereas Gottlieb starts with a fiction and works out to reality, McKibbens examines a real girl trying to be forced back into a fiction, writing, “And now truth sits in your stomach, a cold brass knob/Like every damaged girl, you are full of things/no one wants to hear. Instead, we pin your airbrushed face/over headboards. Pray our daughters become centerfolds,/resist daylight, learn the harp, line bookshelves/with secrets like snakes in jars./Elizabeth, you are proof/that God will always do what he wants,/white girls achieve perfection when they vanish/and America will love you more for your silence.”
The political becomes personal here, the attempt to fit reality into a comfortable framework – reducing Smart to one of People’s “Most Beautiful People” – is ultimately rejected, and its consequences laid bare. Writes McKibbens: “And we will not flinch when your firstborn child/seen squirming in your arms, is a shrieking girl/with her face on backwards.”
3. Form Without Philosophy
Is this the lesson of the new poetry, then? That life is hard, but can be endured? Perhaps, but consider another trope of the aforementioned poems, the feeling that nothing exists in a vacuum – not the poet, not the poem. Again, the outside world is always present, always whispering its demands and sacrifices.
Moreover, particularly when one returns to McDaniel, there is a sense that wild, surrealist metaphor can be used to make a connection with the reader. This is a deviation from the bulk of that tool’s literary antecedents. With the Post-Modern and Language poets, there is often a sense of obfuscation, a sense of language being used as a barrier between the reader and the poet – a sense that language, ultimately, has no meaning save that which the reader infuses it with.
And perhaps that deconstruction of language was a necessary thing, a means to freeing said words from their strict, literalist interpretations. Surely, it seems the contemporary lyric narrative is largely stuck in a denotative rut, with any sense that words can be put to together in a way that they transcend their literal meanings, as though the music were simply a nice jingle the syllables make, with no connotation of its own. (And if this were true, what need would we have of music at all?)
Brendan Constantine reverses this idea in his sestina Fabrications in Transit, published in the 1997 Beyond the Valley of the Contemporary Poets anthology. Writes Constantine: “There are a few things you ought to know about last night/What you thought were baby moths were anise seeds. The stone/in your drink was a ruby. The trembling in my voice wasn’t fear.”
Constantine’s verse is unapologetic in its free-standing symbolism. It is difficult to mine a literal one-for-one denotative meaning from his images, but the emotion conveys in both the sound and the sense that, in combination, everything is more alive, more magical than what the person being addressed believes, and yet, amid this wonder, there’s also harshness:
“You wanted/to leave before you finished saying hello. I should have let you. Surely the night/would have taken less notice of the train. Perhaps I could have slept without fear/of dreaming. Asleep and moving like a windblown ghost or a moon cut from the fabric/of Heaven. An object at rest while in motion. A thrown stone.”
Powerful, complex and even contradictory emotions are evoked here, along with a sense that metaphor – or, particularly, dreams – are no barrier between the self and reality. As much as in Gottlieb’s more stark Gone to Static, the real world is scratching at the poet’s window, and there is no way in which the poet or the persona is isolated from it, even when he or she wishes to be.
This is a fundamental shift in philosophy, a transition between the exploration of the inner world for its own sake to connecting that inner world to the one outside. And in that connection, there is a sense that the world outside is both terrifying and beautiful, and a deep, underlying sense that it’s worth speaking to and for, that real emotion is worth more than the mere comfort many lyric narratives offer.
Poet Mindy Nettifee sums this up well in her poem The Year You Thought You Were Dying, in her book Sleepyhead Assassins (2006, Moon Tide Press). Writes Nettifee: “you ate licorice on the beach in January/swam rum sauced in the icy Pacific/wearing only blue rubber flippers/and your grandfather’s dog tags/and for the first time, it felt good to be cold,/it felt good to be so cold it hurt.”
This is Romanticism at its purest, finding a vibrancy in the very act of living and feeling – pain and the joy both equally beautiful, and worthwhile. And yet, Nettifee casts it with Modernist tools, the images bringing reality and vigor to the work, the ocean connecting the subject to the world, the dog tags connecting to battles past. They all exist in this moment – everything was necessary to get here.
It’s at this point the question needs to be asked: If poetry does not connect to the real world, to the reality of the reader, then how can a reader find value in it? In the descent of mainstream poetry through the decades, particularly from the 1970s to now, there has been a sense that there is some purity in exploring the self in disconnection to the world, that in this there is some sort of objectivity. The bulk of poems published have become increasingly personal, but in that state many have become too personal. There is no point where the poet pulls the reader close to tell them, lips pursed against their ears, “Listen. This is something you need to know.” And there is no sense that this necessary truth may hurt.
Stated baldly, the reader has been treated with contempt, merely a means to the poet’s personal journey. The poet feigns indifference to the act of being read, takes comfort in the fact that the uneducated audience just wouldn’t understand.
What’s lost in that is a sense of service, that art exists not just for the artist, but for the rest of the world. Is it any wonder that that self-centered vanity results in artistic stagnation?
What needs to be acknowledged – the challenge placed on the shoulders of a new generation of poets – is that everyday lives are as worthwhile, as cinematic and vibrant as the poet’s own, that their inner lives sing with the same chorus of emotion that the poet’s does. If that were not true, art would serve no purpose save psychotherapy, and psychotherapy is best handled in private.
4.) Reconstruction
It could be argued at this point that nothing presented here represents a new poetry – these are old tools, after all, borrowing from Modernism and Confessionalism, and in Constantine’s case, even Formalism. And aside from the happenstance of all these writers having been drawn to the National Poetry Slam at one time or another, there’s little else to bind them together. Certainly, the impulse to cast Bonair-Agard as a black poet, or Gottlieb as a feminist or queer poet is overwhelming. It is, after all, where the corporate bookstores would place them on the shelves.
But these definitions seem too small to encapsulate the entirety of what these writers bring to their work, and the term Slam poet seems likewise insufficient. Those disciplines and philosophies become less the rivers the poet swims in then they do mere tools to apply to a task – and indeed, no poetic tool is ever cast aside forever. Poets of all stripes have the arsenal provided to them by literature’s history, and always have.
Is it possible then that movements are not self-driven and inspired by poets themselves, but rather result from poets – often who have shared or similar experience – recognizing that the land beneath their feet has shifted? Is each new poetic movement a sort of literary Darwinism, survival of the writer who recognizes the stagnation of an entrenched power structure; Who uses the tools available to them not to succeed for success’ sake, but rather to create vital, relevant art in the face of limited definitions of what that art should be?
Barr – for what seems the best of intentions – is quick to cast aside the value of MFA programs. Other critics, such as Harold Bloom writing in The Paris Review, have been equally quick to dismiss any value in Slam. All of this combines to a faulty equation, If not X, then Y, when we have been given no compelling reason why we should choose between one or the other. It is a false dualism, a willful casting aside of useful tools, to the detriment of the art form.
This is what the contemporary poet – the one aware of shifts in the landscape – rejects. This genrefication, this attempt to compartmentalize pieces of the world as though they were separate from one another, is merely a distraction, and counterproductive – preventing the poet from accomplishing the task at hand: connecting the marvels within each of those smaller worlds to the world at large.
This stratification within the poetry world should hardly be surprising. The urge to fit things into tidy categories has permeated almost every aspect of American culture: We live in red states or blue states; We listen to alternative rock or classic rock; We read hard science fiction or mainstream literary fiction.
Would it be unreasonable then to posit that the reaction to reintegrate these splinters of poetry’s world is, in some ways, a reflection of a desire to reintegrate the pieces of an increasingly fragmented culture, one where everything and everyone has been defined down to its particular, individual sub-genre?
In her book Teahouse of the Almighty (2006, Coffee House Press), four time National Poetry Slam Champion Patricia Smith hits bluntly at these themes of connectivity between the art and the audience, underscoring the weight the poem can carry in the world, and its potential to heal.
Writes Smith, in her poem Building Nicole’s Mama: “I ask the death question and forty fists/punch the air, me!, me! And O’Neal/matchstick crack child, watched his mother’s/body become a claw, and 9-year-old Tiko Jefferson,/barely big enough to lift the gun, fired a bullet/into his own throat after mama bended his back/with a lead pipe. Tamika cried into a sofa pillow/when Daddy blasted Mama into the north wall/of their cluttered one-room apartment,/Donya’s cousin gone in a drive-by. Dark window,/ click, click, gone, says Donya, her tiny finger/a barrel, the thumb a hammer.”
This is a dire picture, this roomful of children for whom loss and violence is as real as breathing. A poem seems a small thing in the face of such loss, and yet, Smith points toward its usefulness, how it can be used in their service.
Writes Smith, “A teacher tells me this is the first time Nicole/has admitted that her mother is gone now/murdered by slim silver needles and a stranger/rifling through her blood, the virus pushing/her skeleton through for Nicole to see./And now this child with rusty knees/and mismatched shoes sees poetry as her scream/and asks me for the words to build her mother again./Replacing the voice./Stitching on the lost flesh.”
This. This, ultimately, is the task in front of today’s poets. The children in Smith’s poem are an extreme, certainly, but they are by no means unique. One need only look to the television to see those children’s violent lives played out everywhere, and likely, one need only to look to the mirror to be reminded of loss, and its toll. Sometimes that loss is operatic, sometimes the things we love fall away from us slowly, one by one, but nonetheless the same shadows fall on all of us, everywhere. And more and more, all of us seem lost, separated and alone in those shadows.
It is not the role of the poem to shelter us from this. Rather, it is the role of the poet to speak to those shadows, to face them and give the reader a tool to follow suit. Because just as the tools of the poet’s trade are not the poem itself, neither is the shadow the entirety of the world, and it’s only in that rising out of darkness that we can see that we – poet and reader both – are not alone.
Submitted by ocvictor on Friday, December 15, 2006 (02:14:05) (2758 reads)
|
 |
Re: Serving Neither Master
(Score: 1 )
by chameleon on Thursday, December 14, 2006 (22:24:35) |
Hear, hear! I can't even count the number of nails you hit on the head in this, Victor. From the inevitablity and necessity of integrating the different schools of poetry to the role that poetry plays and can play in today's world, you nailed each point solidly. This should be required reading for every serious poet who wonders where they're going and why.
|
Re: Serving Neither Master
(Score: 2 )
by paolodefelice on Friday, December 15, 2006 (07:03:43) |
oh my god what is not "modern" and "poetic" at all is that poets are still discussing the same way like centuries ago. let's focus on poems and not discussions and hopefully we will have many more nice poems to read and many less unuseful polemics papers to throw in our dustbins.
 |
Re: Serving Neither Master
(Score: 2 , Interesting )
by brucedeitrickprice on Friday, December 15, 2006 (13:21:48) |
Well before Barr, I wrote an essay called "The Plight of Poetry." It knocks around the McPoets and academics pretty roughly, so people like it.
Essay tries to show, quickly, what poetry should be.
Title comes up top in Google; or visit Improve-Education.org, #16.
 |
Re: Serving Neither Master
(Score: 2 , Interesting )
by nerdthuggery on Saturday, December 16, 2006 (12:07:17) |
i will also agree this really hit a lot of things on the head. i would also dare add that the sanctioning organization of US poetry slams is in great danger of taking on some of the worst qualities of graduate writing programs, especially an all too growing penchant for nepotism. thanks, Victor.
|
Re: Serving Neither Master
(Score: 2 , Interesting )
by jzp on Saturday, December 16, 2006 (17:39:40) |
Well put .... I wrote and deleted a lot of additional commentary, as it was just trite. Non-servaium! 
 |
Re: Serving Neither Master
(Score: 1 )
by bobahop on Monday, December 18, 2006 (12:48:37) |
I have my problems with both Academia and Slam, the problems being as you describe, though I've been fed by them as well. I've never gone to college, nor participated in a slam, but I've read many books of poetry and theory written by academics, and witnessed several performance poets. I'm always conscious of the balance/tension between the page and the stage.
Most recently I've been reading Paul Valery. Somewhere he writes (my paraphrase won't do it justice) that what the poet feels is felt no more deeply than by any other person, but that the poet feels things which go unfelt by many others. In other words, a poet may feel no more profoundly about a soldier dying in Iraq than anyone else, but a poet may also have a feeling about a candy wrapper lying on a street in Baghdad that many others wouldn't even notice until the poet evokes it for them. Maybe the poet describes a drop of blood on the wrapper. Maybe the drop of blood is still moving, becoming a smear. Maybe a candy bar with one bite out of it is lying close by. In a child's hand. That has no arm. That kinda thing.
Another book I'm reading is Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody by Charles O. Hartman. He describes poetry as the language of attention, and puts forth lineation as the one element which distinguishes free verse from poetic prose (not to confuse verse with poetry, nor to confuse poetry with rhythmic language, and rhythm not to be confused with meter.) So much of poetry theory gets bogged down in confused definitions.
I sense the stagnation which you mention, in both mine and others' poetry. And whatever synthesis is derived from the current dominant processes will probably not come exclusively from any one particular discipline. Some contributors may have MFAs and some may not. Some may have Slam experience, and some may not. Some may have both. What they are all likely to have in common is an interest and dedication to poetry, and enough quirkiness to give poetry's DNA the next twist.
 |
Re: Serving Neither Master
(Score: 1 )
by salinger on Tuesday, January 01, 2008 (18:25:41) |
Nice piece Victor. Well reasoned and thoughtful - I enjoyed reading it.
|
Related Links
Article Rating
Average Score: 4.91
Votes: 12
Spread the word
Options
Discussion
|
Previous: Look! Up in the Sky!
Re: NBC Seasons Black History Month Lunch With Racism
You can syndicate other parts of our site using the following files:
