Is Poetry an Assignment?

Lyric poetry has an aura of necessity about it. This necessity comes from the pressing moment, and the poet's ability to select the exact words for that moment. Poetry comes out of the particulars of life, but also transcends them. Poetry does not begin with an assignment, “Write a poem about an apple.” On the contrary, it begins with the poet’s encounter with an apple, and the overwhelming necessity of the apple’s presence. For a poet, that presence is so great, she is forced to raise up language to meet it. Nothing in poetry comes from simply assigning words to things. Only when something comes into our being with such force that it dislodges words, the way electrons are dislodged by an atomic reaction, is poetry possible. Assignments throw words at things, with the hope some will stick. The poet realizes an experience of such power that words are dislodged from the place where language and things meet. Such it is that we speak of the light of a poem. In poetry, it is not mud we are after, but electricity.

The One Who Won’t Listen

For whom does the poet write? The poet writes for that one person who would listen, but never does. There is someone in our dreams we would speak to, someone in our dreams we hope will listen. Instead of listening, he lays his perfect, naked body in a shallow pool. There he will relax among golden fish and waving fans of sea weed. If only he would listen, then the poems would stop, but he never does, so the poet writes and writes. All poems say the same thing repeatedly. How much did Beatrice listen to Dante? She was too busy in her perfect beauty showing him here and there. Did she listen to Dante’s praise of her beauty? Hardly. The poet writes as one knocking on a door, tapping on a shoulder, “Let me in, please listen.” A poet writes a poem so she will be taken into the heart of the perfect, naked beauty she desires. We don’t have to teach people how to knock or how to dream. What needs to be taught is how to listen.

The One Who Listens

I imagine for those who truly listen, there is only silence, the silence behind every wish.

Approaches to the Truth

In every age there seems to be too many musicians, a few philosophers and only one poet.

Art Schools

There are art schools and writing schools. What do they teach there? In art school, students learn about materials and methods. Eventually they may see the human form as the best model, and its representation the highest accomplishment. What are the materials and methods of poetry? Are words stored and mixed like paint? Are stories about life, love, and death shown to be the highest aim of words? At writing schools do they write from nature, make outlines, try out new materials? All this seems unlikely because a writer only has words to work with. What about the talented painter or writer who hasn’t been to school? Well, there are museums and there are libraries. The irony of the contemporary situation is that modern poetry is often defined in such a way that it cannot be taught, cannot happen in school. Nevertheless, much effort and funds are spent teaching this definition in classrooms. This is what happens in workshops too, that, and the strange phenomenon of poems pulling up, and waiting in line to be fixed.

Poetry and Music

The music of poetry is not the music of music, the music of poetry is the music of words.

Form

When poems rhyme and have a predictable structure, like a sonnet for example, we are helped in making a judgment about their artistic value. By noting how well the formal rules are followed, we may say, “This is a good poem.” Even though form is a rule imposed from the outside, it helps us understand and appreciate beauty. With fee verse, the rules of judgment must be centered in the individual, not the work of art. Here taste is everything, or in the case of most poets, nothing. Here is a rule imposed from the inside. There is something in a perfect poem that says it can be no other way. In both love and writing, we are amazed at what some people choose to embrace. Nevertheless, most people demand a standard of beauty as the object of their desire. Who would court a person whose arm was at their knee, whose nose was on their stomach, and whose lips were on their feet? Form is crucial to the pursuit of desire. Love seems to incline to beauty, as words incline to truth.

Poetic Mission

The Mexican poet, José Gorostiza wrote, “The mission of the poet is an infinitely delicate one. We ought to shield it from innocent pride; we ought to defend it, if necessary, with the whip of our childish vanity. After all, neither the individuality nor the length of a work ought to matter much as a concern among readers. In poetry as in a miracle, what has to happen, what is important is intensity. No one but the Supreme Being, far from us, who we do not know, can sustain in the air for a few seconds the perfume of a violet. The poet, similar to the Supreme Being, sustains the miracle of poetry for a fraction of a fraction. Among all people, a poet is one of the elected few who we can justly call a man of God.” I would believe this, but I live in Chicago.

Poetry Slams

To say the spoken word has more authority than the written word is to retreat from civilization and democracy. In fact, the opposite is true. Civilization and democracy demand literacy. The written word is actually more authoritative and factual than the spoken word. It is even more pure and individualistic. Performance is counter revolutionary. It feeds on the cult of the personality, and encourages alienation in the audience. Performance poetry ends in illusion and fascism.

Poetry and Politics

The Mexican writer Octavio Paz writes, “If poetry was man's first language — or if language is essentially a poetic operation which consists of seeing the world as a fabric of symbols and relationships between these symbols — then each society is built upon a poem.” What is the poem America is built upon, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass? If so, it’s the ultimate destiny of American democracy to embrace being gay. If you don’t like that conclusion, there’s always the fascism of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Beware of heterosexual poets. They don’t know poetry, and they don’t know America.

Poetry and Music Again

Ernest de Sélincourt is correct when he writes in his essay, On Poetry, “...whilst music enchants us by pure sound, the transport of poetry springs from the effect upon us of sound with a clearly defined intellectual content, so perfectly fused with it that we cannot distinguish sound from sense or sense from sound....That words have an intellectual significance from which the poet cannot escape is no disadvantage to poetry, it is simply the condition over which it triumphs; and the effect of the poet's music, as music, cannot be dissociated from its meaning." The only question that remains is what is the meaning of music? If de Sélincourt is correct, then words cannot be used like paints or musical sounds. Words are inherently meaningful. They carry both meaning and emotion, and like sex, words seem to be one of those hinges where spirit and matter fluctuate. Knowing this, the poet knows that poetry, like love, is its own justification for being. Furthermore, poetry does not need to marry any other art. It may live alone. Like the unicorn, people will think it strange because it can find no mate.

Books

As I get older, the more tired I grow of reading. I used to read a couple of books a week. Now I can hardly manage one a month. Most of today’s poetry is too tedious to read. One or two poems, that’s all I can manage in a sitting. What I care about now is writing, writing the poetry book I want to read. Isn’t that one function of a critic? She says to a reader, “No, this isn’t the book you’re looking for, so write your own.” In the end, that’s what writing poems is about, it’s about writing the book of poems you want to read, because no one else will write it.

Amazing Grace

I sometimes get the impression that in our time the arts, especially poetry, have replaced what religious people in the West once referred to as grace. At one time they argued grace was need to effect a conversion from the old person to the new. Nowadays, people talk about art the same way. I remember St. Augustine remarked that grace had three aspects; it was necessary, free and sufficient. It was necessary for salvation, given freely by God to sinners, and sufficient to change them. Well, the political necessity of art is broadcast daily by all sorts of agencies dedicated to keeping college graduates employed. Likewise, most people think poetry should be free. Are poets ever paid to do a reading the way musicians are paid to play? As to being sufficient, well, many so called poets rely solely on the fact they are writers, claiming this alone makes up for their lack of character, talent, good sense and virtue. Hallelujah, there you have it, poetry is necessary, free and sufficient.

The Same Old Story

I know a poet who couldn't decide whether to vacation in France or stay home and work on his manuscript. Another case of publish or Paris.

Packages

The unrequited lover knows emotions are irrelevant. A woman alone has to find a way of life in spite of emotions. This is like a man forced to deliver a package with no address. It must go somewhere. There is no room in his already crowded heart for it. But where? His only help is language. How does language work to help us carry over our irrelevant emotions to the world? I remember a lover leaving. At the bottom of the stairs he yells up, “And don’t send me any poems either.” Do we need any more evidence? Poems have power. By writing them, we shift the weight from our heart to the world. Obviously, the man at the bottom of the stairs was not Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Elevator Music

Nineteen ninety-four is the thirtieth birthday anniversary of Muzak. Is there a poetic equivalent of elevator music? Is there a style in writing that reduces the tragic and exalted to the mundane? We used to say the job of an elevator operator had its ups and downs. In that they are like critics. What is this thing about joining poetry with music? Why there is even a group in Chicago that does “pongs,” or songs and poetry combined. Haven’t these people heard of Sondheim’s musicals? Haven’t they heard of elevator music? And if they want to go all the way, well, haven’t they heard of opera? Periods of good taste have their ups and downs as well.

The Sound of One Desert Clapping

I just read a silly book by Natalie Goldberg called Long Quiet Highway. Well, I tried to read it. Goldberg also wrote Writing Down the Bones. Her books are about writing and Zen. Her books deal with the New Age spiritual quest, those journeys where there is really no spirit and nothing to find. Just a great deal of upper middle class angst and suburban boredom. Just a blind desire to write, a desire, which like all desires from the view of the Buddha, ought to be given up. The shame is, this desire isn’t burnt out before the books are written. You’ve seen the women who do this style of writing. They are tan, dry, and wear much silver and turquoise. They spend a long time looking out doorways and drinking mint tea. They write books and poems with an expanse of white space between the sparse lines. They use metaphors like “bone” and “snow,” and most of all “empty.” Zen for these people is a garment to clothe their profound selfishness. Actually, their books are about nothing, they are about the emptiness between their ears. Guess where they live? Santa Fe, New Mexico. Who knew?

Calculations

2 + 4 Play + Climax = Aftermath

Wrestling With Angels

The critic George P. Garrett thinks public readings of poetry are actually another kind of publication. He writes, “For contemporary poets the largest audience will be composed of auditors at public readings....” To overlook this aspect of the contemporary poetry scene, is to overlook the importance of getting your work out. “...W.D. Snodgrass...changed himself completely as a performer by seriously studying the craft of oral interpretation in mid-life.” I spend time thinking about this. Garrett’s words remain a voice in my head. Then there is another voice also, the voice of Roland Barthes. He wrote, “A writer is not a person with something to say, but a person with something to write.” Can we have it both ways? Can we be both actor and writer? The performance poetry I see is most often uniformly bad, and poorly written. Then again, most of the poetry books I read are uniformly bad, too. I guess this means “literature” is something that has been around awhile. The good writers are usually the dead ones, the absent ones, the ones exiled by time and space. They speak with the particular silence of words on a printed page. Maybe there are two angels we have to wrestle with nowadays — writing and performance — a victory over one or the other earns you a bright, new name.

Neurons

What would you rather have, a book about salvation, or being saved? What do you want, a love poem or a lover? I read they are cutting up brains to see what makes them work. Try to find the atom that makes man good. Is it near the molecule that means a word?

January

If we begin our awareness of the world with the fire that comes to our heart after the passion of an unattainable love, we may be moved to write poetry. That lesson, the lesson we learn from a struggle to find words adequate to our desire, moves our verse out into the world. It is there we can imagine a poet, alone on a cold, January day. The clear blue of a winter afternoon is just fading, as the short day declines. In the deepest part of the deep blue sky there is a metaphor for all the weight of the world. It is what words were meant to say in the face of fire. The heart affirms what is, affirms what was, and how it could not be otherwise. The spirit wants nothing more than this affirmation. Words are sufficient for the world. Poetry is sufficient for our place here. Beyond that the mind wonders. The beautiful poem, as a source of truth and pleasure, remains like a fire to warm the heart. Such poems lift our troubles — become wings on which the spirit rides.

Drag Queens and Lit Crit

Why are some people both attracted and repulsed by drag queens? Why does a gorgeous drag queen, feather boas floating, rhinestones sparkling, elicit feelings of nostalgia and anxiety at the same time? Why are gay men especially delighted when a drag queen is victorious over the stupidity and oppression of the world? These things are possible for the same reason drag queens make good critics. Just like critics, drag queens know the rules, and yet play not to win, but to sing and dance. They know the rules won’t get them what they want, so they combine comedy and tragedy in the same beautiful gown. This is evident when we consider what a drag queen really wants. A drag queen wants a real man. A real man, however, wants a woman, not an illusion of a woman, not a drag queen. The more a drag queen tries to be what she thinks the other desires, the more the other retreats from her grasp. This dance ends with the drag queen becoming a tragic caricature. Just as there are no truly great humorous poems in English, so drag is essentially a tragic language, not a humorous one. Drag tries for the comic, the same way a cat tries to leap a cliff, but falls short. After that fall the cat takes only short leaps. If it falls, silk and lace and feathers will be there for it. The dilemma lived daily by the drag queen is a perfect situation for poetry. The more a poem attempts to grasp the world by language, to leap across the divide separating me and another, the more the world retreats from the grasp of words. The more a poet tries to get what she wants by words, the more she sees the emptiness of what she wants. Do we learn anything from this? One fact, for certain, drag queens and sunlight do not mix.

Jigsaw Puzzles

As a rain of autumn leaves fall on the lawn with their gesture of renunciation, I think of people coming into and going out of the world. What have they to say, for it is in saying that the world holds together? Language is the shape of the world. Best of all, the world is a poem. It took me a while to figure this out. It required much talking to myself. Kicking through the dry leaves and the wreckage of a lifetime, I realized sooner or later all of us are wounded by the world. One way or another, we are cut by the sword of being alive. When we attempt to heal that wound by words, we learn to read what the earth, the water, and the sky have to say. What is written there but compassion, peace, forgiveness? Yes, even forgiveness for fire.