I write here as someone with two special angles of vision on the poetry world. One comes from twenty-odd years as an editor—and three as sole editor—of the durable West Coast all-poetry magazine Blue Unicorn. This job entails constantly sampling, and choosing from, a hefty stream of submitted verse. The second is a lifetime of immersion in the critical ideas and teaching methods of Lawrence Hart, mentor of the so-called Activist Group of poets, and my father, who died in 1996. For a quarter century now I have been documenting, applying, and I hope extending these methods.
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MY POEMS 1
Relax, it’s not what you think. (If you want to see some JH stuff, you can find it at johnhart.com/poetry). What I’m talking about now is poetry by others, verses that I know; that I love; that I possess: poems that have become a part of my mental furniture; lines that just might spill out of me at parties. Quite a few of these, I’m sure, are on anyone’s list—among people who have such lists. Some poems, especially of more recent vintage, maybe not.
It’s a parlor game: impose a limit of one poem per poet. I might start way back, with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, “That time of year thou may’st in me behold,” with its memorable series: “when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang”—a little lesson in effective word placement. Or Thomas Nashe’s “Litany in Time of Plague”: “Brightness falls from the air.” Or certain stanzas—but only stanzas—of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen, such as the portrait of decadence in Book I, Canto IV, stanzas 4-5.
John Donne is tough: love poem, or Holy Sonnet? But has anyone since managed an extended metaphor as well as he does in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning?” John Milton’s “On His Blindness” haunts, though the consolation is less convincing than the despair. Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” in everyone’s anthology, is in mine too. “Our vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires, and more slow.”
I find less that sticks with me in the Neoclassical and Romantic periods, but Blake’s “Tyger” is unavoidable, along with the weird central scenes of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Some Germans chime in here: Goethe for the second “Wanderer’s Nightsong” and Clemens Brentano for his desperately Catholic “Cry from the Depths in Spring,” still awaiting a readable English translation. (That’s another subject.)
For the Victorians, there’s Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” But the era is really redeemed by its three outsiders. Walt Whitman, for the small percentage of hits among his copious misses: I love, for instance, “Song of the Rolling Earth.” Emily Dickinson, that heroine of self-invention: I’ll settle on #303, “The soul selects her own society.” Gerard Manley Hopkins? It has to be one of the “Terrible Sonnets,” say, the one beginning: “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee.”
While the Anglos were ignoring their best, the French were celebrating theirs. The parade begins, for me, with the less familiar Alfred de Vigny, if only for the cynical close of his “The Mount of Olives”: “The just man will oppose disdain to absence.” Gerard de Nerval, for his treatment of the same subject—and of the emerging concept of entropy—in “Christ on the Mount of Olives.” Do I really have to settle on one Baudelaire? Then it’s “Parisian Dream,” his vision of an ideal city devoid of vegetation. (So much for the poet as environmentalist.) Of Stéphane Mallarmé, there is hardly a poem I could let go, but I’ll recite you one of the longer ones, the tribute titled “Toast Funèbre,” in which the departed poet Théophile Gautier is instructed to “to keep his sacred eyes shut, and be still.”
This is already lengthy and I haven’t reached 1900 and an explosion of choices. To be continued.
Sitting in the audience
Attending the typical poetry reading is, for me, a less than pleasant duty, redeemed by the faint hope of a pleasant surprise. There I sit, listening fiercely for signs of life in the flow of words, trying not to radiate grumpiness. These people are, after all, putting themselves out there; they deserve courteous attention (and maybe purchase of their often self-funded books). I may soon be in their shoes. And when everyone murmurs “How moving,” it seems rude to demur.
Am I a hypocrite? Not exactly. To complain about what’s on offer would be like objecting when someone speaks a foreign language, in their own country. The typical reader-out-loud is not really aiming for poetry as I understand it, that difficult reach toward a higher communication. Rather, she or he is doing “self-expression.” This can take the form of a declaimed diary entry, a lineated barstool complaint, a morning’s feeble paraphrase of a dream, a helpless “you know what I mean.” It’s a different lingo, another register of speech.
Sharing such writing in public is like posting on Snapchat: the payoff is in the immediate connection with a sympathetic audience. And indeed—much though the fact bemuses me—many, many people enjoy this scene. (The ones that want more tend to stay home.)
So my issue is really not with the product. It’s with the labeling of the product. As I’ve noted before, “poetry” is the most protean of categories. We more or less know what a short story is, what a play is, what a news item is. “Poetry” is everything not included in these better-defined zones and, indeed, it overlaps them. Its reach is almost coextensive with “writing.” Yet—and this is the core of the problem—“poetry” is simultaneously a term of highest praise.
Say “I’m a playwright,” and people may ask what you’ve had produced. Say “I’m a poet,” and the response is likely to be: “How wonderful! So am I.”
I wish we had more signposts for the sprawling territory we call poetry. We don’t, so here I sit, listening hungrily for something that is very occasionally there.
Anything at all?
Dan Chiasson, called “the country’s most visible poet-critic,” has put his finger on something, and it hurts.
Writing in a recent New Yorker about the poets of the so-called New York School, he remarks: “All at once, a generation of dazzling young people who had studied the canon in deadening classrooms remembered that poems could be, and always had been, anything at all—an invitation, an apology, a thank-you note, a recipe, a valentine.”
With these words he captures, and blesses, the revolution in taste that spread from several centers in the 1950s and 1960s and now holds the commanding heights of the poetry world (Chiasson has a prestigious professorship at Wellesley).
Maybe Chiasson is saying that a poem could be about anything? Fair enough. That goes back at least to Baudelaire. But can it really be anything?
Once upon a time a poem was more or less defined by sound: it was a rhymed, metrical, or otherwise stylized form. The Modernists drew the border between poetry and prose along another line. A poem, formal or not, should create a more intense experience than prose, achieved by a variety of means, and it should so from the first line to the last of anything called a “poem.” This demand created new problems for writers (and readers), which several generations labored with varying success to solve.
Then came mid-century, the era of the Beats, the New York School. and Black Mountain. These new leaders chucked both traditional and modernist criteria, leaving … what? “An invitation, an apology, a thank-you note, a recipe, a valentine.” Or, needless to say, a political or social commentary.
The word “poetry” has become a title conferrable on any piece of language. It is a pedestal on which any verbal object can be placed.
This quiet redefinition might lead to a corresponding modesty. Yet these P words—poetry, poem, poetic—still have an aura. They are still terms of prestige. Poets—those who write their stuff with line breaks, and sometimes initial capitals—still wish to be regarded by definition as Artists, and of a superior sort.
An open door elitism
Somebody dropped the E-bomb. A submitter to Blue Unicorn—advised he would do better to try his luck elsewhere—accuses the magazine of being “elitist.” The jibe started me thinking about this whole question of elitism—and the quite different fact that there are elites.
Quality, after all, does count. We salute the pitcher with the most wins, the surgeon with the best outcomes, the lawyer whose arguments persuade, the climber who can actually make it up the route. In the arts, granted, it gets murkier, because the standards of judgment are constantly under debate. I may think recognition goes to the wrong people. But that doesn’t mean I’m against the recognition. Like the Biblical poor, the elites ye will have with ye always.
Elitism is something different. It’s the feeling, among those who have somehow made it, that very few people can, or even should, follow them into that state of grace. Some earlier writers I admire were outspoken in this view. “I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers,” said Flannery O’Connor. “My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” “Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it,” wrote Anthony Burgess. More recently, Kay Ryan has struck a similar note.
The contrarian tartness of these statements makes me smile, but I don’t agree with them. It’s not that there should be a wall of fire to overcome in attaining the highest level of any skill; it is just that there is such a wall. Some few may find their own way through it; why not give an assist to many more? Universities may or may not be doing a good job of helping people penetrate the wall, but it is all to the good that they try. If they try. My own experience, of the creative writing program at Princeton, gave me an early shot of skepticism about that.
Lawrence Hart, a poetry teacher unblessed by the academy, embodied a third way: not permissiveness, not exclusivity, but what you might call open door elitism. He demanded a great deal of his students, and criticized their work severely at times. But he adopted the principle that anyone who came to him had the potential to achieve mastery, and he threw himself into the effort to help them achieve it.
He once asked a student if she would be jealous if too many people joined the “elite” of really fine writers. The risk of this happening seems not very high, but such was truly this great teacher’s goal. The nonprofit organization named for Hart is dedicated to opening doors like the ones he found—to people selected only by their willingness to enter.
The ambition of Kay Ryan
I like Kay Ryan’s poems, some of them very much indeed. I also like her prose. In a field awash in positivity, she is sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, and bracingly irreverent. I wish every aspiring poet would spend some time with her 2020 book of essays, Synthesizing Gravity.
Here she is, attending a session on “neglected poets” at an AWP conference: “I guess I shouldn’t have expected to like neglected poets since I don’t like many unneglected ones even.” She dares to be bored at a reading by W. S. Merwin. She is acerbic about the workshop world, speaking of “the great creative writing fungus.” When a young colleague gushes over a piece she wrote about becoming a poet, Ryan laments: “What in the world was my essay doing encouraging these ever-expanding fuzzy rings of literary mediocrity, deepening the dismal soup of helpful supportive writing environments?”
Well. Is there no such thing as a tough-minded and genuinely helpful writing circle? But Ryan has a more exalted group in mind.
She challenges us to orient ourselves, not by what contemporaries are doing and praising, but by the best that has been done. “I don’t want to be connected to poetry in an easy, fellowshipping way, but I do want to be connected in a way that will earn me the respect of the dead.” Again: “There, I’ve said it. I want the great masters to enjoy what I write. The noble dead are my readers, and if what I write might jostle them a little, if there were a tiny bit of scooting and shifting along the benches, this would be my thrill.”
Ambition! We need more of it.
I enjoy Ryan’s writings least where she grows more tolerant. I question her belief that there must be, in all poetry, stretches of lazier language. “Almost everything has to be packaging material. The job of almost all the words is to suspend the essential words, which cannot exist without some context. … Don’t we generally do that with poems we love, recall a phrase, or a line or two, exactly, nestled inside some vaguer rhythmic texture?” She adds modestly: “It’s the best I can usually do.”
If there was one distinctive demand of the Modernist era, it was to minimize that “packaging material” and to give, to almost every line, one or another kind of distinctive power. Ezra Pound preached this doctrine but didn’t practice it that often in his poetry. Kay Ryan does the reverse. At her frequent best, she delivers just the kind of consistent punch she is reluctant to demand.
The Poetry Deflation Test
When I am trying to gauge the strength of a poem—or a sequence of words that calls itself such—I sometimes try a simple test. Remove all its line breaks and other typographical devices, and see how it reads when formatted as prose. I find this sobering in assessing my own efforts, and revealing when applied to poetry in general.
The words look different when viewed this way. Some texts show themselves to be perfectly good prose essays or short-short stories. Some are exposed as just rather boring. And some, of course, seem ill at ease in the format, wanting more room to breathe.
Yet the deflation or crumpling doesn’t kill any live poem. It doesn’t essentially alter the working of the words. Strong images remain strong. Striking turns of phrase remain striking. Even meter and rhyme will assert themselves, perhaps subliminally, without the reinforcement of conventional layout.
Our usual way of presenting poems on the page has two functions. The first is to accentuate, to smooth acceptance of, the beauties already evident in a prose arrangement. Some imagistic work is so dense that the reader needs a little pause, a catching of the breath, to appreciate it. Empirically, it seems that three or four meaty words—nouns, verbs, or modifiers that require a bit of brain action to assimilate—are about enough for a single line. Line breaks also help forms emerge from the background, and allow for playful variants like severe enjambement (such as breaking a single word between two lines, in the manner of e. e. cummings).
But the more common function of line breaks, in today’s poetry, is simply advertisement. It is to place the words in a kind of frame or on a kind of pedestal. It is to stake a claim. This is important! This is deep! This merits leisurely attention! The claim may or may not be justified. Yet we have hypnotized ourselves into a kind of rapt acceptance of anything written in lines. My political discontent or trip to the grocery store gets an attentive audience if I have told it with line-breaks (or read it aloud, with expressive pauses, to a familiar type of hyper-supportive crowd).
I find poets I work with rather too focused on lineation, stanza structure, and the like. These, done well, are helpful adjuncts, no more. Critics of a certain kind, too, head straight for these formal elements. A favorite term-of-art is “enactment.” An enjambement in Milton’s Paradise Lost “enacts” Satan’s fall. A line cut in in a poem by Geoffrey Hill “maps urban and class division.” A half-line in Shakespeare “symbolizes Hamlet’s aborted vengeance.” Really? These are the perceptions of a zealous graduate student, not a reader who is responding to the poetry itself.
Try the deflation test on any of a thousand poems in major journals, and ask yourself just how much survives. Or apply it to some lines considered classic. Is there really much going on with certain famous verses by William Carlos Williams? Do we really care that much about Williams’s red wheelbarrow or refrigerated plums? I don’t, no matter how many anthologists tell me I should.