Reading Poetry Today

[Lisa Simon]

Do you? Don't you? Why? Why not?

[Kim Anderson]

My first impulse is to encourage discussion about cultivating (or understanding) readers. As a 50 something who was once a young woman who lived to argue heatedly about the short-comings of confessional poetry; who couldn't wait to puzzle over the newest John Ashbury poem; who would recite Yeats' "Lapis Lazuli" to anyone who stood near me for more than 10 seconds (people wise up surprisingly fast); I mostly stopped reading poetry about 20 years ago. Why? Discuss.

[Lisa Simon]

Interesting. Was it poetry or the aura about poetry (its set of wars) that turned you away? I know you to be an avid reader, so you didn't stop reading altogether.

In the 90s there was an awful lot of poetry calling itself (when it was brave) "language poetry" that didn't seem to speak to anyone or anything except the cacophony of logs rolling down a hill. That was the point. And it scored some fabulous theoretical points. But it was dull and not very nourishing to readers who were accustomed to going to poetry to actually listen to an interior voice or understand something about the big unspoken mysteries of being alive.

My rough estimate is that we lost a few million readers during that era. Were you a casualty, my friend?

[Sheryl Ann Noethe]

I remember when a certain poet/professor at the U of MT told his students that narrative didn't belong in poetry, and that if they had that "irritable reaching toward meaning" they could move on to prose. That year the work that came out of the writing program was incoherent and derivative in direct imitation of that professor. Poetry contests chose writers who considered themselves "Language poets" and all across America readers lost interest, and worst, passion. It was only a phase, and passed, mostly, but did much damage to the culture of poetry." The universe is not composed of molecules, it is composed of stories". (source forgotten) I was not a casualty because I ignored and despised that entire movement. However, it was much harder to publish or win awards because many judges and editors fell for the Language Poetry B.S.

[Kim Anderson]

Thank you both for trying to come to my rescue! Much food for thought--Let's keep Kim on the couch a little longer. I think I understand what you're both trying to say about Language Poets (although certainly Ashbury qualified as one (no?) and I used to adore something about his work. I think Sheryl's point about narrative has something to do with it. Somewhere in my 30s I lost patience with the perfectly captured moment and a vast majority of poetry seemed concerned with that. I think it's my lack, not poetry's. Many poems I run across today (okay, I'll admit it, almost solely in the pages of the New Yorker) seem intent on isolating and stopping in order to examine from every facet. I guess what appeals to me these days is messier--I like poetry that engages me in conversation, even arguement. Here's a poem (certainly jam-packed with narrative) I ran across recently and like:

BRING IN THE GODS

Bring in the gods, I say, and he goes out. When he comes
back and I know they are with him, I say, Put tables in front
of them so they may be seated, and food upon the tables
so they may eat. When they have eaten, I ask which of them
will question me. Let him hold up his hand, I say.
The one on the left raises his hand and I tell him to ask.
Where are you now, he says. I stand on top of myself, I hear
myself answer. I stand on myself like a hilltop and my life
is spread before me. Does it surprise you, he asks. I explain
that in our youth and for a long time after our youth we cannot
see our lives. Because we are inside of that. Because we can
see no shape to it, since we have nothing to compare it to.
We have not seen it grow and change because we are too close.
We don’t know the names of things that would bind them to us,
so we cannot feed on them. One near the middle asks why not.
Because we don’t have the knack for eating what we are living.
Why is that? She asks. Because we are too much in a hurry.
Where are you now? The one on the left says. With the ghosts.
I am with Gianna those two years in Perugia. Meeting secretly
in the thirteenth-century alleys of stone. Walking in the fields
through the spring light, she well dressed and walking in heels
over the plowed land. We are just outside the city walls
hidden under the thorny blackberry bushes and her breasts naked.
I am with her those many twilights in the olive orchards,
holding the heart of her as she whimpers. Now where are you?
he says. I am with Linda those years and years. In American
cities, in Copenhagen, on Greek islands season after season.
Lindos and Monolithos and the other places. I am with Michiko
for eleven years, East and West, holding her clear in my mind
the way a native can hold all of his village at one moment.
Where are you now? He says. I am standing on myself the way
a bird sits in her nest, with the babies half asleep underneath
and the world all leaves and morning air. What do you want?
a blonde one asks. To keep what I already have, I say. You ask
too much, he says sternly. Then you are at peace, she says.
I am not at peace, I tell her. I want to fail. I am hungry
for what I am becoming. What will you do? She asks. I will
continue north, carrying the past in my arms, flying into winter.

--Jack Gilbert

[Lisa Simon]

Get comfortable my dear, you're complex.

This poem you chose and that you like is--even without a strong or precise element one could call "narrative"--pretty far from abstract...which does make me wonder if you were turned off by the glut of abstraction and sound theory. (The NYer printed a lot of it, btw. I hear there was a turn-over in poetry editors about 5 years ago. )

I confess a fondness for the "moment's monument" type of poem, mostly because they often include a physicality where truly abstract poems are decapitated, so to speak--all brain, no body.

And your Gilbert poem, while it may seem like a rapid fire of images and thoughts, is heavy grounded in visceral experience. Here's how:
It begins by battering you around in an odd world--it may be imaginary, but there are tables, chairs & people. Its setting evokes Plato's Republic or a utopian novel where I must figure out the norms of being. What are the rules? Who is in charge?

In moves from that unstable (but exciting) environment into that thick, gorgeous nostalgia at the end through basic philosophical inquiry--who are we, what nurtures us....and the answer, the most felt portion of this poem, comes at the end in naming real people the speaker loved and real places he lived. He takes a metaphoric leap at the end, but it's a concrete image, absolutely grounded in the real visceral experience.

So it's not narrative per se--as in a link-by-link trajectory--but it relies heavily on real nouns (in fact, JG wrote an essay titled "Real Nouns"). He's still using the stuff you can see and feel to reach you, rather than abstract sounds or theoretical ideas.

It's poetry you can feel with your senses, not just puzzle over.

[Sheryl Ann Noethe]

Last night while lying awake worrying I remembered who wrote the quote about
the universe being made of stories: Muriel Rukeyser. Phew. Kim, I love that poem
you put out there by Jack Gilbert. It's like a feast, rich and complex and mysterious yet the reader never suspects this may be going nowhere, leaving her confused and annoyed. Thank you, I'd never read that one before and it is magnificent. The women he refers to, Michiko, is his dearly departed who appears in many of his poems.

[Lowell Jaeger]

I've been ruminating on the why read poetry question . . . which is a question my ex wife asked me more than once. So I offer this poem as fuel for discussion.

Lowell Jaeger

My Ex-Wife The Dancer

needed advice, I thought.
Lesson plans for aerobic dance.
Tell them, I said, how nutrition
and exercise drive the body’s metabolism.
How increased muscle mass burns
calories. How accelerated heart-rates
melt fat. I talked on and on like that

and she stared at my teeth,
strained to read my lips. Till
I quit. Silenced. And she said,
looking at her shoes, “How ‘bout
I just crank the boom-box
and let them kick and sweat.”

Same woman asked me about poetry,
why’s it worth so much of my time.
I still freeze up at weddings
when the band plays and couples
sway. Poetry’s worth, I can’t prove.
Same as she can’t fathom
when there’s music, shouldn’t we all
get up and move?

[Sara Swanson]

a poem on reading today poetry:
"Shakespeare was better."

I think as poets and writers in general, we have a lot to live up to. Reading the classics--which obviously had some art going for them--is one of the best ways for our poetry today to improve. But, we also have some conventions that poets in the past did not, such as...no rules? Fonts and colors, graphic design, a lack of meter. I'm hoping the wave of poetry that comes out of today is good enough to compare to classics, and I think it's possible. There was a scientific study of 'crowds' that stated 'advances in culture and technology were preserved via crowds.' If the internet is the biggest crowd, in all of history, culture is probably at the bottom of a steep curve up. I think poetry today is less about 'what genre or style do you write in' and more about 'what sort of difference does this poem make?' YouInventedMe is one of the best poets of all time, to quote someone else. I wouldn't be able to read his stuff if I lived in any other era, so I'm glad.

[Jason Neal]

Did anyone read (or pay attention to) the poem "Alien vs. Predator" by Michael Robbins that appeared in The New Yorker last January? Here it is:

Alien vs. Predator

Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk.
We’d stay up all night. Every angel’s
berserk. Hell, if you slit monkeys
for a living, you’d pray to me, too.
I’m not so forgiving. I’m rubber, you’re glue.
 
That elk is such a dick. He’s a space tree
making a ski and a little foam chiropractor.
I set the controls, I pioneer
the seeding of the ionosphere.
I translate the Bible into velociraptor.
 
In front of Best Buy, the Tibetans are released,
but where’s the whale on stilts that we were promised?
I fight the comets, lick the moon,
pave its lonely streets.
The sandhill cranes make brains look easy.
 
I go by many names: Buju Banton,
Camel Light, the New York Times.
Point being, rickshaws in Scranton.
I have few legs. I sleep on meat.
I’d eat your bra—point being—in a heartbeat.

I don't find myself reading a lot of poetry (my wife, Lisa Simon, and I drew straws: she got poetry; I got technical manuals), but this one caught my eye, partially because it's just so weird, and partially because it's just so NOT what one typically finds in The New Yorker. I wonder if it models a kind of 21st century mash-up of "narrative" and "language" poetry. There's enough coherence to keep me pondering (for a short while, at least) some of the lines and stanzas, but mostly I just like the crazy language and unexpected rhymes. (I mean, c'mon, "That elk is such a dick"...? I could say that all day!)

I do think there's an authentic perspective, a voice, a character, inhabiting the poem, however, and that's what gives it its heat. So even if it doesn't make "sense" in traditional ways, I find myself compelled because I detect a sentiment that is honest and alive, if not exactly transparent.

Anyone else like or hate it? (And believe me, I think this is a poem a person could legitimately hate, in a way one simply can't hate, say, "Stopping By a Woods on a Snowy Evening"....)

And in case anyone is interested, here are a few links about the poem & author:

Michael Robbins reading the poem

The poem on The New Yorker website

Five more poems by Michael Robbins on La Petite Zine

Interview with Michael Robbins on the Village Voice website

[Ken Egan]

Well, I agree with Jason, that poem certainly catches my attention! I wonder what Lowell Jaeger's ex-wife would say? I just know I laughed out loud many times, always a good sign--I just love the play with language and the surprising shifts (from Camel Light to New York Times!).

But while others puzzle out the persona and point of that wacky poem, let me raise another (potentially facile) thought: Does most of our contemporary poetry appear in popular song lyrics?

I'm thinking Feist, Bruce Springsteen, Kanye West, Dave Matthews, Tori Amos, Natalie Merchant, etc.

In other words, has the "work" of poetry migrated to that more accessible, popular medium? And is that such a bad thing?

[Lisa Simon]

I think Lowell's ex-wife would say Michael Robbins cranked up the music box and, in our responses of delight and surprise, we're moving to it, sweatin' it out without knowing or caring that it's also good for our brains to break out of structures of coherence.

Which is one point language poets were making. Too bad it was mostly boring. Maybe there is a "mash-up" to be found, as J. put it. I think Kim's mention of Ashbury, whom she liked, is a good example.

But I also love the poems Sara showed us by "YouInventedMe"...that are another kind of mash-up...of sound, sense, and on-the-page image (as opposed to one a reader might conjure).

So I'm wondering with Ken whether rock music plays a role. I sense it's different, but I can't put my finger on how. Or whether that difference is personal, since I speak as someone with more of an ear for words than music.

lisa

[Lowell Jaeger]

Sooner or later the gate-keepers need to join our conversation. I, for one, like the drift of a discussion about poetry that tries to open doors into corridors that connect with other arts, like dance, like music, etc. Others would want to separate one species from another, keep poetry "pure." I can never quite understand that point of view, but I do wish someone would chime in to say something about upholding standards, give us a few huzzahs for tradition. As so often happens, I suspect the wise course is in the middle.