Cosmopoetica

[wow, this post got mangled somehow. I've fixed it. I think.]

I’m convinced that the variety of contemporary poetry scenes and the poems that emerge from them provide clear evidence that poetry is not only alive and well, but more vital than ever thanks to blogs and other forms of powerful personal publishing and social networks allowing poets to discover and connect with one another in ways a generation before couldn’t even dream of.

Despite the diversity, my own tastes remain largely mainstream. I can’t find a way in to many “post-avant” poems, which partially explains why I used to feel cheated by them. When I considered how *I* might write such poems, the best I could come up with was an intuitive assemblage, riffing on words, navigating by connotation alone. At worst I imagined these poems as the hermetic products of a wholly personal randomness, words unworked, their authors stopping at the point of “it means to me,” while I see the work of poetry as fashioning the gift– that can only be a gift if it can be given away, and that must begin wth the author giving that gift to me.

There’s an essential selfishness in my own assumptions. If I don’t understand a poem, eventually I start thinking of it as a sham, a ruse, a trick, rather than suppose the existence of a poetry I just don’t get. But if I accept that the atonal (relative to tradition) music of an avant garde jazz musician has something more behind and in it than the similar sounds made by a beginning saxophone player as I once was, even if I enjoy listening to it about as much, and even if the exact nature of the difference between the two is unclear and to some extent a matter of faith, then it’s not just charitable but more sensible– and perhaps obligatory– to assume that the lack of art I perceive lies not in the maker by in myself.

But how to find that way in? Surely everyone– except William Logan and a similar embittered few who have given in to the slight, reductive comforts of the committed curmudgeon– would rather discover the power of a piece of art than revel in (or resent) its ineffectiveness. I’m eager to find my way to the work, and willing to put my shoulder into doing so, but I don’t have the vocabulary or a handhold among the fundamentals of enough strength to pull myself along. Much of the poetry that continues to mystify me is made of the same materials as the poems I enjoy, but formed in some mysterious forge into an inexplicable stuff so other to me that my reading of it becomes like sustained reading in a foreign language without the benefit of a teacher, bilingual friend or Rosetta stone. a fraction of beautiful music might emerge occasionally from my interpretive butchery, but not enough…

Maybe I should get it and don’t, end of story. But I can’t help wishing I had some help. I clearly recognize the danger posed by thoughtless education and anthologizing, and the damage that can occur when a work of art is reduced to an object lesson, a few surface levels illuminated and the rest ignored until it’s frozen forever into the shape of a popularized, received reading serving as a cultural artifact (Frost anyone?). But someone who loves a poem can share something of that love without smothering either. That nothing approaching the whole, rich existence of a piece can’t be explicated for someone else doesn’t necessarily devalue what can be communicated. If anything it *heightens* the value of the small fraction that can be shared because of its rarity and it creates a currency the new reader can mine from poem to build creations of their own, be they in the shape of reading or writing or both.

Where are the teachers? To whom does a beginner bring his beginner’s mind to learn this new language? Many of the post-avant artists– exhibiting a trait of the avant-garde– are clear about, and take rightful pride in, the value of their part in creating something new and transformative. A significant part of that value derives from how (and how much) their work breaks with inherited conventions and where their work can be located on some mythical map of the poetry cosmos.

This means I need a lot more help finding my way inside the poetry of Bruce Smith and Clark Coolidge than I do Philip Levine or Jack Gilbert. I’ve plenty of handle on Charles Simic, but Jack Spicer remains somewhere beyond enigmatic. I need fewer people telling me who their poetic opposition is and what these new poetries aren’t, and don’t desire to do, and more willing to show me something of what they choose to do and what they are. The negative space around these poetries– whether a product of indifference or hostility or inattention– yields a poem’s position without definition, locates its body in a general relation to poems I understand without providing any clarity about what it is.

I know much can’t be taught. Some things that can be taught arguably shouldn’t be. And some things that can’t shouldn’t be attempted lest the poem end up as dead as Twain’s vivisected frog. But that leaves a lot of room for those who possess the gift of new poetry to give the gift of others in return. One of the greatest things about art is that appreciation, aesthetics and enjoyment are part of an economy of abundance without meaningful counterfeiting. Giving our gifts away increases the gifts we possess.

I dream too of a dream anthology with a true selection from the contemporary scene, even as a I recognize that by definition such an anthology could never be truly contemporaneous. I can go to any library or bookstore and find numerous examples of anthologies of mainstream works up to the present day, but scouring the web with my best Google-fu comes to nothing. For the initiated, the web of poetry blogs and innovative publications is a vast anthology, but for the uninitiated it’s a bewildering array objects trapped behind the clearest glass.

Years ago I asked Ron Silliman what he thought should be in a dream anthology of the post-avant and friends, one from which wandering fools like myself could read and from the knowing be taught. He responded quickly that it was an interesting idea he would have to think about. I guess he’s still thinking. I’m certainly still waiting.

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 7 Comments »