(NB: I’m sending this from Substack because TinyLetter flagged my account for abuse (lol). So apologies if you get this from two sources — I’m gonna stay on Substack though!)
I recently read a poetry review in a weekly prestige publication that ended "In such moments, [redacted]'s terse yet beguiling lyric articulates what it is to inhabit a particular body at a particular time in history, and, in the shadow of violence, to seek—or resist—openness." A now-familiar cycle of sensations filled my body: prideful scorn, fatigue, disdain, irritation, all finally cresting into anger.
I am entirely unfamiliar with this poet, so my outrage isn't on their behalf, though probably they deserved a review that actually reviewed something. I was more upset about once again witnessing even the most ostentatious of literary institutions model a way of thinking about poetry that involves not thinking about it at all. I mean: What poem isn't an articulation of "what it is to inhabit a particular body at a particular time in history"? For that matter, what history isn't "in the shadow of violence"? Who, when we write, whether it's a tweet or a text or a poem or newsletter, does not alternately "seek--or resist--openness"?
As I relaxed into the righteousness of my indignation, I returned to the insuppressible question of the last few years of my life: "will I ever read contemporary poetry again?" The identity crisis that managing the slush pile at Unnamed Independent Press induced in me has so far meant I can only answer in the negative. Yet I still read the poetry and all the poetry reviews in the New Yorker; I stare at new poetry releases in bookstores with a sick sense of fascination, as if I am looking at a spectacularly ugly picture of myself. I sometimes buy a new collection, and am promptly disappointed (this is too light a word -- more accurately I am revolted -- repulsed -- I throw the book from me in a rage). And I keep asking myself, what did I once like about the poetry of my contemporaries? Why did it mean so much to me for 20 years?
The answer, of course, is that it told me what it is was to inhabit my particular body (white, pudgy, pained) at that particular point in history (threats of environmental and economic collapse dawning on me) in the shadow of violence (post 9/11 &c). That it let me seek -- and resist -- openness.
It’s from the parentheticals above that the poem emerges, from the energy these modifiers produce as they slide, too personal and too imprecise, into their little containers. The capacity of the non-poetic to generate the tension between itself and the poetic is of course what a review could consider. But nobody who works in books actually knows how to read poetry, so they treat it as some sui generis marvel, a self-contained miracle accessible only to the most purest adherents, the most self-aggrandizing acolytes of the poetic church. And this is why I, having left that church, am still so reactive to its edicts, why I find myself so annoyed that so many critics are unwilling to understand poetry as a part of this world, this shitty, smelly, sick world, to suck just as much as it does.
During my time at Unnamed Independent Press, the voices around me would take on a luscious, trembling timbre when they spoke about poetry: a work was "a force of nature," they would say," it was "a revelation." I would sit silent, thinking about the pile of submissions I was tasked with, about the dreams it was my job to crush, the dreams of mine that would be crushed in the crushing. The sheer volume of unpublished, unrecognized, unread poets literalized the costs that the lofty rhetoric of book sales made metaphorical. For me, the price was disillusionment, a few wasted years of my young career, a depressingly low salary. Others were paying and are paying for MFA programs, writers’ residencies, self-publishing. When you read a poem with this in mind, what you encounter instead of the fragments of your neuroses and your ambition is the matter — the material — of the poem, of the world.
So I'm ending here, not with a poem, but with poetry, a few lines from Jean-Francois Lyotard's essay "The Differend," which is about the incommensurability of human discourses: how the way we talk about what we can know (philosophy) cannot render what we don't even know we don't know (trauma). If we recognize the capacity of the poetic to actually enact the vast silences of non-existence, of the unembodied, the inarticulateness not summond into speech by the powers that ossify language, maybe poetry can look a little more like this excerpt (which I'm lineating here so it reads to you like it does to me):
I can come by your place?
How is the dollar? Or:
It’s a crisis of over-capitalization --
Did you brush your teeth? Or:
Help! Help!
For whom? Or:
Either p or q; if p then not-q; --
Did you know that she had arrived?
Close the door! --
You are saying to close the door.