One morning this spring my wife showed me an advertisement
for a writers’ conference in New York City.
“You should go, really. A gift to
yourself for your birthday.”
At first it struck me as an odd suggestion. After all, as a writer I’m very much into
doing my own thing. That’s part of what
I love about writing – the autonomy it gives you to think and grow on your own
without recourse to anything but a library and the Internet. In the ten years that I’ve been translating
and writing poetry, I’ve become ever more rooted in the belief that it’s far
better not to pay much heed to what other people think (especially other
writers) when it comes to cultivation of your own voice. For me this choice has always seemed
necessary to preserve my sanity, since the classical Chinese poetry that most
appeals to me (and which provides inspiration for much of my own writing) is so
far out of step with current poetic fashion.
And yet I found myself intrigued by my wife’s
suggestion. On the verge of turning 60,
I was at a watershed moment in my life, prone to brooding and self-questioning. What better time could there be to stick my
head up out of my burrow, like a prairie dog, to better survey the surrounding
terrain? And besides, I liked the sales
pitch of this particular conference. It
featured what they called an MFA in a Day, which very much appealed to my
disdain for classroom learning, at least when it comes to poetry. As I already knew from attending law school,
the intellectual component of a professional education can be condensed on the
back of a postage stamp without much difficulty.
So that’s how I found myself boarding the jitney last week
heading into New York City to attend my first poetry workshop. Walking through midtown with my backpack and little
suitcase on wheels, I’d never felt so much like a tourist in my own hometown,
as I made my way to this conference at The Writers’ Hotel.
Now travel often turns out to be a mind-opening experience,
and this was very much the case with my five-day sojourn at The Writers’
Hotel. I learned an enormous amount about
the contemporary American poetry scene, both the good and the bad of it. My plan is to use these next few blog posts
to share my travel notes with you. Up
front, let me concede that these observations have most certainly been formed
on a limited knowledge base – all the understanding that could be imparted over
the course of an extended weekend. But sometimes it helps to be a tourist. By the time you’ve attended your second or
third poetry workshop or gotten your MFA, you’ve likely bought into the
ideology of contemporary American poetics, hook, line and sinker. Instead,
the following notes are offered up with the mixed sense of discovery and detachment,
which belongs to the tourist experience as opposed to that of the full-time
resident. Based on my brief visit, the
fundamental problems facing contemporary American poetry are glaringly evident
to me, much more so than before; and now that I’ve checked out of the Hotel, I’m even more pleased to be able to return to the world of Tang poetry,
which I consider my real home.
* *
* * *
First the good news -- and it really is good. The American
poetry scene is alive and thriving. The
invaluable part of the workshop experience is that it gave me a chance to sit
around a conference table with a handful of other poets discussing one
another’s work. And in my workshop group
of five people, there was an incredible range of personality and talent on
display, from Scott, an Arkansas home builder who is in the midst of composing a
new southern song book, to Tim, a Hawaiian school teacher who is exploring and
exploding the traditional genre boundaries of poetic elegy, to V and Lee who
are both developing their own idioms and metaphors to express their personal
world views.
But then the bad news – and it really is bad. Modern American poetry is, more or less,
intellectually bankrupt; the theory of modern poetry – by that I mean the
received wisdom about what makes for a good poem, at least as it is espoused by
America’s leading poets and teachers of poetry – is based on a handful of
problematic ideas and aesthetic principles that are hopelessly outdated and
ill-suited to the digital age in which we currently live. If the poetry community is serious about
trying to overcome its isolation and virtual irrelevancy to the vast majority
of the American population, it would do well to subject this ideology to
serious self-scrutiny. If it did so I
think it would soon come to the realization that it has, indeed, been suckled
in a modernist creed that by now has long outworn its usefulness.
Am I overstating my case?
Perhaps but not by much. Let me
briefly lay out the three central planks that seem to provide the primary,
albeit hopelessly rickety foundation for the theory and practice of modern
American poetry, at least as it is being presented in poetry workshops today,
by leading poets and teachers. These are
the core beliefs that could be inscribed on the back of a postage stamp; they
provide the criteria by which poets in the mainstream of the current American tradition
seem to assess the merits of a poet’s work – including their own:
1.
Show
Don’t Tell: Suckled in the modernist
creed, contemporary American poets cling to the notion that vivid imagery,
above all, stands as the central and most important element that makes for a
good poem. So the most often repeated
bit of advice you’re likely to hear in the course of a poetry workshop is show don’t tell. Let your imagery speak for itself. What does this even mean? Modern American
poetry’s fixation upon imagery has come about for very specific historical and
cultural reasons (as I will explore further in next week’s blogpost). Show don’t tell is the shibboleth passed
down, from one generation to the next, ever since Ezra Pound first canonized
the idea. Today it functions as little
more than a knee-jerk reaction – a convenient way to dismiss the value of any poetry
that places imagery in a less exalted position. Indeed, up until the early 20th
century, the vast majority of great English language poetry was in no way
subject to any such limiting stricture, and poems invariably included quite a
lot of telling (as well as other modes of discourse) along with the showing,
thinking and perceiving being equally important in imparting overall meaning. What a pity it would have been if the poetry
of Shakespeare or Milton or Donne had been overly influenced by such bad and
limiting advice. (You can read here an article in Writers Digest that debunks show
don’t tell as the great lie of writing workshops for fiction and prose
writers as well.)
2.
An
Obsession With Line Breaks (and the poem as it appears on the page). The
line break is modern poetry’s dirty little secret. Deciding where and when to “break” a line
turns out to have been a central obsession for some of the greatest American
practitioners of free verse; and this topic continues to receive a disproportionate
amount of attention in the workshop (and no doubt in the MFA program) setting. Not that I think there is anything wrong with
using line-break as one of various things available in a poet’s toolbox; but
making the line-break a paramount consideration betrays one of modern poetry’s most
self-defeating tendencies: it is
primarily focused on the visual presentation of a poem on the written page, and
far less attuned to how it sounds or the plain language meaning it has when it
is read aloud or otherwise enjoyed by a non-specialist. After all, the significance of line-break is
altogether lost when a poem is heard and not read, just as it’s equally lost on
a naïve reader. In this way, line-break
functions like a diacritical mark, which is meant to provide an “in-the-know” reader
with additional, specially encoded information about how to understand the
words on the page. This has the
unfortunate effect of directing a poet’s craft and technique towards a narrow
specialist audience (consisting of those who have been similarly trained) and
away from the far larger non-specialist audience.
3.
Good
Poems Are The Result of Intense Reflection and Should Reveal a Poet’s
Personality and Deep Psychology. The
third plank upon which modern American poetics rests is the notion that intense
personal reflection constitutes a preferred subject and mode of composition. In this vein, a poet is encouraged to compose
a poem through an extended and deliberative process, in which he or she grapples
with images and themes that are central to personal identity. It’s meant to be painstaking, personal, and
retrospective process, often focused on memories from adolescence and
childhood. “Because if you think you’re done with a poem, “as one of the acclaimed
poets at the Writers’ Hotel explained it to us, “then you’re probably not.” Our
workshop leader resorted to metaphor in the way he explained it: a poem is a
mirror through which the poet deeply investigates the poet’s place in the
world.
But there is a critical flaw with
this way of thinking, and once again it severely narrows the range of ideas and
feelings that poetry is capable of expressing.
In other words, it encourages a poet to be reflective and self-absorbed,
to the detriment of all other modes of feeling and being. In contrast, Tang poetry is far more focused
on the poet’s experience in the present moment and tense. In fact, Tang poets often composed their work
spontaneously, writing while immersed in the moment. This results in a very different kind of
poetry, which may be less modern, at least by the lights of the modernists,
since it is not result of extended reflection; but Tang poems nonetheless may
be far more effective in capturing the immediacy of human experience.
* *
* * *
This blog post has already exceeded my customary length, so
I will leave further discussion to be continued next week. Except, that is, for underscoring the
importance of this topic, as I see it, particularly when it comes to
understanding how and why American poetry continues to marginalize itself, even
at a time when so many Americans are obviously in need of the uplift that comes along with the simple spoken truth. How sad it
is that modern poetic theory remains mired in tired old modernist ideas instead
of embracing forms and modes of poetic expression that are better able to reach
a general or mass audience. Why do you suppose
Bob Dylan won the Nobel instead of John Ashbery or Louise Gluck? It is popular song that has far better filled the longing of the American people for words that have been fashioned into concise and memorable truth.
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How we all talked so brave and so sweet
Filling our heads with what the great poets said
And did with their clever line breaks
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