Poems about Poems: Why not? [by Katha Pollitt]

 

    Is there something wrong with writing poems about writing poems? And if so, what? My friend Richard Howard was the first person who told me he didn’t approve of  that subject, but since he said it while saying nice things about a poem I had written on that very theme, I didn’t take it as a blanket prohibition, just a personal preference.    It turns out a lot of people share it.  Jackie Sheeler, commenting on yesterday’s post, compares it to ‘talking to your analyst about being in therapy.”  Actually, I think that’s what psychoanalysis is supposed to be all about (see Daniel Menaker’s hilarious novel, The Treatment, for the cleverest portrayal ever of  a shrink, the impossibly vain, hostile, and infuriatingly accurate super-Freudian Dr. Morales, who thinks everything is about himself, sex, or both). But maybe that’s why I didn’t stay in it very long: talking about the shrink to the shrink just seems so rude.   Expensive, too. 
  

   The self-referential nature of art is old news.  We don’t mind songs about singing and singers, or paintings about painting and painters, as any self-portrait is bound to be: here am I the painter, painting myself painting myself. There are dozens of movies about movie-making: Sunset Boulevard, Day for Night, Contempt, Adaptation, to name just a few. Why should poetry be different? Why shouldn’t poets, from time to time, reflect in verse on what is, after all, their occupation and preoccupation?

 

 

  Perhaps there’s a moral aspect: poetry is not “the real world,” where real people , ie people who don’t read poetry, live. So if you want to reach real people, you have to write about something they care about-- baseball or the Byzantine Empire or having a baby, whatever, just not about poetry, because you can be sure that’s the one thing they don’t care about.  Writing a poem about poetry  only going to puzzle and bore non-poets.  Worse, it’s going to sound “elitist,” which is a grave sin in our faux-egalitarian country, where it’s okay to rejoice openly in having lots more money, houses, boats, cars, gadgets,  and power than others, but not in having a big working vocabulary, a good education or a consuming interest in anything unprofitable. Perhaps writing poems about poetry comes across as a way of  saying, I’m so special. Prompting the inevitable response: Who do you think you are, anyway?

 

  Given all this, it’s not surprising that when poets write about writing poetry, they often sound a little depressed.  My psychiatrist-writer friend Anna Fels , whose book  Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives  you should read right away if you haven’t already,  takes a clinical view:  “As a shrink,” she wrote in an e mail after reading yesterday’s post, “ I've wondered sometimes if such poems  represent depressive periods in bipolars or cyclothymics since so many modern poets have been bipolar.” Maybe, but maybe those poets are just responding naturally to the situation of the poet in our time, the sense of being always at the margins, of having to justify one’s existence, of offering the world something the world doesn’t really want.

 

   Here’s a wonderful poem by Grace Paley (right) about exactly that: 

          

          The Poet's Occasional Alternative

I was going to write a poem 

I made a pie instead     it took

about the same amount of time 

of course the pie was a final

draft     a poem would have had some

distance to go     days and weeks and

much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking

tumbling audience among small

trucks and a fire engine on 

the kitchen floor 

everybody will like this pie

it will have apples and cranberries

dried apricots in it     many friends

will say     why in the world did you 

make only one

this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable

sadness I decided to

settle this morning for a re-

sponsive eatership     I do not

want to wait a week     a year     a

generation for the right

consumer to come along

Comments

[DL]

Thank you for following up on this fertile theme - and for posting "The Poet's Occasional Alternative." The pleasures of Grace Paley's prose are many, but even some fans don't realize what fine, moving poems she wrote. I wonder whether the parallel in verse to a self-portrait is really a poem about poetry. The self is a bigger, better, more tempting and more treacherous subject than the poem, unless the poem is a stand-in for the self, in which case we're back where we started. (And as Gertrude Stein wrote, the world just went on being round.)

[Stacey]

The second paragraph brought up a lot of associations for me. Seems a lot is expected of poets that isn't expected of other artists. (That they'll write "political" poems comes to mind.) If writing about poetry results in a good poem, or in the poet getting to the next poem that's a good poem, what's the big deal? Why does there have to be "shoulds" in subject matter? The Paley poem is wonderful. I heard her read once and always hear her wonderful voice when I come across something of hers.