In yesterday’s elliptical post, I was thinking persistently about how reading an anthology, like any one of the Best American Poetry volumes, introduces various crises of knowledge and confidence—how an anthology forces me to change. As one poem is different from the preceding, I have to shift my expectations, to reset my reading mind.
As one poet’s idea or ideas about poetry are different from those of the preceding or the following, I often have to move into another space. It would be easy to read a book or a journal with a clear idea of what I admire or want and only to keep saying No until I’ve found what fits my taste. Much more difficult but also more rewarding to treat each poem as a question, or a series of questions. Where are you going? Do I know all that I need to know to follow?
This is, typically, the stance I take in teaching a text or writing a book review. I ask What does one need to know in order to read this? At times, in a Poetics course or a historical survey, it is useful to apply the idea of genre, to talk about a poem being a particular kind of poem as a way of focusing the act of gathering the reader’s tools. If, for example, a poem calls itself an “Ode,” it may be telling us to remember one or two things: (1) that the poem may be engaged in a kind of praise or/and (2) the poem may be organized in three parts that follow a point-counterpoint-compromise pattern.
Some students take this idea of genre and apply it as if it were a kind of ontology.
This is the place I’m always trying to get to—the place where the poem can be read not so much as a thing or a kind of thing but as an act, as an action or process. And yet, so much of the way we deal with poems—they have titles or labels that we find in tables, we view them like objects &c—reinforces poem-as-thing—ness (though maybe this is just part of life in a capitalist/acquisitionist society: there are no ideas but in things, and we’d rather have the thing than anything else).
I was happy then, in re-reading Best American Poetry 1994 to see guest editor A. R. Ammons dealing with the same tension: “Until they end,” he wrote, “poems exist in time from the first syllable to the last. They are actions.” Or, better, as he wrote a few paragraphs before: “the primary motion of the poet is to put things together and touch a source that feels like life.” For Ammons, few words were more important than “motion.” The poem is a motion, it moves. But, on the other hand, poems also conclude and become things, become still:
When exposition has allowed the poem to arrive, its sentences, rhythms, figures coming together or one after the other, the poem ends. At that point, the exposition ceases and the poem stands whole, a disposition of parts, of movement laid out finished and still, like an object.
And, too, to the point, in the concluding movement of the motion of the introduction:
I’m trying not to go on at too great length, but at the same time I risk losing your attention if I don’t give you the means to follow me. I say that the behavior of a poem, good or bad behavior, gives us access to a knowledge of the meaning of behavior in our time. For example, a heroic couplet, reasoned and rhymed, is characteristic of a certain style of mind and action that identifies a period. A short poem, pure to the exclusion of every challenge, is one style of life. A sprawling, inclusive poem tells us what it is in addition to what it says or does.
So, to put all this succinctly again, I’m thinking about the “what it does”/”what it is” dynamic and how having a certain solid idea of what a poem is make a prediction about what it does that the poem may not/usually will not fulfill, so we have to go back and see what the poem does before we can approach the question of what it is—and I like this in an anthology, how what one poem does does not follow the idea of what a poem is suggested by what another poem in the same anthology has done.
So Peter Davis from “Four ‘Addresses’” in Best American Poetry 2010:
Poem Addressing People With Certain Expectations About Poetry That Are Not Fulfilled In This Poem
Change
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This, of course, applies to people, too. Our thought about who they are or what they are predicts (but also blinds) certain kinds of behavior. Oh, he’s an Episcopalian, they say, as if to say either (a) He’s a little old Fashioned, (b) He’s an Anglophile/(b2) traditionalist, (c) He doesn’t have the guts to be a “real” Catholic, (d) I heard he got drunk in church, (e) He doesn’t like polyester—the list goes on.
And poets—Oh, he’s a narrative poet, which can be code for He’s more concerned about the story than the way the words reach out in sound for one another—though the dichotomies that define our camps are hardly ever so clean as some people need them to be sometimes.
When the loveliest Jill Alexander Essbaum suggested to me that I might blog for Best American Poetry, I thought Hell yes I will do that but also None of my poems have ever been in BAP; I’m not a Best-American-Poetry-type poet/person/blogger… I wanted an address for myself, when all the time I should have just been jogging down the block. Jill handed me my running shoes.
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In his book Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space (which buy now), Charlie Hailey writes:
Defining the camp is a central problem of our contemporary moment. Camps result from the exceptional circumstances of conflict, natural disaster, displacement, and marginality with increasing frequency and ever-greater facility. How and why these camps are made, where they are located, and how long they endure reveal problems and possibilities associated with our built environment…
Hailey’s talking about physical camps first and foremost, but he’s also talking about the idea of a camp as a place where a moment becomes—a series of actions or the intersections of actions become—visible…
…which is also true of “camp” in the sense of a group of like-minded people/poets/whatever, and so a school, which is a kind of kind that should point to the motion that centrifugally holds them together though it also often centripetally pushes everyone else out so the school looks like a thing rather than an act.
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We poets do this to ourselves, or to one another, creating camps and policing them, but thank everything that brings the conference, the journal, the anthology to pull the wire off the fence posts—because we’re largely encamped by those who quit reading poetry a long time ago, the greeting-card salespeople (they are still out there), “systems analysts,” “consultants” who share seats with us on airplanes and either think that poetry is something children do (therefore, you must be a large unaccompanied minor) or something so esoteric and intellectual that to speak with you is to expose themselves to permanent brain damage—and these are the people, some of them anyway, we might poke back in a way.
Ammons, BAP 1994:
Poets are sometimes glaringly unconventional and so openly ostracized, but even the hostile enforcers of social codes may want, half-willingly, to be free, as free as the artist they profess to despise.
The same might be said of any poet, “that we / do not admire what / we cannot understand,” that our fences are made of looking the other way, and that we, too, want to be free, as free as whatever is out there, beyond.
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