When I applied to the MFA program at McNeese State, the application process was straightforward: you sent some poetry or some fiction, and you either got a phone call or you didn’t. Test scores, previous publications, and GPA didn’t factor in. I sent the only six poems I had written. They were dreadful imitations of what little I had read, something like a mash-up of Robert Frost and William Stafford, but any grain of potential within them can be attributed to a gifted teacher, Peter Makuck, who taught my undergraduate poetry workshop with remarkable dignity and discernment. When I speak to poets about how they came to be writers, there are as many different stories as there are poets, but it is worth noting, especially in a climate where educators are increasingly devalued, that most of their stories feature an inspired teacher.
I arrived in Louisiana hungry for direction. I spent every spare minute in the Frazar Memorial Library consuming collections, quarterlies, and criticism. I read every poem in A. Poulin Jr.’s Contemporary American Poetry anthology and then started it again. On my third time through, the binding broke, and I was afraid to tell the librarian (I had no money to buy it, and there was no way I was letting them pull it), so I bound it together with rubber bands and, when I wasn’t reading it, hid it on the Government Documents floor. (There was never anyone on the Government Documents floor).
One night while looking through old magazines, I discovered one called The Reaper, which Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell had edited in the 1980s. I liked it immediately. The eponymous Reaper was an imaginary personality who wrote criticism, conducted interviews, and issued manifestos. He (She? It?) condemned the obfuscating nature of contemporary poetry and argued for a return to narrative. Narrative was the genre I found easiest to understand, so I was seduced by excerpts like these:
Navel gazers and mannerists, their time is running out. Their poems, too long even when they are short, full of embarrassing lines that “context” is supposed to justify, confirm the suspicion that our poets just aren’t listening to their language anymore. Editors and critics aren’t listening much, either. Despite their best, red-faced efforts, their favorite gods—inaccuracy, bathos, sentimentality, posturing, evasion—wither at the sound of The Reaper’s whetstone singing.
The Reaper maintains that both the accurate image and the narrative line, two determining factors of the poem’s shapeliness, have been keenly honed and kept sharp by the poets included here, whereas many of their counterparts, forgetting these necessities, have wandered into a formless swamp where only the skunk cabbage of solipsistic meditation breeds, with its cloying flowers.
Reading this again, I see why it appealed to me so much. The unabashed confidence was attractive to a writer who had no confidence, and the sardonic tone made me feel better about the fact that I didn’t understand a great deal of what I was reading. It gave me permission to dismiss the difficult stuff. If I couldn’t understand a poem, it must be the poet’s fault. There were millions of poems in the world; I shouldn’t waste my time with the inaccessible.
I also liked that The Reaper gave me rules to follow. I needed rules. Poetry was this big thing that I really wanted to write, and I needed someone to tell me how. I wanted an instruction manual. I found one, of sorts, in the third issue of the magazine, which included “The Reaper’s Non-negotiable Demands.” Technically this was as much a list of what not to do as it was an instruction manual, but I took it as gospel, and like any convert to the true faith I also became an evangelist. I remember making photocopies for my peers in the writing program and spreading the good word of The Reaper, The New Narrative School, and Story Line Press. (I’m poking fun at myself here, not The Reaper.)
This past week I pulled out my copy of The Reaper: Essays (selections from the magazine collected in a single volume) because I was curious to see how I would react to what I had once admired so much. I am going to share some of those reactions here, hoping that others might find them worthwhile, or at least interesting, even if they may disagree. Specifically, I want to revisit “The Reaper’s Non-negotiable Demands,” which are:
1. Take prosody off the hit list.
2. Stop calling formless writing poetry.
3. Accuracy, at all costs.
4. No emotion without narrative.
5. No more meditating on the meditation.
6. No more poems about poetry.
7. No more irresponsibility of expression.
8. Raze the House of Fashion.
9. Dismantle the Office of Translation.
10. Spring open the Jail of the Self.
I will briefly summarize the arguments associated with each of these demands. Each item from the list is in bold, followed by an italicized summary of what The Reaper says about it. Beneath each summary is my present reaction.
1. Take prosody off the hit list.
The major defect of contemporary poetry is that it consists of artless, chopped sentences, with no sense of form. Attention to the line is lost. A knowledge of prosody should be used to exclude that which is not poetry rather than describe everything that purports to be.
It was Pound, in his own list of demands, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” who warned, “Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.” That’s still good advice. But I don’t think there has ever really been an anti-prosody faction among serious poets. On the contrary, most poets care a great deal about their craft. Yes, I’ve taught plenty of students who think that feeling the poem is all that matters, but they outgrow this. And even though I was not writing poetry in the 1980s, I’ve read plenty of poetry and criticism from that time, and I’ve never encountered anything resembling a hit list, real or figurative. The Reaper also contends that the poetic line has been compromised. I agree with that contention. But is that such a terrible thing? Over time, the poetic line has gradually become less determinate. We no longer require a specific number of feet, syllables or stresses in a given line. We do not ask poets to capitalize the first word of every line, or to mark line endings sonically with rhyme, as Dr. Johnson required when he called for “every verse unmingled with another as a distant system of sounds.” This is one area in which I’ve changed my thinking significantly since first encountering The Reaper. At the time I believed in “line integrity,” a term often used by formalist critics. In general, it suggests a preference for line autonomy. That is, lines should regularly be broken at natural pauses in syntax or points of punctuation, with non-syntactical breaks being employed only for occasional rhetorical effects—surprise, emphasis, etc. The idea is that when pauses bookend a line, they establish boundaries which, especially in the absence of meter, syllable count or any other strictly measurable unit, give the line an integrity it would otherwise lack. However, I have come to believe that arguments such as these disregard basic fact: the end of a printed line is a boundary. Indeed, it is the only boundary that allows enjambment to function at all. I have seen lineated texts that I would describe as chopped prose, but I have also seen many poems that use systematic enjambment—degrees of enjambment, or what John Hollander calls “Sense Variously Drawn Out”—in artful ways. The final claim in this section is that prosody should be used to exclude non-poems. That sounds like a hit list.
2. Stop calling formless writing poetry.
Not every grouping of four lines is a quatrain. Fourteen lines do not a sonnet make. A poetic form is more than how the words are placed on a page. If anything is allowed, then nothing is selective.
I like it when poets play with inherited forms—Hopkins’s curtal sonnets, to name one magnificent example. Why shouldn’t a poet blend rhyme and meter with heavily enjambed free verse, like Patrick Kavanagh does in The Great Hunger? Why shouldn’t she “roughen” the villanelle by slightly altering the repeating lines, as Elizabeth Bishop does in “One Art”? To me, this is a way of reinvigorating a form and making it appropriate to the Modern world, where things to not fall nicely into neat formations. As a graduate student I wanted to be told what was and was not poetry, so the idea of selectiveness appealed to me. I now carry a much larger umbrella. Exclusive notions of poetry can cause us to miss the value in what is extraordinary simply because we do not understand it. To be clear, I am not against evaluating poetry. As readers and as critics, that is part of the job. If we think a poem is bad, or that it fails according to the rules it sets out for itself, we should say so. But I’m wary of carrying around ready-made containers and disregarding poems because they don’t seem to fit into them.
3. Accuracy, at all costs.
Avoid generality that masquerades as insight. Avoid poetic shorthand. A poem should not require guesswork. Don’t force readers to look outside the poem for what should be in it.
I don’t care for guesswork in poetry. As my friend Morri Creech used to say in workshop, “If ten careful readers of poetry don’t get what you are doing, then you are not actually doing it.” I still think “Don’t kick the reader out of the poem” is a good maxim for a poet. But I have also come to value ambiguity. Some of my favorite poems are not “accurate” in the way The Reaper demands. What exactly does Ted Hughes mean, for example, in his magnificent poem “Wind,” when he writes that “wind wielded / Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, / Flexing like the lens of a mad eye”? What does it mean that the speaker of Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” “must enter again the round / Zion of the water bead, / And the synagogue of the ear of corn” before he will consent to mourn the child’s death? I feel the meaning of these lines in my gut. If pressed, I could probably explain their symbolism. But they cannot be called “accurate”; indeed, replacing them with more “accurate” lines would be a travesty. In fairness to The Reaper, there is such a thing as metaphorical laziness. I once saw a Mad Lib-type exercise called “How to Write a Bad Poem,” and it began with “In the [insert noun] of my mind, / the [insert noun/verb/direct object].” So you might wind up with something like, “In the refrigerator of my mind, / ghosts follow an albatross.” That’s deep stuff, man! Complete with Coleridge allusion! I suspect some people write like this. (All the editors of literary journals are nodding.) But I tend to think most poets are better than this, and as a reader I will always accept inaccuracy if you give me a reason to.
4. No emotion without narrative.
Emotion is irrelevant unless it is the result of a story. Poems should be communicative, transferring the emotion to the reader, and this requires narrative.
I can get on board with the idea that a poem should communicate something, especially if you are going to ask someone else to read it. If it doesn’t offer something, why bother to publish it? Just keep it in your journal. But I find the argument that every poem needs to tell a story in order to present genuine emotion to be the least convincing of all The Reaper’s assertions. Certainly poems should move. There should be some kind of engine that both engages and propels the reader. This is what Charles Olson, in “Projective Verse,” calls “the push of the line.” But this doesn’t need to be a story. Does “Ode to a Nightingale” tell a story? Does Plath’s “Blackberrying”? Does Richard Wilbur’s “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra”? These poems progress, and we follow, but it would be difficult to convince me that any of them tells a story. In the chapter “The Death of the Lyric,” The Reaper concedes that lyric poetry used to work but argues that it has now become corrupt and meaningless, too self-absorbed, and that there is a kind of sameness to all of it. I can absolutely think of poems that warrant this assessment. I can also think of dozens, probably hundreds, of contemporary lyric poems that do not. Some poems engage the intellect. Others captivate us with their music. Some bewitch us with their imagery. And yes, some draw us in with great narrative. But let’s not require all poems to tell a story. If sameness is a problem, that surely won’t help.
5. No more meditating on the meditation.
Poems need a subject. If a poem only makes sense to the poet, it is unsuccessful. The act of writing, as a metaphor for thinking, is not an adequate subject for a poem.
I find I still agree with most of this. Tony Hoagland’s piece, “The Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” offers a good overview of the improvisational, wobbly poem and some of its problems. But I also find that narrative can take the poet too far from an experience. Sometimes we need the distance and perspective that narrative offers, but sometimes that would kill a poem. I think Ellen Bryant Voigt is a wonderful example of a contemporary poet who uses narrative when it is needed and avoids it when it is not. Her poem “At the Movie: Virginia, 1956” is a narrative poem that requires an adult speaker, one who is now fully aware of the racial tensions that the girl in the poem was trying to understand when she was “wanting to look, not knowing how to see.” On the other hand, her poem “The Cusp” eschews narrative:
So few birds—the ones that winter through
and the geese migrating through the empty
fields,
fording the cropped, knuckled stalks of corn:
all around us, all that’s green’s suppressed,
and in the brooding wood, the bare trees,
shorn of leaves or else just shy of leaves,
make a dark estate between low clouds
that have the look of stubborn snow.
In a purely scientific exercise --
say you came from the moon, or returned
like Lazarus, blinking from the cave—
you wouldn’t know if winter’s passed or now
beginning.
The bank slopes up, the bank slopes down to the
ditch.
Would it help if I said grieving has an end?
Would it matter if I told you this is spring?
I suggest that if we knew who was grieving in this poem, or why, or even the identity of the “you,” the poem would lose some of its power. There is, clearly, a story here, but it took place "off-stage." As Voigt writes in this interview with The Atlantic, the narrative always hovers behind a lyric poem, but it isn’t always necessary or even desirable to offer the story itself. We need lyric poems because poetry often is an act of thinking or of feeling or of praying, and because immediacy sometimes trumps rationality and, yes, even clarity.
6. No more poems about poetry.
No more poems about poetry.
This subject has been debated almost to death, but to me it's a non-issue. There are a lot of really bad poems about poetry. There are a lot more really bad poems about love. Shall we ban love poetry? Wallace Stevens is supposed to have said, “All poems are about poetry.” I don’t know if he ever really said it, but I like it.
7. No more irresponsibility of expression.
If you choose a form, you must adhere to the limitations of that form and follow its rules. If you choose a subject, you must be faithful to its expression. There should be a perfect marriage of content and form.
This is the item on the list that I most agree with. While I don’t like the idea that there is a formal buffet from which to choose the form you want—a Spenserian sandwich today, a terza rima trifle tomorrow—a perfect marriage of content and form is the goal, though I say that with the belief that the “perfect” form is often messy (see my earlier comments about “roughing up” form). Perfection is a lot to ask, but poets should all strive for it, and prosody gives them the tools to try.
8. Raze the House of Fashion.
Poets should always be looking to go in a new direction. Whatever is in fashion should be avoided.
Of course this appealed to me when I was beginning to write poems. Who doesn’t want to be new and original? But what a walking paradox I was! I wanted someone to tell me, to give me rules for, how to write original poetry. The Reaper painted itself as a counter-cultural magazine, comparing itself to BLAST and Kayak, and maybe it was like those magazines in the sense of presenting an alternative to what it saw as a dominant, dangerous trend. But Jarman and McDowell also, by their own admission, sought to begin a new trend, and I have come to believe that artistic movements, even well meaning ones, are almost always antithetical to art because they promote a limited agenda. To be clear, I’m not saying art can never be political, or that artists and critics should never fight for what they believe in. What I’m saying is that art answers the demands of the artistic moment rather than the demands of trends. A manifesto is an instruction manual for avoiding old trends and following a new one.
I now realize that what I really hungered for as a graduate student was not an instruction manual or a list of demands, but craft, and that these are very far from being the same thing. My father-in-law has a garage full of tools, and every time I walk in I am amazed that he not only knows what all of them do, but that he can actually create things with them. My Grandpa Darrell is the same way. If it can be made out of wood, he can make it. But the tools don’t tell either of these men what they can and cannot make with them. They had teachers who taught them what each of the tools does, and certain tools were used whenever needs arose. Eventually, after a lifetime of work, the tools became part of them so that they didn’t seem like tools at all but extensions of their vision. This analogy may seem simple to some, but it works for me.
9. Dismantle the Office of Translation.
Poems in translation become indistinct from one another. They sound like their translators and not the poets who wrote them. Too much bad poetry gets translated into English.
Dafydd ap Gwilym. Rilke. Neruda. Catullus. Botev. Akhmatova. I can only read one of these poets in the original language. Should I forget about the others? Having attempted to translate poetry myself, I can readily believe that no translation is perfect. I’ll settle for the imperfect ones.
10. Spring open the Jail of the Self.
Poets exist as part of a world, and the poems should reflect that world. The distinct self is only important when we see the world in which it exists.
In my first poetry workshop as a graduate student, someone said of one of my poems, “This is a poem set in the city that could have been written before the invention of the automobile or electricity.” Point taken. One thing I’ve learned from my study of Welsh poetry is that poets exist as part of a community, and that they have an important function to perform beyond introspection. But I also believe that highly personal poems are often the most communal. This is one of the strange paradoxes of writing: in order to approach the universal, art requires those authenticating details of individual experience. The truth is, we will never know enough about the world. And too many of us prefer not to know. Ideally every poet would be familiar not just with literary history, but also with art history, music theory, political history, and science. The irony of my early reading of The Reaper is that even though it was encouraging me to be aware of the world, it caused me to close off part of the literary world. I initially dismissed some of my now-favorite poets—Wallace Stevens, Geoffrey Hill, even T. S. Eliot—because their poems were difficult. (Incidentally, The Reaper argues, in one of its essays, that Wallace Stevens ruined contemporary poetry. My response to that essay would require a separate post.)
But what is closed off can be reopened. Looking back, I don’t regret the period I spent as a member of The Reaper’s congregation, and my purpose in revisiting The Reaper’s "non-negotiable" demands has not been to show how wrongheaded they are, or to cast myself as having evolved beyond them, but to, in fact, negotiate with them. Even though I no longer fully agree with many of them, I value their existence, and on reflection, I still believe that the principles helped me. They gave me the confidence to write, and even though I now see it as a false confidence, writing is what I most needed to be doing. And for all I know, The Reaper is still doing that for some young writer hiding out in Government Documents.
Thanks, Daniel. I think all that Robert and I ever hoped for was this kind of thoughtful response and retrospective assessment. Of course, when we were The Reaper, we had no time to imagine the retrospective. But it is illuminating to encounter one like this almost 30 years later. By the way, I count myself a Wallace Stevens convert for some years now. I'll bet Robert is, too.
Posted by: Mark Jarman | May 31, 2013 at 06:03 PM
Mark, thank you for taking the time to read this. I appreciate it very much. What you and Robert did was bold, and I always admire boldness. If I ever write something that is still being talked about 30 years later, I'll be very satisfied indeed.
Posted by: Daniel Westover | May 31, 2013 at 08:53 PM
Kudos on this thoughtful, provocative piece. When it comes to issues that vex -- poems about poetry, poets dismissive of prosody and formal principles, the value of narrative, whether to shun fashion or embrace it, the cult of translation, the cult of the self -- it seems that everything old is new again and the more things stay the same. (There's a reason those lines became cliches.) It's a pleasure to see a tribute to a magazine with a mission and the two editors who saw it through -- and what better tribute could there be than an essay that takes the magazine seriously enough to quarrel with it all these years later? -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | June 01, 2013 at 12:25 AM
Thank you, Daniel, for this insightful look back. That we encouraged you, or anyone, to live and write poetry is the greatest unexpected compliment I can imagine. Mark and I hoped to enliven the discourse, ruffle feathers and figure out what we were thinking about poetry in that long ago time. Thanks for rekindling some sweet memories.
Posted by: Robert McDowell | June 02, 2013 at 12:39 PM
Thank you, Daniel, for this insightful retrospective. That we encouraged you or anyone to live and write poetry is an unexpected, terrific compliment. Mark and I intended to enliven the discourse, ruffle feathers and figure out what we were thinking about poetry in that long ago time. Thanks for sparking some sweet memories.
Posted by: Robert McDowell | June 02, 2013 at 12:45 PM
Thank you, David, for providing this forum. Hope all is well with you!
Posted by: Robert McDowell | June 02, 2013 at 12:47 PM
As a poet always fiddling with craft versus impulse, I'd love to read a thorough response to each point from Robert and Mark. Keep the dialog going...One point I would like to make is that there is a huge difference between the poet's intention and the reader's assumption, and yet the poet, in my opinion, should never write for the phantom reader.
Posted by: Jane Galer | June 02, 2013 at 02:19 PM
Thank you, David. It was really rewarding to revisit these essays, and I'm grateful for the forum that provided me the opportunity.
Posted by: Daniel Westover | June 02, 2013 at 07:41 PM
Robert, you certainly did that for me. It was very rewarding to revisit my graduate student days and reengage with this material. Doing so helped me realize just how influential it really was. Warmest, DW.
Posted by: Daniel Westover | June 02, 2013 at 07:48 PM