Post by ekswitaj on Jul 4, 2008 14:06:07 GMT 2
Questions of Trust: Poet and Audience in the Past Two Decades - Judith Barrington
I want to write about trust—about poets trusting themselves and their audience. But first it is necessary to say a little about the current state of the poetry world that we live and work in, here in the United States, since that will lead inevitably to the relationship between poet and audience.
I recently stumbled upon something that Mrs. Melville—the wife of Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame—wrote in a letter round about 1858—some hundred and forty years ago. Mrs. Melville said, in a letter to her mother: "Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around."
This letter was quoted by the late, great—and still grossly overlooked—poet, Muriel Rukeyser, in her book, The Life of Poetry, which is a meditation on the place and potential usefulness of poetry in American society, and, in particular, the place of poetry in relation to war. This book was originally published in 1949, in reaction to Rukeyser's experiences of the Spanish Civil War, and of World War 2 and has been republished by Paris Press.
"You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around." Poor Mrs. Melville was embarrassed for her husband. What would people think if they knew he was writing poetry? That he was a bit of a crackpot? That, unlike writing novels about man against whale, it was an unmanly occupation—a bit effeminate? That he had abandoned his responsibilities and embarked on an unprofitable, self-indulgent pastime? That poetry was, for the most part, irrelevant to the real business of the world?
If these fears were, in fact, at the heart of Mrs. Melville's embarrassment, they don't really seem so old fashioned even now. Some of them are concerns that the proverbial person-in-the-street today might well express, if asked how he or she feels about poets. The idea that poetry is irrelevant, that very few people read it or care about it, is one that recurs regularly and that poets have grappled with for a long time. Sixty years ago, Edmund Wilson published his controversial essay, "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" Fifty years ago, Muriel Rukeyser asked: "Is poetry alive? Is there a place for poetry? What is that place?" More recently, Dana Gioia wrote that poetry is "no longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life." .
We poets, for the most part, support poetry by writing our poems and reading them aloud, and by voraciously reading the work of others. Yet this question of relevance, or lack of relevance, is important to all of us who are poets, Even though we go to readings and we buy poetry books, and even though oral poetry is burgeoning, slams proliferate, and the calendars list many readings each week, if we look around at those readings, we have to admit that it's a pretty small world, and it is a world of our own. A largely separate, self-contained world.
Recently I asked myself: how many people do I know—people of the kind who go to the symphony, or who like intelligent plays and movies—how many of these people do I know who also go to poetry readings? How many non-poets do I know who read poetry? I had to conclude that what many commentators like Gioia or Donald Hall have said about the poetry world is obviously true: poets write and read primarily to other poets. Poetry is published in magazines that are bought by writers—literary magazines. I'm quite certain I don't know any non-writers who subscribe to The Kenyon Review or who buy American Poetry Review off the news stand. And now that the writing of poetry has taken firm root within the creative writing departments of colleges and universities across the United States, the separation between poetry and the rest of life has become even more marked than before—and far more dependably preserved than the separation of church and state.
So, why does this state of affairs matters to all of us who write poetry? Why should we aspire to something beyond the loyal, but limited, audience we can find among our fellow poets—valuable as that is? And, most importantly, what might we all try to do about it. Before I attempt to answer those questions, I'll digress a moment to point out that this situation regarding poetry is not by any means the situation you will find if you go to other countries. In fact, it is a state of affairs currently unique to this country.
I grew up in England, which is where I did my early writing and published my first poems. Although I have been in the U.S. now for over thirty years, I keep in close touch with poetry in Britain. I subscribe to British literary magazines, belong to the Poetry Society there, and visit the country regularly. One year, my visit happened to coincide with National Poetry Week. Now, here we have a National Poetry Month (April), and some of you may have noticed a few ripples spreading from the idea: a bookstore displaying poetry more prominently than usual; an event or two, probably attended by the usual poetry audience. But National Poetry Week in Britain was something else entirely, and the major difference was that it was embraced by the mainstream—not just the mainstream art world, but by the mainstream culture and the mainstream media in many of its different manifestations.
First of all, more poetry than usual was published—not in poetry magazines but in daily newspapers. There is still, in England, one major daily paper, The Independent, which regularly publishes poetry as part of its daily offerings. (In Oregon, where I live, we also have a regular poetry spot in the Sunday paper, but that’s pretty unuual.) That week in England, there were numerous events all around the country: readings, festivals, poetry gatherings at some of which not-famous people were invited to read, not only their own poems, but their favorite poems written by others. This is an important feature—this pleasure in reading aloud poems by a favorite poet, for it assumes two things: first, that literate people, whether or not they write, have favorite poems, and second, that the purpose of reading to an audience is not simply to show off one's own creations. Both these assumptions were true of American readers and writers until relatively recently. Robert Frost and his contemporaries devoted some proportion of their readings to the work of other poets, and this practice was also a basic tenet of the readings put on by American feminists of the 1970's. Poets like Judy Grahn, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich, for example, all believed in the importance of including others' work when they were given a microphone. Not only did it provide delightful variation in the reading, it exposed audiences to more and different work, and it acknowledged the fact that we poets do not produce work in isolation from what has gone before and what is going on around us, even while we sit alone in our attics or at our dining room tables.
When I'm in England, I like to watch television, since some of it, at least, is of a quality hard to find here. Staying with relatives during National Poetry Week, I quickly caught on to the fact that the event had been taken up with enthusiasm by the BBC. Frequent announcements were made about the national search for the top ten most popular poems written in the past fifty years. This was a kind of unscientific poll taken among ordinary television viewers, which produced an enormous response, and a certain amount of discussion that I noticed going on in places like pubs, where ordinarily poetry might not be the topic of the day.
The results were announced on the last day of Poetry Week during a half-hour, prime-time special show, which I watched. I was already in a state of incredulity about the whole thing, and certainly ready to assume that poetry voted in by ordinary people would likely turn out to be of the Rod McKuen variety. But of course I was wrong. The television show featured well-known actors like Jeremy Irons reading the top ten poems. And those top ten included poets such as Stevie Smith, Jenny Joseph, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin.
And that was not all. At the end of this television show, the host announced that they would now give the solutions to the various poetry "clues" that had been dropped throughout the week. Not having known about this, I hadn't been looking for clues, but they obligingly re-played them for slouches like me. It seemed that lines of well-known poems had been buried in the scripts and dialogs of all kinds of different TV programs from daily sitcoms to the news. Not added, you understand, just woven in seamlessly to a report on toxic waste or a love scene in a drama. As is the case with many of the TV and radio contests so beloved by the British, no prizes were awarded. People had played along just for the fun of it—and, like many of the other National Poetry Week events, they could participate because they knew the poems.
I know more about the state of poetry in Britain than I know about it in other countries. Writers more in touch than me have decribed its usefulness to the people of many Latin American countries or its role in Scandanavia or India or elsewhere. But, little as I know about some of these places, I feel confident in asserting that nowhere in the world has poetry taken the course—and I mean the academic course—that it has taken here. I should clarify here that I certainly don't think there's anything whatsoever wrong with writing classes—I could hardly do so with a straight face since I teach myself. The point I am making, although others have made it in much greater detail, is that poetry simply doesn't flourish when all the poets live the same kind of life, know one another, and depend on one another for reviews, recommendations, and grants. An appalling lack of diversity results from this, as well as an absence of honest and useful criticism, and a sameness that is apparent when you read through the literary journals.
Here in the United States, poetry is apparently flourishing and, at the same time, apparently irrelevant to large numbers of people—even those who are an audience for other art forms. But does this matter? As long as someone shows up when we read, what's to complain about?
We live in uniquely confusing times—times that are daunting to write about. The violence of our society is not only increasing, but is far better known to us than in the past. Modern methods of communication allow us to see individuals starving the other side of the world—or the other side of our city, or to witness victims of war, suffering at the moment they suffer. No wonder, then, that so many poets (and I include myself here) choose to write about our own families, our own childhoods, a particularly beautiful flower in the garden, a blue heron on the lake, or the whimsical behavior of the cat. Staying very close to home may be the way we try to keep writing even when the world at large seems too awful—or for that matter too large and too wonderful—to describe.
If you doubt this characterization of today's poetry, you have only to be a reader for a poetry contest, as I have been many times. The experience of reading some five or six hundred book-length manuscripts is one of enormous predictability—even when every fifth or sixth one uses stunning language and every tenth or eleventh one offers a fascinating use of form. Take on this task and it won't be long before you find yourself turning the page saying to yourself, OK now for the grandmother poem; now for the smell of baking bread; now for the spiritual forest poem, and so on, as you become ever more irreverent about subjects that are of course important to many. It's not that you are terminally jaded or a hopeless cynic. It's that most poets are writing poems very like those of their teachers and peers, about experiences very similar to the experiences of those people, in voices that are often remarkably alike. These poems, it must be said, do not, on the whole excite readers beyond the little world that produced them.
Czeslaw Milosz has written: "It is possible that the gloom of twentieth-century poetry can be explained by the pattern that resulted from the 'schism and misunderstanding between the poet and the great human family." Surely it's important, not only to those of us who write but also to those who read, to begin healing that schism. If poets worked within a larger community of listeners and readers, we might produce work that would encourage those readers toward more imaginative thought, more spiritual development, and more humane action. In spite of their apparent indifference to poetry—or as Rukeyser and others would claim—their fear of it, I believe that people who are outside the inner circle of poets do, in fact, have a deep longing for what poetry can provide. Surely there is now more than ever a widespread desire for direct communication with the inner life of others (which may in part explain the current popularity of memoir).
Perhaps it was this deep longing that manifested itself a couple of years ago in a full-page advertisement I saw in the British Poetry Society's quarterly magazine, an ad placed by London's largest law firm. They were advertising for a poet-in-residence. I clipped it and sent it on to Brian Booth, the man who founded the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts, who also happened to be at that time a partner in one of Portland's large law firms. When I saw him shortly afterwards, he said he'd circulated it and it got a lot of laughs. Lawyers in this country may not be ready for poetry, but we must constantly plant the seeds. We must encourage that deep longing for poetry to surface and, when it does, we must reach beyond our little circles to meet it.
I suppose, if I want anyone to do anything different than they are currently doing, I must ask that very American question: what's in it for the poets? What do we get out of expanding the poetry audience? Well, I think what we get is better writing. To write well, to find our voices, to dig deep for the truths we want to communicate, we need to have a strong sense of our readers and listeners. When we put our words into the bottle and throw them into the ocean, we must have a conviction that someone is going to pull the cork and read them. Otherwise the words we seal in there will be hopeless words. Words we haven't struggled with and sighed over. They will merely record our plight, from which we see no escape. To write poems that stretch us beyond what we think we know, we need, not just an audience of one. As Osip Mandelstam said, the audience must consist of more than just people we know. This is how Mandelstam explains it: "If I know to whom I speak, I know ahead of time how he will regard what I say, whatever I might say, and consequently I shall manage not to be astonished by his astonishment, to be overjoyed by his joy, or to love through his love." And, he goes on to say, "It's boring to be whispering to a neighbor."
Perhaps some writers have dealt with this tendency to know ahead of time what the audience will think by moving to another culture—becoming expatriate writers. This was certainly true for me, although I couldn't have articulated it at the time I moved from England to the U.S. But over the years, I found myself saying things like, "I knew too well how they would react over there," or "I never could have written that in England!"
According to Adrienne Rich, it is in the interest of the poet to greatly expand her audience. I quote from her essay, "Someone is Writing a Poem:"
If we think about this as poets, we may realize that to write for a reader who is not like us, requires a far greater trust in your words than to write for someone who shares our view of the world and our language. And so we come to the question of trust. In order to write with skill and confidence, we must trust that our observations, our attitudes, our stories, are understandable and interesting to the stranger. Lack of trust fatally undermines the writing itself. When we don't trust readers to "get it," we find ourselves, for example, both showing and telling. With strong images and rich, musical language, we convey the essence of what we have to say. But just to make sure, first we tell the reader what the poem is about and then, after we have so nicely shown it, we sum it up.
Lack of trust in the reader also leads to adjectival anxiety. To say nothing of the adverbs. Good descriptive nouns and fine, active verbs may be present, but we don't quite trust them to do their work. In anxious poems, the sea doesn't just roil: it is iron-grey and turgid, and it roils ponderously. Anxious poems, too, often suffer from what I call the "bow-tie" ending. That's the two-line, neatly tied-up finish that hits readers over the head with the meaning of the poem and ensures that they take away with them the right conclusion. Written in significantly more prosy language than the rest of the poem, these bow-ties are easily recognizable if we watch out for them. Chop them off and there's almost always a graceful ending sitting right before the bow-tie, waiting to slide into last place.
If it seems hard just to go ahead and trust, perhaps the way into that trust is through the writing itself: excise those adjectives, chop off the bow tie, and sit for a while with discomfort. Feel the inner voice arguing that readers won't get it, and struggle against that urge to add explanations. If we dare to put the poem out in the world without all those anxiety-spawned additions, sooner or later, the listener in the third row with tears in her eyes or the reader who sends a personal story in response, will demonstrate just how well the poem communicated.
Dana Gioia, in his essay, "Business and Poetry" claims that contemporary poetry has little in common with the lives of most people. I would disagree with this to the extent that really good writing, even about the limited number of subjects addressed, does speak to the lives of others and does reveal commonalities. But Gioia's point is that the subject matter itself, is very limited in scope, which is certainly true. The private realm addressed by most poems has, he says, "unlocked the doors to a poet's study, living room, and bedroom," but "has stayed away from his office—unless the office happened to be located in an English department." Poetry not only ignores the world of work, he says, but "there is also a surprising paucity of serious verse on political and social themes."
Gioia believes that this lack of concern on the part of the poet with the wider world has lost poetry much of its potent audience. But, he says, "long before his audience disappeared, a more important thing had already happened: the poet had lost his sense of addressing a public, lost the belief that he and they had anything significant in common. This failure of assurance changed everything he wrote. (Presumably, despite his use of the pronoun, he does know that women write too.)
But how can we believe that we have something in common with every single possible reader? How can we write in a way that, in Rich's words, our "I" can become a "we" without extinguishing others. It is very difficult to write for this diverse audience of strangers in times that have taught us some true and sometimes sobering things about the lives of those who are different. We have learned, often with difficulty, to respect cultural, racial, sexual, and other differences—or sometimes to pussyfoot around them in the name of respect. Having a greater understanding of people who are different from ourselves, we find new reasons not to address them with our poems. If we are middle class, we exclude the working class person who, we think, won't understand or be interested in our middle class perceptions—or, even worse, who might be angry at us because of them. If we are white, we shy away from mentioning race (who are we to approach that subject?) and if we are straight, from including gay people in our poems (someone might get the wrong idea). But these fears merely ensure that we cave in to that great liberal sin, timidity, and continue to write for people just like ourselves. This does not do justice to the poems we could produce if we trusted our audience.
I would be foolish to say that if we try to expand our horizons, our audience will always like it—they won't: if you take risks, sometimes you fall on your face. But if we don't take risks, neither we nor our poems grow. The poets who get into the most obvious trouble are the overtly political poets. Not that they have been exactly persecuted in this country, at least not since the McCarthy Era, but they have been subtly undermined by disparaging reviews, and by being denied funding, labeled "obscene" and often excluded from libraries. Martín Espada, the left-wing political poet who used to be a regular contributor to "All Things Considered," was dismissed from their airwaves for writing a too-political poem on the wrong subject. But, again, our situation is not the situation of many other countries, where the greatest and best-loved poems are very often political poems.
I want poems to be useful—not just in supporting social change if that is something that concerns the poet, but in helping readers see things a little differently or gain insights into another's life so that they are changed just a little bit, no matter what the subject matter. Still, I have to admit that we can't just decide to write poems that matter—we can't sit down one day and say to ourselves, I'm going to say something important and moving in a poem about the state of the world. I know because I've tried this and it doesn't work! What does work is mining our own deeply personal, deeply felt experience in a way that we trust will speak clearly to others. Whether or not we expand our subject matter—and I think doing so would speed up the process of making poetry relevant to more readers—I strongly believe that personal life can be written about in a way that is both relevant and important. Your "I" can become the universal "we" if you dig deep, deeper than is comfortable, for the kernel of truth in your subject.
Trusting our personal stories to speak to a diverse audience, is something that also comes up when we write personal prose. I have been engaged for many years now in writing and teaching memoir, which draws on the author's personal experience to tell a story that in some way becomes universal. As with poetry, memoir works best when the writer does not in any way try to convince the readers that they have something in common with the writer. Readers don't like feeling pushed around, or led like a horse to a water trough they can perfectly well find for themselves. Memoir reaches out best when the writer sinks deep into his or her own story, not worrying at all about the audience. Alice Walker marvelled at this power of writing to transcend barriers, when she said, "We have the capability to connect to absolutely everyone and everything, and, in fact, we are all connected...When I write about my family, about things from the South, the people of China say, 'Why, this is very Chinese.'"
I do not mean to imply that it's easy to trust the audience. I, myself, have struggled with this and have often been afraid to write openly as a lesbian. I've been convinced that my audience will abandon me—at least all but those who are like me. For years, I deliberately conjured up in my mind a friendly and supportive audience while I was writing. And for a while, I only read to audiences I was pretty sure were on my side to start with. But this changed after I published my first book. I was gratified and excited when lesbians or feminists or gay men wrote good reviews or sent me letters. But my most surprised delight came from the first letter I received from a young, straight man. Your poems spoke to me, he said. I saw some things I never saw before.
To be relevant does not mean you have to be on a soapbox. To be relevant does not require you to exclude personal moments, private life, or family stories from your poems. It is, rather, a matter of having something to say about those personal moments. And, in a way, it's about having something new to say.
The very idea of saying something new can silence each and every one of us for years. But really, having something new to say doesn't mean we have to think some thought no one else has ever thought before; it doesn't mean we have to be uniquely creative, uniquely wise. What it comes down to yet again, is trust. This time, trust in ourselves—in the undeniable fact that each of us is a unique individual—that our experience is ours alone. If we can believe that, the only way our work can fail to be unique is if we are lazy with the language. The problems come only if I remember the words someone else used in talking about an experience more strongly than I remember how I really felt about my own similar experience. This is how we fall into clichés, sentimentality, and other short cuts through the language. Saying something new really means saying something true, and saying it truthfully in the only words that can convey its fullness.
I want to end with some very concrete suggestions of things we might all consider doing. Most of us probably know something about what poetry has done for us but these suggestions are about what we can do for poetry. And of course, what we do for poetry will ultimately come back around and do something grand for our writing.
Here is my agenda.
One: remind yourself regularly how important poetry is. This is something most poets speak about and write about often. One way to do it is to imagine a world without poetry. James Tate, in his introduction to a Best American Poetry volume says "Without poetry our Culture and, more importantly, our collective Spirit, would be a tattered, wayward thing." Dostoevsky said that the world will be saved by beauty. Muriel Rukeyser wrote: "We wish to be told, in the most memorable way, what we have been meaning all along." Your assignment here is to find your own words for why poetry is important. Have something to say when someone asks you why you think it matters.
Two: know that you have some power to shape the role of poetry in your life and in the life of your community. If you don't, someone else will define that role for you.
Three: take a friend to a poetry reading—a friend who has never been to one before. Pay no attention when she or he says, "but I don't like poetry." Say simply, "you'll like this one," or "do it for me." Or say, "I'll pay for dinner if you'll come."
Four: buy poetry books as gifts for friends who don't read poetry. Don't apologise or explain. Just act as if it's the normal thing.
Sub-section (a) to four above: buy those books at an independent bookstore. It's important. If the independents go, so does a lot of our poetry.
Five: write poems about work. Write poems about what you read in the newspaper. Write about people other than yourself. Write what feels dangerous. Oh yes—and don't use or tolerate sexist pronouns.
Six: do whatever you can to invite people unlike yourself into your work and into the literary community. Create diversity in your writing groups and ask forcefully for it in the classes and workshops you take. Don't pay a lot of money to a program or workshop that has no women faculty or is all white. Go to events or readings where you might be in the minority.
Seven: when you give a reading, read someone else's poem . And then at your next reading, recite it from memory.
And finally: let your poems and your lives be full of hope.
Selected Essays, Osip Mandelstam, trans. Sidney Monas, University of Texas Press, 1977
Can Poetry Matter, Dana Gioia, Graywolf Press, 1992
The Witness of Poetry, Czeslaw Milosz, Harvard University Press, 1983
What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, Adrienne Rich, W.W. Norton & Co. 1993
The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser, Paris Press, 1996
The Best American Poetry, 1997, ed. James Tate, Scribner, 1997
Donald Hall quoted in The Other Voice, Octavio Paz, Harcourt Brace, 1990
This essay was originally given, in an earlier form, as the keynote address to The Oregon State Poetry Association Annual Conference.
I want to write about trust—about poets trusting themselves and their audience. But first it is necessary to say a little about the current state of the poetry world that we live and work in, here in the United States, since that will lead inevitably to the relationship between poet and audience.
I recently stumbled upon something that Mrs. Melville—the wife of Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame—wrote in a letter round about 1858—some hundred and forty years ago. Mrs. Melville said, in a letter to her mother: "Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around."
This letter was quoted by the late, great—and still grossly overlooked—poet, Muriel Rukeyser, in her book, The Life of Poetry, which is a meditation on the place and potential usefulness of poetry in American society, and, in particular, the place of poetry in relation to war. This book was originally published in 1949, in reaction to Rukeyser's experiences of the Spanish Civil War, and of World War 2 and has been republished by Paris Press.
"You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around." Poor Mrs. Melville was embarrassed for her husband. What would people think if they knew he was writing poetry? That he was a bit of a crackpot? That, unlike writing novels about man against whale, it was an unmanly occupation—a bit effeminate? That he had abandoned his responsibilities and embarked on an unprofitable, self-indulgent pastime? That poetry was, for the most part, irrelevant to the real business of the world?
If these fears were, in fact, at the heart of Mrs. Melville's embarrassment, they don't really seem so old fashioned even now. Some of them are concerns that the proverbial person-in-the-street today might well express, if asked how he or she feels about poets. The idea that poetry is irrelevant, that very few people read it or care about it, is one that recurs regularly and that poets have grappled with for a long time. Sixty years ago, Edmund Wilson published his controversial essay, "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" Fifty years ago, Muriel Rukeyser asked: "Is poetry alive? Is there a place for poetry? What is that place?" More recently, Dana Gioia wrote that poetry is "no longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life." .
We poets, for the most part, support poetry by writing our poems and reading them aloud, and by voraciously reading the work of others. Yet this question of relevance, or lack of relevance, is important to all of us who are poets, Even though we go to readings and we buy poetry books, and even though oral poetry is burgeoning, slams proliferate, and the calendars list many readings each week, if we look around at those readings, we have to admit that it's a pretty small world, and it is a world of our own. A largely separate, self-contained world.
Recently I asked myself: how many people do I know—people of the kind who go to the symphony, or who like intelligent plays and movies—how many of these people do I know who also go to poetry readings? How many non-poets do I know who read poetry? I had to conclude that what many commentators like Gioia or Donald Hall have said about the poetry world is obviously true: poets write and read primarily to other poets. Poetry is published in magazines that are bought by writers—literary magazines. I'm quite certain I don't know any non-writers who subscribe to The Kenyon Review or who buy American Poetry Review off the news stand. And now that the writing of poetry has taken firm root within the creative writing departments of colleges and universities across the United States, the separation between poetry and the rest of life has become even more marked than before—and far more dependably preserved than the separation of church and state.
So, why does this state of affairs matters to all of us who write poetry? Why should we aspire to something beyond the loyal, but limited, audience we can find among our fellow poets—valuable as that is? And, most importantly, what might we all try to do about it. Before I attempt to answer those questions, I'll digress a moment to point out that this situation regarding poetry is not by any means the situation you will find if you go to other countries. In fact, it is a state of affairs currently unique to this country.
I grew up in England, which is where I did my early writing and published my first poems. Although I have been in the U.S. now for over thirty years, I keep in close touch with poetry in Britain. I subscribe to British literary magazines, belong to the Poetry Society there, and visit the country regularly. One year, my visit happened to coincide with National Poetry Week. Now, here we have a National Poetry Month (April), and some of you may have noticed a few ripples spreading from the idea: a bookstore displaying poetry more prominently than usual; an event or two, probably attended by the usual poetry audience. But National Poetry Week in Britain was something else entirely, and the major difference was that it was embraced by the mainstream—not just the mainstream art world, but by the mainstream culture and the mainstream media in many of its different manifestations.
First of all, more poetry than usual was published—not in poetry magazines but in daily newspapers. There is still, in England, one major daily paper, The Independent, which regularly publishes poetry as part of its daily offerings. (In Oregon, where I live, we also have a regular poetry spot in the Sunday paper, but that’s pretty unuual.) That week in England, there were numerous events all around the country: readings, festivals, poetry gatherings at some of which not-famous people were invited to read, not only their own poems, but their favorite poems written by others. This is an important feature—this pleasure in reading aloud poems by a favorite poet, for it assumes two things: first, that literate people, whether or not they write, have favorite poems, and second, that the purpose of reading to an audience is not simply to show off one's own creations. Both these assumptions were true of American readers and writers until relatively recently. Robert Frost and his contemporaries devoted some proportion of their readings to the work of other poets, and this practice was also a basic tenet of the readings put on by American feminists of the 1970's. Poets like Judy Grahn, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich, for example, all believed in the importance of including others' work when they were given a microphone. Not only did it provide delightful variation in the reading, it exposed audiences to more and different work, and it acknowledged the fact that we poets do not produce work in isolation from what has gone before and what is going on around us, even while we sit alone in our attics or at our dining room tables.
When I'm in England, I like to watch television, since some of it, at least, is of a quality hard to find here. Staying with relatives during National Poetry Week, I quickly caught on to the fact that the event had been taken up with enthusiasm by the BBC. Frequent announcements were made about the national search for the top ten most popular poems written in the past fifty years. This was a kind of unscientific poll taken among ordinary television viewers, which produced an enormous response, and a certain amount of discussion that I noticed going on in places like pubs, where ordinarily poetry might not be the topic of the day.
The results were announced on the last day of Poetry Week during a half-hour, prime-time special show, which I watched. I was already in a state of incredulity about the whole thing, and certainly ready to assume that poetry voted in by ordinary people would likely turn out to be of the Rod McKuen variety. But of course I was wrong. The television show featured well-known actors like Jeremy Irons reading the top ten poems. And those top ten included poets such as Stevie Smith, Jenny Joseph, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin.
And that was not all. At the end of this television show, the host announced that they would now give the solutions to the various poetry "clues" that had been dropped throughout the week. Not having known about this, I hadn't been looking for clues, but they obligingly re-played them for slouches like me. It seemed that lines of well-known poems had been buried in the scripts and dialogs of all kinds of different TV programs from daily sitcoms to the news. Not added, you understand, just woven in seamlessly to a report on toxic waste or a love scene in a drama. As is the case with many of the TV and radio contests so beloved by the British, no prizes were awarded. People had played along just for the fun of it—and, like many of the other National Poetry Week events, they could participate because they knew the poems.
I know more about the state of poetry in Britain than I know about it in other countries. Writers more in touch than me have decribed its usefulness to the people of many Latin American countries or its role in Scandanavia or India or elsewhere. But, little as I know about some of these places, I feel confident in asserting that nowhere in the world has poetry taken the course—and I mean the academic course—that it has taken here. I should clarify here that I certainly don't think there's anything whatsoever wrong with writing classes—I could hardly do so with a straight face since I teach myself. The point I am making, although others have made it in much greater detail, is that poetry simply doesn't flourish when all the poets live the same kind of life, know one another, and depend on one another for reviews, recommendations, and grants. An appalling lack of diversity results from this, as well as an absence of honest and useful criticism, and a sameness that is apparent when you read through the literary journals.
Here in the United States, poetry is apparently flourishing and, at the same time, apparently irrelevant to large numbers of people—even those who are an audience for other art forms. But does this matter? As long as someone shows up when we read, what's to complain about?
We live in uniquely confusing times—times that are daunting to write about. The violence of our society is not only increasing, but is far better known to us than in the past. Modern methods of communication allow us to see individuals starving the other side of the world—or the other side of our city, or to witness victims of war, suffering at the moment they suffer. No wonder, then, that so many poets (and I include myself here) choose to write about our own families, our own childhoods, a particularly beautiful flower in the garden, a blue heron on the lake, or the whimsical behavior of the cat. Staying very close to home may be the way we try to keep writing even when the world at large seems too awful—or for that matter too large and too wonderful—to describe.
If you doubt this characterization of today's poetry, you have only to be a reader for a poetry contest, as I have been many times. The experience of reading some five or six hundred book-length manuscripts is one of enormous predictability—even when every fifth or sixth one uses stunning language and every tenth or eleventh one offers a fascinating use of form. Take on this task and it won't be long before you find yourself turning the page saying to yourself, OK now for the grandmother poem; now for the smell of baking bread; now for the spiritual forest poem, and so on, as you become ever more irreverent about subjects that are of course important to many. It's not that you are terminally jaded or a hopeless cynic. It's that most poets are writing poems very like those of their teachers and peers, about experiences very similar to the experiences of those people, in voices that are often remarkably alike. These poems, it must be said, do not, on the whole excite readers beyond the little world that produced them.
Czeslaw Milosz has written: "It is possible that the gloom of twentieth-century poetry can be explained by the pattern that resulted from the 'schism and misunderstanding between the poet and the great human family." Surely it's important, not only to those of us who write but also to those who read, to begin healing that schism. If poets worked within a larger community of listeners and readers, we might produce work that would encourage those readers toward more imaginative thought, more spiritual development, and more humane action. In spite of their apparent indifference to poetry—or as Rukeyser and others would claim—their fear of it, I believe that people who are outside the inner circle of poets do, in fact, have a deep longing for what poetry can provide. Surely there is now more than ever a widespread desire for direct communication with the inner life of others (which may in part explain the current popularity of memoir).
Perhaps it was this deep longing that manifested itself a couple of years ago in a full-page advertisement I saw in the British Poetry Society's quarterly magazine, an ad placed by London's largest law firm. They were advertising for a poet-in-residence. I clipped it and sent it on to Brian Booth, the man who founded the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts, who also happened to be at that time a partner in one of Portland's large law firms. When I saw him shortly afterwards, he said he'd circulated it and it got a lot of laughs. Lawyers in this country may not be ready for poetry, but we must constantly plant the seeds. We must encourage that deep longing for poetry to surface and, when it does, we must reach beyond our little circles to meet it.
I suppose, if I want anyone to do anything different than they are currently doing, I must ask that very American question: what's in it for the poets? What do we get out of expanding the poetry audience? Well, I think what we get is better writing. To write well, to find our voices, to dig deep for the truths we want to communicate, we need to have a strong sense of our readers and listeners. When we put our words into the bottle and throw them into the ocean, we must have a conviction that someone is going to pull the cork and read them. Otherwise the words we seal in there will be hopeless words. Words we haven't struggled with and sighed over. They will merely record our plight, from which we see no escape. To write poems that stretch us beyond what we think we know, we need, not just an audience of one. As Osip Mandelstam said, the audience must consist of more than just people we know. This is how Mandelstam explains it: "If I know to whom I speak, I know ahead of time how he will regard what I say, whatever I might say, and consequently I shall manage not to be astonished by his astonishment, to be overjoyed by his joy, or to love through his love." And, he goes on to say, "It's boring to be whispering to a neighbor."
Perhaps some writers have dealt with this tendency to know ahead of time what the audience will think by moving to another culture—becoming expatriate writers. This was certainly true for me, although I couldn't have articulated it at the time I moved from England to the U.S. But over the years, I found myself saying things like, "I knew too well how they would react over there," or "I never could have written that in England!"
According to Adrienne Rich, it is in the interest of the poet to greatly expand her audience. I quote from her essay, "Someone is Writing a Poem:"
Someone writing a poem believes in a reader, in readers, of that poem. The "who" of that reader quivers like a jellyfish. Self-reference is always possible: that my "I" is a universal "we," that the reader is my clone. That sending letters to myself is enough for attention to be paid. That my chip of mirror contains the world.
But most often someone writing a poem believes in, depends on, a delicate, vibrating range of difference, that an "I" can become a "we" without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images. A language that itself has learned from the heartbeat, memories, images of strangers.
If we think about this as poets, we may realize that to write for a reader who is not like us, requires a far greater trust in your words than to write for someone who shares our view of the world and our language. And so we come to the question of trust. In order to write with skill and confidence, we must trust that our observations, our attitudes, our stories, are understandable and interesting to the stranger. Lack of trust fatally undermines the writing itself. When we don't trust readers to "get it," we find ourselves, for example, both showing and telling. With strong images and rich, musical language, we convey the essence of what we have to say. But just to make sure, first we tell the reader what the poem is about and then, after we have so nicely shown it, we sum it up.
Lack of trust in the reader also leads to adjectival anxiety. To say nothing of the adverbs. Good descriptive nouns and fine, active verbs may be present, but we don't quite trust them to do their work. In anxious poems, the sea doesn't just roil: it is iron-grey and turgid, and it roils ponderously. Anxious poems, too, often suffer from what I call the "bow-tie" ending. That's the two-line, neatly tied-up finish that hits readers over the head with the meaning of the poem and ensures that they take away with them the right conclusion. Written in significantly more prosy language than the rest of the poem, these bow-ties are easily recognizable if we watch out for them. Chop them off and there's almost always a graceful ending sitting right before the bow-tie, waiting to slide into last place.
If it seems hard just to go ahead and trust, perhaps the way into that trust is through the writing itself: excise those adjectives, chop off the bow tie, and sit for a while with discomfort. Feel the inner voice arguing that readers won't get it, and struggle against that urge to add explanations. If we dare to put the poem out in the world without all those anxiety-spawned additions, sooner or later, the listener in the third row with tears in her eyes or the reader who sends a personal story in response, will demonstrate just how well the poem communicated.
Dana Gioia, in his essay, "Business and Poetry" claims that contemporary poetry has little in common with the lives of most people. I would disagree with this to the extent that really good writing, even about the limited number of subjects addressed, does speak to the lives of others and does reveal commonalities. But Gioia's point is that the subject matter itself, is very limited in scope, which is certainly true. The private realm addressed by most poems has, he says, "unlocked the doors to a poet's study, living room, and bedroom," but "has stayed away from his office—unless the office happened to be located in an English department." Poetry not only ignores the world of work, he says, but "there is also a surprising paucity of serious verse on political and social themes."
Gioia believes that this lack of concern on the part of the poet with the wider world has lost poetry much of its potent audience. But, he says, "long before his audience disappeared, a more important thing had already happened: the poet had lost his sense of addressing a public, lost the belief that he and they had anything significant in common. This failure of assurance changed everything he wrote. (Presumably, despite his use of the pronoun, he does know that women write too.)
But how can we believe that we have something in common with every single possible reader? How can we write in a way that, in Rich's words, our "I" can become a "we" without extinguishing others. It is very difficult to write for this diverse audience of strangers in times that have taught us some true and sometimes sobering things about the lives of those who are different. We have learned, often with difficulty, to respect cultural, racial, sexual, and other differences—or sometimes to pussyfoot around them in the name of respect. Having a greater understanding of people who are different from ourselves, we find new reasons not to address them with our poems. If we are middle class, we exclude the working class person who, we think, won't understand or be interested in our middle class perceptions—or, even worse, who might be angry at us because of them. If we are white, we shy away from mentioning race (who are we to approach that subject?) and if we are straight, from including gay people in our poems (someone might get the wrong idea). But these fears merely ensure that we cave in to that great liberal sin, timidity, and continue to write for people just like ourselves. This does not do justice to the poems we could produce if we trusted our audience.
I would be foolish to say that if we try to expand our horizons, our audience will always like it—they won't: if you take risks, sometimes you fall on your face. But if we don't take risks, neither we nor our poems grow. The poets who get into the most obvious trouble are the overtly political poets. Not that they have been exactly persecuted in this country, at least not since the McCarthy Era, but they have been subtly undermined by disparaging reviews, and by being denied funding, labeled "obscene" and often excluded from libraries. Martín Espada, the left-wing political poet who used to be a regular contributor to "All Things Considered," was dismissed from their airwaves for writing a too-political poem on the wrong subject. But, again, our situation is not the situation of many other countries, where the greatest and best-loved poems are very often political poems.
I want poems to be useful—not just in supporting social change if that is something that concerns the poet, but in helping readers see things a little differently or gain insights into another's life so that they are changed just a little bit, no matter what the subject matter. Still, I have to admit that we can't just decide to write poems that matter—we can't sit down one day and say to ourselves, I'm going to say something important and moving in a poem about the state of the world. I know because I've tried this and it doesn't work! What does work is mining our own deeply personal, deeply felt experience in a way that we trust will speak clearly to others. Whether or not we expand our subject matter—and I think doing so would speed up the process of making poetry relevant to more readers—I strongly believe that personal life can be written about in a way that is both relevant and important. Your "I" can become the universal "we" if you dig deep, deeper than is comfortable, for the kernel of truth in your subject.
Trusting our personal stories to speak to a diverse audience, is something that also comes up when we write personal prose. I have been engaged for many years now in writing and teaching memoir, which draws on the author's personal experience to tell a story that in some way becomes universal. As with poetry, memoir works best when the writer does not in any way try to convince the readers that they have something in common with the writer. Readers don't like feeling pushed around, or led like a horse to a water trough they can perfectly well find for themselves. Memoir reaches out best when the writer sinks deep into his or her own story, not worrying at all about the audience. Alice Walker marvelled at this power of writing to transcend barriers, when she said, "We have the capability to connect to absolutely everyone and everything, and, in fact, we are all connected...When I write about my family, about things from the South, the people of China say, 'Why, this is very Chinese.'"
I do not mean to imply that it's easy to trust the audience. I, myself, have struggled with this and have often been afraid to write openly as a lesbian. I've been convinced that my audience will abandon me—at least all but those who are like me. For years, I deliberately conjured up in my mind a friendly and supportive audience while I was writing. And for a while, I only read to audiences I was pretty sure were on my side to start with. But this changed after I published my first book. I was gratified and excited when lesbians or feminists or gay men wrote good reviews or sent me letters. But my most surprised delight came from the first letter I received from a young, straight man. Your poems spoke to me, he said. I saw some things I never saw before.
To be relevant does not mean you have to be on a soapbox. To be relevant does not require you to exclude personal moments, private life, or family stories from your poems. It is, rather, a matter of having something to say about those personal moments. And, in a way, it's about having something new to say.
The very idea of saying something new can silence each and every one of us for years. But really, having something new to say doesn't mean we have to think some thought no one else has ever thought before; it doesn't mean we have to be uniquely creative, uniquely wise. What it comes down to yet again, is trust. This time, trust in ourselves—in the undeniable fact that each of us is a unique individual—that our experience is ours alone. If we can believe that, the only way our work can fail to be unique is if we are lazy with the language. The problems come only if I remember the words someone else used in talking about an experience more strongly than I remember how I really felt about my own similar experience. This is how we fall into clichés, sentimentality, and other short cuts through the language. Saying something new really means saying something true, and saying it truthfully in the only words that can convey its fullness.
I want to end with some very concrete suggestions of things we might all consider doing. Most of us probably know something about what poetry has done for us but these suggestions are about what we can do for poetry. And of course, what we do for poetry will ultimately come back around and do something grand for our writing.
Here is my agenda.
One: remind yourself regularly how important poetry is. This is something most poets speak about and write about often. One way to do it is to imagine a world without poetry. James Tate, in his introduction to a Best American Poetry volume says "Without poetry our Culture and, more importantly, our collective Spirit, would be a tattered, wayward thing." Dostoevsky said that the world will be saved by beauty. Muriel Rukeyser wrote: "We wish to be told, in the most memorable way, what we have been meaning all along." Your assignment here is to find your own words for why poetry is important. Have something to say when someone asks you why you think it matters.
Two: know that you have some power to shape the role of poetry in your life and in the life of your community. If you don't, someone else will define that role for you.
Three: take a friend to a poetry reading—a friend who has never been to one before. Pay no attention when she or he says, "but I don't like poetry." Say simply, "you'll like this one," or "do it for me." Or say, "I'll pay for dinner if you'll come."
Four: buy poetry books as gifts for friends who don't read poetry. Don't apologise or explain. Just act as if it's the normal thing.
Sub-section (a) to four above: buy those books at an independent bookstore. It's important. If the independents go, so does a lot of our poetry.
Five: write poems about work. Write poems about what you read in the newspaper. Write about people other than yourself. Write what feels dangerous. Oh yes—and don't use or tolerate sexist pronouns.
Six: do whatever you can to invite people unlike yourself into your work and into the literary community. Create diversity in your writing groups and ask forcefully for it in the classes and workshops you take. Don't pay a lot of money to a program or workshop that has no women faculty or is all white. Go to events or readings where you might be in the minority.
Seven: when you give a reading, read someone else's poem . And then at your next reading, recite it from memory.
And finally: let your poems and your lives be full of hope.
Selected Essays, Osip Mandelstam, trans. Sidney Monas, University of Texas Press, 1977
Can Poetry Matter, Dana Gioia, Graywolf Press, 1992
The Witness of Poetry, Czeslaw Milosz, Harvard University Press, 1983
What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, Adrienne Rich, W.W. Norton & Co. 1993
The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser, Paris Press, 1996
The Best American Poetry, 1997, ed. James Tate, Scribner, 1997
Donald Hall quoted in The Other Voice, Octavio Paz, Harcourt Brace, 1990
This essay was originally given, in an earlier form, as the keynote address to The Oregon State Poetry Association Annual Conference.