There's a War On in American Poetry (Part III) [Aborted]

More than a week ago I wrote (but never posted) Part III of this essay series, an entry which was largely focused on how my Tolkien-inspired "Battle of the Four Armies" trope was self-consciously tongue-in-cheek -- an acknowledgment that we really don't have a good language for discussing the pushes and pulls of history, none of which (at least in poetry) are actually violent or scary, thank god, so we end up mythologizing them in (in my case cheekily Tolkienesque) terms. I wrote about how different ideologies at various points ally with one another -- and that at their most clandestine (which usually just means "no one is paying attention," not that anyone is engaged in purposeful subterfuge) -- these alliances operate in a manner consistent with "conspiracies," though just like conspiracies it is only a sort of secrecy (self-conscious or de facto) that's required, and not (as some wrongly believe) perniciousness. But of late -- I mean, because of the concerns I have, and have expressed here, over the recent dialogue between Yankelevich and Perloff in the "pages" of Boston Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books -- I wonder whether the subtlety of a tongue-in-cheek military trope is really appropriate right now. It's hard to convince people that one considers these discussions to be fun, that one doesn't actually believe much is at stake here, and that therefore one is merely trying to inject some fun and passion and excitement into what otherwise would be the most esoteric, dreary discussions imaginable. (Has anyone here recently read reams of Contemporary Poetry Studies scholarship? I have. And let me tell you...) But really I do know, and anyone reading this should know, that none of us will be read after we are dead and that the only people who "matter" when it comes to posterity (a topic that doesn't interest me in the slightest, unless it's a question of enacting permanent structural changes that benefit real people in real terms) are a small cadre of anthologists who, now and historically, are even more likely to be ethically ambivalent than the rest of us. So, so much for that.

What does matter in all this -- in the "There's a War On" posts and elsewhere -- is whether our participation in poetic discourse is intended to produce something of general value or merely a very small form of personal satisfaction. Every week there are one or two minor scandals that "rock" (that's tongue-in-cheek also) the poetry world -- most recently it was the decision, by Ploughshares, to fire a blogger for conduct they felt was unbecoming of their "brand"; and that blogger's decision, in turn, to release private e-mails to the media in his own defense -- and to me the question is always one of first principles. As in, are there any first principles at stake here? Or are we merely dialoging through one poet's or one editor's or one magazine's personal experience of the poetry community? That's not a loaded question; I really don't have any opinion on whether the Ploughshares debacle met that standard. Nor on whether the binary Yankelevich constructs in response to Perloff's binary is anything likely to advance our understanding or appreciation of Art. Maybe? Probably not. But how would I know, or how could I say? And it's not for me to decide whether anything I write here meets that standard -- only to say that I hope it does, and that I intend it to, and that I can't really understand the thinking of poets who sit on the sidelines of the world and carp. You know the sort; they're all over Twitter and the blogosphere launching snarky asides about folks they've never met and/or issues they've not the courage to speak directly to themselves. Ultimately, that sort of apathy -- inasmuch as it's so often dressed up as intelligent remove -- is the only thing I find ugly, even grotesque. It makes the world sad and turgid.

So what in the world is TSE attempting to contribute? Well, I believe a revising of how we view and use poetry reviews could dramatically change the presence and vitality of poetry in American culture. I believe more clearly defining our terms in the contentious discourse over "the academy" can help ensure that such discussions are more profitable for all involved -- and for poetry generally, inasmuch as some great poets and poems and poetry and poetics fall through the cracks whenever our way of looking at things denies all the subtleties we actually perceive and live through. I worry that an entire generation of writers is being ignored in literary studies by scholars like Perloff, and even by binaries as well-intentioned as Yankelevich's, and that our entire culture stands to lose if we can't find the language to at least possibly incorporate every poem, every poet, and every poetry into our experience of Art on Earth. By the same token, I do a lot of work on MFA programs because I believe that, in the long run, such work increases the common stock of justice available to individual poets and institutions. And maybe I'm wrong -- maybe I'm wrong about a lot of things, and maybe some people hate me for not being a better man than I am, however close by their various bedroom and bathroom mirrors may be -- but when it all washes away the one thing that will be clear about each and every one of us is how much we attended to (or tried to attend to) people and ideas and values outside our own immediate experience, and how much that attendance was earnestly directed at improving the experience of life that others enjoy. We occupy a community -- and Twitter and blogging software certainly doesn't help with this -- in which witty snark and fashionable boredom is more often responded to with admiration than is active engagement. And that's not going to stop. But it stinks. And every once in a while we all, myself included, have to look at those around us and ask how much investment they actually have in any other person or ideal besides their own skin and their own subjectivities, or whether keeping things light and airy and sociable is in fact the first principle always most vitally in operation.

I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, many of them quite recently -- the past few years should never have happened in the way they did, and I'm angry at myself for wasting my time with nonsense -- but none of them have to do with trying to do something Big, even when I've failed. I'm going to pull back from this essay series primarily because I just have too much reading to do, partly because I need to save some of this research for a book or article (not for career purposes, as frankly I've been very down on any sort of professional activities for a couple years now, but rather because no one really reads or takes seriously anything written on a blog, and I really do want to contribute to the discourse on/about contemporary poetics), and in small part because I do think the possibility of raising negative energies rather than stoking positive ones exists whenever one uses the sort of tropes I've been using (and in spots the sort of tone I've been using), even though, on my end, this is simply how I amp myself up about things and people and ideas I care about and am invested in. But above all, I just really don't have any interest in feeding the apathy mill that (I'll only say "in my experience") dominates the contemporary American poetry community -- or the personal drama disguised as crusade (of which this essay series has, of course, already been accused) -- and incredibly it is sticking one's neck out that tends to provide the fodder for others' vulturistic tendencies.

Juliana Spahr once argued that it was MFA programs that have encouraged political apathy among the nation's young poets; that's not so -- it's the sociology of poetry itself, which is what I started this blog by writing about back in 2005 (I ran an essay series called "The Sociology of Poetry") that produces that effect. And the sociology of poetry is, in the simplest terms, the sociology of poets: the bare fact that you just can't make a viable and healthy community -- one that encourages passion and energy and integrity and earnestness and bravery -- out of a population of people, myself included, who spend such a significant percentage of their time on Earth indulging their worst selves. The same sort of woundings we give and incur in our personal lives due to that abiding lack of commitment to honor and compassion we also give and incur when we enter the public square as (in our various roles) activists, wallflowers, snarks, or leeches.

Every once in a while I activate this blog to try to do something Good, to make up for the things I know I've done that were Bad; to aim High, having trolled Low on too many occasions, and put my energies into things that really didn't deserve them. And every once in a while, after I've activated the blog, I return to that same sort of non-participation Juliana Spahr decries, and which I in the abstract decry, because I have seen the soul of a poet -- in the mirror, across a pillow, at a gathering, in a conference setting -- and I really think it's something none of us should be exposed to for too long. It is, finally, -- not ill-intended, no -- but both pretty and poisonous all the same. I love poetry, and I think careful positivism in both scholarship and reviewing is the way of the future; that doesn't mean interacting with poets is something I love (though on occasion I certainly do). I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. I'm sure some day I'll return.

{NB: None of this is aimed at anyone or any group of persons in particular; it's just a present-sense impression of how I feel.}