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.