The poets I like have to be good
writers, first and foremost, no matter what their work looks like on the page.
There are many writers whose works are stunning to look at as a kind of
typographical art, but reading them winds up being an insufferable experience,
unpleasant not so much because the poems are difficult but because the writing is just plain awful,
being either willfully obscure to disguise a lack of real feeling toward their experience, or,
most typically , for exhibiting an inane, unoriginal and cliché choked
sensibility that would never have gotten out of a junior college poetry
workshop. In either case, the visual look
of a poem is a distraction from the mediocrity of the piece being read. Good
writing always matters, and there are many, many wonderful poets whose works
have an originality achieved through a mastery of language that fortunately
leads us away from the nagging dread that a tactless and unschooled savant
garde has completely overtaken the conversation. Good poets must be concerned with
language, I think, since that is the stock
and trade of the art. Language made fresh, reinvigorated, reinvented-- I have
no arguments with anyone who earnestly attempts to make language convey
experience, ideas, emotion, or even the lack of emotion, in ways and with
techniques that keeps poetry and poetic language relevant to the contemporary
world, the one that's currently lived in, but there is a tendency for a good
many young poets , fresh from writing programs, to repeat the least interesting
ideas and execution of their professors and to make their work obsess about
language itself, as a subject.The concern, boiled down crudely,
is that language is exhausted in its ability to express something fresh from a
imperialist/patriarchal/racist/individualist perspective, and the only thing
that earnest writers can do is to foreground language as their subject matter
and investigate the ways in which proscribed rhetoric has seduced us and made
our work only reinforce the machinery that enslaves us.
This kind of stuff appeals to the
idealist who hasn't had enough living, not enough bad luck, not enough
frustration or joy to really have anything to write about, in large part (an
grotesque generalization, I know), and it's easy for someone to eschew the work
of absorbing good poetry -- Shakespeare, Stevens, Whitman, Milton, Blake,
O'Hara-- or learning something of the craft and instead poise their work in non
sequiters , fragments,clichés, sparsely buttressed
inanities, framed , usually, in typographical eccentricities that are supposed
to make us aware of the horrific truth of language's ability to enslave us to
perceptions that serve capitalist and like minded pigs.More often, this sort of
meta-poetry, this experimental notion that makes a grinding self-reflexivity
the point of the work, reveals laziness and sloth and basic ignorance of the
notion of inspiration-- the moment when one's perceptions and one's techniques
merge and result in some lines, some honest work that cuts through the static
thinking and makes us see the world in way we hadn't before.
I speak, of course, of only a
certain kind of avant garde; one I endured in college and have since survived
when I found my own voice and began to write what I think is an honest poetry.
With any luck, some of these writers will stop insisting on trying to be
smarter and more sensitive than their readership and begin to write something
that comes to resemble a real poetry that's fresh and alluring for its lack of
airs. Others might do us a favor and get real jobs. Others, I think, will
continue to be professional poets as long as there is grant money to be had, and will continue in
their own destruction of forest land.