I like epic things and ideas, but big things are unwieldy. Where to put Truth and can you plug the Spirit into some notion of the Cosmos? And why in Zeus’s name would you want that in pentameter? You can only concern yourself (or your poetic self) so much with thoughts and other ephemera before you get yourself into trouble, or brought up on charges of Being Silly, Over-Important, or Anachronistic. Also, anti-poetic, which is an especially bad one when trying to write poetry.
In The Triggering Town, the poet Richard Hugo counsels against making music conform to Truth; you can get yourself into a lot of trouble that way. And good advice it is—if the silo is white and not silver (Hugo’s example)—damnit, make it silver. Literary truth is different than factual truth is different from spiritual truth, etc., ad infinitum. There, bases covered. But the further away you get from trivial description, the tougher the questions get about representation and truth, and art and abstract concepts that begin with capital letters. Pretty soon you’re having to consult philosophers and mystics, which is a problem considering Heidegger makes you nervous, you’re not sure how to scan “hermeneutics,” and why would you put equals signs in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E anyway? And now we’re taxing the little poems to their limit, trying to stuff a lot of nonsense and things that won’t fit into our modest verse machines: we’re in danger of voiding the warranty.
Ok, so let’s cut Poetry a break and just stick with poetry. Let capital P poetry = the practice of poetry and little p poetry = the art of writing a poem. The distinction is vague at best, but for the purposes of the argument there aren’t any good rules. Certainly, I’d object to that too—there are rules, but perhaps just not any good ones. Which metric will we measure the work by? And now we slip down the anti-rational slide, giggling all the way. This is fun. But we can’t get too carried away.
So let’s say this: modernity is a motherfucker. Consequently, all the other things that go along with being a poet (eating, sleeping, growing food to eat, buying food and cars and houses and pencils, and voting, and crying, and persecution, and money, and newspapers, and falling in love) are complicated. Many of these things show up in poems. In my poems, I am reacting to things and arguing for things, and trying not to break the damn things while getting them to do something novel / fancy /amusing. It would also be nice if they were true. True in some Platonic sense? I am not even sure that I know what Plato meant by true, or what brand of true I mean—I would like it to mean “true enough without beating out everything that makes poems poetry and not something else.” And literature alone can’t be my guide: there is too much to see.
But I’m also tired of a poetry that loves poetry for the sake of poetry, or the games we play, or irony because the world is confusing and mean and we’ve just got to something with our time besides watch TV. "Have you seen what they’re putting on TV these days?" They ask in a desperate tone, "The inmates are running the asylum." Poetry as distraction written by Declinists. The world is terrible, and strange, and unjust, but the art we make against it has to hold fast. To paraphrase Adam Zagajewski, yes, there’s always someone as harried as Job to show up and point out it’s only poetry. But it’s all we’ve got. The good news, of course, is that there are multiple poetries, that verse slipped away while we were otherwise engaged and now shows up in all sorts of places, its children varied and legion. So for the rest of us still playing with the page and publication there’s a struggle (as the Talking Heads would put it, “Same as it ever was”) to “make it new” in spite of the fact that Ezra Pound was out of his gourd. Good poet? Sometimes. But frankly bonkers, and it shows up in his poetry. I think it’s good to say that too.
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