A few years ago my husband and I were at a party, and the conversation turned to poetry. After we were outed as writers, a fellow guest said how much he liked the work of a much-anthologized contemporary poet. Although we’d never discussed Said Poet’s work with one another, my husband and I found ourselves united in an effort (probably unsuccessful) to respond in a generous and meaningful way to this person’s enthusiasm for poems neither of us cared for. On the way home, we tried to articulate our thoughts on Said Poet. “It’s not really even poetry,” we agreed. “Well, maybe sometimes it is, but a lot of the time it’s not.” We couldn’t say exactly what disqualified it from the realm of our concern. (This is one danger of living with another writer: you can form a shared aesthetic that never has to be articulated or examined.)
In this month’s Poetry, Adam Kirsch nails that “it’s not really poetry” feeling in an interesting essay on the metaphysics of contemporary poetry. Building on Heidegger, Kirsch distinguishes “poetry of world”–in which the poet is an active interpreter of experience, concerned with the poem’s “mythical, historical, and spiritual context”–from poetry of earth, in which the poet is one who bears witness to the non-human “earth,” rightly naming it through artistry of form and language. This naming of the earth through special language makes the familiar foreign, allowing us to see it. Kirsch’s example of the earthly poet working well is Seamus Heaney with his poems full of frogspawn and lorries and other earthly stuff. Kirsch contends that the history twentieth century poetry is a movement from poetry of world toward poetry of earth.
In Kirsch’s essay, a poem by Billy Collins exemplifies a failed poetry of earth–poetry in which the ordinary remains the ordinary.
Kirsch writes:
“The poetry of earth succeeds only when it manages to make the earth itself strange to us, so that we can perceive it in its aloof beauty. When the poet allows the earth to remain familiar, however, his praise of it becomes mere praise for the familiar–for everything that is undemanding and reassuring.
That is the note Collins strikes in ‘Earthling,’ where, after imagining what it would feel like to be heavier or lighter on other planets, he concludes:
How much better to step onto
the simple bathroom scale,
a happy earthling feeling
the familiar ropes of gravity,157 pounds standing soaking wet
a respectful distance from the sun.
Collins turns the very name of earth, which was an enigma to Heidegger, into a synonym for all that is ‘simple’ and ‘happy.'”
In a response to Kirsch’s essay, A.E. Stallings goes further in characterizing the unsuccessful contemporary poems of earth: “poems ‘celebrating’ everyday suburban pleasures in which the only artifice is a deliberate eschewing of trope and–the logical conclusion of that line of thinking–actual embrace of clich??–as a hallmark of ‘authenticity’ or ‘sincerity’.”
When that voice inside my head says, “is this really poetry?” this is what I mean.
Kirsch’s distinction, like any literary distinction, is useful as far as it goes. Ultimately, the accomplished poem of earth winds up invoking a world and vice-versa. But the distinction got me thinking about how contemporary poets sometimes do consciously put their work in historical, mythological, and spiritual contexts in a time when there is no one cast of gods, when we are so conscious of the ways in which there is no world that is singular or shared. In “The Changing Light at Sandover,” for example, James Merrill created a drama that’s earthly, worldly, and otherworldly. It doesn’t hearken to a lost world as the Modernists did, according to Kirsch; instead the earthly matter of the poem exists within an extended metaphysics. Then there are poems like this one, part of a series in progress by John Canaday, that re-imagine events taken from the world-historical stage, like the Manhattan Project. There are the many works of Norman Dubie and Linda Bierds (excellent profile here), in which the poet takes on the voice of an historical figure. I think these works are enriched by having contexts, by being of earth and, in a sense, of world.