Sick today, and so I’ve been clouding through some lovely interviews with famed writers. I balance Paris Review anthologies against KR Online and everything seems incredibly well-said. It heartens me at least that they sometimes edit the proofs, that this brilliance doesn’t all just fall off the truck. But still.
Linda Gregerson’s KR Online interview explores the evolution of her use of form–a while back she built herself a pivoting tercet, with one thin, “skeletal” middle line providing resistance to the longer-lined, syntactically sinuous first and third lines. This tailored form served her well. If you’d ever heard her read her poetry aloud you could hear her still when you encountered these tercets on the page–it was clear how to breathe–which nicely refutes Philip Larkin’s fuss (in the Paris Review) about how he never gave poetry readings because the listener wouldn’t be able to hear the difference between “their” and “there,” etc. and for that matter readings were the death of good poetry because they required simple syntax and simple ideas. Gregerson’s poetry, full of complicated syntax and complicated ideas, is good on the page but even better when you can hear her voice. So there, Philip.
Gregerson also talks about the resistance syntax offers to meter, how meter pushes syntax. And how facts offer resistance. I perked up. And then she got to how shameful it is that poets don’t write about politics the way fiction writers do (which, if you believe the Nobel Prize rep in the NYT this week–see Sergei’s post on this–means we poets are doubly out of touch). As I watch the market go to crap, as our jobs and homes get more precarious, as I read Tom Davis’s chilling interview in the NYT magazine today about the terrifying nothing that seems to be taking place in Congress these days, as I sit in front of my computer’s blank screen waiting for a new poem to take over and start asserting itself across the page, I agree with her and yet. If we grant that most writers, myself included, don’t write the poems we intend to write but rather the poems which find their way through us, then how do you bring politics back in? I am so used to the split, the poetry part of my life which explores syntax, myth, science, etc., and then the daily part of my life which panics about the economy. The economy does not seem to want in to my poems. Is my poetry an escape? I hope not.
Maybe the more useful question, then, is why the economy so rarely seems to come up. Is it because poetry itself is so far off to the side that it’s gotten comfortable there, and doesn’t reach anymore for the main stage? Or could there be something in line breaks, in meter, that resists the newspaper’s explanations (and not in the fruitful, Linda Gregerson sort of resistance)? Is it because the economy won’t hold still long enough for us to draw its picture? I’m not sure what it is. Why would something that’s such a huge part of our lives right now not make its way onto the page? We had this with the war, some, and then some slightly self-conscious war poetry–but at least it was there. But economic poetry? An ode to WaMu? Anybody?