(Rain bells off the gutter above a booth at a bakery on Cherokee Street. Zach spreads honey and vegan butter substitute on a scone while Maggie, focus-faced, scribbles on a pad.)
ZACH. Why do you so silently sit there?
MAGGIE. I’m trying to finish a poem. (She holds her pad up to light, lays it by.) Our poetic era reconciles opposites, we’re told–the epiphanic and fragmentary, the procedure and product, the absorbed and unabsorbed–not really interesting–but we never ask about another poetic axis: the monstrous and the human–or the monsterizing and the humanizing.
ZACH. You mean poetry of the immoral and beastly, opposed to poetry of the alert and sympathetic?
MAGGIE. Not really– What I mean is, most contemporary experimental poetry monsterizes experience’s familiar features: producing an opaque personality-performance, presenting the psyche as a timeless mania-knot, magnifying broken instincts. I’m curious about experimental poetry that does the opposite, humanizing experience’s bizarrer features: asserting reckless doubts, producing a language transparent of personality, addressing but refusing to magnify ideals or debasement.
ZACH. (Mouth full of scone.) Tell me more.
MAGGIE. John Berryman’s the emblematic speech-performer, and the emblematic monsterizer. In “Dream Song 74,” “Henry stabbed his arm and wrote.” He clown-paints strangers and mimes out his permanent division from a first, wholer world, “obliged to perform in complete darkness operations of great delicacy” on himself. His poems’ spotlight suppurates, insisting it can’t be otherwise.
ZACH. Wait–are you saying violence and inappropriateness in poetry are inhuman?
MAGGIE. No. It’s not how the world is distorted in Berryman; it’s how he loves, and sinks fathomlessly into, separation pain. Monsterizing poets think like Piaget’s children. It’s a horror-movie filter on fairy tale psychology: in their world, they live moral binaries, and if they’ve lived badly there’s no limit to the audience-and-punishment they deserve. It grosses me out. Anything for more lonely concealing spoken performance!
But to me, humanizing poetry refuses this: it likes nothing better than to tell a human story to something ideal or to something debased. It’s a different boldness: James Wright speaks “To a Blossoming Pear Tree” (“little mist of fallen starlight,” hearing Wright’s own “dark blood,” for God’s sake, who writes this way now?), and what Wright tells it is “if you could only listen, / I would tell you something, / Something human.” Humanizing poetry still welcomes the spazzed and obscure, elevating it to fidelity with the poet’s mature, humane life.
ZACH. “Something human”–you mean the old love-starved man who begged Wright for sex on a Minneapolis street?
MAGGIE. Yes, Zach, the poem’s ugly as well as beautiful. Either monsterizing poetry or humanizing poetry can be disjunctive, elusive, fragmentary, or violent. I even find humanizing those poems which are shucked-skin dreams and enthusiasms and nightmares, like Frank O’Hara’s “Eager note on my door” and James Tate’s “Fuck the Astronauts.” Tate’s poem does choke out the lines, “Eventually we must smoke a thumb / cheap talk I’ve got my own angel / on the steps of the problems the bank / said to me I don’t need that,” and ends “nevermind the lightning / in your teeth let’s waltz / I am the hashish pinball machine / that rapes a piano.” But it’s not monstrous. Neither is O’Hara! The poems’ wildness is a molted old body, an insane formed relationship to another, which the poet saved.
ZACH. This sounds like a conversation about life.
MAGGIE. It’s not hip to say, but I sometimes think mature humanity is necessary before your poetry is mature and humane. I don’t mean joyless, or tame, or obvious. Monsterizing poets haven’t learned the damned soul is a plateau. As for humanizing– You know those times a moon baby crawls over your public life, the rain falling reads our Tarots, or a bowl no bigger than your hand keeps your hand clean? Humanizing poetry doesn’t wish to perform its distortions or sink into its manias; it instead seems to seek a self-recognition, based on the understanding of one’s relationship to another. No matter if difficult, if goofy.
ZACH. (Munching his scone.)
MAGGIE. (Writing:)
listen, gray
blossoms: when your face
is terribly disfigured and
you’re a stranger, i
will press my face
against yours immediately and,
slowly stepping away, sigh
because everywhere is normal
once i’ve been there.