Musing
on poetry’s place in the 21st century–reignited and redefined after re-reading Reginald Shepherd’s article in AWP from May/June 2008 about difficulty in poetry and how poetry matters. Shepherd argues that complaining about poetry’s difficulty has been going on a long time, but that poetry should be difficult because it keeps the reader engaged. He says:
In the perennially popular “death of poetry” discourse, there’s a consensus that people don’t read poetry because it’s too hard, too “elitist” (another word that should be expunged from the English language: it’s never descriptive, only pejorative). I’ve always thought the opposite, that most poetry isn’t hard enough–
but I’m beginning to parrot Zach Savich–“forget the vanity that asks if poetry can matter rather than seeing poetry as matter itself.”
I have been vain.
***
This past summer I had the delight of spending time with Helen Forman and talking about poetry with her. She has wonderful stories about her father and the other poets with whom he kept company, and has penned and published her own poems. Extremely well-read, Helen shared many a memorized poem with me, and talked about how poetry studied in her day, ‘the classics,’ never seemed difficult because it was “delicious in the mouth.” Helen felt like a lot of poetry written today has forgotten that poetry should be fun to read–there should be some element of puzzle and surprise to keep readers returning to it again and again, but it has to be fun in the head and out of the head.
An awkward transition~
These ideas echoed Reginald Shepherd’s argument. In his essay, he shares a story about attending a workshop with Ted Kooser, who believes that readers “[want] to be lead by the hand” when reading poems. I know many readers and writers who, themselves, wish for this. A good writer friend of mine who has just begun closely studying poetry in the last year, argued with me about various poets and their difficult work. She simply felt these poets were somehow poking fun at her because their poems didn’t “make sense” to her. I tried to share how poems can and should be revisited over time, and that each poet is different, and that poetry investigates the world through language, which sometimes doesn’t “mean” in the way we’re taught for poems to “mean.”
I was remembering all of the literary study I had to go through in high school, college, and graduate school–looking for and defining symbols; examining the “message” of each piece of literature–I started thinking about how post-modernism and post-post modernism wink at the audience–
Here’s what I’m doing, and if you’re smart enough and well-read enough, you’ll see it and you’ll be in my club. BOOOOooooo.
In the last 30 years or so, poets, writers & artists have moved through the re-invention of old, cultural and literary traditions, (easily seen for the pop-culture lover in the late 80’s with comic book properties like Swamp Thing and The Sandman)–taking characters and reframing how the audiences understand a character–(AKA breaking the toy and putting it back to together–or to quote a friend, dismantling the sea ship and building a rocket to the moon!)–or using “real,” historical facts and counting on readers to recognize the reconfigurations. Modernism was to jazz as post-modernism was to hip-hop–as–what are we in now?
And all of a sudden–
I don’t care. I just want people to read poems and write poems. I want people to hit themselves with coconuts and then see a talking doorknob asking “would you like to come in?” Does poetry matter? Can poetry matter? Should poetry matter? Why bother:
Poetry is the matter. So then I DO care–
Perhaps poetry’s movement in the 21st century is toward a new Jazzed Hip Hop; or, to quote the Kenyon Review—“surprise & delight.” We may be in-the-moment of relying on our well-practiced skills instead of our shtick & bravado–we need to believe we can fall forward without knowing where (or if) we’ll land; we need to let our talent catch us. And why? So that we can get back to the real in a world full of reassemblage. A television show like Madmen may be a good, pop-culture example of this Reconstructivism (a term I thought I independently conceived after conversation with my boyfriend, until we googled it and discovered it was coined by Chris Sunami–and an alternate term, post-millenialism, coined by Eric-Gans; so I’ll call mine Millenial ReConstructionism or Matterism!).
First, a definition–
Matterism! as I see it, diverges from Sunami’s Reconstructivism and Gans’ post millenialism (although please be kind–I am no theorist–just a writer). Matterism! utilizes what’s fallen into the gutters these past 30 years (not necessarily “building upon” what’s come before, as in Sunami’s theory), but still using the un-contextualized pieces (as with post millenialism and reconstructivism); however, these pieces are used without wink to or reference to the original, and not as the driving source of “surprise”–and they’re not used in an “anything goes” manner, or in a contextualized manner that pays homage to the structures and confines of classicism.
Surprise & Delight
While Reconstructivism, as Sunami sees it, uses surprise within the scope of classism/classical structures–the talent being your ability to insert new into old forms, Matterism! builds new structures to communicate the surprise–your talent, your abilities, that quality of genuine inside you, serves as the driving force. It’s not what you make, or how you make it, or your story, it’s you. You’re no longer using the products of other talents and stringing them together in unique ways (post-modernism) and you’re not fitting your talent and ideas into some other previous container (Reconstructivism)–you’re using your talent as the engine of the artwork–creating matter.
For example, in that great TV show, Madmen,
the time period and the historical events are well known, but the surprise for viewers is not that a wedding has been scheduled to occur on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated (a Reconstructivist tactic)–the surprise and delight comes in how the characters move through rather than react to that event–thus making a new ‘reality’ for themselves. The show is not about the re-actions of the characters to historical events, or even the rewriting of historical events in unique ways (as with Quentin Tarantino’s recent film Inglourious Basterds), but about how the characters compose new structures (i.e. ways of living) in order to build the real.
O dear, it might matter–
In poetry, this might be a small sampling of the Matterism! movement in context with the previous eras:
Post-Modernism—Anne Waldman, and many more–(a great blog by Tony Hoagland from 2006 listing others: “Fear of Narrative”)
Post-Millenialism/Reconstructivism/Performatism/New Sincerity/Pseudo-Modernism/a.k.a. that thing in reaction to Post Modernism–Brian Turner, G.C. Waldrep
Matterism! –A few (of my favorite) poets who matter right now: Kazim Ali; Zach Savich; Rachel Zucker; Jennifer Kronovet; Arielle Greenberg;
And back to Reginald Shepherd–lets wrap it up here ~
Shepherd is right too. Boring poems are boring. Poems that aren’t “utterances”–they’re trying too hard to do something. Poems can communicate, sure, but they don’t have to mean. They are in the moment. They are an expeirence. “Difficult” poems can be a more enriching experience, so arguing about whether or not poems should or shouldn’t be poking you in your eye seems silly.
Poems: matter.