As Robert Frost once wrote (riffing on a line from Hamlet), “Play’s the thing. All virtue in ‘as if.’” Last Thursday, at the New School, thirty-odd poets (the hyphen is important) took part in the launch reading of this year’s volume of The Best American Poetry. The spirit of play prevailed. Melissa Barrett read a mash-up of Craigslist personal ads (“Fish counter, Giant Eagle: / My husband knows how attractive I find you”). Dora Malech explored the ambiguous pleasures of piñata-smashing (“We think we know how this ends, // how good it feels to play at this, / violence and darkness, // the beast / that harbors something sweet”). Airea D. Matthews, in the evening’s most electric performance, imagined her late grandmother as Gertrude Stein (“Lark-fed. Corned bread. Bedfeather back. Sunday-shack church fat”). Evie Shockley aligned herself with the Oulipians and banished fourth-fifths of the vowels (“we knew we’d effect the deed! / we’re the bee’s knees! they’ll / never see cleverer femmes”).
Missing from the stage, of course: Michael Derrick Hudson. Among Hudson’s many errors, one that hasn’t been much mentioned is his prioritizing of work over play. Consider the tedium of sending out a poem fifty times. (“I keep detailed submission records,” he reports, joylessly. “I’m nothing if not persistent.”) I have to think that some of those hours of drudgery might have been better given over to play—to writing more lines of poetry!—and not to devising a “successful” placement strategy. Because here’s the truth: If, after countless hours of work (the dreary kind of work: self-addressing envelopes, clicking on Submittable links), you finally land a poem in a journal (even a prestigious journal, like Prairie Schooner), a gazillion times out of a gazillion and one, almost nobody is going to read it. Hudson’s poem is the lucky “one” in that ratio—but I can’t imagine he’s feeling fortunate. The week’s news includes an article on Hudson having cancelled a “Writing and Reading Our Poetry” help session at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne.
Anyway, as someone once sort of said, all work and no play makes us dull. Or as one reader playfully announced (to great applause) last Thursday on stage: “I’m Aimee Nezhukumatathil, an actual Asian-American poet.”