Reading good poetry criticism makes me want to be a better poet. This effect can sometimes be paralyzing, but having interacted with Jonathan Farmer in his role as the editor of At Length, the online site for long poems, I knew him to be an exacting reader and a painstaking editor, willing to push an accepted poem through several rounds of editorial exchanges until it becomes what it somehow always longed to be. This alchemy gets accomplished because he also possesses the rare quality of rooting for the poem and wanting to know the poem in the same caring, responsive way you might know a person. The process made me feel my poem was a living thing.
So I was delighted but not surprised when Jonathan’s first book of critical essays appeared with the title That Peculiar Affirmative: On the Social Life of Poems (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2019). I’d found his reviews of contemporary poetry books (on Slate as well as other sites) mold-breaking, not in their form but in their thought, evidenced in the characteristic lengths and windings his mind travels. The book’s essays are similar but necessarily more sustained and more accreting. Its title borrows a phrase from Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose,” a poem Jonathan describes as “long, slow, patient” in his introduction. Patient is also a good adjective for his approach to the essays in the book, which consider poets as wide-ranging as Lucille Clifton, Philip Larkin, Claudia Rankine, and Patricia Lockwood in the refracted light of “big” topics like joy, kindness, humor, and confidence—all qualities we look for and prize in the people we know. Jonathan’s attention to the poems discussed in the book takes its time, as any meaningful relationship does. Remarkably, his critical consciousness is not in service to intellectualized fireworks (although his intelligence is formidable) nor to over-assured rankings; instead, he makes distinctions and connections that lead the reader to a more intuitive understanding and a warmer appreciation for poems. The book mediates between the reader and the poems through the frankness of the author about himself and the ways poems have changed him; we feel like his companion on the journey each poem required of him. I ended the book feeling I wanted not only to be a better poet, but also a more open member of the community of humans—which also means a better, deeper reader.
A year later, in 2020, with my own social life radically changed and curtailed, and my need for poems—and for connection—more exigent, I revisited That Peculiar Affirmative and wanted to talk about it with Jonathan. Our email conversation follows.
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Kathleen Ossip: In your essays, and particularly in this book, criticism takes on aspects of the confessional. How conscious was that choice and why did you make it?
Jonathan Farmer: I think it was mostly intuitive. It felt right. I’m sure that was partly an extension of the subject—it would be strange to write a book about social life without any people in it. And I was the person I could most reliably write about in this regard. But I tried to keep that from narrowing the book—of making the poems seem to be about me. Rather, I was hoping to model some of the ways in which poems could function. Poems don’t exist independent of people—not in any meaningful way. Their value comes from the ways in which they affect actual people: emotionally, intellectually, physically…. And so in looking closely at the poems, I wanted to also show some of what can happen while we look.
Plus, I very much wanted this to be about more than poems. Part of the pleasure of writing about poems, for me, is that it can be a way of writing about the things a poem engages. So I wanted space to meditate on the nature of kindness, and joy, and human interaction. Of course, you can meditate on those things without talking about yourself, and at times I do, but in other moments it felt important to place them against an actual pulse and to give them more of an essayistic freedom to change, move, retract.
But I try to be very clear about who I am, so that I’m not universalizing from my own experience but rather letting my presence in the essays be a reminder that poems, like all parts of our social and private existence, vary from person to person. A passage from the introduction might be worth repeating here:
I don’t intend to argue for my taste, any more than I would want to argue for my personality. Instead, I’ve tried to use these particular poems to get a clearer (or, at least, more detailed) image of what it means—what it might mean—for one person to encounter another through this particular, imperfect medium that is itself as various as the humanity it hopefully serves. Its service, writ large, of humanity is a function of this poem’s service to this person, in this moment, and I—an often-anxious, middle-aged man, one who learned to trust poems at a time when he hadn’t yet learned to trust people; one who has sometimes found in poems evidence that life matters (found ways of imagining my own life as mattering) when otherwise incapable of imaging that; one who, like many people who grew up inside my particular, massive constellation of demographic and personal good fortunes, only belatedly learned to see how fortunate he was—I am at the heart of it.
KO: Reading a poem seems to me a very intimate act. In your book, the poem is not a person, but it is an entity that you can have a relationship with. When were you first aware of the intimate, mutual experience of reading poems and what made you want to write about it?
JF: Honestly, I think it’s what got me interested in poems in the first place. I started writing them in high school while trying to manufacture an identity for myself, and then in college when I started reading more of them (I imagine I’m not the only person who came at in that order), the ones I was drawn to made me feel less lonely.
In the many years since, I’ve learned other things about poems (and people!), but it’s never stopped mattering to me that they’re things people make out of these ancient artifacts—words—that humans created out of a need to share things with other people, things that humans have been revising ever since in order to better express the things they feel compelled to say. I sometimes tell my students to think about etymology as a kind of archaeological dig, a layered record of people trying to talk to each other. And I find it so touching, all those fossil traces (apologies for the mixed metaphor) of the human appetite to connect.
And another thing I wanted from this book was for it to have some emotional resonance. I always want criticism—whether it’s mine or someone else’s—to be worth reading in its own right. I think I saw an available drama there—or maybe it would be more accurate to say I saw something I thought I could effectively dramatize.
But I also wanted to make a case, implicitly, for that potential intimacy. A lot of the discourse around contemporary poetry seems to discount that element. I read some criticism and wonder, if that’s really what the poem does, why would anyone want to read it? I’m not a poetry evangelist. I think people need food, and love, and meaning, and justice, and dignity, and a lot of other things, and some people can get some of them through some poems, which is great. Others have a better chance of finding them somewhere else. And, to be honest, I’m kind of picky. I don’t get very excited by most poems. And all of that seems fine to me. But I do want to make available the possibilities of finding meaning, and pleasure, and human connection, where they seem available. To the degree that I’m capable, I want to share that with others. I want (I still want) to connect.
KO: Most of the poems you explore in the book seem to use the subjectivity of an I-speaker (or, sometimes, a we-speaker), which facilitates the connection you want in poems. Do you have any use for, or any affection for, poems that are more abstract or impersonal? Can they also allow connection?
JF: I do.
And yes.
Here, for example, is the first stanza of a poem from Fulke Greville, an English poet from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:
The world, that all contains, is ever moving;
The stars within their spheres for ever turned;
Nature, the queen of change, to change is loving,
And form to matter new is still adjourned.
There’s a volta of sorts at the end of the poem, in which Greville pulls back a curtain and reveals the whole thing to be a love poem, but that’s not the main reason I carry it around in my head. It’s this prolonged (it goes on like this for three more stanzas) statement of a conventional worldview that captivates me. Or maybe a better word would be enchant—it enchants me, which is another thing a poem can do, and maybe is especially well suited to do, given the roots of poetry in song.
And of course, we tend to talk about poetry in terms of music, but I think the better metaphor for what I feel here is athleticism. I get from this something similar to what I get from watching an extraordinary athlete or dancer in motion—that awareness of a human body, with its rough equivalence to mine, moving in ways I never could, and having something of that grace or power enter my body, imaginatively, extending it.
To be more specific, it’s the way Greville works the ideas across a pattern that, in a somewhat-simplified version, looks like this:
Line 1: iambic pentameter sentence, interrupted by a phrase between subject and verb, ending in an unstressed syllable.
Line 2: uninterrupted iambic pentameter line, ending in a stressed syllable.
Line 3: iambic pentameter sentence, interrupted by a phrase between subject and verb, ending in an unstressed syllable and rhyming with line 1.
Line 4: uninterrupted iambic pentameter line, ending in a stressed syllable and rhyming with line 2.
There’s more to it than that, but just that much is enough to create a remarkably satisfying motion toward closure in the even-numbered lines, especially in line four, and it happens within the context of these vast statements describing essentially everything that exists in the mutable world.
It still matters that this is something that a human being made, as it might when looking at a work of architecture. And it matters, too, that it’s happening in the context of human speech. And that’s still a kind of connection, although a very different one.
And then there’s a poem that I discuss in the book, Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Sundays of Satin Legs Smith,” which (with one exception, a playfully condescending “us” in the lines immediately after the ones quoted here) doesn’t have a first person but does, at times, have a “you,” as in these lines:
Ah, there is little hope. You might as well—
Unless you care to set the world a-boil
And do a lot of equalizing things,
Remove a little ermine, say, from kings,
Shake hands with paupers and appoint them men,
For instance—certainly you might as well
Leave him his lotion, lavender and oil.
“You,” here, is an imagined reader who would be critical of Satin Legs Smith. It’s someone who may or may not resemble the person who is actually reading the poem at a given moment. And since that’s based on the way you evaluate and understand Smith, Brooks gives you the option to be someone who can enjoy watching her pierce this “you” or to be the person who gets pierced.
Claudia Rankine does something similar in Citizen, which also comes up in That Peculiar Affirmative. And it’s another kind of connection—one in which the poet emphasizes and even exploits their control over the interaction. And part of what makes that complicated, and compelling, is the fact that it’s consensual. I can always put down the book. But even then, there’s something complex happening, not entirely unlike what I was saying earlier—about witnessing athleticism. I’m taking in what someone else has done and being made aware that they have done it, being made aware of their authority. Which, in a different way, Greville’s poem accomplishes too.
KO: I was surprised when your book ended on a marvelous exploration of confidence in Macbeth and Hamlet. Which, of course, are poems, but we don’t experience them in the same way we experience the other poems you discuss. What made you want to include them in this book?
JF: It’s funny: the idea for the book came out of that essay. Or, more precisely, it came out of the interaction of some issues that were on my mind and some of the possibilities I stumbled into while writing that essay. So it ends the book, but it also precedes it, and it’s different in style from everything else in there, which ended up feeling right to me.
I teach Macbeth to my tenth graders every year, and I think you develop a different relationship to anything you teach—it takes on different potentials, it starts entailing your relationship with your students, which are both complex and immediate (at least in my experience). I’m obsessed with making the play available to them. I want them to be able to see the difference of the world it comes out of and the richness with which it deploys unfamiliar (to us) ideas that are among the many ancestors of the ideas that we breathe today, without even seeing them as ideas—they’re just air to many of us. And I want the students to be able to experience some of the vitality of the play, including the exquisite violence, which was, of course, an effective mode of entertainment then, as now.
When I wrote that essay, I was still learning to teach. (I’m still learning to teach now, but with less terror and desperation.) And so all of that was especially charged. And my life was changing a lot too. I was just finding some stability after a few years in which a lot of things had been thrown up in the air—and it still wasn’t clear that all of them would land safely. And I’ve always been an insecure and anxious person, especially in terms of social life (hence, I guess, the book; to some extent, I’ve studied social life as an alien trying to enter into it incognito—or, at least, it’s felt that way sometimes). And I’d been writing poetry reviews for maybe a year, so I was trying to figure out what I could do with that, too—what else was available in writing about poems….
And so all of that—confidence, Macbeth, depression, anxiety, poetry, other people—was swirling around in me. And I’d already been fascinated by Hamlet for years, a play which has always had, for me, this really strong emphasis on listening and confidence and faith in others—all those messengers, the poison going in through the ears, Hamlet’s refusal to communicate directly in so many situations. It took a long time to figure out how to write the essay, but figuring out that I wanted to write it happened without much deliberation.
And then, finally, I think the fact that they were plays mattered too. The fact that they implied an audience (and have kept finding audiences for centuries). A lot of the discussion about contemporary poetry imagines (or fails to imagine) audiences in ways that I find confounding. Maybe there’s a world of people who interact with poems in the ways that a lot of critics imply—ways that seem so far afield from the ways in which the people I’ve met act in every other part of their lives. But, clearly, I’m skeptical. And so writing about plays, with their visible and observable audiences, was probably part of the appeal too.
KO: Has your relationship to poetry changed at all during the pandemic? Would this book be different if you started to write it now? Do we need a social life with poems more than ever?
JF: I’m embarrassed to admit this, but with the exception of a few books by friends, I’ve read almost no new poetry since the beginning of the pandemic.
I think part of that has to do with continuity. Like many people, I depend on having some kind of narrative to make time shapely, propulsive. And with so much less to look forward to, that’s been harder to maintain. Most of the time, I’ll feel OK in my life—even as I’m alternately outraged and despondent and afraid about so much of what’s going on—but it’s brittle. Like Wile E. Coyote, when I look down, I fall. And so much contemporary poetry is so jagged, elusive, so quick to jump away; I have an especially hard time right now holding on.
It’s not just that, though. All my life I’ve had an unhealthy tendency to outsource my sense of self, and having a book of my own out in the complicated, not-always-healthy economy of poetry was hard, and sometimes intensely lonely. So as the new books come in, the wash and sift of it all has made the sands underneath me feel loose. I keep telling myself I’m going to start reading some of them, and I don’t. I’m embarrassed about that.
I’ve had better luck reading older poems, even if they aren’t especially old. For a few years, I’ve been working on a series of essays about twentieth-century American poets. So far I’ve finished essays on Lucille Clifton, Robert Lowell, George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and, most recently, Thom Gunn. And that’s felt more sustainable to me. I think it’s partly that all of those poems are more continuous and partly that they’re farther removed from (or maybe just more cemented in?) the economy in which I’ve been bewildered—and also that there’s no rush to get to them, no calendar of coverage and timeliness. But the essays have a lot of kinship with That Peculiar Affirmative. I’m still trying to see how poems can embody various ideas. Each essay is an attempt to see what a given poet has made of a particular concept over time—goodness, recovery, the importance of poetry itself. In that sense, not that much has changed.
Jonathan Farmer is the author of That Peculiar Affirmative: On the Social Life of Poems and the poetry editor and editor in chief of At Length. He teaches middle and high school English and lives in Durham, North Carolina.