"The Genius of the Shore": Why Local Poetry Matters

           I have friends who are into the “local food” movement, refusing to eat anything not grown within a small radius of their home. I have other, and some of the same, friends who are into local music, rejecting the corporate world of big labels in favor of bands they can follow at local clubs. I know one person who “dresses local,” refusing to use any material in her clothing not generated within a short journey from her home. Local is the big thing now, and with good reason. I wonder, however, if in this rush to embrace our inner Wendell Berry we haven’t overlooked one very import category of the local: the local poet. I think it is often assumed that “local poetry” is amateur poetry, and only the poet of national reputation matters. This certainly seems to be the attitude of most MFA programs, which, with a few notable exceptions, rarely encourage their students or faculty to get involved in the coffee house readings, critique groups, or small journals and presses of local poetry scenes. So, let me outline some of the reasons why local poetry is worth investing one’s time, and even one’s money, in.

            All good poetry is rooted in some particular place, and a local poetry scene helps to keep poetry rooted and particular. Think about how much television has done to flatten out the rich variety of American dialects and accents. If we think of American literature as only significant on the national level, then we are in danger of flattening out the rich variety of American poems, reaching only for some nationally acceptable standard: the flat non-accent of the nightly news anchor. Honestly, I sometimes think we are already on the verge of a literary culture in which every poem takes place in some unidentifiable and uniform suburbia. A thriving local poetry scene encourages a poetry of particular place, images and topics grounded in the shared experience of the local audience. Rather than creating an insular poetry, this opens up avenues to the universal through the particular. Think of Robert Frost’s or Jane Kenyon’s New England or Christian Wiman’s Texas. Like food, poetry that seems substantial, that seems real and nourishing, comes from someplace identifiable. The poetry that best embodies real experience and real particulars is not produced purely for export. It speaks into a place first and then through it to the wider world.

            If local poets in the smaller places of this country aren’t so focused on exporting their poems, they are free to focus on building literary community where they are. Local poetry scenes provide a support group for practicing poets. For poets who have graduated from MFA programs, the local scene can be a place to continue the camaraderie and support they have come to rely upon. Perhaps more importantly, the local scene provides encouragement, support, and feedback for poets who are outside the MFA system for cultural, financial, or other reasons. Long before the rise of the Iowa workshops, developing writers were nourished by rich local scenes: think of Ben Jonson and associates gathered at the Mermaid tavern or of American expats in the cafes of Paris. It is only the success that time has brought them which keeps us from thinking of these writers as “local.”

            I might add that it is in these local communities, and certainly not in the academy, that the great developments in poetics have taken place. In reading David Lehman’s fantastic account of the “New York School of Poets,” The Last Avant Garde, I was recently struck by just how local these poets were. Ashbery, O’Hara, Schyluer, and Koch may be very cosmopolitan in their outlook, but it was their proximity to each other (with the exception of Ashbery’s time in France), their appearances at the same parties and the same bars, the same galleries and the same readings, that gave them the opportunity to develop together approaches so needed to freshen up American poetry at mid-century. One may counter that these sorts of incubating communities can now occur nationally via the internet or through the gathering of prominent poets onto campuses, but I would argue that internet versions – unlike the communal life, the shared-experience – are always more plastic and contrived, more about abstract ideas than about literary passions and tend to fizzle out quickly, fossilized forever on abandoned websites. As for the campus as a place for new poetics to emerge through creative community, one might point out that such artistic cross-fertilization is often nipped in the bud by the alarming vagrancy, the nomadic spirit, of the typical creative-writing faculty. When it isn’t, when one finds a core group of writers working side by side on a campus year after year, then what one has is, in fact, simply a very solid, relatively well-paid version of the local poetry scene, at its best often interacting with local poets off campus as well. Sadly, though, even poets long established on a particular university can focus all their literary energies at the “national level,” neglecting the literary world just past the edges of the campus, especially if they happen to be located somewhere outside the traditional centers of literary activity on the east coast. When local poets, on campus and off, interact, however, one gets the variety of influences and pressures, of poetics and approaches,  that fosters innovative thinking. Contrary to what snobbery would dictate, poets grouped nationally are much more isolated aesthetically than the poets at the local coffee shop reading, where one might hear a language poet reciting a string of punctuation marks one minute and a neo-confessional poet detailing his latest break up or break down the next.

            Perhaps less obviously, the local poetry scene gives poets a chance to define artistic and career success in terms that are both more realistic and more meaningful. Accordingto Seth Abramson there are 45000 poets graduating from MFA programs every decade and 20000 books of poetry published every ten years in the U.S. If, as Ecclesiastes put it “there is no end to the making of books, then the deciding factor on who “makes it big” and who doesn’t – out of the pool of the thousands of most talented, ambitious, and determined poets— is more often than not, simple luck. The smaller, local poetry community, however, provides an arena in which a poet can build a meaningful reputation based more on accomplishment than luck or connection. Before you dismiss this notion as simply settling for the minor leagues consider that when Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne were building their great reputations during the Renaissance, the combined population of England and Wales was about four million, which is not significantly more than the current population of Oklahoma. London, the real home of literary reputation in the age of Shakespeare, was itself significantly less populated than Oklahoma City today. Dante made his great reputation as the national poet of a country a good bit smaller than the state of California. If you figure in the lower rates of literacy in the past, it becomes even more apparent that a contemporary American writer aiming for national importance is up against numbers unfathomable in any precursor literary community. A local poetry scene, with established readings, journals, and presses, gives a poet a more reasonable measure of her success. There is great honor in being one of the best of where you are, wherever that may be.

            We’ve recently gone through another perennial round of hand-wringing over the supposedly dwindling audience for poetry, the ever-present “Can Poetry Matter?” debate.  Over at the Huffington Post Seth Abramson posted a list of 200 “national figures” who will make you care about poetry.  As much as I admire the people on the list, and as grateful as I am for their large-scale investment in the art of poetry, I couldn’t help thinking that local poets can do a heck of a lot more than any “national figure” to revive the public’s appetite for the art of poetry. The uninitiated into the marvels of poetry are much more likely to wander into a coffee shop reading than into a large lecture hall to hear a national poet. Local poetry can spread a love for the art from person to person, neighbor to neighbor, at the “grassroots” level. This is why states have poet laureates.

            So, if you care about poetry at all, support your local poets. Go to readings (heck, you could even host a house-reading at your place). Buy books. Subscribe to the journals that live where you live. You don’t have to stop paying attention to the big, nationally-known poets. Just try to save some of your support and encouragement for the poet whose kid goes to school with yours, or who sits in the pew behind you at church, or who teaches at your local community college. And if you are a local poet, wear the mantle proudly.

REVIEW:

Joshua Robbins. Praise Nothing (The University of Arkansas Press, 2013).

Despair, and its accomplice Acedia (the spiritual version of ennui), have been part of literature since at least Chaucer’s disturbing portrait of the Pardoner. Recent poetry knows these complex feelings best from Berryman’s mantic and morose Henry, who makes a game of his despair and invites the reader to play along. In Berryman’s dream songs, we are surprised to see that rather than nullifying the poetic impulse, despair urges the poet toward enumeration, that the poetic analog of Acedia is not silence but rather catalog. There seems to be something about despair that drives one to ever closer examination of what is, as if the fear of the void pushes a poet to cling frantically to the variety, the astounding copiousness of the material world. This same tendency to turn despair into catalog, into ontological enumeration is apparent in Joshua Robbins’ debut volume, Praise Nothing.

Praise Nothing announces its despair in its title and begins with a poem in the form of a list. The poet names “the streetlights’ high murmur,” “the rattle of shopping carts,” “the skirr of asphalt // worn to gravel” and on in a minutely observed and detailed catalog of a decaying suburbia. The poem’s insistence that “nothing / need be forgiven,” its essential nihilism expressed in lines like “whatever / your thoughts of heaven / by now they’d be long // unutterable,” is in creative tension with the abundance of the imagery. This tension animates the poems throughout this book. I could pick examples from anywhere and begin cataloging Robbins’ catalogs, but let the poem “Collateral” suffice as an example, as it is very explicit on the matter. In the silence after listening to his neighbor beat a stray dog with a two-by-four, the poem’s speaker tells us

                                    it was

                        as if this world had never been

                                    more pure, that the rasped October

                        breeze through the birch trees on our street

                                    meant nothing, saw nothing, could say

                        nothing. There was only silence,

                                    then a clang of wood on concrete

                        and, somewhere, the dead leaves stirring.

The creative tension between the urge toward nothingness and the urge toward enumeration is evident in the brilliant line break between “as if this world had never been” and “more pure,” a taking away and a giving. Again as the poem ends, he creates silence, then fills it with the two-by-four dropping, the leaves stirring. The book stays energized by never settling into total negation nor simple abundance: neither second-rate Baudelaire nor second-rate Whitman, neither Nine-Inch Nails nor Mary Oliver.

Thus, when I point to the thread of nihilism in Robbins’ book, the tendency toward negation, it should be understood that this nihilism is tentative and contested, always at odds with the intense desire to recover faith. Such is always the way with despair, which is, after all, not a form so much of atheism (one could not imagine a despairing Richard Dawkins) as a form of frustrated desire. Think of the Pardoner’s preoccupation with the language of salvation or Berryman’s Henry always teetering on the verge of hymn (or indeed of Berryman’s own last works, such as “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”). This desire for belief is expressed in poems such as “When I Say Hymn,” in which the speaker expresses clearly the will to believe in lines such as “the day after the fire // we sang over the sanctuary’s / ashy smolder.” The image itself carries the tension of faith and despair, of hymn and ash. We see this tension also in “Heaven As Nothing but Distance,” in which the poet declares, “I could not even begin to count / all the things I wished to believe in,” again linking a faith deprived with a sense of the copiousness of the world.

In Praise Nothing Robbins shares many characteristics with poets whom we may call, loosely, the best of the “neo-confessional,” poets such as Matthew Zapruder or Matthew Dickman, born in the 70’s or 80’s, writing about the vacuity of American life, drawing frequently on popular culture and personal reminiscence: edgy and direct yet also, at times, experimental. (Another good example, and well worth a read, is Jeff Simpson, author of Vertical Hold). Robbins’ religious sensibilities, however, add something unique to his work, a reaching after eternity even as the poet seems to feel that his reach exceeds his grasp.

POEM IN CURRENT ISSUE OF 32 POEMS

I am very pleased to say that my poem, "Louise Bruns Recalls the Dust Bowl Cattle Slaughter, Guymon, OK, 1934" appears in the current issue of 32 Poems.

You can also read my commentary (at the 32 Poems Blog) on another poem from the same issue, Joanna Pearson's "The Arsonists in Love."

Review: The Lady Victory by Jane Vincent Taylor

The Lady Victory, by Jane Vincent Taylor, 80 pp. Turning Point, 2012. $18.00

           

            Commentators on contemporary poetry often contrapose narrative and lyric, attempting to trace trends in which one approach may be said to dominate over the other. One could, to be sure, see a certain reassertion of narrative in the new formalism and “expansive” poetry of the eighties and nineties, just as one could argue that the renewed interest in French surrealism via John Ashbery’s influence has lead poets away from narrative in the past decade. Whether this trend away from narrative results in a more “pure” form of the lyric, is, however, a matter of opinion.  But perhaps the point is moot, for Jane Vincent Taylor’s The lady Victory – like Eliot’s Prufrock or Yeats’ poems from Irish legend – makes nonsense of the distinction between lyrical and narrative approaches to poetry.

            In The Lady Victory, Taylor recounts the experiences of young women who are hidden away at the Our Lady of Victory, a home for unwed mothers. She tells also of the emotional life of the nuns who serve there. The narrative is fragmentary and elusive, and the reader’s inability to grasp fully these lives renders the poetry all the more poignant, as if we are privy only to the images and impressions that, by virtue of their emotional force, remain long after the particular framework of individual lives on which they hung is gone. The effect is somewhat like reading Sappho’s fragments or Spenser’s unfinished book of the Faerie Queene: one is struck by the simultaneity of absence and presence.  This impression is strengthened by the way each poem seems to stand alone and yet resonates powerfully with the other poems around it. For instance, “Friday Nights on the Road” conveys the young women’s frustration with their confinement by describing the way they would dream of automobile rides while cruising up and down the hallway in wheelchairs, “popping wheelies down the hall / on our little trip to nowhere.” The image is engaging and emotionally effective, but it is amplified by the very next poem, “A Votive Light,” in which an actual automobile trip is described as the narrator is taken to the hospital to give birth. The wheelies of the previous poem are echoed in the way the “station wagon hits all / the 23^rd street pot holes.” Taylor masterfully creates overtones and echoes that keep the reader emotionally engaged.

            The best poem of the book’s first section is certainly “A Kind of Food,” in which Taylor’s elusive narrator informs us that “Banana is the food of charities / always on the table in plastic bowls / day old, week old, blackened.” She goes on to vividly describe “the dried up stems curled like nuns’ / arthritic fingers, eternal crooks.” The image is so effective not just because it is exceedingly clear but also because it carries so much of the young narrator’s feelings about her benefactors/captors. As the poem progresses we see these feelings turn inward:

                        we will know each other

                        when we meet in the real world

                        someday – the post office, supermarket,

                        cleaners – by the lingering odor

                        oozing under our skin, old oily shame.

To work so much emotional impact, so much emotional complexity, out of a banana is surely the feat of a very gifted poet.

            Even more affecting are the epistolary poems which make up the second section of the book, poems written in the voice of a nun placed in charge of the infants in the nursery. These letters to one of the children formerly in her care are tender and vivid, an exquisite evocation of love and longing. They are poems about our desire to belong to someone, but, in a powerful reversal, it is the nun’s desire to belong to the child that is so moving in these poems. She writes

                        You were a meteor falling into a cold furnace, your

                        mother’s sobs receding hour by hour, your new

                        ghost ancestors a huddle of dutiful nuns.

                        It fell to us to finally break the crusty cord. That

                        moment you were freed, untethered, floating with

                        the other beautiful sad babies bedded down in the

                        infant nursery. Except that you weren’t sad. We

                        were never sad, were we little falling star?

The suggestion of separation in the image of the broken cord is powerfully, because desperately, contradicted by the we urgently repeated in the last two lines. We see also, in the sister’s description of herself as a ghost, the longing to be made solid by belonging to someone. This deep longing is demonstrated also in the nun’s wild and tender variations in how she addresses the child: “Dear little flame,” “Dear flower fist,” “Dear birthday candle,” Dear little chirp,” “Little ear, dear angel drum,” “Dear little wind behind the rain,” just to name a few. These letters are so sweetly sorrowful, I recommend against reading them in public, as you are likely to embarrass yourself as I did trying to cry inconspicuously while waiting for my daughter’s swimming lesson to end.

            The book ends with a third section of three brief and lovely lyrics. These final three poems find a common grace in the human voice, in our ability to sing our sorrows:

                        I would make some everlasting blues

                        from the sound my baby must have made

                        to her new mother when she saw her, saved

                        from the orphanage, the pity of those nuns’

                        soft-singing world.

                        A song for nuns. A song

                                                            for the long sobriety.

Contemporary poets rarely get this mixture of sadness and sweetness so right, so close to the tone of Feste’s final song in Twelfth Night or the final stanza of Yeats’ “Song of Wandering Angus.” As the book ends, the narrator – perhaps many years later, perhaps seeking spiritual rest in a convent retreat—listens “to the sisters singing alleluia into silence.” The line sums up well the experience of reading this book, its play between song and silence, its affirmation of life even when the living is difficult. The Lady Victory is fine poetry because it is well-executed but also because it is well-felt. Regardless of the facts, the emotions ring true. Isn’t that at least one of the things we look for in good poetry?

Spots of Time: A Review of Kathleen Johnson's Subterranean Red

Kathleen Johnson, SubterraneanRed (Mongrel Empire Press, 2012)

Kathleen Johnson’s Subterranean Red treats of memory in the form of murmur and of snapshot. Like a character in a gothic novel held captive by a ghostly lover, the poet is haunted by a past she would rather escape and yet, despite herself, courts in her imagination. This past is often evoked visibly in the series of family photos that accompany the text, a technique reminiscent of Jeanetta Calhoun Mish’s very successful Work is Love Made Visible. Rather than bringing back the past, however, these pictures and the poems which they accompany serve to remind the reader that what time has broken can never again be made whole, that memory is always a matter of arranging and rearranging the fragments. Remembering is imagining.

The theme of the past’s constant murmuring in the consciousness of the poet is established in the collection’s first poem, “The Apothecary of Minerva Best.” As throughout the book, memory presents itself as both desirable and painful:

                        I’m left with an ache as faint

                        and elusive as the sound in

                        a conch put to my ear.

                        The ebb and flow now

                        no more than a murmur

                        or a memory.

The image of the conch summarizes well the way in which memory is sought as a pleasure yet remains elusive and painful. Johnson adds to this theme by the use of internal and occasional rhymes throughout the book. The faint rhyming becomes a form of echo, of murmur. Take for example these lines from “Three Generations of Cherokee Women: A Portrait,” in which she describes her great-grandmother:

                        She’s seen them come and seen them

                        go. The stories she could tell

                        I’ll never know. But her hands look like

                        they’ve wrung a thousand chicken necks.

There is enough ghost of the iamb in these lines to accent the rhyme of go and know, but the line breaks skillfully work to half bury the rhyme. This effect is even more powerful in the beautifully evocative “Wild Sand Plums”:

                        Roadside sunflowers face the sun,

                        sway in the wind.

                        Near the cornfield, I bend

                        to pick up a mottled feather.

The rhyme is of course both aural (wind and bend) and visual, the figure in the poem bending in rhyme with the top-heavy sunflowers. Enacting the way imagination constructs the past, the poem builds itself from echoes and murmurs. Johnson’s poems are this carefully constructed throughout Subterranean Red.

Many of the poems in this volume are written in the psychologically frank fashion we have for over half a century now referred to as “confessional,” but these poems nevertheless recognize, as does the best work of Robert Lowell, the role of imagination in framing and shaping memory. The accompanying photos rather than representing proof of a definitive past are offered rather as self-conscious constructions of family history. At times, the photos, like the poems, represent an effort to remake that history, as in “Granddad Scott”:

                        On my wall I keep a picture

                        so I won’t remember him just as a cruel man:

                        in a white dress and turned-up cap,

                        he is a blue-eyed baby

                        grinning

                        on his daddy’s lap.

At other times they are emblems of something more like negative versions of Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” as in “Father’s Day”:

                        And I realize that the line from my dream

                        has something to do with

                        this picture, that even in sleep I cannot

                        rest, but must forever watch

                        him falling off that fence,

                        falling to pieces.

In both versions, be it dream or wakeful and willed effort, the photo represents the activity of the poet’s imagination. The pictures, like the poems, don’t capture the past: they shape it. As Johnson says in “Following the Red Hills Home,” “the imagined is as real as the rest of it.” It is Johnson’s sharp imagination, along with her artistic presentation and self-consciousness, that keeps the poems about, for instance, her father’s philandering from descending into the sort of cheap latter-day confessional poetry that relies on shock and attitude rather than on craft and rumination.

In “Raven Mocker” Johnson gives us the raven as an image of, among other things, poetic inspiration, something beautiful but also dark and dangerous. Such a bird is a fitting mascot for these poems, alive to the point of tense contact with death itself, earthly scavengers yet transcendent in flight. Subterranean Red is a poignant, powerful book of poems that will be reread for many years to come.

My poem "Li Po and Du Fu Jump out of a Cake" appears in the new issue of Devil's Lake.