Fuming, then Relaxing

December 8, 2004

I spent most of the flight home from Ketchikan fuming about poetry blogland and scribbling in my little notebook all the things I was going to say. I pictured each statement in my mind with a soft thwacking sound of my mental dueling gloves across the cheek of my poetic antagonists.

“Yo, Mayhew!” I planned to write, and then call the Jazzmaster out on calling me humorless, maintaining that he wasn’t, and then posting this.

And oh how I planned to take it right to Josh Corey and his crowning of the Bürger-King… how futile it is to speak of seeing between the fragmented pieces to a present reality as if those words actually meant something, how silly it seems to take the analogy of poetry and painting to the point that one is essentially painting with a poem, making sense of the non-representative, while ignoring the fact that the fundamental unit of painting is paint/color, which has no meaning, while the fundamental unit of poetry is the word, which does. I even had a glib Mitch Hedberg quote to make light mockery of the idea that some kinds of poetry could conceivably escape being enclosed in an already composed past:

Someone handed me a picture and said, “This is a picture of me when I was younger.” Every picture of you is when you were younger. “…Here’s a picture of me when I’m older.” Where’d you get that camera man?

Hell, maybe I’d even write to Mike Snider and Greg Perry and ask them how they avoid going crazy when confronted with this kind of stuff, Mike even going so far as to elevate Billy Collins above Silliman… in poetry blogland public! I was suddenly remembering very clearly why I stopped participating in poetry blogging, the frustration I felt at being excluded by a group that often works hard to maintain a sense of martyrdom regarding their own exclusion, the anger of staring dumbly at something that just MADE NO SENSE that others were praising, the suspicion that I was the butt of some big joke that everyone was getting but me.

But then I went back to my BAP reading and had this fantastic moment of epiphany and clarity reading the Jean Day poem, which I’d tried unsuccessfully to get into about five times before. The poem suddenly started coming together for me. It was funny and nonsensical and fragmented and non-communicative– but I was enjoying the ride anyway.

And I realized that while very few poems that I like have ever become worse due to discussion about them, given the proper time to think about what is being said has brought many poems that I didn’t into focus and made them better. It may be true that some of these poetries are playing different games or pursuing essentially different projects under the misnamed umbralla of “poetry”– I have surmised the same many times myself. But if I can keep from making a complete ass of myself long enough (and remain strong enough not to lose sight of what I really believe in a torrent of powerful ideas that could easily become received wisdom), these dialogues can really be nothing but rewarding… and I finally begin to understand why I stay “here” at all.

Tags: Poetry and Poetics, Psyche