Thursday, March 18, 2010

Release The Beast




“The best thing that could happen to poetry is to drive it out of the universities with burning pitch forks. Starve the lavish grants. Strangle them all in a barrel of water. Cast them out. The current culture, in which poetry is written for and supported by poets has created a kind of state-sanctioned poetry that resists innovation. When and if poetry is ever made to answer to the broader public, then we may begin to see some great poetry again—the greatness that is the collaboration between audience and artist.”


It seems to me that Andrew Sullivan, author of the recent essay, “Let Poetry Die”, in an online edition of “The Daily Dish” needs to update his home library. It is hard for me to believe that anyone, especially those in the writing field, could ignore the growth of poetry since the modernists. To say that poetry stopped at Ashbery is to say that the last real painters were Picasso and Pollock and that conceptual art has no place in society. It’s a pretentious statement to say the least, and in my opinion, a fairly ignorant one. Sullivan calls for poetry to be a phoenix, to die and be reborn from the ashes of its destruction, but what he doesn’t realize, I think, is that poetry is constantly renewing itself.

One can’t ignore the changes that have come through poetry that are real examples of poetry. The fact that Sullivan has the audacity to say that poetry was lost after Ashbery is a real slap in the face to amazing poets like Allen Ginsburg, Ezra Pound, Yusef Komunyakka and Rita Dove. The face of poetry and the face of the world have changed since Elliot and Frost (although their poetry is still a strong house). Just because Andrew Sullivan can’t accept change doesn’t mean he should chase poetry around like a maniac with a pitchfork. Look at Slam Poetry; look at all the performance poetry that is leaking out from big cities on down to little places like Lexington. Poetry is alive and is thriving; people just have to know where to find it. Look back at beat poetry, and post-modern poetry. They have changed the face of the way people read poetry and you look at poets like Billy Collins who have followed the footsteps of poets like Frank O’Hara and realize that poetry is adapting to become closer to the reader. It’s transforming itself for its audience. Billy Collins (certainly not a poet in Sullivan’s eyes) is one of the most popular poets of today and his roots can be seen in O’Hara’s poetry. It’s obvious his style is all his own, but his ideas are rooted in the modernists. Frank O’Hara said in “Personism, a Manifesto” that “The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages,” and that’s what has become a characteristic of contemporary poetry across the board. And it’s not surprising that poetry today is under a microscope, tied up for execution. Isn’t that what happened with Picasso? With Warhol? Just as post-modernist art has been beaten down, so have poets like Pound—following a Pollok-esque style of poetry. Art will forever be criticized and there will forever be people like Andrew Sullivan who don’t open themselves up to art.

It’s not poetry that’s pushing society away. Society doesn’t realize what poetry is. Society is becoming more accepting of the mediocre and the downright terrible. With the availability of blogs and web sites now, anyone can be a great poet, but that’s not really how it should be. I agree with Mr. Sullivan that poets shouldn’t write for other poets—they need to remember who their real audience is, but I believe poets today need a lesson in constructive criticism. Poets write for other poets, because other poets are the only ones who are willing to say, “Man, this is really terrible.” For a writer, your work is your baby. It’s your own creation, but, as Mitchell Douglas would say, “You have to be willing to let them kill the baby.” Otherwise, the mediocre seeps into our publications and the poetry that is wide-spread throughout society. Poets should be conscious of their audience, but their audience is responsible for keeping the poets in line.

It’s a fine line to walk, between accepting criticism and calling out for personal creativity, but the amount of poetry that is accepted today that shouldn’t be is vastly understated. Personally, I think that Sullivan’s statement that poetry should be “driven out of the universities with burning pitch forks.” (first of all, how can a metal pitch fork be burning?) is ludicrous. It’s the MFA “cookie-cutter” programs that are weeding out this mediocre that Sullivan is so passionate about demolishing. Sure, there are poets from those kinds of programs that stick with a copied style that no one likes to read, but writers like Nikkey Finney come with those programs, Kelly Norman Ellis and Crystal Wilkinson. MFA programs need to adapt their curriculum—update it to new forms. They might be breeding mediocrity, but they shouldn’t be done away with. They need to be revised. I was under the impression that it was important for a writer to learn the rules before breaking them—maybe I’m wrong, but these programs are dishing out poets that are the blood of poetry today.

They’re the blood of a beast that is more mighty and terrible and awesome than Mr. Andrew Sullivan realizes. Poetry is constantly renewing itself and whenever society can stop chaining it up and threatening it with these mysterious metal pitchforks that burn, it can thrive. Poetry is not a beast to be killed. Society needs to cut off its own choke collar, accept change and see the art growing around it. Don’t kill poetry—release it.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Aquainted

(Winner of the "Take Back the Night" Festival 2010)


Night is in the far corner of her bedroom,
arms over bony knees, tucked behind
the moonlit curtains, waiting
for the door handle to stop
rattling the glow-in-the-dark
planets hanging from her ceiling.

She is asphyxiated by the eternity
between the dips of the horizons,
hoping to be extinguished
into silent sunrise so she can
pretend she doesn’t exist,
so she can go back to bed
and pretend it isn’t so warm.

Night has lost her nerve
to her own reflection. She is afraid
of the black in her eyes and the stars
on her skin, all the constellation
blue prints. She smothers them in
flannel pajamas and prays the pounding
in her head will disappear behind
the bed skirt and stay with all
the lost socks and wool sweaters.

She hides inside her cornflower
blanket and imagines she
is the sun inside a jar, flickering
through flutters of wings,
pushing against the lid,
wishing someone had
remembered air holes.