MANIFESTO
Warning: this is a really long post and maybe not helpful or relevant to anyone but myself. I apologize, but I don’t see any other way to say this. Then we can return to previous discussion of manageable things.
There are so many things I want to say & to figure out. Let me start with Juliana’s essay about the Auden line, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” about her experiences in graduate school & her position on the necessarily political role poetry plays, or should. This question was germinating last semester, in the craft class. I have been writing poetry for many years, not as many as some of you, but as long as I have been able to write. I did my undergraduate work at UC Santa Cruz in poetry. And then I was out in the world & poetry became kind of an amorphous presence through absence. Poetry for me, when I was out of school, was something I thought of so much but I did not have the community of thinkers that I have now. What I mean to say is, when I was not talking about poetry, when I was only thinking about it on my own, I was not asked these questions. These questions of politics. Because I never thought about it that way, and I did not seek out the community that would have been discussing it. When I was in the craft class, I was immediately shocked to be outside of my own head, and to remember what should have been obvious and present, but which was not. That is: I had to suddenly confront the fact that there are so many people writing for reasons which I had never considered. They just did not occur to me. When I heard (remembered) that there were these Language poets, whose explicitly stated primary goal was to strip language of what it was, what it is, I immediately understood the idea, but couldn’t understand how one could continue to do this, or try to do this, for a long period of time, over many poems. Yes, the concept makes logical sense: language is a form of control, language and society are interdependent, to break down the control of the society means breaking down the language. But I don’t understand how one does that over and over. How one has the energy and passion to keep doing that. TO write more and more, to write every day, to keep making poems to try to do that. I thought, once you break down language, what else is there to do? What else is there to write? You’re done.
And in then our class we moved on to this War between the experimental and mainstream, and that was also interesting to me and incomprehensible. Because I honestly hadn’t really thought of poetry in those terms before. Yes, I went to UC Santa Cruz and Peter Gizzi was my teacher and he introduced me to poets I had never heard of. But I don’t remember ever thinking “Wow, this is so different from what I knew of as poetry.” It just seemed like more poetry, more language. I never thought of Adrienne Rich as “mainstream.” I guess I see it more now, but when I first read her I did not discriminate in that way. She blows my mind. So do experimental writers. So does the thesaurus, the desert, music both popular and not, so do movies, so does life. I don’t think I really discriminate in this way. There is something to be found in good narrative poetry. Something to be gained in classics. Something important to life in pop music. And “experimental poetry,” it’s just another style of poetry. It has words, I don’t care if you’re trying to strip the words of their meaning. For this reader, you have failed. I don’t think it’s human nature to accept meaninglessness. We make meaning. We make symbols. It has been going on forever. It can’t stop. And it isn’t necessarily harmful.
So suddenly these questions started swirling for me. Suddenly, I was asking myself and being asked questions which had never been posed for me before. For this, I am very grateful to Juliana. I don’t know if these questions would have been raised as much without her pushing. These questions don’t come up in the “regular format” workshop of which we are all so familiar. It’s hard & it’s important to ask these things.
So anyway, when she posted her essay, I felt like someone had taken a stand. I can’t express how happy I was that this happened. It was an absolute! You are working for the revolution, or you are complicit with the system. Of course, I totally disagreed with this, but I didn’t have the words to explain why. I hadn’t reasoned through it. So I started asking you guys about it. What does it mean to be political? What does political work look like? Does just using the words of politics mean a work is political? Does just using disjunctive syntax mean it is? I was never asking to confirm the original argument, I was looking for my own way of reasoning my way out of it. Because what happened was, in one paragraph, Juliana made me feel like I was on the side of the system unless I figured out a way to either be political or to justify another way of writing.
And then what happened was, I felt, the discussion went soft & vague. “Everything’s political.” “Just being a poet is political.” Etcetera. I was craving strong arguments, but no one had them. I still didn’t feel that politics was the only answer, but I wasn’t satisfied with what was offered to stand by it.
It’s funny, one day after class I was in the Tea Shop with Meg and Dennis. And I was telling them how I felt about all this, and I think I was a little depressed and beaten down and frustrated. And they commented on the religious overtones of my need to know these things. The questions verging on metaphysical issues. This made something clear to me: my question of the role of the poet was wound up with my question of life. Of what it means to live life, what is the purpose. With Juliana’s statement I had ended up in a crisis of faith and a crisis of asking these really Huge Questions of what it all means. When I realized what I was doing, it was a relief and it was scary. Because it meant that while I was never going to get the answers to unanswerable questions, it also meant that this thinking was important and was necessary and was so far away from my years of working 50 hour weeks at an advertising agency worried about working another weekend to get a client’s ads to a magazine or sitting miserably making hundreds of pdfs and Excel spreadsheets.
My first answer to why I write was this: I write because I feel nostalgia and longing for life in the moments as they occur. This made perfect sense to me but I need to say more, because I am currently constantly surprised as I am misunderstood when I say things succinctly. So here it goes. This is life, these are the trappings of mine and of others: work, money, cleaning and mopping, trash, food, driving, reading the paper, piles of books, dusty rugs, bills to pay, tourism, aging. I sit within this life. I sit here at my desk, I sit on my back stoop, I sit in my car driving the freeway to school. I sit alone, I sit with other people. Life made up of these little constant moments of unrealized reflection and observation. And then within this life there are times when things are for some reason heightened. We observe the sun falling at a certain orange angle at dusk, and we feel something. Or at least I do. I feel longing. I feel longing for the moments that lift us out of the dirty dishes and the subway and the traffic and the junk mail. Longing for the sun or extreme weather. Longing for the ability to look on everything as radiant. Longing, even, for the pain of someone I love dying, because it places me in a realm that is always surrounding the mundane world but is not always accessible. Longing for love even when I am in love. Longing for the past, the future. It’s a very anti-Buddhist way of living life but I think it is why I write.
When I was a kid I learned to read very young. I read constantly. I was given these books to read, and everyone agreed it was a good activity. The books made a promise to me that was broken by life. The books said there is adventure and magic. The books said there are passages in a closet that lead to Narnia. The books said that the mundane world is not the most important one. The books said maybe there are fairies and ghosts and time travel and kid detectives. This isn’t funny. This is a real problem. The world gives us these books and they shape our view of the world. And then as we grow up, one by one these things are taken away and are disproved. I would sit ay my desk in Manhattan and say “why am I here worried about the print quality of postcards and billboards?” I never thought this was what life was going to be. They never tell you this when you’re young. I’m really mad about it. I am honestly, humorlessly, angry. Angry that here I am and no one believes in ghosts and the imagination is an instrument of torture for what doesn’t exist.
This is a story, one example, one way of explaining the sorrow that covers life. The emptiness that surrounds of and which we write ourselves out of, which we read ourselves out of. We live lives wanting more than the lives we have. The war is a problem, the broken down car is a problem, the poisoning of the planet is a problem, but beyond these things, the need for more out of life is the big one. It’s really, the most important problem. And this is where art comes in. It has to. Or religion. Luckily I don’t see much of a difference between the two.
So last night I went to Stephen’s Modern American Poetry class and we talked about Wallace Stevens. And particularly the essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” This is probably old hat to lots of you, but it was new to me. And I walked in and two different people said to me, “This essay answers your questions!” And I hadn’t read it but then I read the most important parts. And then today I read the whole thing. And it was like a popping zoom of an answer, finally. This is the answer I got. This is really only concentrating on the parts of the essay that I want to be the answer, and it’s probably a gross oversimplification of the essay, but I don’t care.
Here’s what I take from it. There is the reality, and then there is the imagination. For me, these two things are the words for the contrast I wrote about above. There is the world of stuff and politics and duty and money, which is reality. And then there is the need for more, which manifests itself in religion and art, which is the imagination. And the fascinating thing is that Stevens thinks the two are symbiotic. The imagination, the art, the spirit, must base its creations on the world. And the world, in change, becomes something different and shining when the art is there. Art gives the world its significance. Art needs the world first. It’s a beautiful idea. It’s helpful to me.
So the role of the poet is one who makes the world what it can be when it is important. The poet makes a poem of the bent spoon or the poverty or the war or the love or the silly dead cat or the potted plant, and turns the mundane world into something more. It’s the act of poetry that creates the possibility of nostalgia, and continues it, out of it, for it. This makes so much sense to me. Maybe it’s elitist and old-fashioned and wrong in some way. Go ahead and tell me how. Tell me how the authority of the writer over the reader is just like George Bush taking away our freedoms or something. It just sounds true to me and I can’t deny that.
This is my answer for me right now. This is my gauntlet. Somehow I got here.
On the question of what happens when we read that I was asking yesterday, and how I want some deep answer. That’s right, I do! This is the question. When you read something that strikes you in some way, that means something to you, I want to know why that is, and what happens in your brain when you read it. When we are in workshop and we say “Ooh, I really like this line here.” What do we mean? I suspect my answer will have a whole lot to do with the above long-windedness. In fact it might be the very question that made all that up there happen. I don’t know.
