You Can't Go to Everyone's Wedding

For my last poetics post, I wanted to go back and untuck that last discussion we had in class. I thought it was a pretty good discussion, full of interesting and poignant points about Watten's most interesting idea: the relation of the poetic speaker to the outside world, the "total syntax" of poem to everything around it plus poet to everything around her/him/it.

Why this fear of fractured poetry? Even as our television shows get more and more complicated, our mainstream movies more subtle and our mainstream humor more whittled (watch Major League against The 40 Year Old Virgin if you think Bush is really as bad for comedy as Reagan was). Well, for one thing, poetry is simply the musty old thing. Poetry is the good-for-us oatmeal taught in high school. But it's not really that simple. Poetry is also occasional--not in the sense of infrequent, but geared toward occasion. We're not called upon to write skits for our friends' weddings and birthdays: we're asked to write poems. If asked at all, I mean, we are asked to write "a little something" -- but if you've ever been in that situation you know what that means. People want to commemorate occasions with poems the same way the poem is somehow supposed to commemorate language.

Huh?! What?!

I know. I know. Poetry is for new language!

But for all this talk of poetry reassembling language, love poetry isn't supposed to reassemble love. Consider Mr. Leonard Cohen's popularity and his lines: "Many loved before us / I know we are not new. / In city and in forest / they smiled like me and you." Yep, and many have probably written those very lines before you too, most aware they weren't original. Many want language to communicate, go from self to self, and therefore want poetry to commemorative the universality of ourselves. Not in those words of course. But in the sense of "I don't get it" versus "That's pretty." So of course they don't want fractured, saturated poetry crippled in its awareness of global roles and such. We resent the self getting smaller and smaller and more particularized (pulverized?), losing our ties to the universal.

But wait. Universality? Is that concept--really--universal? Or is that, I don't know, an imperialist gesture designed to bully cultural variety into death by declaring the existence of overarching values? A book review that says "this touches on the universal idea of love" is not that far from the Roman empire declaring a god of love, implicitly declaring anything outside that godly design not love at all but some vague savagery. I remember Nabokov's introduction to Lolita making fun of the then-popular Hemingway-esque minimalism, where he raises his eyebrow at the so-called "realism" of "short, strong sentences" like "He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy."

The idea behind those sentences is "the less explanation the better." But isn't this a ridiculously aggressive gesture? Basically, it says there is one right way to say things, that things can be pared down to that one right way. This one right way is then charged with "universality." Please be aware: such a style is different from just emulating a formally constrained vocabulary, trying to make language talk like people talk or something. No, it's different. A "universal" style is saying: this is how it's done. There is a God and he acts crazy. You know what I mean and if you don't--if you ask what I mean--I won't say anything and you will feel alienated until you finally come around to my universality.

In other words, this style has no sense of humor. Of play. Of "I could be wrong tho."

Looking back over the term, I see this failure peeking up everywhere, this idea of universality via language. It's bleeindg raw in Fenollosa's romance with the Chinese character. It's confronted with humor and ironized into Cheshire cat mode in O'Hara's Personism. It's very male (but maybe just a parody) with the coming and ramping to the end in Bernstein's Semblance. It's everywhere!

That's why I think it was very useful how we left that last discussion. You pick your audience and you write for the audience. Allow universality to fail. People will be interested in the particulars of your audience and what you and your audience are doing, just as we're all interested in our neighbors' recipe for lasagna. On certain scales, we understand perfectly that universality is a weak sham.

So why do we keep hearing wedding poems about how love lights our wings or something? People are trying; they are trying to sound "poetic." And the audience is trying; they are trying to feel the universal stab of the "poetic," like it's a wind that feels the same wherever it goes. But I think the audience knows better. I mean, what lines get the laughs, the smiles? The in-jokes. The lines no one understands except those who understand them. Those are the lines to write. Maybe.

In any event, what a beautiful class! Thank you all for being so wily and inventive and keen.

And special thanks to Sir Kasey Mohammad for being a comet, a carnival, a Charlemagne among poetry teachers. Major major props. Good luck to you all. =)