And you may ask yourself . . . .
Not just letting the days go by
Gentle Reader, what have you gotten yourself into here? Some random old man’s thoughts on poetry – are there no better ways to waste your time?
But . . . poetry! I love the stuff. You might love it, too, but that’s not necessary. I have made a career of offering ways into poetry for people who don’t like it, or who suspect they don’t like it, or who are sure, on the basis of prior classroom experience, that they don’t like it, or who have never read enough of it to have determined whether they like it. The heart of that activity is simply sharing. Here is something that I think has value, and here is why I think it’s valuable. What do you think? Does anything in here resonate with your values? Or, better: here is something in which I take pleasure and here’s how I think it produces that pleasure. Do you find anything about it pleasurable?
I sometimes use the analogy of wine tasting (indeed, I toyed with calling this humble newsletter “Tasting Notes”). It can be useful to be told a few things about the grape, the terroir, the winemaker, the vintage. Having some words for what we’re going to taste, some articulated anticipation, can help us to find those notes, and to explain our own sense of what we’re tasting. I taste a lot of wine, but that’s not immediately relevant for now. I also read a lot of poetry, and what I hope to do in this space periodically, even something like regularly, is offer to whoever wants to read them, some essays in appreciation, some notes on what draws me (often over and over again) to these particular makers, these specific grapes and vintages.
The written conversation about poetry takes a few standard forms. There are reviews of new books, of course, though these are infrequent in the large-circulation outlets of the major media. There are scholarly books and essays that read the poetry through interpretive frameworks in order to make broad arguments about the poetry and/as the culture it interacts with. Both of these have value and I’ve written in both veins, but neither is what I want to do here (though if there is new book I like a lot and want to share, I’ll feel free to share my thoughts on it, and if there is an academic argument that I’m struck by, I might offer a note about it, too). Between these poles are the various interviews and overviews, the introductions and conclusions, that range from, say, the Paris Review’s “Art of Poetry” installments to the “On Poet X” articles that sometimes appear in the New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books. The latter are often written by poets who are also critics and are often great articles. I have learned a lot from Maureen McLane, Michael Hofmann, Ange Mlinko, and others in those venues. While I am not a poet, those essays are close to what I’d like to do here, though where they have to cover a whole career in 2000 words, I might stretch things out and spend that long on each of several volumes in addressing the work of someone I really like.
Expect, then, essays in appreciation. Every couple of weeks, I’ll post here a couple thousand words about a poet and their work. I’m mostly interested in sharing thoughts about poets and poems of, say, the last thirty years. That’s not a randomly chosen period. I think it’s a pretty good span that can credibly be called “contemporary.” It also maps closely onto my own professorial career (I started as an assistant professor in 1995), so roughly the period of my life when I’ve paid the most sustained and rigorous attention to what’s going on in poetry currently being published. And it also stretches back to what I am retrospectively finding to be an interesting moment, my shorthand for which is “back when we thought that what Dana Gioia thought about poetry was important.” If anything connects the various poets whose work I keep returning to, the ones I want to write about here, it might be that they found and modeled and thereby offered ways out of debates about poetry in the 1990s that were . . . unproductive. I might come back and say more about that moment and those debates. Or not. (Alas, my chosen time span doesn’t quite stretch far enough to reach William Bronk, but that might not prevent me from an essay, one of these days, on how the work of that fine poet helped me to get through the first winter of Covid.)
A few things not to expect:
Deeply researched and theorized scholarship. That’s my day job, and I’m mostly doing that on things other than recent poetry these days. Here, I just want to share.
My own poems. When you teach and write about poetry, people often ask if you write poems. I usually lie and say that I don’t. But I will admit to you, Gentle Reader, that in fact I do write poems. Many of them. I think of my poem-writing practice like I think of my yoga practice (yep, I have one of those, too): it’s important for me that I do it, but for the love of God nobody needs to see me do it. (That said, I have been known to put a few together in a self-produced chapbook [sometimes you really do wish someone had seen that headstand], and if you’re interested just let me know and I can hook you up.)
Negative reviews. I think it’s probably the case that most of what gets published or produced in any art form in a given moment is not much good, so, of course, there is a lot of new and recent poetry that I don’t like. You won’t read about it here. I’m much more interested in reading, thinking about, and talking/writing about what I enjoy. (I have to confess that this has not always been the case. I have changed. I like to think of this as growth. Who knows?)
Comprehensive coverage. I mean, who can do that?
If this sounds like something you want to check out, please subscribe. It costs nothing and never will cost anything. And if you know anyone who might be interested, I hope you’ll let them know these essays will be here.