Is there a poet in the room?
I had a conversation recently about Renee Gladman's Prose Architectures, a book that I've found increasingly interesting, and absorbing. Gladman produced the word drawings in the book during the time she was working on her series of Ravicka novels, which comprises four books to date. I have those books on my shelf, have read the first one, and have begun reading the second book, called Houses of Ravicka. My reading has stimulated some thinking, focusing initially on Gladman's deployment of the color yellow in Event Factory, the first book in the series, where the air is yellow, and where it seems that the ecosystem itself has been conditioned or deeply affected by that color.
My reading of Event Factory, that first Ravicka book, happened to coincide with reading Pierre Michon's 'novella', 'The Life of Joseph Roulin'. Roulin's portrait (along with all Roulin's family members) was painted by Vincent Van Gogh, Michon touching on Van Gogh's use of color, especially yellow in its various iterations while glancing at the artist striving to capture and reproduce Pissarro's yellow, an elusive goal, unattained it seems. There's also the use of color pigments among the California Paiute, which may be apposite here. The writer of a book on the subject discusses the relationship of yellow and red pigments, the Paiute sometimes deriving the latter by subjecting certain yellow pigments to fire. And back again to Van Gogh, hoping to understand his varying usage of reds and yellows. It's vague, I know; but how does it mean?
The Roulin novella appears in Masters and Servants, Michon's gathering of stories about several notable artists -- Van Gogh, Antoine Watteau, Francisco Goya, and others -- ascending to a meditation on forms of engagement with art – and which incidentally may shed light on that conversation I mentioned. In the story about Lorentino D'Angelo, Michon addresses the painter's lost masterpiece, a rendering of the legend of St. Martin:
Who can know what it looked like. But it was a masterpiece, since Lorentino had given the best he had to give, had devoted himself as one should, just as each of us, doing the best we can, devoting ourselves as best we can, doubtless makes a masterpiece.
Several years ago I attended several monthly meetings of a now-defunct writers' group, but was unhappy with the emphasis on memoir among those writers at that time. So I opted out. The group is no longer meeting, to my knowledge. But when I mentioned them to my interlocutor, they said they'd also gone to one or two of those meetings and had also quit -- for much the same reason. They joked that those writers may not have been up to the job of writing a good memoir and had turned to writing poetry instead. That's an arresting thought! But had they? Maybe so. But whatever the literary value of memoir, I think my acquaintance was adumbrating a trend among writers or would-be writers nowadays, who lean heavily into personal narrative, into 'story' per se, as a foil against the more demanding work of literary engagement. This resonates alongside my personal view that a surplus of junk poetry is being written/spoken nowadays – arguably precipitating from the widespread memoirist impulse in contemporary culture.
The recent issue of PNR (Poetry Nation Review #280, November-December 2024), features a piece by Andy Croft, who more pointedly says what I mean to say here, via a sort of in memoriam for Smokestack Books, the now-defunct small press that was shuttered last year. Croft notes that,
In the last twenty years the poetry-reading circuit has collapsed into a culture of slams and open mics. Adult education writing workshops have been replaced by higher education Creative Writing programmes. Local poetry festivals have been swallowed by corporate book festivals. Kaleidoscope by Front Row. Poets who used to work in community-writing residencies have disappeared onto university campuses. Yesterday's elitists are today's populists. In place of the critical culture of small magazines and poetry presses, we have life-style profiles of poets in the weeklies. Although these days the Guardian reviews new poetry only sporadically, in the last ten years the paper has published over seventy reviews, features and interviews with Kate/Kae Tempest. And every poet must have a prize.
Oh yes; every poet must have a prize! Croft notes that Smokestack Books was modeled on Curbstone Books in the US, and Le Temps des Cerises in France, the latter, significantly, were "publishers of 'la poésie d'utilité publique'".
Much of what Croft reveals about the British poetry scene would, I believe, be applicable here. PNR printed an important piece several years ago on this same subject – also a critique of the contemporary British 'poetry scene' (though resonating stateside too). Written by Rebecca Watts (issue #239, Volume 44 Number 3, January - February 2018), the piece is titled 'The Cult of the Noble Amateur'. Watts wonders,
WHY IS THE POETRY WORLD pretending that poetry is not an art form? I refer to the rise of a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their 'honesty' and 'accessibility' – buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft that characterises their work. The short answer is that artless poetry sells.
And there's more. PNR (an inexhaustible source of ideas and inspiration, apparently) – recently published an interview with Stanley Moss, who was about to turn 100 at the time of the interview. Moss was citing an elder poet he knew. My recollection was faulty. I thought he'd reported the poet saying that back then there'd be just one poet in a crowded room; nowadays there's only one person who's not a poet!
Ok, here's what Stanley Moss actually said:
One of the problems with much contemporary poetry is that they have MFA classes throughout the United States, and they've got a few hundred thousand people who think they're poets. In San Francisco, I think, out of all the people who registered to vote (I don't know the number) something like fourteen thousand of them registered as a poet. I remember Kunitz saying: 'There's only one poet in the room'.
Moss conveys something important there. On that note, and in closing, I want to turn to Tiffany Atkinson, who has an essay in Against Storytelling, a recent collection derived from a symposium on the subject (which includes essays by Charles Bernstein and Amit Chaudhuri among others). Atkinson helpfully arrays poetry and storytelling into a productive context:
Nonetheless, I can see, obviously, the value and merit in storytelling, so my take against storytelling here is not really so much antagonism or direct opposition...but more a kind of leaning against, an askance-ness, a benign friction or pressure that at least tries to assert the value of alternative notions of language-use. The idea of a benign friction is something that interests me now because it's how I would describe embarrassment, and recently I've been trying to follow through a hunch that more than any other literary genre, poetry is a field prickly with embarrassment, despite the best efforts of literary theory or creative writing teaching (which are aspects of my day job) to behave otherwise. This may just be making virtue of necessity since poetry has always felt like the embarrassing other of my critical work, and the predicament of actually being a poet can be just embarrassing all around.
So then, once more, with feeling: Is there a poet in the room?