Reading Jason Koo’s work is like watching someone who can’t make up their mind: Do I want to be a poet? Or a standup comic? Poet? Comic? Poet? Comic?
Jason Koo is obviously a very clever guy.
But what is this? It’s from something—and we think it’s supposed to be a poem—called “Standby at Chicago O’Hare.”
If this gets yuks, it succeeds. If it doesn’t, it’s not even poetry. Even if you don’t like Katie Couric, it’s just creepy.
Professor Koo is the founder of Brooklyn Poets and has launched The Bridge, “the world’s first networking site connecting student and mentor poets.”
We wonder what kind of mentoring Koo does.
We wonder if Professor Koo tells his students, “It’s OK to use the hackneyed expression, ‘I mean,’ in your poems.”
at the “jazz” restaurant. Piles of pineapple. Sliced grapefruit.Is there anything better than sliced grapefruit? I mean,you don’t have to insert your spoon properly or anything.The bags of coffee beans for sale in the coffee shop
from “How Would You Rate Your Lodging Experience?” –Jason Koo
“How Would You Rate Your Lodging Experience?” is a work of 52 lines in which Koo, after staying at a motel, answers this question humorously, just as if he were writing a jokey letter to a friend. Koo puts his jokey letter into quatrains to make it look like a traditional poem.
There. We’ve been “mentored” by Jason Koo. In five minutes. For free.
It is one thing to advocate for education to meet the needs of the universal citizen. But to sell education for personal gain is a totally different animal. Not that both can’t be corrupt, or cannot overlap, but there is a difference.
Here’s some of Daniel Nester’s interview with Koo at the Best American Poetry website:
So I guess you’re of the mind that writing can be taught? I mean, I am as well, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.I am, yes. I mean, of course it can–like anything else. I’m amused by this idea that writing poems can’t be taught, but things like yoga and tango can. Imagine signing up for a yoga or tango class with no previous experience, paying for it, then showing up the first day and hearing the teacher say, Okay, show me what you can do. And pointing at the floor. You’d be mortified–and pissed, because that’s not what you’re paying for. You’re paying the teacher to show you the basics, to introduce you to the discipline. You’re not expecting to become a master overnight or possibly ever. You’re interested in discovering what the discipline is about and seeing how you like it, how it might change you. And you pay experts for instruction because without them you would literally–yes, I’m going to use that adverb–not know how to make the first move.
Poetry’s a lot different than that.
For some reason, in the discipline of writing poetry, people assume they do know. Or maybe they’re not so arrogant to assume this, but they think maybe their poetic efforts are best served without the nuisance of instruction, the self-conscious shock of it. This is the legacy of bad Romanticism–people taking all the Wordsworth and Keats out of Wordsworth and Keats and leaving–themselves. Poetry as self-expression rather than art, a “practice”–that is what I love about yoga, how teachers and students refer to what they do as a “practice.”
The assumption being that they’re never going to perfect it. Hell, even lawyers seem to understand this about what they do! But not poets. Teachers still go into creative writing classrooms today and tell students just to bring in a poem and then they’ll workshop it–for the entire semester. I mean, really? Why does a teacher have to be paid to do that? That’s like the tango teacher going into a dance studio and saying, Show me what you can do. And the sad thing is that there are so many poet-teachers I know out there without full-time jobs who could teach the hell out of those classes where those students are being failed by their teachers.
I love that notion. “I could teach the hell out of that poet!”
Anyone who thinks poetry can’t be taught should simply look at a pile of undergraduate submissions for a poetry contest. I saw this at Quinnipiac, where I teach and helped judge a contest last year. It was immediately obvious which poems were written by someone who’d taken a poetry class and which were not–you could toss the latter after glancing at the title and the splay of the poem all over the page, usually i i i staggering everywhere with no end in sight. The former were not necessarily good poems, and some were too obviously written on assignment (i.e. write a Shakespeare sonnet, boys and girls), but they at least showed consciousness of poem as craft.
One thing that people don’t seem to consider when they bemoan the culture of MFA programs and poem-sameness blah blah blah is how much worse poems might be without those programs. I mean, yeah, I don’t want to read 800 sestinas a day–I just threw that in for you, Daniel–but I’d rather read those than the kind of stuff I see in those undergraduate submission piles. Or that I’ve seen in slush piles for various magazines I’ve worked for. Yikes.
We agree that teachers should teach, but yoga and the tango are not the same as poetry, for a number of different reasons.
One has to get on the floor and ‘do’ yoga or the tango, to learn and benefit from these arts, and very specific physical steps are involved, which, if followed, will precisely reflect what yoga and the tango are.
If one were to read the poems of W.H. Auden, one would learn poetry, in the act of reading Auden, as much as one learns yoga by actually doing it. Dead Auden (his poems) is a better mentor than living Auden. Excellent poems mentor the best.
Judging by Jason Koo’s poetry, reading magazines and watching TV would probably be a better mentor than Jason Koo.
Auden, as “mentor,” would not help you to become a poet nearly as much as the poems of Auden would. Ratio of mentor power: Auden, 1, his poems, 1,000.
Now, if you slept with Auden, you might become a famous poet, but we don’t think Jason Koo’s website, The Bridge, is quite about that.
If you studied the poems of Koo instead of the poems of Auden, you wouldn’t be doing “yoga” anymore, for Koo and Auden are not the same thing. Here again, Koo’s analogy to yoga fails. Yoga contains variety, but yoga is basically a single discipline. By comparison, poetry is variety itself.
We love the reference to “bad Romanticism.” To those schooled by Modernism and the New Criticism, all Romanticism is “bad.” This is because “self-expression” is not allowed in the mentoring universe.
It wasn’t Jason Koo, who stayed in that motel, who expressed himself in that poem about staying in that motel. It was a mentored “practice” that wrote that poem.
When it comes to poetry these days, the only “self-expression” they want is your money.
