Stephen “Stephanie” Burt, Harvard professor and distinguished poetry critic
There is always an assumption that anthologies and categories of ‘poems about X’ are good for poetry and X.
Why?
Even if our anthology of ‘poems about X’ has nothing but bad poetry, the sentiment supporting X, supporting poetry, and supporting poetry on X, inevitably wins the day.
Why?
We’ve all seen the high-minded, fawning reviews and notices. The implication is: Some of you out there selfishly write poems which are just…poems. But here we have something worth cheering about, worth feeling good about…Poems about X!
For instance, Blog Harriet recently wrote:
Hurray! Stephen Burt reviews the TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson edited breakthrough anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics for the Los Angeles Review of Books!
Hurray?
And here’s an excerpt from Stephen “Stephanie” Burt’s review:
I was bored, occasionally, by all too straightforward verse about identities lost and found, verse I would have ignored were its subject almost anything else. But the reading also let me delight in seeing at least one femme author I’d never encountered before, both because she looked great, and because Troubling the Line turns out to be her first national appearance in print. That author is Lilith Latini, of Asheville, North Carolina, a ravishing, raven-haired studio-era femme fatale. (This is the first time I have ever written a sentence for publication about how a poet looked when she read her poems.) Those poems, raw as they could be, spoke to my twinned and antithetical desire for glamor and for solidarity, my wish to stand with others and my wish to stand out. It’s not a wish unique to LGBT people, but it sounds great when Latini finds it in the thoughts of Stonewall queens: “Don’t send me / out of the closet and into the streets alone. / Someone has to help me out of my strappy shoes before I run.”
Poetry can interact with anything, and we have nothing against that. There’s nothing wrong with “added interest.”
But this ‘Category-first-Poetry-second’ attitude needs a hard look.
Perhaps even Stephanie might want to give a listen.
Once poetry—verse or prose—serves any category outside itself, it is diminished by the ratio of how much it gives itself over to whatever category it exists for.
This may not be apparent to those who view poetry as bi-part:
1. A non-poetic subject
2. Poetic form
At first blush, this makes perfect sense: poetry exists in (poetic) language, and no modern believes there are ‘fit’ poetic subjects, or subjects more fit for poetry than others—love, death, friendship (remember those old poetry anthologies?) are categories that claim many poems only because they are broad categories, not because poems ought to be defined by them.
Today, in high-brow circles, we have poems about queers, blacks, and women.
(It wasn’t all that long ago that the categories were death, love and friendship.)
The categories, in all cases, diminish poetry because they are subjects apart from, subjects not necessary to, poetry.
For the poetry, and the poetry, alone, should, ideally, create the subject.
Ideally, poetic language alone manifests whatever subject comes into existence (at the same moment the poem comes into existence).
If the author is inspired by the subject—or the category—the poetry is merely the means to read about the pre-existing subject, a subject which exists outside of the poem, and thus, by definition, is the “non-poetic” part of the bi-part poem mentioned above.
The poetic genius, however, finds a subject through the poetic exertion, so that the two—the subject and the poetry—arrive as, and exist as, one. Superficially, one could work backwards and extract a kind of “subject” from the poem. The “subject,” however, remains (and here is what the New Critics attempted to articulate) unparaphrasable, without apparent authorial intention, without apparent design on the reader, and fully immersed and integrated in the poem qua poem.
The genius begins writing a poem on no subject. The poetry elevates/determines not only the language, but the thought, of the poet, who composes a subject suitable only to poetry.
The subject proper is not pre-existing (nor is there any pre-existing category) or identified in any way as category or subject—the poetry itself creates a new subject.
The poet may use a germ of a story, like a bit of sand to grow a pearl, or some half-formed motif, or half-conceived method, but the point is for the poetry-making faculty of the poet to discover the subject entirely on its own.
The subject suitable only for the poetry itself is the only true subject for poetry.
There are poets who attempt this and fail: they will write a poem ostensibly about “their father,” for instance, but aware that modern poetry is not bound by old-fashioned anthology categories, their poem is not really about dear old dad. All well and good. But here’s what happens: the poet succeeds writing a poem without their dad as the actual subject—and yet, what is the subject? The poet has not found the “only suitable subject for the poetry,” but merely avoided a subject altogether.
The true subject for the poetry will be one with the poetry—and it will still be a subject, just one newly emerging. It will just not be a category or subject pre-approved by the editor of a specialist magazine.
This kind of poetry, in which the subject is created by the poetry itself, is rare, because it does take a genius to write it.
So you ask: what is the subject?
One can’t really say. One has to read the poem and therein, within the poem as a whole, is the subject.
And that subject might be: death, love, friendship, woman, queer, black. But it could be anything.
The subject is whatever the poem says it is.
It will be a subject not only of the poem, but of the poetry of the poem.
Prime examples of this kind of poetry are “Endymion” by Keats or “Prometheus Unbound” by Shelley.
These are long works, major works.
Can a minor work illustrate our point?
We think not.
As an experiment, and just to stir up debate, we’ll see what our readers think of this poem composed by Marcus Bales.
Before we close: In this poem, is it true, and in this poem’s favor, that the poetry and the subject could not possibly exist without the other?
The Free-Verse Anti-Poetry Cartel
What kind of putz would diss the villanelle
And doesn’t like refrain lines interlaced?
The free-verse anti-poetry cartel.
They want to kill all other forms as well;
Whatever’s not in prose is toxic waste
To putzes who would diss the villanelle.
They wish they had the power to compel
The rest of us to write in their debased
Old free-verse anti-poetry cartel.
They think it makes them sexy to rebel
Against what great-great-great grand-dad embraced,
The putzes who would diss the villanelle.
But some of us prefer that we excel
At poems lineated prose replaced
With a free-verse anti-poetry cartel.
A poet writes in meter, raises hell,
And spices up a language long disgraced
By putzes who would diss the villanelle
In a free-verse anti-poetry cartel.
—Marcus Bales
