A good new poem in any style
will appear to a poet who writes in another style
as propaganda
for the Demiurge he has hated all his life.
Who deprives him of respect
(however respected he is), who excluded
or beat him in elementary or high school,
who kept him from being beautiful or loved
(however loved he is), sober or rich.
He may study the other poem, feel
the hair on the back of his head
rising, as Housman said, or the top of his head
coming off (Dickinson),
run upstairs to show it to his wife
and email it to friends and students, but
beneath all that maturity and culture
he hates it -
not only because he didn't write it,
but because it's in another style.
This rule applies to women poets also,
don't kid yourself. Eventually he (or she)
goes for a walk. And what he thinks he's doing
is seeking new perspectives
on trees, cars, childhood, the decay
of Being, the depredations of capital, but what
he's really doing
is trying to get past that poem: to rewrite it
in his style or, if that's impossible,
to make it not to have been.
He may decide that canonical sophistication
counts less than being accessible
to dreaming, warm-hearted, ordinary people.
Or that style is obsolete, even oppressive;
that it can be transcended
by, say, aleatoric techniques. These insights are futile:
whatever he writes next will be a style.
For poets only think they go outside.
Actually they sit, each in his room
in a grimy old apartment building;
the street, other poems, capital are in the room.
A painted-over door in each back wall
leads to a shared hallway, but few pry it open;
a mugger lurks there,
swift and merciless,
familiar with all the words, believing none.
Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness, both published
by Story Line Press. Other of his poems and essays have appeared in Hudson Review, Southern Review, Fulcrum, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Die Gazette (Munich), Representations and elsewhere. Poems have most
recently appeared in the print journals Iota (UK), Orbis (UK), Naked Punch (UK), Magma (UK), The Hat, Bateau, and
Moment. Online, poems have appeared in Hamilton Stone Review, Diagram, The New Hampshire Review, Denver Syntax, Barnwood, elimae, Wheelhouse, and elsewhere. Pollack is an adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University, Washington, DC.
| Recently I've
seen poets praised, by editors and reviewers, for being "humble."
I don't think poetry should be humble. If it is, it usually has a
lot to be humble about. Poetry should be bold, visionary, and
rude. This poem is at least rude. In part it concerns the
awkward fact of envy among poets, and their rationalizations of
it. The repetition of "style" is also calculated, for "style" is
an unfashionable term nowadays. The academic pseudo-avant-garde
like to feel they have escaped or transcended style, via "aleatoric techniques," asyntactical word-salad, the "signifier set free" and other nonsense. Moreover, no one likes to feel that his or her style is merely part of the style of an era, which will one day rest in textbooks, no longer "modern" or "post-modern," its flaws and blind spots all too evident, imitated by second-raters. My work brings to bear an historicist viewpoint, applying it consistently and uncomfortably both to my self and to my world. Towards the end this poem invokes ("for poets only think they go outside ... the street, other poems, capital are in the room") the idealism I also like to play with. |
