A Syllabus for Poetry

I discovered something important about poetry while thinking of something else, which is, I suppose, pretty much how it’s done. In a lull in a Humanities class–perhaps I was giving an exam, I don’t remember-- I had a moment to think about the half-forgotten pioneers, heroes and strivers who changed the world and have for their reward obscurity, or even contempt, the kind of contempt the young have for those who made mistakes which their making saved us from, and who remain unforgiven and misunderstood. The theme of the revery was Sacrifice for the Common Good, even at the expense of self. I’d no sooner articulated this concept than I realized I was thinking at the same time about one of the things closest to my heart, also sacrificial, unforgiven, and fully misunderstood, poetry.

(Oh, poetry, forever going on about itself and the world, forever trying to find its place in the world. Well, isn’t that what you’d do if you were a prince in exile, with dim but indelible memories of better things?)

I believe Shelley that poetry was the first and remains the most enduring and necessary creation of man, antedating and necessary to the creation of gods and sciences, yet I see also how little apparent power it has in the world today. It is like the heroes and pioneers in my vision while looking out the window in Humanities class. In ages before this one, it gave its power away for the good of all. It gave information to journalism, discovery to science, worship to religion, governance to politics, scorn to comedians, and is like many a good mother held in contempt by all its offspring. It has watched its own garden grow barren for the sake of wide fields it first seeded. To change the metaphor, poetry is like a seer who has shown a people the way to the Promised Land, but who has been left behind in their haste to arrive, and who, because he is cryptic and difficult and lies at the beginnings and the ends of things rather than in the middle, languishes forgotten until the beauties of the land pass away, and the people again seek for a voice to lead them again. Poetry is like a great but mysterious father who gives his children so much that they think they have enough and can remove themselves from him, not understanding how deep his wealth is, how bountifully he would pay it out if they just turned and asked. Poetry is the voice God gave us to answer Him back, but that conversation has been interrupted.

Shelley speaks of this when in “Ode to the West Wind” he imagines his words employing their own annihilation and dissemination as a power seeding and fertilizing the world. But the loving sacrifice turns to tragedy when the energy is always outward and away and tradition is obscured and new poets do not know how to come into being. Most poets in 2008, when I write, have not learned how to be poets, though certainly a good number of us, by definition, write verses. I remember myself saying on several occasions, “being a poet means writing poetry. Period.” I think I was using that as a weapon against all the girls and boys around me then who called themselves poets without really making any poetry, a stolen identity, a chameleon’s vocation, and insofar as I meant that, well and good. But for anything beyond, I think I was wrong. Writing a poem has no more to do with being a poet, necessarily, than taking an aspirin does with being a physician.

Being a poet. I have been striving for this one thing since I was fifteen, and have no idea whether I have achieved it, for there is no one to tell me. My typical audience does not discriminate between the good and the bad, but only between the recognizable and the elusive. The audience I really trusted was the one I had during my brief tenure as a slam poet, and what a slam audience loves is so mingled with the quality of performance that I didn’t know whether I was being complimented (or hissed) as an actor or a writer. Commercial publishers certainly make few thoughtful discriminations, but select new volumes like a man groping around in a barrel in the dark. Since we are taught that poetry is for an unforthcoming elite, trying to make judgments about it on our own seems futile or, worse, itself elitist. Might as well publish your girlfriend or another edition of Rumi with another cloying introduction by the guru of the hour. Literary or independent publishers do better, or at least try harder, but it takes a publisher of genius to lighten the obscurity into which poetry has fallen, where the good and the bad, the momentary and the eternal, are mixed up together like motes in a whirlwind. There are ways of telling them all apart, but even those with an intuitive grasp of these things must occasionally doubt themselves in the face of epidemic public indifference.

Where does one learn? My teachers either encouraged or discouraged, but neither of those is teaching. I myself go–or for a long time went–into the classroom feeling confident to tell a young poet whether her poem was good or bad, but--whatever sallies I might make into the unknown-- my confidence stopped there. I could improve the poem but I could not show a straighter road to the source of poetry.

I am making excuses for the fact that the stature of poetry is partially to be laid at the door of poets. Few of us have considered it a holy task. Few of us are worth the paper we take up on the remainder shelves. This truth is complicated by the fact that very many of us– hundreds, I would say– are quite good writers, witty and skillful and full of the richness of learning that makes for good literature.

Plus, we mean well. Although we all know individuals who go at the trade of poetry for what thin wisps of renown it can still offer– a café full of rapt faces at a reading, an invitation to an important conference, with your way paid and the drinks free–most of us are self-defined by our sincerity. I wonder if the concept of sincerity every crossed the mind of Milton or Yeats. It is the cornerstone of the self-awareness of the contemporary poet, and there are certainly worse things to build an art upon. Yet if I walked into a gallery and called a painting “sincere” or “heartfelt” or even “deeply felt,” most people would read that as polite damnation.

The prophetic voice is gone. In truth, I don’t know what it would prophesy, but here I am, an instance of my own complaint. I think of Blake’s two poets, one at the opening of “Songs of Innocence” and the other at the opening of “Songs of Experience.” Among us is neither the happy singer of paradise who plucks a pen from the grasses and writes that every child may laugh to hear, nor the thunderous bard crying on the watery shore against God and all dark angels. There are a whole bunch of us writing about how are daddy’s didn’t spend enough time with us and how an owl hooted into our window in the dead of night, and I love that, but it is a pleasant (or at least a familiar) vale between vast forests and towering mountains which remain unexplored.

When asked what I do for a living I almost never answer, except in very specific circumstances, “poet.” My passport says “college teacher,” and though that is true, it is hardly the whole, or the central, story. Two decades back I began turning seriously to playwriting as a mode of expression. I liked it. I felt I was good at it. Furthermore, there was no lack of people telling you how to do it, in workshops and development sessions and chamber performances of newborn works. And these people were not content to dicker with a few words here and there; there was no hesitancy about sending you back to the basics, about demanding that you really listen for the nuance of human voice, really get a grip for the mechanics of the stage, really separate your will from the will of the play. That the advice was often bad didn’t matter so much as the fact that it was important to those who gave it. I learned that I had an audience to please, and my task was to please it without smirking and without groveling. I learned that I had a message to communicate, and that I had to communicate it without shooting it over my audience’s head or driving them out of the theater with confusion or revulsion. There was no assumption that individual vision was sacrosanct without being tested for honesty in the human voice. There was no temptation to assume that every neophyte playwright had something to say simply because he had the will to say it.

I did not turn to playwriting because of a change of interests. I wanted to learn how, as a poet, to speak with a language not so immersed in my own consciousness, delicious as that might be to me. I wanted an expression not so colored with my thought and redolent of my smells that I would never be able to know if it told the truth. I needed to hear my words in another’s voice. I had to be able to judge if my vision was good for everybody, or just a bit of self-indulgence to enshrine me in my own private Poets’ Corner. It is a shock for a poet to hear someone else reading our poem or quoting our line. It is a shock because it is our stage suddenly lit by a different light than we intended, and that is a moment of danger. In theater, there is nothing else. I picked up playwriting because every line, every scene has several voices speaking in it, and one of them is mine, and if the music sound false, it is at least possible that it’s my fault. We have forgotten that poetry was once a public art and subject to exactly this public oversight. I don’t mean that we should all go roaring our poems in the street or declaiming them from theater stages, but I would like to see a time when we actually could. I would like to see a time when we bellow and cajole and lore-pass and our hearers would take it as information, or affront, or love-making, or assault, and not just that tiny precious moment saved for the visiting poet.

When I last taught my poetry workshop, I handed my students a syllabus which they found, for once, worth comment:


I’ve made a mistake in the past by assuming that poetry is, for this century, the record--albeit in heightened expression-- of everyday life. I bought, if only partially, into the dogma that the materials of poetry are unavoidably mundane, and that the inspired, the particular, the sacred are somehow effete or fantastical or against the solid American grain. This semester I am going to try an experiment, with you as my partners and co-conspirators. The experiment is to see if perhaps Shelley and Keats and Milton and Blake and Whitman and Yeats were right that poetry is not merely heightened craft, but heightened perception as well, even a finer tone in the living of life. I am going to ask you not only to write poetry, but to live like poets. We will talk in class about what that could possibly mean. There are a few things I am sure of at the outset:

1) I am going to ask you not to watch television.

2) I am going to ask you not to read the newspaper, or any publication which aims primarily at excitable 7th graders.

3) I am going to ask you to choose a poet from before 1950 as your guide and mentor. Any language, any nationality. Read him. Know him. Understand what he meant poetry to be.

4) If drugs or alcohol or cigarettes are a problem to you, if you think about them more than a few minutes a day, I’m going to ask you to give them up. You cannot serve two masters. Some have told you that chemicals aid or enable the creative process. In one case in a thousand this might be true. You are not the one.
5)
I am going to ask you to impose on yourself a discipline. Milton said an epic poet must live simply and drink water out of a wooden bowl. Yeats recommended fly fishing. But reach into your soul and see what you need, what you are capable of, and choose a discipline you can be loyal to. Examples? Become a vegetarian. Do not eat after 3 PM. Meditate nightly. Fast two days a week. Give up drugs and alcohol. Run three miles a day No Matter What. Become the best friend of the kid in the hall whom you really, really hate. Walk the streets of a night and do not come home until you’ve done a good deed. Learn every plant or tree you encounter in the Botanical Garden, and not only the ones with signs on them. Learn yoga REALLY. Learn how to give your devotion to Shiva (Jesus, Buddha, Ahura-Mazda, the Great Mother) and do it. The discipline you choose can be anything. It can be arbitrary. It can relate intimately to your history and life goals. You may share your discipline with anybody, but you MUST share it with your workshop partner (see below) so you can keep each other on the straight and narrow.

I wrote this syllabus because I wanted to see if it were true that fully preparing for poetry, that being a poet, was something different from writing the occasional poem. I wanted them to love poetry enough either to dedicate themselves to it, inconveniently, sacrificially, or else go about some other business. I was not haunting their dorm rooms. I don’t know to what degree they really carried out this program. Some confided in me and some did not, and public disclosure was never part of the plan. But what can be said is that I received the best poems I ever had. They seemed different in kind as well as in quality, bolder, less familiar, sometimes more awkward than earlier pieces I had seen from the same people, but with the awkwardness of new, bold growth. I didn’t add “keep in touch with me through the years” to the syllabus. I wish I had, to know of something caught, an ember that could smoulder a long time, or set a whole self aflame.