Some Parenthetical Poetics

Jonathan seems to be mellowing, or maybe I’m finally reading him right: “As I read Silliman's blog each morning, I come to distrust more and more my own propensity to invest in rankings and hierarchies.” Not that I’m in the same critical league, but I’ve come to lately mistrust such categorizations also. Coming from the formalist side, I’ve begun to think there’s something about the almost religious dedication to form (and I’m not just talking about Mike Snider), along with the provincial-minded intolerance towards anything free verse (Rhina Espaillat [discussed in this excellent blog post by uber-formalist Timothy Murphy], a true free spirit, excluded) or god forbid postmodern, that is limiting and drives me nuts. Or rather drives the creative side of my mind absolutely loco.

Of course such intolerance is not limited to formalists. The so-called avant garde have their own cultists. And Ron Silliman is its high priest these days. Of course, he may be just seizing his place in history. He was, after all, the first poet on the blogosphere. And now he sits there like Adam (get a fig leaf at least) and begins to name the poetic flora, classifying all into schools of quietude and his own idiomatic one, even informing us which poets falls into what class. Thanks oh blogofather. And when he waxes zenlike while busy dualizing the world, it seems silly at best, and supercilious at worst.

But enough about our Adam, and more about me. And for me, reasonable rankings and hierarchies are good for the reader in me, even good for the craftsman, but bad for the actual poet. The fact that someone is busy doing such ranking (in all definitions of the word), allows me the luxury of finding good new poets to read (of course recognizing the critic’s critical tastes is important also [I wouldn’t expect a Silliman to rightly rank a Collins or even a Kees]) and work on the craft. But when I write, I need to let in everything good, whatever school it comes from, and not allow these divisions, too many of them ego-driven, any consideration at all. For me, every poet’s technique (even a “bad poet” could have uniquely misused an exceptional technique) is just another tool I can borrow (steal) to write the poem my muse wishes to write. The more tools the merrier. The more various the poets, the better.

As Thoreau said in his blog today, "All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind, is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love,—to sing." And that's all the poet in me wants to do. And the cold-hearted critics can rank on it (or just ignore it) all they like.