What we seek in poetry is ourselves
Why read poetry?
Does poetry still have power beyond the page? Does it speak to the world as it is—not only with beauty, but with grit, urgency, and relevance? In these excerpts from an essay adapted from his introduction to The Best American Poetry 2019, poet and editor Major Jackson wrestles with these questions and more. What begins as a reflection on poetry’s perceived elitism turns into a call to reclaim its power: to reach beyond the narrow mirror of the self, to reconnect with the world and one another, to “renew the bonds between reader and poet.”
This is one of the most galvanising essays I’ve read about the state of poetry today—at once critical and full of faith. With candor and compassion, Major Jackson traces the fault lines between art and audience, prestige and purpose, and reminds us of what’s at stake when poetry forgets its street-level heart. If you’ve ever asked yourself what poetry is for, or whether it still matters, I invite you to begin here.
Does Poetry Have Street Cred?
My faith in the transformative power of literature has never waned.
Does American poetry suffer from an abundance of artistic dignity and not enough street credibility? It’s possible. When I asked a friend, a terrific prose writer, why she seems to have a slight disdain for poetry, she replied, “It’s too elitist, like walking through a beautiful forest in which I know not where to look, much less know what I am searching for. If I don’t get it as a reader, then I feel like an idiot and somehow not worthy of the form.” In years past, I would have fretted and dismissed her remarks as garden-variety philistinism, but my friend is admirably sensitive, a brilliant scholar, Ivy educated, and not someone prone to make trivializing remarks without great consideration.
Nor is she alone. For the better part of my life, at dinner parties, at neighborhood gatherings, or on the sidelines of my children’s sporting events, I have had to confront the incredulity of ordinarily thoughtful, even erudite people who professed a similar antagonism toward poetry. An English department chair, a Renaissance scholar relishing a moment of candor, with tapenade and a flute of Dom Ruinart in hand, admitted to me that he is “terrified” of poetry. The roots of such fears and anxieties have been the subject of many essays, and as a result there are as many defenses as there are quarrels with poetry, the most recent being Ben Lerner’s humorous and insolently titled The Hatred of Poetry.
Three decades ago, my friend Sven Birkerts explained, almost prophetically, that poets write in an age of great distraction brought on by society’s materialist compulsions, and are helpless in the face of the latest seductive technology that renders the inner musings of poets frivolous, irrelevant, and downright absurd. He writes:
The race is busily standardizing itself and turning its attention outward: sciences, technologies, and the mass processing of information are the order of the day. Truth, for the time being, is what can be measured, calculated, or found on some instrument … And the inner life is given its due only when the strain of imbalance sends a crack zigzagging through the outer shell.
Around the same time, the late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz—who defined poetry as “the passionate pursuit of the Real”—pinpointed the source of division to the moment in the nineteenth century when, just as the physical laws and equations of science began to assert themselves aggressively as the only relevant language to explain phenomena, poets with an eye on posterity (Ars longa, Vita brevis) resolutely glorified the poem as “Art” for its own sake (L’art pour L’art), with no grander aims than to serve as a vehicle for their fame. The result? A weakening if not a loss of the poet’s divine imagination, through which humankind once profited from the ability to provide consoling metaphors and language that explained our passage from life to death. And thus, says Milosz, the bond between the poet and the “great human family” ruptured, leaving us with no more than slim “volumes of poems incomprehensible to the public” amounting to a collection of “broken whisper[s] and dying laughter.”
My faith in the transformative power of literature has never waned. A year ago, however, after a decade as the poetry editor of The Harvard Review and a score of years teaching undergraduates and graduate students, I began to share the sentiments expressed by my prose-writing friend, particularly regarding the preciousness of poetry. I became disenchanted with what amounted to beautiful architecture, glass fortresses of language whose walls and ceilings were lined with parallel-facing mirrors in which the poet’s ego or aggressive wit or moral superiority or mannered experimentation gradually faded into an abyss of itself, ad infinitum; the age lost its witness, and the reader, yearning for human connection, was crowded out by a narcissism that was hard not to see. And these works were written by some of the best minds! If they failed, it was not for lack of talent. The poems worked for their intended audiences. They won prizes, adulation. Yet their lack of engagement with the world beyond art limits their appeal. It may even be that some poets, “afflicted with a modesty of ambition,” as the recently departed Donald Hall declared, are apt to preen more for their Instagram feeds than for Mount Parnassus.
When faced with the challenge of reading, I have sometimes found myself heavy bored, and the poem in question excessively underwhelming, lacking dimension or scale, or altogether devoid of any authentic feeling or thinking that might render the work illuminating or inspiring. About audience, I am fond of telling students that writing poetry is on par with composing for the gods, who themselves are makers and, we are told, all-knowing, and that the challenge of any poet is to sing beyond the ennui and cynicism that are the byproducts of a restless omniscience. Even the gods are entitled to their revelations, a new purchase on their divinity.
Our art should do more than celebrate ourselves in Whitmanian fashion, or sublimely frame our individualism, or camouflage our moral shortcomings and desperate self-regard. Even the most personal poems should break through our novelistic sense of ourselves and stabilize the mutual fate of our shared destinies, our ephemerality.t me—about why I am necessary “even in the failure to communicate.” Poems I admire require my involvement in the project of “toppl[ing] distinctions” between who gets to talk and who is being asked to listen. And that and only that kind of engagement—the convergence of writer and reader, of speech-maker and audience, of the talker and the silent, of the poet as subject and the reader normally supposed to be an object—will “ease doubt.”
…
I had long ago put aside the highbrow argument that rap lyricists and songwriters such as the Nobel laureate Bob Dylan are nonliterary, and thus I was open to the message that, though not a populist art, poetry has the potential of captivating more than an audience of one if it aims for the highest imaginative reaches of human speech, advances an untainted vision of humanity that preserves our dignity as a species, and works to maintain the sovereignty of language against abusive and corruptive rhetoric that breeds hatred (like much of what we experience today in our political sphere). Filled with this conviction, I calibrated my thinking.
And thus editing The Best American Poetry 2019 came as a challenge to fulfill a single criterion: locate poems that by the sheer force and virtuosity of their making renew the bonds between reader and poet, the holy trinity of an art formulated once by Etheridge Knight as “the Poem, the Poet, and the People.” I sought poems that braved human connection; poems that battled the inertia of our daily routines and fixed modes of thinking; poems that shaded in the outlines of contemporary life and generously extended us into a profound understanding of ourselves as outraged, joyous, vulnerable, intelligent, fearful, loving; and finally, poems that overpowered the indifference we exhibit toward each other, which, if unchecked, may become one of the great horrors of living in the twenty-first century. Even with multiple social media platforms, even with satellites that televise from every corner of the world, we are, without art and literature, incapable of taking in the full width and complexity of our humanity and are likely to overlook the miracles that are found there. Now that our skies are once again our battlefields, we reflexively turn to our screens to see our proliferated differences, ideological or otherwise, amplified into profits, a kind of circus composed of codes.
What I am trying to say is that we are the forest, to take up my friend’s metaphor: inscrutable, trodden, and, yes, beautiful. What we seek in poetry is ourselves beyond the inarticulateness, silence, and immeasurable mystery that define human existence. Poems work to free us of this tyranny. We are all aware of how difficult it is to absorb and embrace each other’s unfathomable natures, let alone our idiosyncratic feelings and thoughts, which, when encountered in a poem, can make the uninitiated feel ruthlessly uncomfortable, to the point of bristling.
Still, how rewarding the happenstance when we encounter a poem that embodies that complexity and difficulty, the shape and contours of our deep humanity and aloneness, the words that give expression to what we feel or did not know we felt. Like wow! when one hears a jazz solo and a phrase is played amid the seeming chaos, wholly familiar, just slightly changed and zoom! it’s off again navigating between the suburbs and bedlam of sound.
Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry including, Leaving Saturn, Hoops, Holding Company, Roll Deep, and the forthcoming collection The Absurd Man. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, he lives in South Burlington, Vermont.
Adapted from the introduction to The Best American Poetry 2019, published by Scribner.
This post was originally published in The Paris Review, 06 September 2019 (Source)
