June 2006
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  Dear Editor, I turned to Tony Hoagland’s essay “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment” [March 2006] hoping to see some discussion of the lively debate among contemporary poets over verse narrative. What I found in Hoagland’s piece, however, struck me as at most only half an essay. He doesn’t really address narrative at all, but writes instead about a few younger poets, from whom he generalizes a larger contemporary avoidance of or outright hostility to narrative, quoting and discussing some rather weak poems along the way. From Hoagland’s essay one would never know that there are many poets, of all generations, writing all sorts of narrative poems, from the coherent anecdote up to the book-length poem with epic aspirations. To press the point, I’d suggest that there are far more poets publishing narratives now than there were twenty years ago. Even a short list of prominent book-length narratives to appear since then would have to include a number of Walcott’s books (especially Omeros), Heaney’s recent creative translation of Beowulf, and Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs. In the following generation, poets like David Mason, Mark Jarman, Robert McDowell, Andrew Hudgins, and many, many others have all published compelling book-length poems within the past decade. Among those who write powerful shorter narratives it seems there are so many, of so many schools, it’s hard to know where to start—but how about, say, Dana Gioia, Rita Dove, Wendy Cope, Billy Collins, and B.H. Fairchild, if one is simply looking for the successful and well-known. This is not even to mention the scores of younger poets and folk/rock/pop/hip-hop lyricists who simply don’t share the assumptions which Hoagland sees as legion. As Oscar Wilde supposedly once quipped, “Everything changes... except the avant-garde.” One can find any number of reasons to proclaim that narrative poetry may be dead or impossible or even just unpopular, and one can find any number of weak poems to flesh out such a position. But why not cast the debate in a more positive light on both sides and bring some of the many ambitious contemporary narrative poets of all ages, backgrounds, and schools into the discussion? Some readers may not like their work, but it doesn’t make for a very convincing essay if one neglects even to mention that they exist. David J. Rothman Crested Butte, Colorado Dear Editor, My reaction to Tony Hoagland’s essay was: why must poetry be at all concerned with narrative? Why must a poet tell stories when poetry is the only genre of writing in which we can be wholly concerned with the nature of language itself? The shorter, more concentrated form of poetry allows each word to garner the attention given to a sentence in prose and should say just as much. We are blessed to be readers and writers of a genre that encourages us to enjoy the minutia and delicacy of language. I adore reading a single word in a poem that rings with four different yet viable meanings. I adore coming across a string of words on a line with new visual texture and sound. As poets, we should not be concerned with the sentence, as so many are wont to be, but with the word. Poetry is our only outlet for this type of lexical adventuring. Shouldn’t we revel in this freedom instead of condemning it as obscure or difficult? I actually loved the lines from Kevin McFadden’s poem, which Hoagland quotes disparagingly: “Oily fellows, earthmen. Spell/freeway, spell monolith, sell/me a fossil. Wholly repellent.” I’m immediately rapt with this close attention to the word—even the letter—rather than the sentence. (We learn in the footnote that each line is made up of identical letters shu±ed and reshu±ed.) The fact that Hoagland dismisses the sense-making of the poem and then mentions this very important key to it in the form of a footnote, an afterthought, is disturbing. Isn’t there merit in the nature of this poem’s construction? This doesn’t seem a case of “eluding structures” to me but an interesting way to address and modify structure and language itself through a microscope. Where else, but in poems such as these, could we witness language like this? Jeanette Karhi Scottsville, New York Dear Editor, How bad is it?! Tony Hoagland’s essay surely understates the aesthetic dangers of the self-conscious, elliptical, dissociative, and cerebral qualities found in the “Poem of Our Moment.” As Hoagland points out, such a poem runs the risk of lacking emotional and/or humanistic value. The essence and consequences of the loss reside in the fundamental trade-off of emotion for language: just as no one truly loves an idea, no one truly loves the mechanism of language; the humanist poem risks sentimentality, while the Poem of Our Moment only risks being called stupid. Most disturbing of all is that today’s fashion of studied experimentation with self-consciousness and with language play has led us not to the new voice but to the non-voice. The lack of someone, anyone, in the poem has been the problem for too long now: that tinkerer in the Poem of Our Moment and for the past twenty years has been a denatured persona at best and, at worst, a total effacement of and by language. It’s the singer that counts, not the song. Pretending and writing otherwise is a crippling attitude because it makes the worst religion for writers and readers alike: no one will become a believer in a poetry that wishes to make an agnosticism or atheism out of who we are, out of our very real selves. Garrett Doherty Charleston, South Carolina Dear Editor, Tony Hoagland raises the question of whether or not there has been in poetry a paralysis of feeling not unlike that in response to cultural relativism. The overarching issue seems to be fear: of loss of self, of coming to consciousness in a terrifying world where Attitude (as Hoagland suggests) is all that can be sustained because the grief of living is too large to bear. Hoagland calls elliptical poetry skittery and, finally, trivial. It may be, but it is also a symptom of the terror that is closing in on all of us culturally, psychologically, politically, and artistically. Laura McCullough Galloway, New Jersey Dear Editor, I found Tony Hoagland’s essay to be interesting and well thought out. However, it also felt over-generalized when examining the cultural “topsoil” of American poetry. I’m sure that Hoagland, whom I respect greatly, is absolutely right about a sort of anti-narrative movement as far as graduates of MFA programs are concerned. But let’s not forget that, for every poet who has just received a master’s, there are at least a hundred others who are starting their own chapbook press, performing at a poetry slam, or sending their work out to little zines. The work of these poets is very often narrative. These poets are the salt of the earth, rather than the topsoil. Bradford Allison Fairhaven, Massachusetts Dear Editor, George Szirtes’s “Formal Wear... ” [February, 2006] and Tony Hoagland’s essay were thoughtful, provocative, and penetrating insights into contemporary poetry. When Szirtes says, “the constraints of form are spurs to the imagination,” and Hoagland reveals that “every style has its shadowy limitation, its blind eye, its narcissistic cul-de-sac,” the analyses are not contradictions. Both endorse a deep commitment to language that is meaningful and memorable, and condemn the trivial “inventiveness” of so much contemporary poetry. Cordell Caudron Lewiston, Idaho Dear Editor, It is not clear that Virgil’s primary intention in the Georgics was to write a handbook for farmers, but two generations after him Columella, the author of a practical prose treatise on agriculture, repeatedly quotes passages of two or three verses because they contain useful information in brief, memorable form—compressed, precise. We look in vain for these attributes of Virgil’s poem in David Ferry’s version. Peter Campion quotes Ferry’s handling of Georgics 3.425–431 [“Repossessions,” March 200<6] and it will serve for an example. Here are Virgil’s hexameters: est etiam ille malus Calabris in saltibus anguis, Here is a literal translation: Also, there is that noxious serpent in Calabrian meadows Here is Ferry’s version: And there’s that dreadful snake whose habitat Ferry transforms Virgil’s seven tight verses into ten sprawling ones. And Virgil’s formal concision isn’t all that’s lost. His sense is impaired, blurred, dulled: in the first verse malus does not mean “dreadful”; it means “harmful, noxious.” This is not “a matter of interpretation”; it is philology, and sense. “Whose habitat is” has no basis in the Latin, neither does “marshy” or “down there.” Ferry’s third verse is ludicrous and grotesque, as comparison even with the literal version suggests. “Threatening” is again padding. Virgil writes convolvens (coiling), not “wreathing and coiling.” Readers deserve to be told that things like the repetition of “spring ... springtime” are not Virgil’s. Nor does the Mantuan emit somnambulent thudding dullnesses like “rainfall steep/the earth in water” (too bad it wasn’t raining whiskey). “Where he can satisfy his appetite” has no basis in the Latin and actually contradicts improbus (greedy, immoderate). Not to mention the passage’s climactic face-plant, “croaking frogs” (no sir, they did not whistle), which loses all the accuracy and wit of Virgil’s epithet for the garrulous amphibian: loquacibus, “talkative, loquacious.” Enough talk. Virgil’s poetry deserves way better. Caveat lector. Jim Powell Berkeley, California Dear Editors, Robin Kemp responds to the commentary on women’s poetry [“Exchange,” January 2006]: I found it odd that only a handful of living women poets were mentioned, with an equal number of dead women poets, and many, many dead men poets. [“Letters,” March 2006] Why does she find this “odd”? What are her underlying assumptions? That we want to mention as many living women poets as possible? That mention in Poetry is, first of all, a publicity coup? The assumption seems to be that good poetry is always there, lying around, or (more accurately) that “good poetry” is whatever one says it is, so we will just take whatever women write and call it good, in order to represent them equally. Publication is a way of bringing poetry to a larger audience, yes, but, beyond that, Poetry, as I have known it over the years, has not been much invested in the business of publicity. It makes no attempt to cultivate poets as personalities, does not establish a hierarchy among its contributors, and has always been willing to publish unknowns beside famous names. Here dead poets are as vital a part of the conversation as living ones. And why should it be otherwise? Belle Randall Seattle, Washington Dear Editor, My compliments to Katherine Larson, first published in the March issue. Her poem “Statuary” has entered my personal favorites collection—never to be forgotten in the days I pass through. Dennis Mull Irvine, California Dear Editor, Not to discount the obvious literary talent of Katherine Larson, but in reading her poem “Love at Thirty-two Degrees” I found a disturbing betrayal of science well before the last line. A squid has no brachial heart—unless by some poetic license the writer means to conjure up the picture of a squid wearing its heart on its sleeve (brachial=arm). She means “branchial,” which to any faithful lover of science conjures up so much more poetry—the gill, the embryonic neck, from which even the poet’s own ear and voice arise. Arleen Lawson-Willey St. Joseph, Michigan |
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