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The Futility of the Poetry Workshop

A recent attempt to "workshop" my attempts at poetry with another poet revealed the process to be an awkward and self-negating one. I think we both approached the session with the intent of offering advice, encouragement, and constructive criticism, but left feeling a bit helpless in the endeavor.

The problem with workshopping poetry is that you can only go so far in critiquing mechanics and structure when they are so often perverted by the poet deliberately. When you assume (as you should) that every mistake or idiosyncrasy is a tool or a stylistic device, you can only really critique how well the poet uses such tools to get his point across. But knowing his point is an unrealistic exercise in meta-poetry; it asks how well the poet poetically delivers his poetry. "Real poems" come without their authors to explain them away, so we're really just left with our gut reactions: I like it, or I don't.

To Pan or Not to Pan?

A passage from Wilson's critique of free verse caught my eye:

Far from those eroded banks, work that responds to the name “avant-garde” usually takes this tendency to a far further extreme, and robs words of their status as language by printing them in such random, self-confuting order that they no longer constitute a statement, but are merely a hunk of jumbled pseudo-subversive phonemes spat upon the page. We see the latter in, say, Lyn Hejinian’s senseless Writing is an Aid to Memory, which I quote at random (honoring the fashion in which she wrote it):

its consent to time

mass perhaps in a form against it

a cheap reading of what surrounds

this taste of opinion

it all can be admitted up

Thanks to her collection of essays, The Language of Inquiry, which by some hundreds of pages dwarfs her poor little ticker tape of “poetry,” I am aware of the radical intent of this work. Above all, I am aware she has succeeded in creating a kind of writing that refuses to be read...

Sometimes slamming someone else's work just doesn't have a place; it never enhances your argument unless your argument is "this sucks, and I'm pissed." Although a poetry review is a decent place for paltry scatterings of such malice, a supposedly accredited journal of academic criticism is surely not. Wilson's undermines his own persuasions here, taking cheap (albeit well-written) potshots where he could be developing a more convincing line of reasoning. It's rhetorically ineffective, to put it nicely (although personally, I find it deplorable, pompous and vain, but in order to maintain my ethos I will withhold such opinions from my argument, reserving them instead for this bit of parenthetical irony).

There is a conspicuous line between support and insult, and choosing to breach the threshold is a professional risk; I'd be surprised if Wilson didn't sacrifice some esteem in doing so.

Comic Relief: ABPJ Review

Professor Roy and the Amazingly Bad Poetry Journal is a healthy dose of snide, belittling fun. The poems come from undisclosed locations and read like high school English assignments. Some of them aren't quite insufferable, but "Professor Roy" has a way of making even the most earnest attempts seem embarrassingly inadequate. Depending on your perspective, this can be seen either as cruel or hilarious. Either way, a love poem called "Mr. Fix-It" deserves some kind of attention, doesn't it?

Free Verse: Fight the Good Fight

Become a freedom fighter! Send a comment using CPR's suggestion page and stand up for free verse in all of its liberating glory. Tell them you've heard enough from haughty pedagogues like James Matthew Wilson.

"Begone, J. Evans Pritchard, Ph. D!"

CPR: Literary Pedantry

Contemporary Poetry Review's recent feature, "Our Steps amid a Ruined Colonnade: Grammar and Expression," is brimming with unintended irony. Its third part, which is essentially a denunciation of free verse, is either a masterful example of self-mockery or the work of a turgid buffoon. Here are some examples:

#1: After all, Kant’s obscurities launched a thousand ships of obfuscation from which philosophy in general has never fully recovered. In contrast, whatever the complexities of the reality he describes, St. Thomas Aquinas found a clear and efficient medium to express that reality—and, crucially, it is the clarity of Aquinas’ writing that helped ensure the soundness of the thought within it. If he were forced to write his articles on the Incarnation of the Word in Sapphics, more people might read Aquinas but even fewer should understand him properly.

Hmmm....talk about obfuscation! Wilson has the audacity to slam Kant for being unclear, but the essay itself is an exercise in prolix conceit and nebulosity. He establishes the dichotomy here between formal clarity ("determination," as he will later refer to it) and the chaos of free verse, but wavers arbitrarily between the poles.

#2: But formal verse certainly does not prevent anyone, student or master, from saying anything that needs to be said. I have always been perplexed by those persons... who seem to believe that the writing of poetry is primarily about self-expression.

Perhaps his perplexity comes from confusing opinion with fact. How can anyone criticize artistic motive or significance? How can Wilson sincerely rely upon his own discursive feelings and free associations as the primary mode of their censure? It's this kind of contradiction that makes me wonder if the whole thing is a joke; the essay champions free verse in form while denouncing it in message.

#3: The freedom of free verse is anarchy like any other anarchy, eschewing form for formlessness; liberty requires discipline and rewards it with accomplishment. Formal verse offers poets the only kind of freedom that actually exists: the freedom to be determined.

Wilson apparently becomes a demigod by the end of the essay; he can tell us what kind of freedom "actually" exists, and equates freedom and determination in near-biblical alpha and omega fashion. I'm sure he would call it a "holy paradox," but any logician or semi-literate yahoo will see it as sophistic contradiction; he takes the most licentious of liberties in decrying the dangers of taking liberties. Here's the kicker:

Only an easy drunk could expose himself to such obvious contradiction.

The Best of Joanna Newsom

But always up the mountainside you're clambering
Groping blindly, hungry for anything:
Picking through your pocket linings - well, what is this?
Scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus?

***

so;
my bride
here is my hand, where is your paw?
try and understand my plan, Ursala
my heart is a furnace
full of love that's just, and earnest
now; you know that we must unlearn this
allegiance to a life of service
and no longer answer to that heartless
hay-monger, nor be his accomplice
(that charlatan, with artless hustling!)
but; Ursala, we've got to eat something
and earn our keep, while still within
the borders of the land that man has girded
(all double-bolted and tightfisted!)
until we reach the open country
a-steeped in milk and honey

will you keep your fancy clothes on, for me?
can you bear a little longer to wear that leash?
my love, I swear by the air I breathe:
sooner or later, you'll bare your teeth

***

Last week our picture window produced a half-word
Heavy and hollow, hit by a brown bird
We stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnake
And pant and labour over every intake

I said a sort of prayer for some sort of rare grace
Then thought I ought to take her to a higher place
Said: "dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you
And though you die, bird, you will have a fine view"

Then in my hot hand
She slumped her sick weight
We tramped through the poison oak
Heartbroke and inchoate

The dogs were snapping
So you cuffed their collars
While I climbed the tree-house
Then how I hollered!
Cause she'd lain, as still as a stone, in my palm, for a lifetime or two

Then, saw the treetops, cocked her head and up and flew
(while, back in the world that moves, often
According to the hoarding of these clues
Dogs still run roughly around
Little tufts of finch-down)

The cities we passed were a flickering wasteland
But his hand in my hand made them hale and harmless
While down in the lowlands the crops are all coming;
We have everything
Life is thundering blissful towards death
In a stampede of his fumbling green gentleness