Poet Laureate

Hello everyone and thank you for being here.

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It is a tremendous honor to accept the role of Beacon Poet Laureate. I am grateful to the Howland Library for choosing me. And I thank my friends and colleagues and students who have made my life and work in Beacon such a deep source of joy. It is no small thing to find a community and to make one’s life and home within that shelter. Beacon has given me so much and I hope, as Beacon Poet Laureate, I will be able to return your warmth and generosity.

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I am here tonight as a Poet and a teacher and a community member. I expect that you will want me to say something about poetry, about how it is “good” for people. How “ it,” as we are often told, “inspires,” “lifts us up.” “allows us to express our deepest feelings and convictions,” “allows us (as poets) to “give voice to the voiceless.” I might be expected to offer an apt chestnut (here it comes) – i.e. William Carlos Williams in Asphopdel, that Greeny Flower

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                      It is difficult
to get the news from poems
                       yet men die miserably every day
                                               for lack

of what is found there.

 

There are so many cliches that speak to “inspiration” and “uplift” or one version of poetry propaganda or another. Alternatively there are so many arguments that intellectualize poems, beating them into submitting to one theoretical notion or another. In preparing for this talk I listened to one very young eager academic explaining contemporary poetry. When he told us all that we had to read Derrida, a French philosopher, to understand contemporary poetry, I gave up and shut off the video. It isn’t true. Believe me it isn’t true. Forget Derrida. Read the poems and trust your intelligence and your heart.

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I like what Frank O’Hara says in his essay, “Personism,” in addressing the matter:

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You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

 

Poetry, really and truly is not about school, Mineola Prep or otherwise.

 

I reject uplift and theory along with all the defensive talk about poetry, all the learned folk telling us that poetry is dead, not relevant, etc. I reject all the approaches that separate poetry and poems from pleasure and from community.

 

A poet, who had been in Vietnam during that unhappy war, once told me about a village he had been to in Southeast Asia – it might have been in Laos or Vietnam long after the war. Each week the townspeople gathered in some appropriate place for a party at which people translated poems. A whole room of people happily translating poems in the presence of other happy people.

 

That is what I like to think of when I think of poetry. Note please, that I am not talking about “happy poems” – that’s uplift for you – I’m talking about the shared, the communal experience of engaging with poems by reading them and writing them in the presence of others. In India children start writing poems at age 7. Here we often teach people to read poems by asking the deadly “what does the first line mean?” And after that the second and more meaning and by the end what you have is sort of a dead horse and an unhappy child who will not ever want to read a poem again.

 

I’m arguing against the presumed hermeticism of poetry and the presumed isolation of poets – the Emily Dickinson myth of the poet struggling alone in a garret – pulling language painfully out of a field of suffering and despair located somewhere in the stomach. I think Emily was having more fun than we are willing to admit.

 

I have learned, happily, that this library has a group writing project going. I bet the people in that group are having a really good time and are happy to be together.

 

I’m a teacher as well as a poet and when I teach I think of writing as a studio art – something to be done with other people – something pleasurable and surprising. The people I work with gather to write, not to criticize. My job is to instigate matters so that something surprising will happen in the writing. “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” The aim is surprise. And surprise is pleasurable, even when the sources of surprise are difficult or painful. The mere fact of saying something you didn’t know you would say produces surprise. And from where does the surprise come – from the language itself. The poet plays with language and then the reader or listener gets to experience the language that produces surprise. And guess what? Exciting poems emerge and are heard. And those heard poems get published. And so, pleasure and surprise extend outward to the larger world.

 

I am not enamored of directly polemical or confessional poems. They subsume language to paraphrasable ideas. I argue against the notion that in a poem we are attempting to “communicate” something. You can fight me on that. The poet Richard Hugo says, “if you want to communicate use the telephone.” The poet, doing the work rightly, is discovering something by writing and then that experience of discovering is given to the reader or the audience to experience. A poem constructs an experience joyfully submitted to by the reader/audience. That doesn’t mean the poet can’t write politically or ecologically or erotically– but the obligation of the poet is, I think, to stumble upon what hasn’t yet been discovered or said about those familiar things. And I’m not opposed to difficulty in poems – I just think the writer must discover the rules by which he or she wrote the poem and then hand over to the reader the rules by which to read it. The reader, I think, has the obligation to engage in the relationship and to parse the rules. Relationships are never easy. Poems, too, require collaboration and translation and like all translations or relationships will never ever be perfect. The only perfect thing is death and who wants that? At its best a poem is honest and alive and sparks a kind of aliveness in the audience/reader.