Every five or ten years some mainstream magazine like Harpers or The Atlantic—or most recently even Inside Higher Ed—publishes an article about the death of poetry. These paragraphs are not that. Instead: Why does poetry still live? Especially since by the precepts of the market, it should be dead; it barely sells.
In some ways, that question is easy to answer. As every poet knows, for the most part poetry lives on thanks to the generosity of philanthropy, sometimes the private sort, sometimes the governmental sort. These monies maintain all parts of the professionalized poetry industrial complex: the grants, the residencies with their boxed lunches and fancy dinners, the reading series with their cheap wine, the publishing houses, the prizes, and really everything else. For most poets, it is not enough or it is barely anything at all. But there are always a few poets who are lucky enough to reap large and repeat rewards, and sometimes this lucky poet manages to collect over a million dollars over a number of years.
At the same time, and here is where it gets interesting, there remains this stubborn network of poets who do much of what philanthropies do but using their own monies. These poets often group themselves around certain political and/or aesthetic concerns (often ones that they perceive to be in opposition to the philanthropically supported). Their various networks form a scotch-taped-together and significantly less hierarchical infrastructure of readings and publishing houses. Danny Hayward in Wound Building: Dispatches from the Latest Disasters in UK Poetry calls this the “self-organizing poetry scene” and the poets who belong to it “non-institutionally supported artists” (15, 22).
And then there is higher education, which overlaps with both these scenes, providing professionalizing credentials and a limited number of jobs. While the philanthropically supported often have an easier time of it in academia and often have attended elite institutions, the scotch-taped poets also tend to be graduates of higher educational institutions, where many are also employed. The latest disasters of Hayward’s subtitle, for instance, are mainly the Marxist poets that come out of the PhD programs of the UK such as Frances Kruk, Verity Spott, Lisa Jeschke, Nat Raha, and Sean Bonney; despite their PhDs, Hayward understands them as unaffiliated.
Because I taught for many years in an MFA program, higher education has had an enormous impact on how I understand poetry. I recognized this support as an exceptional privilege: “I am the luckiest,” I often said to myself as I prepared for my classes in some Bay Area coffee shop with midcentury chairs in the middle of the afternoon, “sitting here on a weekday reading Rimbaud one more time.” It was not as if I was fine with poetry’s reliance on higher education; I was and remain a skeptic. I also was very aware that I was merely an employee in these moments. But still, I recognized some of the pleasures within it. These pleasures were, as many pleasures are, undeniably bourgeois, elite. And I combined this pleasure with a commitment to my job. I wanted to do it as well as I could.
There were certain things I tended to focus on in the poetry workshops I taught during those years. These things were in many ways simple. I wanted to share how complicated poems can be. I was convinced that colloquial free verse had taken over poetry and pretended that one could just line-break some deep thoughts about one’s self and call it a day. I wanted to celebrate poetry’s complexity—rhythm, rhyme, repetition, anaphora, other sorts of patterned language. I also wanted to clarify the complicated relationship that poetry has with the state, a relationship that was easily legible in the position of poet laureate but also defined a great deal of philanthropy. And in addition, that this relationship that poetry had to the state was far from innocent and probably, I was increasingly convinced, the result of the Cold War. By this reasoning, the Cold War also explained why I was among the luckiest in that coffee shop preparing for a class on Rimbaud—or Césaire or Mayakovsky.
Then two years ago, the small liberal arts college where I had taught these classes for the last eighteen years was taken over by a global polytechnic university with a peculiar, at least for academia, start-up-like atmosphere. The university sees itself as tearing down academic conventions, an identity that is perhaps more hubris than reality. As far as I can see, its real skill is in rebranding the conventions of higher education with unsettling nomenclature. “You campaign/in conventional verse, but govern in avant-garde/pieties regarding pulling it apart,” Ben Lerner writes in The Lights, as if talking directly to this particular university.1 Grants are called “Impact Engines.” If one manages to get more than one grant, then it becomes an “Incubator Hub.” The study abroad programs are called “Dialogue of Civilizations.” The field trips where students are bussed onto the campuses of the technological giants that shape our lives are called “Trek Days.” What had been called the humanities is now called “humanics,” the study of which made one “robot-proof.” Even jargon on top of jargon: “virtual reality,” the memo went out one day, is now called “extended reality.” I suppose “merger” might be another of those words because what happened has felt more like a conventional marriage than the merging of two equals.
This merger preserved my paycheck but took away my luckiest afternoons spent in a coffee shop reading Rimbaud; there were no more classes in poetry to teach. Prior to the merger all the majors and programs that had defined the small liberal arts college were shut down. And then we were encouraged by the university to rebuild new majors but every major we proposed that had anything at all to do with humanics (even when we accepted the absurdity of the word into our proposal) was not allowed to proceed after we submitted it to “the Portal” (commonly known as a website form) for evaluation by leadership (also known as the Provost). I got it. If I were leadership and I had been given a campus that my CFO called an “undergraduate-enabled blank slate that came with 650 million in assets,” I probably would also be thinking about whether I wanted to put a creative writing class that enrolled around twelve students in that blank slate or a class with fifty business majors instead, and I would likely decide the second. I get that this is the world in which I now live and work, one created without my consent but with my acquiescence, an acquiescence that I often excuse by pretending it is a clear-headed awareness that we are not yet mighty enough win. What surprised me though was the realization that I had taken poetry’s reliance on higher education for granted. I saw it as something that defined the genre and also something that higher education needed to maintain its role in the culture. The merger reminded me that the support of higher education can also be withdrawn.
So while I had perhaps been the luckiest, now I was a unit head and a teacher of classes on writing for social media where we did a week on Rupi Kaur, discussing both ballgown selfies and poems, but not much else with poetry. “All the culture here is dead, not living / no poetry, and am I happy?” Jennifer Soong asks in Comeback Death (49). Soong does not bother to answer this “no poetry, and am I happy?” question in her book. But I am going to answer and say that for me, I was not happy in this position of unit head and without poetry, but I felt like I should be the happiest as finally I had a day job and it no longer overlapped with what was either my hobby or my calling. It was a misreading, but I began to think of myself as someone who was no longer a professional poet. Maybe I could get back to reading books unprofessionally, which in my mind meant that I no longer had to read those poets who were regularly philanthropically endorsed because I had a professional obligation to be able to describe the field.
I have always thought of my heart as being with the scotch-taped networks, which is why I sat down and read Hayward’s Wound Building, a collection of essays about a very small, specific subgroup of UK poets. My usual reasoning is that while the philanthropies have their own reasons for supporting poetry, some of them mundane and some not, besotted conviction is usually not one of them. But the conviction that self-organized sociality matters combined with the conviction that thoughts can happen in more experimental uses of language are the main reasons that the scotch-taped exist. When Hayward makes a persuasive case for why one might put one’s heart with the scotch-taped, he uses the word love: “I am interested in poetry that hates its own ideas and wants to see the world diminished. At the time of writing I still think that this is a kind of love poetry” (27); “I care about these poems. I could barely love anything without them” (27); “I love people who wreck and torture language, because in the encounter with their own refracted needs the whole history of what we can no longer candidly mean seems to burst back into the concepts” (93). He gushes about Verity Spott’s Click Away Close Door Say: “I love this poem, I think it is unforgettable; no one will ever be comfortable in it; and it is because and not in spite of this fact that the love that leaks from its entire body betrays itself without any guarantees that it will pour out towards its end” (90).
Hayward is particularly fascinated by work that he describes at moments as “crass, stupid, and unthinking” and in which he sees a freedom, an expression of class hatred, an escape from fascism, a possibility for a meaningful mutual aid and solidarity. His claims are big. Certain poems can “retrieve from the claustrophobic everyday surroundings of a destroyed and destructive workplace the intellectual resources with which to understand a fascist reality” (24). This sort of conviction also shows up in Lerner’s The Lights, but as a memory: “I am trying to remember what it felt like to believe/disjunction, non sequitur, injection/between sentences might constitute/meaningful struggle against the empire.”2 Hayward, however, sees the question as one that is still crucial, alive. He writes an entire essay on it, even as he complicates the possibility of an anti-fascist poetry.
I kept wanting to both push back at these moments when Hayward would go all out into love or the freedom of the crass and the stupid and the unthinking. I kept wanting to mock him. I kept wanting to inventory all the wrongs and hurts of my personal poetry disasters as evidence that the word “love” was the wrong word. But just when I would begin to roll my eyes, I would remember the endless moments I have sat in a room with other people and listened to fractured words and contorted language and how that can easily be compared to a besotted conviction, which is what I might call a close equivalent of love. And I also care about those moments and I would say I could barely know anything without them.
Scotch-tape networks have had a particular role in US poetry: they have for many years supported and maintained a poetry that might conventionally be understood as peculiar. And yet this sort of poetry is having a difficult time of it. The collapse of Small Press Distribution is but one example. And if I had to describe the sense of the room in general, I might do it as David Lau does in a recent issue of Lana Turner when he writes that the “avant-garde poetry is problematic today.” (He laments this understanding, just to be clear.) But really the scotch-taped always have a difficult time convincing anyone outside of the particular milieu to take them seriously and there is a many decades long history of various diatribes and complaints. Cathy Park Hong in “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” wrote one of the most powerful critiques ten years ago. It began: “To encounter the history of avant-garde poetry is to encounter a racist tradition.” It was a true statement, especially in 2014, although if there was a misdirection in the statement, it was that it was true about poetry in general. And even she admitted that she could have been talking about the deluded whiteness of any sort of poetry: “Avant-garde poetry’s attitudes towards race have been no different than that of mainstream institutions.” Still, the overly easy read of her essay—that the avant-garde is uniquely racist—is what remains, an argument that resembles a punch down in that it leaves the philanthropically supported poetries of the time and their delusions of whiteness unindicted. And yet, in all fairness, I have to admit that Wound Building is an example of the mainly white avant-garde that Hong no longer wants to fuck with (despite Hayward’s beautiful essay on Xu Lizhi and Raha and some paragraphs on Amiri Baraka).
What bothered Hong, what led her to proclaim “fuck the avant-garde,” was something more specific than the racial demographics of avant-garde poetry. It was the “luxurious opinion that anyone can be ‘post-identity.’” But I have trouble locating this luxurious opinion in the books that I read and love. Scotch-taped poets have for years used the atypical language possible in poetry to explore how the construction of the self is in an unavoidable state of redefinition all the time, a state that I understand as in no way “post-identity.” And at moments they have found this unavoidableness crucial. There are, in short, numerous reasons why someone might turn to an avant-garde to articulate something about identity for reasons other than luxury, and I think these reasons are enough to urge a caution around wholesale dismissals of the avant-garde or equivalent.
One recent example here is Violet Spurlock’s In Lieu of Solutions, recently published by Future Poem, a press edited each year by a “rotating panel of distinguished guest editors.” (The scotch-taped love complicated editorial protocols: teams of editors, rotating editors, tag team editors, etc.) Spurlock, who is trans, relies on a series of experimental formal conventions to hold the transitional: words are crossed out, some are bolded, others cross the page at peculiar angles, poems argue and talk about themselves and yet remain resolutely serious, rigorous, thoughtful. “What is not normal is the reduction of a body to hormone levels,” she writes, “What is not normal is the reduction of society to a vector complex” (36). And all of this refusal of whatever is normal about gender defines the content of the poems, too. “We debate about my tiny titties,” the poem “Epidermal Ripple Pools” begins, and then proceeds to do just that. “–You think they are getting bigger, / –I think they are getting smaller” (2). But not just that, the poem questions what words to use, even what words are: “I began by thinking about the words that I needed/But could not give myself./–One of those words was titties” (4). The poem is amusing and playful and dead serious all at the same time.
Another example, although from an entirely different direction, is Soong’s Comeback Death, recently published by Krupskaya, a press edited by a trio of poets. Soong’s poems are more clearly lyrical, more conventional in tone, less provocative in content, and focused on lineage. But she also takes on questions of identity and, similar to Spurlock, embrace-rejects them: “of all the things that can/find their words, I holds the least promise/and how I became a poet/is by desiring what I cannot command” (60). And yet, the embrace: each poem dedicated to a female poet or poets: the first to Sappho; the second to Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian; the third to Ingeborg Bachmann. The poems embrace what it means to be inside these various traditions that themselves wrestle with the I. These four poets of influence form a crucial nexus for Soong to think through something about identity while thinking about identity.
For instance, Soong configures Sappho not conventionally, not as the origin for the singular subject that defines lyric. Instead, she alludes to the Sappho that comes to us as a series of resonant phrases that float on the page, surrounded by odd punctuation and often not all attributed to a singular subject, a Sappho that became more and more common after Anne Carson’s translations in If Not, Winter. It is this floating up that defines the first poem, “1. Contempt,” which begins with a complicating of the self: “those years I did nothing, was nobody/to myself” (3). And then a few pages later, she writes, “still, as unknowing as I am/I didn’t both up what it is to be/poet, a damn cache makes/for many words love and contempt–/profuse, useful, and above all, to be leveraged/against the proper chord” (11). I feel like Hayward might agree with “poet, a damn cache” that makes “many words love and contempt.” And Spurlock might possibly, too, when she writes:
I felt like I was losing one body and seeking or receiving another
Via nefarious negotiations as if the making of the arrangements
Determined their outcome and why not it’s like the Marxists say
Nothing but the means of production my body a mere conduit
Spending hours of my life debating about routes of administration
When I know I prefer my opiates administered metaphysically
I don’t want want to know where it’s coming from I want to know
It’s coming from nowhere. (86-87)
This is one of the reasons that the scotch-taped still resonates for me: it lets room in for the coming from nowhere.
While both these books, I think, provide a useful beginning for a defense of poetry, I did not set out to write something that defended the scotch-taped, the self-organized, the non-institutionally supported. I set out to write something about having been lured into presuming that poetry was a part of a world that employed me and then realizing that it was not and then wondering what this freedom might make possible and whether I even felt this freedom was worthwhile. And yet this is where I ended up, provoked by Hayward’s example. It might be that I had to write this to stop myself from yet again calling up another mid- to late-in-life friend and lamenting how philanthropically supported everything about poetry has become, all those bio notes that are a list of prizes won, all those humble brags about this or that honor, all the ball gowns and tuxedos on Instagram. It might be that I wanted to remind myself that scotch-taped poetry is still a place that can hold all the weirdness of things otherwise, all the possibilities that these possibilities can be at moments good things, values I want to support.
But there is also another moment in Spurlock’s book that also caught me. She writes at the end of “Epidermal Ripple Pools,” “I recall asking a friend about her sex life. / She said, well my pussy doesn’t quite get hard these days” (5). And then the poem puts all its maybe-this-or-maybe-that aside and commits: “I love my friend’s pussy because a word was made different in response to a need” (5). And this sentence, Spurlock writes:
saved me because
–It articulated a form of life.
–A life in which the words we use are the words we need.
I love my friend’s pussy because I cannot speak its name without getting free. (5)
The getting free part, a word made different in response to a need: that is all I ever wanted from poetry. And from everything really.
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Endnotes
Juliana Spahr