“A Poem as a Way of Interacting with Others”: In Conversation with Jonathan Farmer and Stephanie Burt // E Martin Nolan

Interviews Editor E Martin Nolan follows up on “Prefer a Wider Definition,” which appears in the Summer 2019 Issue of The Puritan.

E Martin Nolan: The title of your conversation is: “Prefer a Wider Definition.” That is drawn from something Stephanie wrote about including some prose in the definition of “the poetic,” but it is also a theme that runs throughout the conversation. It comes up in terms of poetry being entertaining and funny, and not just serious and difficult. It also comes up in terms of representation in the poetic tradition and whether poetry is a public art or confined to the academy and intellectual spheres of culture.My question is: do you see that definition reflected in the world? Is poetry expanding its influence, or being defined more broadly in recent years? Performance, or slam, poetry is increasingly popular. Beyoncé’s use of Warsan Shire’s poetry in Lemonade was very good for poetry as a popular form (Beyoncé performed those poems exquisitely). And, of course, if you consider Cardi B and J Cole to be poets (and academia increasingly does), well, poetry is incredibly popular. To simplify: It is my belief that if you have language, then poetry is inevitable. But the reception poetry receives is not guaranteed. Have you seen that change in the time you’ve been writing about it and teaching it?

Jonathan Farmer: Stephanie is better qualified to answer this than I am, so I’ll defer to her. I’ll admit, though, that the popularity (or lack thereof) of poetry is weirdly unimportant to me. Late in my book, I quote William Carlos Williams’ defense of poetry:

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

There are two ways of reading the phrase “what is found there.” It can refer to something that is found there and only there, or to something that is found there and in other places. I suspect Williams intends the former, but I just don’t see it that way. What people “die” of—he means that figuratively—isn’t the lack of poems. It’s the absence of love, of hope, of meaning, of the sense that your experience has some place in the world around you. For some people, some poems can (sometimes) provide some of that—as can the sense that we’re engaged with something called “poetry.” For others, that’s the last place they would (or should) look. And for that reason, it does matter immensely that more ways of engaging with and writing poems are receiving validation, including—maybe especially—poems that engage with and foreground cultural experiences and relationships to language that had been marginalized before. But if people would rather engage with movies or comic books or food or friends (not that any of those are exclusive of reading poems), that’s fine with me. 

Stephanie Burt: Comic books are great! Also, food is necessary to human life, which poetry—defined as the artful, emotionally charged arrangement of words, especially but not only when those arrangements are short or non-narrative or in verse—probably isn’t. “If you don’t need poetry bully for you” (Frank O’Hara). I’ve been writing about poetry long enough—because I’m an Old now—to see its reception change a couple of times, within the North American (and to some extent the British) academy and outside of it. During the 1990s there were critics who insisted that poetry in pre-modernist, metered forms (printed or recited without music) could regain the audience that modernist poets had (supposedly) lost. There were also critics (most of them coming from outside the discourse of book-based, prize-winning poetry) who insisted that performance poetry, rap lyrics and pop lyrics were the most vital kind of poetry out there. The first kind of critics were often on the political right; the second kind were often writers of colour. The second kind had a very good case; the first kind were, I think, confused about the history of taste and the history of media, although I like some of the dead poets they like (Longfellow in particular).At this point—because they circulate on the Internet so easily—popular poems can become extraordinarily popular, very rapidly, even without (or prior to) certified critics’ validation. My favorite example is Patricia Lockwood’s “Rape Joke,” but you could also point to Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” or even to Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again,” which bounces around the Internet all the time, and not because Hughes experts consider it his best poem. (I love Hughes. I don’t like that poem at all.)Those are all poems that weren’t initially sung, and that didn’t get validated by pop stars before the poets became well known. Warshan Shire, of course, did. Nothing wrong with that. I wish more pop stars treated more poets that way. Poetry—both in the expanded sense (the one that includes Virginia Woolf’s prose and Angel Haze’s rap lyrics and Scott Miller’s songwriting) and in the more restricted sense (the one that includes Shire and Oliver and Philip Sidney and Archilochus but excludes Woolf and Miller)—depends on critics less now than it did for most of the 20th century. There are more channels by which a poem, or a poet, can acquire a reputation somewhere. And “reputation” isn’t a linear thing. A poet can have a high reputation in one place or among one set of readers while remaining in low repute, or simply unknown, elsewhere, and there’s a limit to what one critic can do about that, even in 2019. (Canadian readers already know this. If I could get Mary Dalton US readers by climbing the Chrysler Building or eating nothing but black beans for a week, I would very seriously consider it, although my loved ones would probably talk me out of the beans.)

EMN: That transitions me nicely to my other question, which I’ll make a two-parter. Stephanie, you just touched on the poem-reader connection, which connects to a question explored in your conversation (and feel free to tweak my interpretation): to what extent is a poem a human thing, a thing that might stand in for humanity? Jonathan, in you your book you write about “trying to map the rich, unlikely relationships that occur between imperfectly imagined poet and unimaginable reader.” I think the key word there is “occur,” because it implies that reading poetry is a process, an occurrence that is experienced, as opposed to some static thing that is examined. That concept brings to mind something I’ve been thinking a lot about. In “Thought and Language” the Russian psychologist and proto-linguist Lev Vygotsky claimed (with experimental support) that “word meanings are dynamic rather than static formations.” That dynamism is borne of the social nature of language: “The word is a thing in our consciousness ... that is absolutely impossible for one person, but that becomes a reality for two.” Here’s how the essay ends: “Consciousness is reflected in a word as the sun in a drop of water. A word relates to consciousness as a living cell relates to a whole organism, as an atom relates to the universe. A word is a microcosm of human consciousness.” Given that, can we put the following claim to a test? Claim: if what Vygotsky says of the word is true, then is poetry a particular way, or history, of transferring consciousness? Is the imperfection of that transfer process what leads to much of the joy and surprise of poetry? Is that why it can’t go away until we all go away? I want to read your thoughts on that, but I also want to see how those thoughts play out in practice. So let’s consider Laboni Islam’s “Field Marks” as a kind of test case for this claim. It’s a poem concerned with discerning, watching, and interpreting. It’s about what we actively bring to that process, but also what’s outside of us. What do you think? 

JF: I’m not sure about transfers of consciousness. I find it more helpful to think about writing a poem as a way of interacting with others—and of reading a poem as a kind of interaction, too, though one that usually doesn’t reach back to the author. When we say that a work of art moves us, that seems like a fairly literal description of something a poem can do: it creates kinds of motion in our brains and sometimes, in the rest of our body, too. What impresses me most about “Field Marks”—which is wonderful, by the way—is the way it moves, and the way that my mind, in moving with it, delights in discovering the sophisticated orchestrations behind those movements. One way of tracing that is looking at what happens to the pronouns in the poem. The subject of the first sentence is “I,” and the speaker is describing a situation in which the stakes are relatively small. Starting the poem with the word “sometimes” adds to that impression, as does the lack of particulars. The signals all say that there’s not much of consequence here—so much so that it puts me on alert for something more significant to emerge. There’s a tantalizing quality to it. After the first sentence, the poem gets more impersonal. There’s a “they” at the end of the second sentence, a distancing “they say.” The next sentence is not only without pronouns; it has no subject at all. It’s very remote, almost disengaged. And then the next two sentences are commands. The subject is implied: “you.” And the voice is becoming more authoritative—it’s the voice of an expert, who can tell someone how things are supposed to be done. (The pronouns here, the explicit ones, are all versions of “it,” which is an accurate pronoun for a bird but an awful one for a person—and soon enough the speaker is going to connect herself to the bird). As I read it, the speaker is putting on that voice—she could be the “you” just as much as I am. That sense gets sharpened by the next sentence, in which the subject is once again “I”: this time, though, “I” is the first word of the sentence, and what she (the “I”) does now feels more pointed, more personal: she “feel[s] for the birds,” so she’s no longer aligned with the authority, the watcher, but rather with the watched. And in one sense, that transit feels surprising, unwilled—as if it’s a completely spontaneous response to the vulnerability of the birds, and in particular to the recognition that they face “love and fear.” But in another way, it feels orchestrated—a payoff on the initial sense that something more important was afoot. And I feel pleasure in being able to stand in both of those places at once, as well as feeling touched by the emergence of this more tangible person, this person who is vulnerable to the sentience of other creatures. The next sentence returns to that tone of authority—“Group hysteria causes misidentification.” But now, instead of representing the authority of the expert birders, it’s presenting an authoritative critique of them—and, of course, not just of them. Because now the poem is presenting its actual topic, one that finally becomes explicit in the next sentence, with its mention of “prejudice.” So even as it refuses to break its posture—to step outside of the subject that is now, unmistakably, a metaphor—the poem deepens dramatically. There are three more sentences, and they alternate between “you” and “I,” with the “you” being a reader a lot like me: someone who is in a position to make assumptions about the child of immigrants who aren’t white, and to make assumptions about where she does (and doesn’t) belong. In the first of those three sentences, she’s once again using a command, but this time it’s very different because the authority is hers, and the “you” is someone she has claimed (and, I would also say, earned, by dint of her sophisticated artifice, her agility) authority over, so much so that she can tell me, in the poem’s sweeping, small, final sentence, what’s in my head. (All of this is sharpened by the shorter sentences that conclude the poem, making everything more pointed.) I’ve been trapped by the poem—in the way a bird might be caught in a trap—but I’m happy to be caught there. That pleasure probably depends on my being sympathetic to the poem’s animating claims, but it’s also a function of having been moved so artfully, as if by an extremely skillful magician. A professor of mine, Michael Ryan, used to describe poetry as “serious play.” I don’t think that’s true of all poems, but it is true of many of the poems I cherish, including this one. My descriptions here of one of the ways in which the poem moves are part of my interaction with it, but the poem doesn’t need those descriptions to work. I think an attentive reader is likely to feel the effect of those shifts on a first read, whether or not they go back to articulate the mechanisms behind them. And it matters to me that all this is taking place in the context of something that needs to be said—something that compels speech and compels listening. I don’t think Islam has transferred her consciousness to me. The poem in fact tells and shows me very little about what it’s like to be her. Rather, she’s shown me a lot about what she can do, which is one of the pleasures poems can provide (as Stephanie describes in her book)—a demonstration of mastery over the circumstances of our being, including the words we speak, and including, at least within the framework of this poem, the kinds of bigotry that elsewhere act on her.

SB: Jonathan, I love those remarks. I don’t have nearly as much to say, given how much you’ve said! I also like that poem—thanks for showing it! “The birds in your head/ shape every bird you see.”All the poems I know have been made by humans, and if we build an AI or meet dolphins or aliens who can communicate with us at length and share what we recognize as art, to that extent I suppose their art, their poems, will be human or human-compatible too. Powerful, memorable poems usually ask me to imagine a human being behind them, an implied author whose interests and feelings show up directly or indirectly within the poem. That’s also true of novels; it’s less true or not true at all for investigative journalism and other kinds of expository or narrative prose. So if, when we read a poem, we imagine a person (whether that’s a person full of evident feeling or a person who likes making puzzles and setting traps for us), then I suppose poems do convey imagined consciousness from writer to reader. You never know if what you get is really what the actual author wanted you to get, but the same is true even in face to face conversation. As O’Hara says, “You go on your nerve.” And some of my best friends are androids.