“Prefer a Wider Definition”: A Conversation Between Jonathan Farmer and Stephanie Burt
Stephanie Burt is a poetry critic and author of many books of both poetry and criticism. She is a professor of English at Harvard University and co-editor of poetry at The Nation. Her latest book Don’t Read Poetry was published in 2019 by Basic Books. Jonathan Farmer writes about poetry at Slate, and is Poetry Editor and Editor in Chief at At Length. He is the author of That Peculiar Affirmative, published in 2019 by Texas A&M University Press. Below they discuss some of their latest thinking on poetry, criticism, audiences, if poems and humans can be friends or not, and much more.
This conversation was conducted over email. As it begins, Stephanie and Jonathan get into the connections between life and criticism.
Stephanie Burt: These chapters have the kind of structure that comes from somebody making something they love—they’re neither fully armoured scholarly tracts nor book reviews. Did you have to work hard, or revise a ton, to find this kind of essay form?
Jonathan Farmer: I didn’t. (Which is not to say that I didn’t have to do a lot of revision.) For whatever reason, expository prose has always felt intuitive to me in a way that other linguistic forms—writing poems, making small talk, writing dialogue—haven’t. The first draft came together relatively fast fueled in part by the pleasure of making these essays, the ways that the poems turned generative in the right light, the ways they lent themselves to a kind of thinking that was fluid and felt rich, the ways that the writing, in its continuity, seemed to redeem the time I spent on it.
But it was also fueled by a sometimes-desperate hunger to complete something that would (or so I imagined) validate me. Writing has always been entangled with my desire to create an appealing identity for myself, which may be part of the intuitive quality of that kind of prose: it’s closely related to a kind of authority that’s always been a useful camouflage for me. That may suggest something about my inability to really understand what appeals to others or, more likely (more honestly), my fear of sticking my neck out too far. My social life has never included a lot of people who read poems, and so poetry was safer, off to the side. It risked eccentricity, but it also made it easier to seem like I knew what I was doing.
Regardless, that hunger—and the things it’s showed me about myself and about being a person over many years—is something I try to respect in this book. I try to be honest about my need for others, including potential readers, and I try to be attentive to the ways other people’s need for human connection and validation can shape both poems and their reception—the way poems, that is, can make us less alone, even in our loneliness.
This is a good opportunity to quote admiringly from your book, Stephanie:
Even the great poems of joy, love, attachment, and satisfaction … emerge from the ways in which we are shaped by pain and the ways not every joy can be shared. And the mixed feelings Auden found at the center of every good poem, the multiple uses and multiple pleasures I have been trying to help you find in poems, so often come back either to what we can share with others—to who’s listening—or to what we can make into song.
Your book doesn’t read as something especially personal, even though it’s incredibly welcoming. Still, I ended up wondering if some of what’s been going on in your life has informed your critical disposition (or maybe vice versa!). It feels, in retrospect, like I started seeing you explicitly talk about poems in terms of their potential audiences around the same time that you were beginning the public process of coming out as a trans woman. Throughout this new book, you seem to be making an argument about audiences—about discussing and recommending poems in terms of the different things people might want or need as opposed to what critics might think they should value. Did your decision to be, publicly, who you were—who you needed to be—have any influence on that turn in your criticism? Am I even right on the chronology?
SB: You’re nearly right on the chronology! I’ve been thinking about poems in terms of potential audiences for a lot longer than that, but coming out as binary trans and transitioning definitely helped me see the limits that come with an unmarked, default, or majority point of view. At least as important as my changing life has been the change in American poetry culture over the past five years, when it’s become clear that African American poetry feels like the centre of gravity, the centre of activity, not just to black poets but to nonblack poets, and it’s become clear that white poets and white critics need to engage with the history of white supremacy, and with structural racism, in order to make our art and do our job.
... it’s become clear that African American poetry feels like the centre of gravity, the centre of activity, not just to black poets but to no-black poets, and it’s become clear that white poets and white critics need to engage with the history of white supremacy, and with structural racism ...
Back to you, Jonathan: poems are like friends, but they’re not friends (they may trope friends); reading a poem is like getting to know a person, but only like it (not the same), and the best poems somehow acknowledge their status as trope (they’re not exactly the same as getting to know a person for real). I think that’s your thesis, or one of your theses. Is that right? Are there kinds of poetic goals you admire which that thesis leaves out?
JF: I’m not sure I agree with all of this. I think reading some poems (emphasis on “some”) is a way of getting to know someone. A poem includes all kinds of artifice and mediation and even misrepresentation, but so does conversation, so does touch. It doesn’t give us everything we need from another person, but neither does joking around, or sex, or praise, or a road trip. Poems aren’t friends—full stop. But they are the sum of the choices made by an individual human being, and those choices, in most cases, have to do with trying to communicate with other humans. And I think we can often learn a lot about another individual by paying attention to that—we can, that is, get to know them, albeit partially.
That brings to mind one of the many passages I underlined and starred from your book: “Of course, we can’t ever know [what it’s like to be another person]—we are not telepaths—but we can’t be sure we know our real-life, in-person friends either. We can, though, get the sense that we have come close...”
I’m most often interested in poems that seem to be presenting a version of the poet, and that of course leaves out all kinds of good and great poems—too many kinds to list, including many of the types you discuss in your book. But whatever the type of poem, it seems to matter immensely to me that it was made by a single person—in a way that it might not matter as much with a song, for example, or even a movie, with its collaborative and corporate origins.
Each of Don’t Read Poetry’s chapters focuses on one thing that poems can do well, and you occasionally suggest that there are other things that poems can’t do well, or that will make a poem less effective. That seems to imply that there is something that poetry is—certain qualities that are inherent to the art form.
Though you also write: “Poetry is not always anything except a name for a complicated history in which many people use words in many ways, making patterns that give readers and listeners pleasure, listening and changing many conventions and rules.” So maybe what you’re describing has to do with the dominant conventions?
Do you have a sense of what poetry is, or isn’t, that you can articulate?
SB: “Poetry is a name for a complicated history...” I stand by that. Patterns made of words with emotions behind them, maybe. That means some novels and nonfiction projects in prose also count as poems, if you read them that way. The Souls of Black Folk. Mrs. Dalloway. Engine Summer. Of course, there are fiction and nonfiction projects in verse, almost all from before about 1820, that count as poems, if you read them that way: The Loves of the Plants. Crabbe’s The Village. By some definitions (Arnold’s, for example) they are not poetry. But those definitions restrict poetry to interior states and spiritual projects (chapters one and four in my six-chapter scheme). I prefer a wider definition.
There are certainly some things for which you wouldn’t turn to poetry first, or fourth. Conveying complicated directions through three-dimensional space, for example, or proving a mathematical theorem. We have CGI and architectural blueprints and math for that. And there are kinds of personal experiences—physical, tactile, culinary and gustatory, say—for which, if you want to represent them adequately, poetry might not be your first choice. Or it might. Try it and see.
You say you almost never like funny poems, but your examples of not-quite-funny poems you do like (Hayes, McDonough) are all contemporary. Do you like the funny, or the satirical, poets of the past? Do you have time, in particular, ever, for Pope?
JF: Some of them! I mention the first poem from Astrophil and Stella in the book, and that seems like a wonderful comic poem to me. (I take great pleasure every year in acting out all the poem’s wildly mixed metaphors for my students.) But I think what I really cherish in those poems, and in so many older poems, is wit—by which I mean: displays of ingenuity, ways of writing that foreground surprising connections, a kind of intellectual and linguistic athleticism, sense-making turning into entertainment. Wit is a virtue I’ve been thinking about a lot lately as I try to figure out if there’s anything that’s true of all poems—or, at least, all poems in English. I’ve been wondering if wit isn’t woven so thoroughly into the traditions of poetry in English that even its absence takes on significance. I haven’t really come across any poems where that doesn’t seem true, but I’m always wary of generalizing, in part because I’ve read such a slender fraction of what’s out there.
Whether or not that’s right, I seem to cherish wit in poems both old and new, which was not at all the case when I started reading and liking and even sometimes depending on poems. Then, I hungered for sincerity, earnestness (or, the appearance of those). Now, though I’m still a sucker for that, too, I’m much more likely to see wit as a kind of generosity, whereas once upon a time it seemed selfish to me—and insincere—which was, I think, a result of my very limited imagination about people, including myself. Near the end of the humour chapter I spend some time talking about my friend Sean, who’s one of the funniest people I know, and how long it took me to understand how present he was in his joking.
... I seem to cherish wit in poems both old and new, which was not at all the case when I started reading and liking and even sometimes depending on poems.
I can still be painfully and even frustratingly earnest a lot of the time, but I’m much better at seeing how many ways there are of being fully and meaningfully human—and I’m more and more inclined, too, to think that being human is, all by itself, something extraordinary.
SB: Or just being sentient. Some of my best friends—X-Men fans, mostly—have problems with being human: they ID as mutants. Or in one case as cephalopods (jk/nk).
JF: I’d love to talk to you about taste, which seems to be central to Don’t Read Poems. I always find it helpful to think about the metaphor buried in that term—taste. Our taste in food is partly personal (and in some cases, strictly genetic, as in our responses to cilantro) and partly cultural. Food critics and others have spent a long time worrying about what kinds of food people should and shouldn’t like and implicitly evaluating people based on their preferences. And yet, those preferences rarely begin in ethics (though they can have ethical implications) and are distinct from (but entangled with) questions of what is good for us. How do you, as a critic and as a person, think about taste? Should we try to change it, serve it, investigate it? All or none, or something else altogether?
SB: Understand, investigate, and expand. Especially since gustatory taste is sometimes a proxy for other forms of culture (grade schoolers get introduced to the diversity of world cultures, and of US ethnicities, through holidays and through foods). I prefer to liken taste in poetry to taste in food, rather than adhering to a post-Kantian attempt to separate them. As with food, though, there is poetry where if you consume no other kind, only this kind, you and the people around you may regret the consequences. Imagine consuming nothing but Robert Lowell. Or Percy Shelley.
More generally: yours is a great book about how poetry works, but almost all the nondramatic examples come from the last 100 years. You must teach older poems sometimes. What older poets matter to you most? Are there older poems that underlay—or complicate—your arguments?
JF: I do. I start my 10th grade classes, every year, with 16th and 17th century British poetry, and that, along with Macbeth (which I teach around the end of the second quarter) is probably my favorite part of teaching. (One other contender—my honours seminar, which alternates between Gwendolyn Brooks one year and Elizabeth Bishop the other.) I stuck to more recent poems in the book mostly because I don’t feel qualified to write about older ones; my understanding of their historical context, my knowledge of the different shades of meaning words had then versus now, my familiarity with the conventions and references that were important to them: all of it just feels too thin to make a confident statement about those poems.
Do they complicate my arguments? A little. I do love reading poems in concert with their authors’ biographies, and for so many of those poets, there’s just not much biography to go on. And all the gaps in my knowledge that I mentioned above lead to me placing a greater emphasis on structure in ways that seem less likely to conjure a specific person, as does my sense that lyric poetry was more often more thoroughly performative then. At times, the pleasure I take in older poems feels more nearly escapist—or more like the pleasure I might take in actual music, or puzzles, or math. The stakes change for me, and I welcome that. The author is less present and so, it seems, am I (or, at least, much of what I usually recognize as myself).
You do a great job of presenting continuities, sometimes surprising ones, across different periods and traditions. And I suspect that as a professor you spend a lot of time teaching older poems. Do you respond differently to them? Do those poets feel as present or seem as imaginable to you as a contemporary American poet might?
SB: Their techniques feel different at times—rhyme in the 18th century works differently from the way rhyme works in poets who use rhyme today. At times their technique feels similar, though. There’s not all that much distance between Pope or Jonson trying to coin a proverb and Hass or Glück or even Hayes (“There never was a black male hysteria”) trying to do the same thing.
Honestly, I think that 17th century poets differ as much one from another as they do from some of their 21st century heirs. It drives me up a tree the way so many contemporary readers—including some of my friends!—find it easy and pleasant to navigate around so many territories of the contemporary and then freeze up or run away when asked to check out the English-language past.
What were the challenges, and what were the discoveries, as you figured out how personal to make this book, how much of your own feeling (“the poem does sound kind to me in ways that I think have to do with more than what is broken in me”) to put in?
JF: I was rarely making conscious decisions about this. It really just came from trying to be answerable to the poems and the ideas and the shapes that the writing was making. I was often desperate to get it right without even knowing for sure what “right” was. I just wanted so badly to make something good and to say something that seemed true. And so a lot of it was discovery. I was often surprised by where the essays led, which is part of the reason there was so much pleasure alongside the hunger. I always looked forward to getting back to these.
What about you? I said earlier that your book doesn’t seem especially personal, but you’re certainly not hidden in this book. There’s a lot of first-person singular, and you talk about your position in relationship to some of these poems. Is there a line you try to draw, as a critic, between acknowledging your individual and, for lack of a better word, demographic perspective and something that might feel more introspective or self-revelatory?
SB: Hmm. I don’t think there can be a hard and fast line. When I’m operating as a poetry critic I try not to say anything about a poem that obviously or uniquely emerges from who I am when I’m dnot reading poems. Except when the assignment lets me do otherwise, I try to describe only the kinds of responses that somebody coming from another subject-position—somebody who’s not trans, or not white, or not a professor, or not a parent, or not an amateur melodica player, or not an X-Men fan—might conceivably share. Of course, I sometimes write personal essays where those aspects of my life come to the fore. There’s a sense in which all writing about lyric poetry requires introspection on the part of the critic. But some of that introspection ends up just implied, not spelled out, in the published critical work, which ought to bring the reader closer to the poem, even if the reader is not much like the critic, in demographic terms.
JF: And one more question about criticism: I’ve noticed in general that you’ve been using the word “good” as a term of praise more frequently in recent years. (Or, at least, it’s looked that way to me.) I think that’s interesting, and I’d love to hear more about that decision.
SB: I hadn’t noticed! I suppose one could do some digital humanities work and find out. The word “good” conflates aesthetic pleasure and ethics and social efficacy in a way that I dislike, but the word also has the advantage of sounding colloquial, informal, everyday. I dislike “great” under most circumstances (unless it’s sarcastic). I like more specific terms of praise: “lovely,” “helpful,” “beautiful,” “powerful,” “mysterious,” “peppery,” “catchy,” “deft,” “strong,” “sweet.”
SB: Back to your own book: What about poets who are nonblack and nonwhite? I realize that you couldn’t get everybody you admire into the book, but/and the book’s treatment of race and ethnicity is very much about black and white. Who are your favorite poets now from other backgrounds?
JF: That, for me, is the book’s most glaring failure. It’s very much a book about blackness and whiteness, in part because that was a part of my own education that I was very belatedly wrapped up in (and still am). It was amazing to me to get near the end of the book and realize how much of contemporary America I’d left out of a book focused largely on contemporary American poems.
A very short list, since I always feel like I’m leaving out more the more writers I list. Paisley Rekdal, who does come up in the book, has been very important to me. Athena Farrokhzad’s White Blight (or, to be more accurate, the translation of it by Jennifer Hayashida) is one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a long time. I think Phillip Metres is wonderful. So is David Tomas Martinez. Victoria Chang keeps getting better from book to book and is always a delight to read. I love Jaswinder Bolina’s new book, and though I’m biased (she’s a friend and was one of my two primary readers for this book), I think Sumita Chakraborty is brilliant. I’ve been a big fan of Sherman Alexie’s poetry, and in fact had some of his poems in this book, but I took them out because I’m no longer sure how to think about his poems in light of what he’s apparently done to a lot of people. I’ve seen some remarkable poems from Oliver de la Paz recently.
There’s a paragraph near the end of your book that I want to quote in full:
You don’t have to be medieval to enjoy Chaucer any more than you have to be British, or Nigerian, or a Londoner to get Agbabi (and I certainly hope you don’t have to be a trans white Jewish American college professor to read me). If you start to think about literary history, though—about the communities that poets make possible, about who can join them, and how, and when, and why—you will have to think about who gets the chance to speak and publish and write, and why, and on what terms. Too often, school-approved literary history has placed (whether or not the teachers intended to do so) white, rich, urban, cisgender men at the centre, treating their experience as universal and other poets as special cases. The monumental unfairness of Western history, including literary history, is no reason to stop reading Keats (who was far from rich), but it is a reason to ask—as poets interested in community and tradition have had to ask—how a literary community, and a literary history, a history not just of authors but of styles and ways to read, looks if you put (for example) Caribbean writers, or people who grew up poor, or women raising young children, at its centre.
First off, yes. This gets so much right. And I’d love to talk to you a little more about identity here. We—as a literary community, as a country, as individuals—are very much defined and defining ourselves right now in terms of how we respond to the kinds of injustice you describe here (or how we refuse to acknowledge them). In some of our public conversations about identity, I feel like we (many of us) end up doing something like what happens with the phrase “write what you know”—which is to say, we create shortcuts in service to something essential. Kaitlyn Greenidge wrote a great column about this for The New York Times—arguing that instead of avoiding writing about others, we need (especially those of us who are, like me, the inheritors of profound privilege and power) to make ourselves more accountable. (As regards “write what you know,” the better advice would be “know what you write.”)
I wonder if you have any sense of where we might go, how we might embrace our current flourishing—rooted in part in a greater willingness to centre a lot of identities—while also finding and preserving ways of engaging our shared humanity, or our shared fate as sentient creatures on a warming planet, or anything else we share? As someone who reads a lot of contemporary poems, do you see anyone who’s doing this especially well?
As regards ‘write what you know,’ the better advice would be ‘know what you write.’
SB: That’s a tall order! I like to send people comic book panels, as you probably know, and one of my favorites has She-Hulk, who is at least seven feet tall, bright green, can lift a bus, and is also a skilled, versatile lawyer, taking a break from her desk, and telling herself, “No one is only one thing.” I like poems and poets that recognize how we are more than one thing. Hayes comes to mind. So does Dana Levin. So does Brandon Som, whose first book holds up exceptionally well. So does Allan Peterson. So does Lisa Robertson, when I understand her, which is maybe half the time. I’m hoping the other half will open its wisdom up to my eyes soon.
Quoting you: “Poetry is in part a place where the otherwise-intolerable might, with enough care, eventually be said.” I agree! Can you say more about saying the unsayable, or the intolerable? Is the situation different when the society won’t let you say it directly (on the one hand) and when you won’t let yourself say it, or see it (on the other)? (This question could easily turn into an hour-long discussion of Hart Crane.)
JF: Because of the conventions and associations we’ve built up around that term, “poetry,” and not (or not as much), because of anything inherent in the art (if there’s anything inherent in it at all; I’m convinced that there is), one of the things poetry can do is authorize a different way of acting, talking, thinking, etc. This is true of most kinds of interactions: we have different expectations for what we should talk about, say, in a classroom, or in a mosque, or in bed (and of course those expectations will vary from person to person, family to family, culture to culture, and moment to moment, etc.). In this country, for quite a while, we’ve tended to see poetry as an art form that lives (lurks, even) at the margins—where we sometimes exalt it, often fear it, occasionally cherish it. And with that, along with a lot of other things in the traditions and assumptions we’ve inherited and claimed, comes an assumption that this is a place to say what might be out of place at family dinner, or at work, or even among friends.
The distinction you draw between different kinds of prohibitions is an interesting one. Yes, I imagine, the situation must be different, but I imagine that there are so many other variables in there that the nature and degree of that difference must vary beyond the reach of categorization. (And of course, those two kinds of prohibitions are often tangled beyond any hope of seeing where one leaves off and the other begins.) It may be worth adding here that another one of the conventions of poetry, for many of us, is that they’re the product of painstaking, even slow work, and that once finished they often take a long time to reach others and, even then, might be missed by many of the people who are otherwise part of our lives. So, I think that changes it, too: you have so much time to get a poem right before anyone else will see it.
As you know, I have an outsized chip on my shoulder about “the unsayable,” if by that you mean what language can’t convey, rather than what we don’t feel permitted to say. I’ve read a lot of criticism lately that posits or assumes an inherent connection between poetry and “the unsayable.” I don’t know how you look at the history of poetry in English (to say nothing of other languages, which I know only through translation, and not nearly enough) and come to that conclusion. I think it forecloses our imaginations in the present moment both to what might be written and to some wonderful poetry that people are already writing. I seem to get more and more interested in the sayable, the observable, the public, the patterned, etc. And I want to read (and try to write) poems that deal with all of those. Beyond that, I’m enough of a literalist (and enough of a curmudgeon) to balk at the (admittedly deliberate) illogic of the phrase “saying the unsayable.” And since I don’t see any way of drawing a clear line between poetry and prose, I don’t know why poetry would have some unique claim to the unsayable, whatever that really is. Are those categories any clearer for you?
I seem to get more and more interested in the sayable, the observable, the public, the patterned, etc.
SB: Hmm. I think there are poems and poets and kinds of poems that really do want to reach for a truth beyond language, or for a truth bound up with unreason, just as there are religious practices that do so. Some people and some religious practices are mystical or anti-rational. Some aren’t. Same with poems.
The poets and poems that do want to reach “the unsayable,” the ineffable, the condition of music, etc. differ one from another: sometimes they want to represent ultimate evil or world-historical tragedy (Celan). Sometimes they want to reach God. Sometimes they want to represent really good sex. Sometimes they want to imitate instrumental music, or mime the impossible questions of modern philosophy (arguably, that’s Mallarmé).
Certain Romantic and post-Romantic poetry critics—and here I agree with you—have treated these kinds of poems as better, or more important, or more essentially poetic, than poems that pursue the civic, the explicit, the conversational, the clear. Those critics are wrong.
You again: “This is the Bishop I love most.” How much does Bishop (whose poem gave you your title) inform your whole outlook? Is there a Bishop in your head to whom you compare new poetry? Who else might be in your head?
JF: As to your last two questions: I suspect so. And I’m not sure. Those things are pretty opaque to me. There’s an element of criticism that’s trying to stand in the position of some other reader—imagining how I might value this if I were someone else, perhaps the kind of person for whom it seems to be meant. But my insight into my own taste is always a little murky. I can describe the poem and the way it works, and hopefully in doing so I’m able to show why someone else might care about it, but that’s not quite the same thing.
That said, I think part of the reason that Bishop matters to me is that she seems to refract a lot of my own personality and disposition. So often in her poems, usually long before I’m conscious of it, I’m encountering aspects of myself, including my own limitations, but they never lead anywhere I could have imagined. And then, too, there’s something about her ability to sustain something so long without hurry or slackening that I find profoundly consoling. I have a complicated relationship to time, or so I’m coming to believe. It seems to me that time is the fundamental human medium, and I often (though less often than I used to) feel out of step with it, misaligned, stuttering while it runs on, stalled. Reading Bishop’s poems seems to change that for me. They carry time, modulate time, carry my attention through time, exceptionally well.
Are there any poets you go to for consolation? Also, of the potential virtues of poems that you lay out in the book, are any especially important to you?
SB: Bishop, Marianne Moore, Donne, Whitman. For a long time that list would have included William Carlos Williams. W. H. Auden. George Herbert. Jarrell. Lowell. Stevens. Wordsworth. Probably it will again next year. I’ve taught those poets so often that I may be burned out on them temporarily.
All the virtues matter to me, but I probably seek out feeling, skill, and community more often than I seek out difficulty or wisdom.
Is poetry itself a way of presenting “the life not lived”? (Can novels do this too? Or movies or comics or games?)
All the virtues matter to me, but I probably seek out feeling, skill, and community more often than I seek out difficulty or wisdom.
JF: No, but some poems are. As are some novels, movies, comics, wistful conversations, schmaltzy paintings ...
To go back to an earlier question, are there things that you think poems can’t or shouldn’t do?
SB: “You can say anything in a poem. You just have to place it properly” (Robert Lowell, and he was right on this one).
I agree that Citizen imagines “the impossibility of speaking to everyone.” And yet some of us have told a story for so long about how lyric poetry aspires to speak to everyone. What happens to that aspiration as a matter of genre? (Do you see poems splitting up into poems that wish they could be universal, and poems that know they’re not?)
JF: And maybe poems that do some of both, or that play with one on the way to the other … I do think there’s value, even necessity, in saying “we” sometimes, along with the importance of understanding the intellectual and moral risks of doing so. We’re always navigating all of these layers of identity, different kinds of collectivity, different elements of atomization. Whether we’re talking about poetry or politics or anything else, I don’t want those things to stop talking to each other. I’m not sure they can.
As you know, I was heartened by your approach to poems in this new book. Most discussions of poetry, and especially most of the definitions of it that I’ve read lately, feel alienating to me. Still, I wonder if there isn’t a risk in atomizing ourselves as readers. As the categories we find in bookstores break into the algorithmic recommendations of websites like Amazon or Netflix—or the consumption of news from places like Fox, or the customized and addictive feeds of social media—is there also some value in encouraging readers to step outside of their own tastes or tendencies? Was your approach in the various chapters—laying an ancient poem next to a contemporary one, shifting from a poem in English to one translated from a language and culture many Americans know little about—an attempt to counterbalance that?
SB: YES.
JF: And, a related question, how much of the value of poems comes from our belief in something called poetry—and from the received assumption (right or wrong) that it has a specific and exalted and even uniform purpose?
SB: None. But some kinds of poems do have exalted purposes. Imagine if we thought all doctors were heart surgeons. That would be a pretty bad mistake. But it wouldn’t decrease the value of heart surgery. Unless we started making rheumatologists and allergists perform it.
What do you want to see a poet do that, as far as you know, no contemporary poet has done, or tried to do?
JF: It’s not so much that no one’s doing these things, as that I don’t feel like we’re very good at recognizing them or discussing them right now. Public poetry. Explicitness. Poems as entertainment, as potential page turners. The potential for poems to excel at many of the things we’ve consigned to prose, including being well-written in the ways we might describe various kinds of prose as well-written. Continuity (as opposed to disruption, which is not to say that there isn’t a place for disruption, too, even alongside or in tension with continuity.)
The potential for poems to excel at many of the things we’ve consigned to prose, including being well-written in the ways we might describe various kinds of prose as well-written.
You introduce Don't Read Poetry as a response to your frustration with “books that told their readers, and teachers who told their students, that poetry was one thing.” As you know, I share that frustration, but I suspect you've read and heard more of those narrow descriptions than I have. Do you see new or familiar patterns in the ways that critics and teachers are defining poetry in the past few years? Any things that are especially likely to be privileged—or left out?
SB: I think teachers—especially high school teachers—do a better job more often at recognizing that performance-oriented poetry, “slam poetry” (a bad name for it), rough-edged, sometimes apparently improvised poetry, really is poetry. It’s about time.
I wish we would all pay more attention to poets from outside the United States, and from outside the last fifty years. There’s a lot, and we’re missing most of it.
P.S. Dear Readers, for more from Jonathan and Stephanie, check out the accompanying discussion, to be published in The Town Crier shortly after this issue is released. There you’ll find Jonathan and Stephanie discussing poetry’s reception in the wider culture, and reading a poem from, you guessed it, outside of the United States.
