I’m Not
Really Sure How the Stanza
about Stafford’s
deer in my last poem fits.
It just felt good, mostly,
to say
something mean about a poem
which is
generally regarded as great
by a lot
of people, including me. Because it
feels quite nice to violate
some of
the stuff I was taught
and have
genuinely believed
about what
can and cannot
go into
a poem.
About the kind of language
which can
or cannot go in,
about lyricism
(which, mind you, I do love),
about exactly
how much
intellectualizing,
and so
on and so forth. I realize, too,
(Sometimes
I just think
we need to look in the mirror
and tell ourselves frankly
that we’re assholes.
Americans,
I think,
have trouble with that. Maybe
it’s our repressive,
Puritan
background,
or maybe our John Waynian, masculine-defensive,
tough-fuck-hics vs. effete aristocratic British
foundations,
but we seem to have trouble admitting
that we’re assholes
to much of the world. How we always use language
like “democracy” and “decency”
in Central America or the suffering
Middle East
when the issue is really just money
oil or running shoes or french fries—
How we use the word “freedom”
when all we ever mean is the freedom
to buy and sell. How
we never give a shit
about dictators or human rights
until we start losing money.
How we say things like, “They’re destitute anyway,
we’re doing them a favor by giving them jobs”
about the people we employ
in sweatshops.
It embarrasses me, really,
to be American. Though of course,
you don’t exactly see me
taking the next boat out. You
don’t see me fighting
what my government does. I haven’t volunteered
for the Peace Corpse ((oh my god,
what a typo)) lately.
I don’t know what to do.
Though I do think self-scrutiny
is important because
it’s always so very
humbling,
and maybe results
in slightly more kindness—
kindness resulting from empathy
and sympathy—out on the streets, day by day,
as we creep through our circumscript
lives. Maybe. )
the audience
for this sort of poetry
has got
to be hugely
limited
in size. Maybe, then, it isn’t even
poetry. Maybe it’s just theory
or babbling or political ranting
in lines,
theory making use
of what
line breaks can do. Why not? There’s nothing mystical
about line
breaks, after all, formal or otherwise. Free
verse line breaks
have no
fundamental connection
to what
we often consider “the poetic”—i.e.,
the felt,
the intuitive, the Romantic, the unconscious, the beautiful, the semi-
otic. So why
not write theory, memoirs, reviews,
and so
on and so forth
in lines?
For one thing, as in most poetry, line breaks call attention
to artifice,
to the ritual and cultural and historical
positioning
of any piece of writing. And this,
I think,
is good
When I write “theory”
(like,
right)
in
lines, and perhaps because line breaks summon up
my background
in lyric poetry,
well, I
start to think autobiographically.
“I” tend to get featured a lot,
and the
piece seems to have muscles. You know,
the feeling
of stretching,
flowing, burning, and tearing which prose
of course
can also convey or be,
although
the click or thunk or long slow hush or suck
of air
which a line break makes, finally—
however
imperfect, nonmandatory, or do-able
by other
means—
is still
nice. And maybe helps to give theory
some body?
And maybe helps bring the theorist
herself
into the
light of the hot white lamp,
into the
narrowing circle
of judgment…
(Doing this kind of “theory poem,” see,
is like I’ve had myself arrested,
see,
for harebrained lack of focus, for
failure to make
choices, for being much too
cerebral
for most people’s tastes.
It’s like I’m on the proverbial hot seat,
see, I’m in the center of the circle
of noir male faces—
coppers and private dics,
hostile, demeaning, and demanding—
for my whishy-washy theorizing
for my utterly unresonant…poetrizing?)
My god, where am I?
Should I stay with the image of
the lamp? The heat and solidity and
gravity?
The hot circle, like noon,
which will
probably lead to some
epiphanic lyric moment, something to do
with the
ineffable and the male, the self’s noncoincidence
with itself,
with postponement and displacement, with the ever-boggling paradoxes
of mind
and flesh and the limits
of language?
I don’t want to go there. I won’t let this poem
do that.
I’m going to ignore
the image
of the lamp and the circle.
I WANT TO KEEP TALKING.
(This
whole issue of endings, after all,
is a big one. If we’re
interested, after all,
in what poems can be,
then endings—
insofar as they determine
emphasis, shape, content, and kind—
are practically everything.)
So how about:
“theoretical
autobiography”?
Autobiotheory. Awe-toe-buy-oh!-thuh-ree.
A type of theorizing
which is
nothing but the theorist’s
theoretical
scrutiny of the
theorist.
(Hell, why not? In fact, let’s all do it
together! Let’s get
monumentally
naked! Everybody, all
together now…)
Because the biggest sin of theory,
it seems to me,
is not
its jargon, nor its lack of body and heart,
nor its
difficulty, nor its obscurity, nor the inevitable limits of reason,
but its
built-in presumption
of objective
distance. Of course, if I now privilege
the personal
and the immediate and the naked and the “close”
above all
else and in opposition to
the impersonal,
abstracted, safe and “removed,” then I’m presuming and endorsing
a “self,”
aren’t I, some noncontingent, absolute, godlike
center
from which
we can measure distance,
goodness,
and human worth. And well, then, I’m
only endorsing
what I
claimed, at the start of this stanza, to hate:
totalitarian presumptions
of some
free and separate space
and God-on-my-side
ideation
which makes
self-questioning
out of
the question, which makes my argument, any argument coming from
me, or
my “heart”
beyond
question,
and many
scary things to follow
upon that
premise
(like branding
one fellow being
as good
and another
fellow being
as evil
and fuck
that).
How about a somewhat different
proposition: let’s PRETEND there is a god-like center, ok,
but it’s
centered absolutely nowhere
in particular.
(Except, perhaps, when viewed a certain way,
in particulars.
The ones we see, yes, but also the ones
we don’t.)
(Sweet
Jesus, help us.)
The center, that is,
could be
anywhere—in us,
in our
enemy, an enemy IDEA,
a speck of dust or Mt.
Everest,
right here
or in the next universe over.
Which means we
have to be
very very very very
careful
about what
we hurt.
Give everything, living or not,
the benefit
of the doubt.
(Oh
come on, what does such an ethic
mean, in the most specific, day to day sense? At school,
at work, in bed, in mourning, in
labor? In the chaotic
minutia
of everyday plodding along?
I don’t know.
That’s maybe a question
for a novelist or a writer
of realist, narrative, socially-oriented
poems. I’ve never been very good
at those. Besides,
maybe there’s no such thing
as “complicitous critique.”
Maybe any endorsement, any ethic at all
eventually goes sour, if not evil, becomes an INSTITUTION
—as likewise NON-
endorsement and the ABSENCE of ethic
eventually goes sour, if not evil, becomes an INSTITUTION…)
So anyway. In closing. Last but most
least: I’m endorsing non-egoistic, non-fetishistic,
non-monument-
producing,
monumental kindness. Like Buddhists: let’s
walk softly.
Try as best we can
not to
kill anything,
& hope like hell we’re not killed
when we
fail.