poetry is not a luxury (audre lorde)

{tree stumps below sarrail falls, kananaskis}

I recently stumbled across this webpage (http://www.goodreports.net/) and read a few essays by the author, Alex Good, that critique the current scene of published poetry in Canada. He primarily writes book reviews (see Carmine Starnino’s ‘The New Canon’), but I found a few rants as well under the essays and reviews section. (See: “The Morning After”, an essay from 2001 dealing with April as National Poetry Month, etc)

Now, currently I am debating whether or not to send him a little note, because the more I think about what he has to say about poetry, the more I wonder if he has actually read any recent poetry...

So I read these essays – he said some things I agree with (e.g. some poetry is pretentious), as well as some things I vehemently disagree with (which I will discuss in a moment). However, overall I just dismissed them as just another person who doesn’t like (hasn’t read??) much contemporary poetry, and I suppose I agreed with him in some ways when he talked about how pretentious some poetry can be, etc. It’s true. It can be.

But not all poetry now is like that, not by any means at all. Not at all.

Tonight I watched a film ‘Listening for Something’ that is all conversations between Adrienne Rich and Dionne Brand, and is beautiful and thoughtful and illuminating in every possible way – it’s so fascinating to listen to them discuss politics and class issues in a thoughtful, respectful, yet provocative way, and then hear them read their poetry, in a way that is like collaborative storytelling... and immediately I thought back to these things that Good has written. And I just couldn’t understand the place from which he writes, I couldn’t understand how he could be missing so much.

In his piece called ‘The Morning After’, he writes:

“The dullness of today's poetry has become so pervasive, such a given, that we have to force ourselves to remember that poetry is not at all dull by nature. Donne is not dull. Blake is not dull. Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, and Pound are not dull. Reading new poetry, however, nearly always bores me to tears, and for many of the reasons we have just been canvassing: its sameness, the lack of imagination and energy in the language and verse, and the unalterable truth of human nature that it is never very interesting listening to people talk about themselves.”

see: http://www.goodreports.net/essays/themorningafter.htm

Or, in his review of the ‘The New Canon’, he implies that most of the poetry being written is detached & irrelevant:

“But it has always been the long poem, the epic, that most directly addressed, allegorically or otherwise, our deepest political, religious, intellectual, cultural, and social concerns... The non-narrative, non-thematic, non-intellectual (indeed anti-intellectual) poetry of epiphany and observation, no matter how exquisitely crafted and brilliantly realized, is no replacement.”

see: http://www.goodreports.net/reviews/thenewcanon.htm

And so, I can’t help but feel incredulous. He deifies Donne, Pound, all those past poets – but has he ever read Dionne Brand? Adrienne Rich? They are writing now, still writing, and I’d hardly call them dull or irrelevant – they both are the first to come to mind when I think of poetry that is deeply socially, politically, spiritually, & intellectually aware.

And he is so quick to denigrate the non-epic poetry – doesn’t he understand that all realizations, all powerful statements come from ‘epiphany and observation’. (Even the themes that find their way into epic poems begin here!) That’s the only way we ever come to understand anything at all. To be able to express your own moments of clarity, comprehension, emotion, idea is the most potent thing I can think of – I am so unspeakably, inexpressibly thankful for writing for inspiration. I truly am. Being able to express my feelings and experiences and thoughts in a way that even a few people find relatable and meaningful saves me.

He needs to read Rich’s “What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics” – perhaps after reading some of these essays he will finally see that there is a connection between poetry and everything. That a person who says ‘I don’t understand poetry’ is losing so much, that a person who reads two poems in junior high school and decides poetry is ‘dull’ because it doesn’t flash like a television & does involve thinking, and feeling, is selling themselves short.
In her piece entitled, ‘To invent what we desire’, she quotes Audre Lorde: “Poetry is not a luxury.” And that in itself, is so much of what her writing embodies. Poetry is necessary, and accessible, & can be created & understood by everyone. It is, as she writes, “activity and survival.”

So I am very close to writing a friendly little letter to this Alex character, suggesting that he go to his nearest library, rent this film, tell him to listen to these women discuss what inspires them, drives them -- issues of race and gender and sexuality, the politics of the countries in which they reside, dying, living, disease, desire, everything. And then he can listen to their poetry (full of striking imagery & delicious phonology), like Dionne Brand’s ‘No Language is Neutral’, Adrienne Rich’s ‘An Atlas of a Difficult World’ and be moved by poetry that is relevant, political, full of passion, anything but dull.