- Sydney,
as the former Vermont Poet Laureate, how would you summarize the state of
poetry today, in terms of society embracing it?
It seems odd, but the number of aspirant readers of poetry seems to be
greater than its readers. Or perhaps not so odd after all: we live in a
world– social and political– in which language is constantly debased (I
think of the idiocies of advertising, which speaks, say, of a car as
"an American Revolution"), distorted, or undercut (think of the
shorthand language of Tweets and texts) that it's small wonder there
remain many among us, known to an audience or not, who long for carefully
chosen words and undistorted
signification. In point of fact, poetry in the U.S. with odd aberrations
such as Longfellow, Frost, and recently, Billy Collins– has always been an art for the few. But
those few, I believe, will continue to have their poetry in one way or
another, whether it be rap or Ellen Bryant Voigt.
- Are
you concerned about the statements the new administration has made about
defunding the National Endowment for the Arts? I am
deeply concerned. The right wing’s contempt for the NEA (and the NEH) has
to do with the notion that if it doesn't sell, why bother? Why, say,
support symphony orchestras in towns and counties where they would not
exist without such subsidy? Why support poetry? Why dance? How are they
“useful,” or commercially viable? On and on. In a word, the 'market"
view of the arts is that a given product's value is reflected in its
capacity to support itself on the basis of its popularity, which means that
a sufficient number of "customers" are willing to pay for it as
to generate a profit somewhere for somebody. Thank God that notion didn't
rule the day when Shakespeare was writing; his major tragedies would have
taken a back seat to bear baiting. More recently, the market might tell us
that Rod McKuen was a far superior poet to Wallace Stevens. Needless to
say, this is an idiotic conclusion. True artists have always had patrons,
unless (like Stevens himself, say, or James Merrill) they were
independently wealthy. There are few nowadays for literary writing, which
is where the NEA has stepped in.
- Where do you see the future of book publishing heading?
The future of
book publishing? Well, I am surely no expert. The cyber-revolution will
certainly have a greater and greater impact; indeed, it already has had a
huge effect. It is in our time a snap to get “published”; whatever its
merit, you can put your book online and voila! you are a published poet, novelist, scholar, memoirist,
what have you? Production costs for online publication are virtually nil,
so even serious, professional houses may well want to go in that
direction. I am old (74), so can, I
hope, be excused for my sentimentality. But I already miss the feel of the
book in my hand. I don’t want it
on a screen, even though my friend Fleda Brown, former poet laureate of
Delaware, and I did publish an e-book via a small and fine independent
publisher, Autumn House . It’s called Growing
Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives. Even that feels somehow unreal to
me in its disembodiment, but it seems to me the way we are headed. The
trouble with the cyber-world, in my view, though, is that it puts the
village idiot in the same room as Emily Dickinson. Standards seem to me inevitably
to get saggy in such a domain.
I do hope that, whatever its format, the
publication of poetry, my primary genre, will amount to more than what is, in
effect, vanity publishing, that publishers
will keep alive the notion of judicious peer review.
But as my comments above have indicated, these publishers of the less sellable
genres like poetry will probably be small independents and will need some sort
of support, public and/or private, to hold such a flag aloft for any length of
time.
- Tell
us about your most recent books. I believe one of them was a poetry book,
right? Yes, I published my twelfth volume of poetry, No Doubt the Nameless, with Four
Way Books, an independent NYC publisher. It’s a house that will survive but
undergo major challenges if the NEA is defunded, by the way– which worries
me selfishly (and otherwise too), because FWB, concentrating on poetry
alone, is by far the best of the eight different houses that have done my
work across the genres. I am not
sure what to "tell" about my latest collection; once a poem of
mine is in the public domain, it is public property. Likewise, a book. It
seems to me that everything I write contains, as it were, an allegory, one
that is usually hidden...even or perhaps especially from its author. So I
tend not to say much about any collection's "meaning." Indeed I
am interested in the meanings ascribed to it by others. They are in
general as valid as anything I'd offer, I suspect.
- Please tell us about last year’s published volume of
essays. A curious
project indeed. After publishing my
last poetry collection but one, I
Was Thinking of Beauty, I was looking around for a new project. I knew
that I had a bunch of poems on hand, some quite old, that I’d never been
able to whip into what I considered adequate shape, and –who knows where
the impulse came from?— I wondered if, given the greater suppleness of
prose, they might work in the essay format. I tried that very format for
one or two failed poems...and I liked the result. So I tried a few more and
ditto. Having done that much, for a considerable spell my writing impulses
seemed to come at me in this same unconventional format; I didn’t need the
prompts of stalled poems anymore. I
ended up compiling, I believe, 61 essaylets. The book is called What’s the Story? That indicates, I think, my contemplation of
just how many of my experiences (hence my writings too) are factual as
opposed somehow to being parts of a narrative instinct on my part. In this case, I saw in due course,
though as I’ve implied this may true, overtly or covertly, of any author’s
work—I saw that these little essays were deeply autobiographical for the
most part. To that extent, they represented a sort of summary reckoning of
my path or paths through the world over seven decades. Thus the subtitle: Reflections on a Life Grown Long.
- What more can be done to encourage more young people to
be exposed to poetry? Well, that will depend, I think, on how
many teachers are committed to including the art in their classroom’s
everyday affairs. The inordinate and to my mind foolhardy stress on
standardization and on STEM practica in our time makes this a challenge
even for those thus inclined. And it is so easy for teachers, no matter
how well intentioned, to put students off poetry anyway, by their
insistence that a poem is principally a vehicle for “ideas” or “meanings.”
As if, that is, it were forevermore a matter of psychology or politics or
sociology or philosophy or whatever else.
Teachers (and readers and would-be
practitioners) should always remember that poetry is an art, that it is
primarily the result, like song, of a current of air rising out of the lungs
and vibrating over the vocal chords. It may contain “ideas,” but it does not
exclusively consist of them. It is first and foremost a matter of
arresting language. It would occur to
no one to doubt that paint is a painter’s primary material, that notes are a
composer’s, that movement is a dancer’s. Why do we imagine that poetry is any
different? Its materials are words, yet we keep claiming that these are mere
technical matters, that “hidden meanings” lurk behind those words. I love Billy
Collins’s notion that a teacher should simply read a poem a day, as vividly and
precisely as he or she can, and leave it at that. If this doesn’t make a
student fall in love with poetry, I’m not sure what will. We must rid ourselves
of the idea that poetry is a secret language that one must labor to learn.
- What
subjects do you tend to tackle, thematically, on a frequent basis, through
your writings? Why do you think you focus on them? For whatever reasons, the workings of
memory have always been an obsession. I was an elegist when I was far too
young to qualify as one, and I have remained so. In that respect, though
the comparison is pretentious, I am somewhat like Wordsworth. People often
speak of me as being a child of Robert Frost, and no doubt I am to some
degree, not least because of where and how I live in northern New England.
But I tend to think Wordsworth’s my real daddy. This is really a mystery.
My childhood, though rather privileged, was not a disaster but not
terribly happy either, for reasons I won’t address here. And yet something
like a longing for the past colors a great deal of my poetry.
- Any advice for a
struggling poet or up and coming writer?
Yes: write. Then write some more. Then more. And more. And more.
That sounds so simple, but it’s the only way. It is bizarre that so many
people, including highbrow academics, have so juvenile a conception of the
poet. They imagine poetry to be somehow the result of a gale of
“inspiration.” Keats, say, just walked out one day and –bam!— he was the
poet we know. (Same with Adrienne Rich—or whoever.)
But if you look at Keats’s early work, published and not, it is really
pretty dreadful. So is Stevens’s. So are the juvenilia of any author,
myself decidedly included. Truth is, each “established author is one who
simply kept at it, and anything you keep at for an extended period of time
is something you’ll get better at.
To use an analogy, I’m sure that there were contemporaries of his
who had equal physical talents to Michael Jordan’s. But Jordan was driven,
and worked and worked on his moves. He did so over and over and over.
Poetry offers rewards to that kind of persistence too. Practice may not
make perfect, but it will make much better. Perhaps you won’t end up being
a memorable poet– or you will. Who’s to say? But you’ll never know either
way until you apply yourself as frequently as you can over a span, say, of
a decade. Suspend self-judgment at least that long.
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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog
are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter
@theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more
important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog
2017©. Born and raised in Brooklyn, now resides in Westchester. Named one
of the best book marketing blogs by Book Baby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs
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