When Talking About Poetry Online Goes Very Wrong

Miller, Wayne. "When Talking About Poetry Online Goes Very Wrong," LItHub.com,  february 8, 2021. https://lithub.com/when-talking-about-poetry-online-goes-very-wrong/?fbclid=IwAR3szGGqqwbNcxj2B8nGEbv0oa4tJ9GNp0KQ3C2FZFMXmgRIsjORjin0NVw

For three years of college I organized my schedule so that each day after lunch I could go to the library for an hour and read one new book of poetry pulled more or less at random off the poetry section shelf. The world I entered there (and never really left) was a “small back room” inside the library, inside the university, inside the town, inside the country. It was occupied by me and a bunch of poets—some famous—that no one really knew about, and it hummed for me with invisible promise.

COMMENT

Nowadays, Miller edits the poetry journal "Copper Nickel."   The article is a defense of poetry journals over self-publication on social media platforms.  The essence of his argument is, a publication with a small, self-selected niche audience is a better place for writers to experiment than the sometimes vicious  public platform of the Internet. Here's how Miller describes the role of literary journals:

I’ve been editing literary magazines for twenty years, and something that strikes me when I’m reading through submissions is how often really good poets submit work that’s not (or not yet) successful. All poets treat submitting to literary journals with different levels of provisionality, but it’s consistently true that as a magazine editor I get to read failing poems by excellent poets—poems that will never make their way into the poets’ books. Some poems published in magazines—even high-profile ones—don’t make their ways into poets’ books; or if the poems do, they appear in significantly revised versions.

My point is that the work of literary magazines is simultaneously appreciative, critical, collaborative, and provisional. When a new issue of a magazine is out in the world, we often say: “Did you see what So-and-So is working on? I can’t wait to see the book!”

 

Best American Poetry 2020

 David Lehman, "Foreword" in The Best American Poetry, 2020. 2020. p xiii,

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are the two nineteenth-century poets who continue to exert the greatest influence on contemporary poetry.  In 2019, the bicentennial of Whitman's birth was celebrated with exhibitions devoted to the poet at the New York Public Library the Morgan Library, and the Grolier Club in New York City. 

COMMENT

      Libraries host many kinds of displays, but particularly celebrating writers.

In the Archives

Tess Taylor. "In the Archives: Susan Howe's New Poems Paste Together Collages from Old Letters, Manuscripts and Concordances." New York Times Book Review, August 2, 2020, p. 18

When do we risk happiness? When do we risk encounter? How can reading offer those things now?  Howe's books may accompany you in these questions.  They may also make you long for the smell of libraries, for the humming quiet of reading rooms, the gentle rustle of others turning pages, too.  Howe writes against a world that disappears too far away online, in which we lose the bodily perception of space, the tenderness of touch.  In this era of social distancing, I felt the prick of these poems: They urged me towards aliveness.

 COMMENT

Howe's collage poems evoke a sensory experience of the library as place.  "We need to see and touch objects and documents," Howe writes, and the reviewer agrees.

New Poets of Native Nations

Heid E. Erdrich, ed. New Poets of Native Nations. Graywolf Press, 2018.

     Although a few poets of Native nations are now producing work within the mainstream of American literary publishing, very little poetry by Natives reaches a large audience-- few readers are exposed to multiple indigenous authors at a bookstore or library or even in an academic course. There's simply not enough of our poetry out there where readers can find it.  There is no current basis upon which others might understand what poetry by Native Americans is today, in the twenty-first century.  Consequently, I have witnessed editors and prize jurors choose poets they think are Native American. The result is that more often than you would imagine, what is selected is work by non-Natives.  This poetry not only misrepresents the lived realities of Native people, but it does our communities real harm by presenting another's views as our own. 

 COMMENT

     You'd think that someone, maybe academic librarians, would be working harder to collect Native American poets.  But poetry doesn't  tend to circulate much without encouragement and these days it's unfashionable to collect for the sake of bibliography.  In order to persuade my own library to buy such such poetry I've had to suggest a purchase for my own personal use, even for books by poets like Sherwin Bitsui or Orlando White who had recently been in town to give readings and workshops.

    Poetry is an especially weird genre. Everyone wants to be a poet, but nobody wants to read poetry. Well, I do. I even like to write reviews of poetry books. I think one barrier to poetry is that it's actually quite difficult to figure out which poetry to read. Poetry resists descriptive reviews so you have to experiment a bit to discover what you like.  There is a lot of truly dreadful poetry out there, so you also have to be confident to recognize it as dreadful and move on.

     That's why Heid Erdrich has performed such an important service to introduce us poetry readers to some Native American  poets she likes (she's a wonderful poet herself, BTW). [1]  Here's a book that we librarians can catalog and simply pull off the shelf when a student or professor is seeking Native American poets. It would be even better if we bought some of their books.  There's a bibliography of sources on pages 281-284 in case any librarians want to order some.

[1] Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects

Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder, "By the Book," New York Times Book Review, April 28, 2019, p. 8.

   

Did you read poetry as a child? What books made you fall in love with poetry?
As a western Washington State '30s family we had few books.  My mother was a reader, though, and every Saturday we drove into north Seattle to check out the university district library and the thrift stores.  It seems I heard Whitman, Robert Frost, Poe and Robert Burns before I could read. 

COMMENT

     I'm happy to know that Gary Snyder's mom read him poetry.   

     If anyone asked me this question the answer would be Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats  / T.S. Eliot,  The Bat Poet / Randell Jarrell,  The Bad Child's Book of Beasts and Moral Alphabet / Hillaire Belloc, Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Other Modern Verse / ed. By Stephen Dunning and Edward Leuders, and Edward Lear's nonsense poems. Also those unlikely poetic parodies that used to appear in Mad Magazine at a time when there was an assumption that everyone was familiar with certain poems. (Once upon a final inning/ with the other ball team winning/ and my Mudville teammates trailing/ by a score of 2 to 4... If Edgar Allen Poe wrote Casey at the Bat).

   It's not quite  fair to say that youngsters these days don't read poetry, though. The strikingly passive-aggressive lines of William Carlos Williams' poem This is Just to Say have become an Internet meme (as I recall, the poem was included in the Reflections anthology).  My daughter appreciates This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin.


     



   

  

Shale Play

Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Steven Rubin, Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

     I grew up in Westmoreland County during the 1970s, when steel mills started closing along the rivers of Pittsburgh. Surface mining operations and slag heaps, abandoned coke ovens, and coal patch towns were just familiar parts of the industrialized, rural landscape I called home.
     With this project, I returned to those places with purpose, opened my laptop in the Pennsylvania Rooms of public libraries and in the Coal and Coke Heritage Center on Penn State’s Fayette campus. I talked to people in diners, attended public meetings and scribbled a lot in my notebooks. Jim Rosenberg and the Fayette Marcellus Watch group welcomed me to their monthly meetings at chain restaurants on the strip outside Uniontown, and I visited the homes of some of the group’s members. Typically, I told people I wanted to write about fracking and asked if I could transcribe their experience in their own words.  [pxxiii]

COMMENT

     You wouldn’t guess it from the research methods, but this writer was working on a book of poetry. 

     The Environmental Humanities have created a new clientele for special collections and archives that focus on local history. Writers and  artists are making use of place-based collections to inform work about the relationships between people and places. Library collections like the Pennsylvania Rooms and academic special collections hold a key to interpreting place-based identity that in turn informs community resilience and the possibility of sustainable change.

      Not that fracking is sustainable. The stories in Shale Play are unbearably sad ones about people trading their forests, farms, rivers, animals, good health, dignity and sense of community for a pocketful of money. Even so, the poems attest that the wounded land and damaged communities are still there despite the overlay of colonial industrialization. Perhaps in some form they will manage to outlast the bastards. 

A Tasting Menu of Seamus Heaney's Poetry

Jim Dwyer, "A Tasting Menu of Seamus Heaney’s Poetry: An Exhibition Offers an Archive of a Productive Literary Life," New York Times, Oct. 31, 2018, p. C6.

DUBLIN— On a December day several years ago, the poet Seamus Heaney drove up to the back door of the National Library of Ireland, his car packed with 12 boxes of attic. The haul was more than 10,000 pieces of paper—drafts of poems on envelopes and halfway-there typescripts, even a clipping of one he first published in a newspaper and later reworked in pen and pencil on the printed page. Now that collection has been harvested to create a tasting menu of Heaney, young to old, in “Listen Now Again,” an exhibit to be housed for three years in a cultural space at the Bank of Ireland on college Green, here in Dublin.

COMMENT

     Heaney was a Nobel laureate poet and therefore his paper debris was deemed worthy of archival space. In the digital age many writers no longer leave behind this kind of paper trail.  There are no longer any typescripts. Revisions done on a computer leave no trace of previous versions.  Nonetheless, the thought process of famous people is thought to provide insight into their writing.  

     
     The library must have asked Heaney for the papers which he delivered himself. It occurs to me that if by some unlikely turn I ever became a famous poet I would have no papers to give.  I don’t save anything.  It all goes in the recycle bin as soon as I’m done marking it up and typing the revisions.  In fact, I find early drafts deeply dismaying with their sloppy word choice and poorly-expressed ideas.  

    
     While Heaney used the library to store a record of his work, the exhibit curator used it as source material for a museum museum display. Dusty boxes, however exciting the contents, are not very visually appealing.  The challenge for the curator was to find a way to give textual information some kind of visual impact.  In this case a nod to Irish history with a circle of pillars that resemble Neolithic standing stones and the progress of revisions shown through multimedia displays.  For ordinary poets, the best we librarians can do is just to keep the pretty dust jackets on and set up some book displays. 

The Best American Poetry, 2018

David Lehman series ed., Dana Gioia, guest ed., The Best American Poetry, 2018, (Best American Poetry Series) Scribner Poetry, 2018.

     My editorial method was simple and unoriginal.  For twelve months (starting October 2016) I spent two or three hours each day reading new poetry. I read through every journal I could find as well as dozens of online journals. I bought piles of unfamiliar small magazines and subscribed to new journals. I read every issue of every literary magazine in my university's large periodical room.  When I traveled, I brought along a separate bag of journals to read on the plane or in the hotel room.  Meanwhile the series editor sent me weekly packets of poems that had caught his attention.  I initially wondered if David Lehman might want to press his suggestions. He is a persuasive advocate for the poetry he loves.  Lehman, however, gave me complete editorial autonomy.  I told no one outside my family that I had taken on the assignment. I didn't want to be lobbied by poet friends and acquaintances.
    I'm not sure how many thousands of poems I read. I surely broke the five-digit mark. Every time a poem grabbed my attention, I earmarked it or printed it out for rereading. My studio became a mountain range of periodicals, printouts, and photocopies. The most interesting part of the process was rereading and comparing the hundreds of poems that had made the first cut. Week after week I read and sorted the poems into three scientific categories -- Yes, No, Maybe.  After much agonizing, I made the final selections. 

COMMENT 

     This tale of extreme research raises a question: Why didn't the university library's large periodical room have more poetry journals? Actually, I can answer that one myself.  Many years ago during a budget shortfall the library where I worked slashed periodical subscriptions. The poetry journals were the first to go.  They weren't expensive -- we could have bought all of them for less than the cost of one science journal subscription.  But library use statistics indicated that almost nobody ever read them. 
     One problem was, most literary journals weren't listed in any of our indexes. Nowadays, Project Muse indexes a few of the well-known poetry journals (most of them represented in this book according to an appended "List of Magazines where the Poems were First Published"). But there are also zillions of small-press poetry journals. In order to submit to them, the poet sends in a few poems with a small fee that presumably keeps the journal going. After a while, this process of fee-based submission becomes deeply discouraging. It feels like everyone submits poems but nobody reads. 
     Yet libraries are nonetheless doing a disservice by ignoring poetry.  The mistake, I think, is trying to focus on  "important" poetry. There are a few poets who are famous enough so that their books are likely to circulate (I'd say Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Billy Collins, Maya Angelou, etc...  I doubt that Gioia particularly likes any of them).  However, I'd argue that the  most important poetry for librarians to collect is localized, written by the local community of writers (including at local institutions of higher education) but also (don't laugh) nature poetry. Gioia identifies an emerging trend of politically charged place-based poetics.  He writes, "The nature poem had become the major vehicle for political meditation and protest.  The bright innocence of Walt Whitman's American Eden has been overtaken by Robinson Jeffers's dark prophesy of spacious modern civilization."
    While librarians were busy cutting poetry from our collections, the poetic form has re-emerged as an particularly  important voice responding to the slow emergency of the Anthropocene. The Dark Mountain Project explicitly makes the Robinson Jeffers connection, and in Uncivilised Poetics (Dark Mounain10) the editors write "What's the point of poetry when the streets of Syria have been bombed beyond recognition? What's the point of poetry when the permafrost is melting?  But poetry matters because it offers an alternative reality --it refuses the logical, reductionist, materialist aspects of industrial cult; aslant, it invites us to feel our way in the dark." If libraries want to capture this important voice, they are going to have to rediscover poetry. 
    
   
    
    
     

Autobiography of Red

“XXIV. Freedom,” in Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, Vintage Books, 1998.

Geryon’s life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste.

 ——-

He got a job in the local library shelving government documents. It was agreeable to work in a basement
humming with fluorescent lights and cold as a sea of stone.  The documents had a forlorn austerity,
tall and hushed in their ranges as veterans of a forgotten war. Whenever a librarian came clumping down the metal stairs with a pink slip for one of the documents, Geryon would vanish into the stacks. A little button at the end of each range activated the fluorescent track above it.
A yellowing 5x7 index cardScotch-taped below each button said EXTINGUISH LIGHT WHEN NOT IN USE.Geryon went flickering though the ranges like a bit of mercury flipping the switches on and off.The librarians thought hima talented boy with a shadow side. One evening at supper when his mother asked himwhat they were like, Geryon could not remember if the librarians were men or women. 

COMMENT

     The words of the old spiritual say, "this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine." It's a reference to Matthew (5:15), Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house."

     The dreary government documents stacks are a dark night of the soul for our hero Geryon who has been dumped by his lover and is now obeying instructions to "extinguish light when not in use."
I find the metaphor particularly amusing since I am a documents librarian. And yes, we documents librarians are a lot like the ones in the poem —  heavy-footed, gender ambiguous trolls lurking in the basement with flickering lights, pink slips, and forlorn, joy-killing, unreadable books. But note also  the librarians' radical inclusion. Geryon is literally a monster, red with wings (incidentally also a queer, tortured artist) but to the librarians, he is a talented boy. In an depository, grand dramas of sex and passion are quite simply irrelevant.  If Geryon wanted to, he could become one of them.

     It seems probable from the nuanced description that Anne Carson experienced this particular documents library as an actual place. These days most government documents are online. One day the FDLP depository in the poem may seem like pure imagination, the fanciful invention of an impossibly drab, soul-sucking job.

Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects

"Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects," [poem] in Heid E. Erdrich. National Monuments. Michigan State University Press, 2008.

Guidelines for the treatment of sacred objects
That appear or disappear at will
Or that appear larger in rearview mirrors,
Include calling in spiritual leaders such as librarians,
Wellness-circuit speakers and financial aide officers.

COMMENT

Erdrich's poem refers to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990). It's not only delightful to see a poetic interpretation of a government publication, I also appreciate the tongue-in-cheek appearance of librarians in the role of spiritual leaders.  Libraries, wellness and financial aid are indeed useful support services, though let's be honest, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Much of Erdrich's poetic work references the role of cultural heritage organizations -- libraries, archives and museums-- and their treatment of Indigenous knowledge and artifacts. In National Monuments the theme is human remains presented as spectacle, as if there were no longer any living relatives of those mummies and bones, as if certain kinds of dead people weren't really people at all. 

I also recommend Erdrich's latest book of poems* for librarians who would like a poetic introduction to issues surrounding the collection of Indigenous knowledge. There are a lot of good scholarly articles, too, but they won't have the same emotional punch to the gut.

*Erdrich, Heid E. Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media. MSU Press, 2017.

Earth and the Librarian

"Earth and the Librarian," in Jean Valentine, Break the Glass. Copper Canyon Press, 2010, p.25.

COMMENT

I love this poem so much.  Delicious little books of baked earth pretty much describes what I hope to give people who come to the library.