One of the most common pieces of advice given to poets is to avoid self-consciousness—to carefully partition the artifice from the art, to hide the crafting from the crafted. And it’s good advice. The pleasure and insight we receive from poetry comes from our ability to enter it, to suspend our disbelief and become fully absorbed in the moment’s object. It’s almost impossible to get lost in a poem when the author keeps popping out from behind the bushes with a sign that says, “You’re still reading a poem.” Yet this is exactly what Matthea Harvey does in what might be the greatest poetic sequence of this young 21st century.

Harvey’s “The Future of Terror / Terror of the Future” sequence, from her book Modern Life, is abecedarian, meaning that the lines proceed alliteratively through the alphabet—in this case bookended with F for “future” and T for “Terror,” her grist all the words that start with G through S in between. As described in American Poet (1MB PDF), she stumbled on the form accidentally, after hearing the phrase “the future of terror” repeated over and over again on the radio. She wanted the words to “mean something concrete as opposed to being an amorphous umbrella of dread.” (American Poet, 11) A trip to the dictionary had her making word lists on a whim, as her fingers traveled from “future” to “terror,” and certain words that seemed to relate caught her eye. Those lists grew spontaneously into a post-apocalyptic narrative of 21 poems—11 moving forward through the alphabet, 10 moving in mirror, backward T to F.

The result of this formal “gimmick” is wild alliteration, some of it almost too musical to tolerate:

We all carried plump pods filled with poison
that quivered as we made our daily rounds
of the ruins. Giving sadness the run-around
was even harder after your Sergeant succumbed
to Salt Lake Syndrome. At night in our
smokeproof sleeping cars we dreamed
of sharp sticks that would make wounds
a simple surgeon’s knot couldn’t fix…
(Modern Life, 13)

At times, particularly during longer runs of S’s and P’s, the speaker seems to channel Looney Tunes’ Sylvester the Cat, spraying the room with spit: “Our poets were Pied Pipers handing out/ photocopies—parroting, parenthesizing.” (12) The language is so acoustically rich that it’s impossible to forget at any point that you’re reading a poem, that an artist is carefully spoon-feeding you art.

It should be difficult to become engrossed in 21 pages of this richness, akin to 21 slices of chocolate cheesecake. Yet the imagined world that emerges from the abecedarian sequence is so haunting that it happens anyway. Matthea Harvey set out to give form to the umbrella of dread that’s been dogging us all since September 11th, and she has. She’s made tangible the real terror of terrorism, the deep and occluded unease about everything we thought we knew—a future full of soldiers without orders making daily rounds of civilization’s ruins. With one line she captures our despair: “We ate our gruel and watched the hail/ crush the hay we’d hoped to harvest.” (22) With another she crystallizes a culture of paranoia: “Suddenly the sight/ of a schoolbag could send us scrambling.” (11)

The simplicity and acuity of that line is astounding, and its easy to see how it evolved out of the form, from the alliterative key words “suddenly,” “sight,” “schoolbag,” and “scrambling.” The image, so perfectly attuned to this moment in history—not a “handbag,” but a “schoolbag,” denoting childlike innocence and its loss—wasn’t something she held in her mind and shaped into a poem, it sprung spontaneously from the poem itself.

Harvey acknowledges the spontaneity of the process in her essay: “…the words led me, pulled me in new directions, created a narrative I didn’t have in my head. It was perhaps the most wonderful experience of writing without knowing where I was going that I’ve ever had.” (American Poet, 12) She goes on to call her experience with the form “one of extraordinary exhilaration and surprise.” Indeed, and seemingly unintentionally, she surpasses her own amorphous dread to explore dozens of relevant social issues, moving beyond the apolitical nature of her previous books. Some lines comment on the incumbent President:

We could all do impeccable imitations
of the idiot, his insistent incisors working on
a steak as he said there’s an intimacy to invasion.
(Modern Life, 11)

On torture:

When we got jaded
about joyrides we could always play games
in the kitchen garden with the prisoners.
Jump the Gun, Fine Kettle of Fish, and Kick
the Kidneys were our favorites.
(11)

On our disillusionment with the government:

Out of glass blocks
we built a glorious latrine which we meant
to show the governor when he arrived
with his hand on his heart, but for some reason
we hesitated. Was it the rust on the hinge
of his briefcase? His car horn’s half-hearted honk?
(14)

All of these scenes seem to be generated by the chance alphabetical lists of words, but as Marcel Duchamp once said, “Your chance is not the same as mine.” The real operator here is the interaction between randomness and the author’s unconscious mind, which has been mulling over these issues of war and terrorism since the start of the “War on Terror.”

When the overt, conscious mind becomes preoccupied with form, the wellspring of the unconscious is free to rise to the surface and assert itself. For decades, psychological studies have shown a link between distraction and persuasion—the over-mind serves as a kind of shield for the more malleable under-mind—and I believe the effect works in the opposite direction, as well. Formal poets often describe how their own meter and rhyme becomes a kind of crutch; after awhile they can no longer access their own creativity without having their focus fixed on the form. It becomes the only way the formal poet knows how to enter what Elizabeth Bishop called the “self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration”—the meditative state necessary to create great art. Without the form, they’re left with what the Buddhists would call too much “willful will”—the stronger, overt mind resists the emergence of the transformative, covert mind.

Harvey seems at the cusp of understanding what’s really going on when she develops a metaphor for what she calls the “abecedarian’s particular combination of restraint and freedom”:

Perhaps writing with full access to every word in the language is like looking at a 360-degree panorama from which we can choose to look at any thing at any time. The thing about the panorama, though, is that, while it’s available to us, we don’t use it all at once. We can’t ever keep the entire possibilities of the language in our heads at one time… By contrast, writing abecedarianally…is more like walking up the stairs of a castle and looking through a series of small windows. From one you see the forest of F, complete with flora and fauna. Through another you see the meadow of M… There’s a lushness to the abecedarius that speaks to the old saw about form allowing freedom…
(American Poet, 13)

She understands that a narrowing of focus leads to an expansion of consciousness. All that’s missing from her description is the underlying why.

“The Future of Terror / Terror of the Future” comprises less than half of Modern Life, and it isn’t the only sequence that deploys a poetic gimmick in pursuit of new understanding. Other sections use other gimmicks with varying degrees of success. The dozen or so “Robo-boy” prose poems remind—or were perhaps inspired by—Haley Joel Osment’s role as an android in the Spielberg film A.I. They work individually, and remain interesting throughout, yet fail to match the cultural resonance (and relevance) of the abecedarians. The subject makes sense for the book, and certainly seems like meaningful commentary on “modern life,” but rather than formal and full of chance, the conceit is situational, and thus too overt, the stylings too plainly stylized. The Robo-boy poems fit within the metaphor of the small window—the narrow opening, this time, being the narrative of the young android—but the narrowing isn’t distracting to the author’s will, and so doesn’t have the same revelatory effect.

This problem has far more excruciating results in a series of extremely brief poems, each written around a kind of joke between “I” and “You.” Here’s a complete example:

You Have My Eyes

Give them back.
(Modern Life, 75)

The initial idea is as quirky and interesting as that of “The Future of Terror” or “Robo-boy,” but the conceit leaves absolutely no room for input from the interior. Here the idea for the poem is the poem; the only will is willful. These are the poems that, in an otherwise glowing review of Modern Life in the New York Times, David Orr calls “coy productions.” In other words, they’re too self-conscious, the gimmick too glaring.

“The Future of Terror,” on the other hand, uses the gimmick of the abecedarian poem to quiet consciousness, thus allowing the poet to act spontaneously within the work. Later in his review of Modern Life, Orr remarks that “One suspects that the reason Harvey likes to talk about the safe subject of form so much is that she’s a bit unsettled by her own project.” That unsettled feeling is what makes the sequence so powerful—and it feels so unsettled, I believe, because the raw imagination was exposed through her close attention to its form.

Most of you know that Hayden Carruth passed away last week, at 87, at his home in Munnsville, NY.  I’m late to the party because this is a busy time of the year, but also because I was trying to hunt down the audio of our interview with him, which, as far as I know, is the last interview he ever did.  At that point, December 2005, Carruth was pretty much confined to the first floor of his house, tethered to an oxygen tank he had to wheel around with him.  Unfortunately, all I have is a microcassette, and no way to transfer it to the computer.  (One project in the future is going to be converting all these tapes we have to digital files, so we can put them online.)

For now there’s no audio, so you’ll just have to order a copy of issue #25, or the Rattle Conversations anthology, where it’s also featured. The interview is probably my favorite we’ve ever done — and probably Alan’s favorite, as well.  I’m not sure if it’s because he was nearing the end of his life, or if he was just always like this, but Carruth was one of the most open, honest, and direct poets I’ve ever met.  He speaks of his successes and his failures in equal measure, refers to himself as a “basket case” and a “name-dropper,” and admits that at the time his greatest problem is loneliness — in fact, the interview stretches beyond the planned length, because he asked us to stay.

Beyond the insights into his own personality, Carruth reveals countless truths about the life of the poet in general — the kind of truths you won’t hear in a creative writing program.

FOX: Well, do you think writing poetry can be taught?

CARRUTH: Essentially not, no. It’s a fraud, it’s a fake, the whole thing. And I used to tell the students that all the academicization of poetry and literature was a mistake. It was bad for poetry, it was bad for people. And I still think that, and I’d advise my students to get out of a university and go get a job on a farm or something like that—honest work. And that their poetry would improve, and I think I was right.

That comment is about more than just Yankee Pragmatism; getting away from the art is an important part of the creative process.  For a few summers I worked a as a landscaper, digging gardens, trimming hedges, pitching mulch, and daydreaming.  So far those have been the most prolific periods of writing for me — working with your hands somehow makes you want to go home and work with your mind.  It was validating to hear Carruth describe the same experience:

CARRUTH: …it used to be when I was working in the woods, I would think of poems, and I’d get strings of imagery running in my mind, and strings of language along with them, and then I could just go home and write them down and I’d have a poem.

Even more confirming was Carruth’s resistance to revision.  I think the act of revising is drastically over-emphasized in the universities, for a very simple reason: it’s an easy way to teach.  It’s easy to have students bring in a new messy poem every week, and then work through ways to clean it up, and then send them on their way as if they’ve learned something.  It’s much more difficult to teach the creative process itself, from inspiration through composition — the spontenaity, the precision, the absorbsion in detail.  Elizabeth Bishop’s “self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.”  How do you teach that?  And yet that’s where the real art lies.

FOX: Would you say that when you were writing, you wrote pretty quickly and edited quickly?

CARRUTH: Oh, yes, I did. I used to…often I did do exactly what I just said, I would think of a poem when I was out walking or working in the woods or doing something like that. I’d come home, I’d write it down in longhand on a piece of yellow paper as quickly as I could. And I’d type it up and look at it and change a few words, and that was it…  I never did a lot of revision. There were other poems, I had projects like writing long poems like “Contra Mortem” and “The Sleeping Beauty,” and I worked on them for a long time. And I know what it means to sit down every day and try to continue a piece of writing that you were doing the day before. It’s pretty difficult sometimes.

There’s much more worth mining from the interview — too much to list here, and anyway, the interview isn’t supposed to be the focus of this post.  What I wanted to say was that Carruth was the sort of person I tend to gravitate toward, the sort of person I tend to respect.  He was gruff and frank; he always gave it to you as straight as he could.  Maybe it’s the masochist in me, but that’s the kind of person I admire.

There’s a letter from Carruth pinned to the bulletin board above my desk, sent shortly after he saw a copy of the issue in which he appeared.  The body of the letter is one sentence:

Dear Sir,

I am struck by how easy it would be to change your name to Prattle.

Sincerely,
Hayden Carruth

To this day, I’m not sure how that letter was meant.  For a while, I reveled in the insult.  You have to admit, it’s a pretty good zinger.  From blurbs to cover letters, this business is full of so much flowery pandering that even the most brutal honesty can seem refreshing.  I pinned it to my corkboard with pride.  When I had to contact him a few months later, and he was as warm and generous as ever, I wondered if maybe it was senility, if he’d simply forgetten what he wrote.

It hadn’t occurred to me until recently that maybe he was only refering to his own interview within the issue. The hypothesis fits my experience of him so well that I’m amazed it too so long to think of it. Maybe Carruth’s “Prattle” comes from the same place as his loneliness, his “name-dropper” and “baseket case.”  Maybe it was only his reputation for being difficult that made me assume the worst — a reputation, perhaps, built up through decades of similar misunderstandings.

He was “fired” as editor of Poetry for defending Ezra Pound at a time when most people saw him as a traitor.  He famously called Thoreau a fraud.  Things like these gave him a reputation as a curmudgeon, but it’s easy to see them as further examples of his openness and honesty.  He was a brilliant mind, who couldn’t help but speak the truths he saw.  And those are the kind of people I can’t help but respect.

The fall e-Issue just went up last night, featuring selections of poetry from a pair of great books by Carol V. Davis and David James, artwork by Lois Gold, Andrew Kozma’s review of a suite of chapbooks, and a preview of the Winter 2008 issue. You can download it for free at the e-Issue page, or directly by clicking here (1.2 MB PDF).

The highlight, though, is clearly David Alpaugh’s essay: “What’s Really Wrong with Poetry Book Contests?”

Alpaugh is an journeyman poet, with stops all over the literary map.  As both winner of a book contest (The Nicholas Roerich Prize from Story Line Press) and organizer of one, he speaks with authority on the subject.  Rattle published a pair of his visual poems in issue #30, but he might be best known for his influential essay “The Professionalization of Poetry,” first printed as a two part series in Poets & Writers in 2003.  That essay detailed the sacrifices poetry has made to become a viable profession within academia–the diluting of talent, the rise of esotericism, the praise of the banal.  In Rattle e.5, Alpaugh turns his attention from the university to the free market, exploring the opportunity cost of so much good intention–the founding of (yet another) poetry book contest.

I say “good intention” intentially, because, beyond the numbers, that’s the important truth that Alpaugh articulates so clearly.  It’s easy to paint those who run book contests as dishonest or greedy or self-important–maybe thanks to Poetry.com and Foetry.com–but in reality, every contest is a labor of love.  Every editor and judge thinks their contest is special, that they’re adding something unique meaningful to literature.  If it wasn’t a labor of love, they’d be looking for another job, one that pays more (or often just pays at all).

The problem is that book contests are convenient–that’s why there are so many of them.  No need for fundraising, or sales strategies, or PR.  By the time you’ve chosen the manuscript, it’s already paid for itself.  And since there’s no shortage of poets hoping to be published, and willing to pay the price of admission, the environment is primed for exponential growth.

When I first read the essay several months ago, I had a few counter-arguments.  Alpaugh argues that presses don’t take the marketing of their winners seriously, because they don’t have to–but I’d counter that no small presses take the marketing of their books seriously, because they don’t have the means to.  You know that when you’re working with a small press, the onus of finding an audience is on you.  You have to arrange your own readings, mailing lists, press kits…  I’ve only experienced this once, but everyone I know who’s published a book describes the same thing.  No poet is Stephen King with a PR rep.  Maybe the contest winners feel content to rest on their laurels instead of doing the legwork (they are, after all, Prize Winners!), but whose fault is that really?  And what contest-awarding press is going to tell their winner, “Don’t go out and market yourself, we don’t want to sell more books”?

But that was June.  In the time since, I’ve had a great experience with Red Hen Press–they’ve done a lot to help with the publicity of American Fractal.  What’s more, I’ve spoken about this with more former contest winners, and for several, all their press gave them, to quote one, was “a box of books with a letter inside wishing me good luck.”  I hadn’t realized this was so prevalent.  Presses have less of an investment in their contest winners, and it seems to show.

The only counterpoint I can still make is that, while I agree that the proliferation of contests do muddy the quantitative waters, I think they might be a boon to quality overall.  A small press, even a non-profit, has to always worry about just breaking even with a book.  And so they’re forced to look for books that will sell, rather than books that are actually good.  There are, of course, the perfect storms where each go hand in hand, but given the choice of a decent book by a writer with a ready-made audience, or a great book by an unknown, they’ll pick the merely decent book every time.  By subsidizing the winning book, poetry contests allow the presses running them to ignore any fiscal yardsticks–they already have broken even, so they’re free to just pick what’s best.

I think this might be a bigger problem than the problem with contests.  Whether you want to point to horrible poetry books by Jewel or Billy Corgan or Leonard Nemoy, or similarly dull books by already-established poetry stars, there’s a lot of bland poetry being published simply because of marketability.  Is that really what’s best for poetry, that a knack for publicity should be a trump card?  These days its Whitman every time–Dickinson’s only shot would be to enter a contest.

But even this argument hinges on the numbers game.  Out of 500 entries, is a contest guaranteed to receive a better book than that aforementioned bland poetry by a fading star?  I’m not so sure.  Having never run a book contest myself, I really have no idea–does the judge find dozens of books worthy of publication, or none?  If you ask, the judge will surely say dozens, but is that the truth, or kindness?

As difficult as it is to find fault wth Alpaugh’s central argument, it’s even harder to think of solutions to the problem.  As long as poetry remains on the margins of American life, poetry books need to be subsidized to exist.  The contest “losers” can subsidize the winner, or members of a poetry collective can subsidize each other.  Small presses can avoid this only with individual donations and grants, and that’s no easy task.

Evolution isn’t a complicated process, and neither good nor bad–it’s just what happens when stuff sits around in an environment for a long time.  A rock evolves smooth in the same way a bird evolves into wings.  The current state of poetry publishing is just what happens as poetry lovers tumble down the paths of least resistence.  It’s neither good nor bad, and won’t be changing any time soon, but it’s important to pause every so often and examine what you’ve become.

In any event, this isn’t the first time David Alpaugh’s held a mirror up to the poetry industry and asked a lot of provocative questions, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.  It’s a good read, and a subject well-worth pausing on a Monday afternoon to think about.  So go read it.

The new issue of Oak Bend Review features an interview with yours truly (click on “Honorary Guest”), along with a generous spread of poetry (including one previously unpublished), glowing praise for American Fractal, and even a posting of that YouTube video Poetry.la did a while back.  I don’t know about “honorary,” but I truly am honored.  The last editor/poet to be interviewed there was Christian Wiman, so more than honored, I feel a little out of my league.

The interview drifts between commentary on the state of poetry in America, poetry itself, various issues we’ve done at Rattle, and our editorial outlook.  In addition to my aforementioned tendency to yodel out an avalanche of bad metaphors, you’ll notice a more general tendency to spew forth whatever comes to mind, unfiltered.  I can see this getting me into trouble some day.

Moreover, looking back at the interview–which we did about two months ago–it occurs to me that I’m pretty damn opinionated.  I’m humble about my own insight into poetry, or lack thereof, particularly when it comes to weilding my imaginary editorial clout.  In other words, I really don’t think I have any special understanding of literature; though I read a lot, I’m not particularly well-read, and so on.

But boy, do I have my opinions about poetry–somewhere along the way I’ve developed a fully formed poetic ideology, from creative conception to life on the page.  I think I know what poetry is, how it works, and why it’s useful–and not in some general sense.  My poetic ideology is specific and nuanced, centered around my personal interpretation of eastern philosophies, but also informed by cognitive science and psychology.

When I read other peoples’ comments on poetry, I’m past the stage of absorbing them — I’m merely judging them in relation to my own theories, saving those that fit, discarding the ones that don’t.  This has been coming up more often lately, as I’ve been reading essays on poetry for Aram Saroyan’s class.  I’m always thinking, “Pound is right when he says X, but seems not to understand Z.”  I’m even looking forward to turning my thoughts into a book, a project that at times seems more interesting than writing new poems.

This kind of opinionated arrogance flies in the face of my editorial stance as a relative novice, open to anything.  But I guess four and a half years of full-time poetry will do that to you.

Anyway, do check out the whole issue.  I’ve only had time to skim parts of it, but in the poetry section, I’ve already enjoyed Drew Riley’s bawdy voice, and E. Darcy Trie’s delicacy.  There are some names, too, familiar to Rattle readers–Antonia Clark, Martin Willits, Jr.–that I’m saving for later.

The journal is very young, but editor Sandee Lyles fully realizes the virtues of the young with her enthusiasm and dedication.  The format is interesting, too, both online and print-on-demand.  Think about submitting some work.

I don’t know that I’ve mentioned it before, but as this blog has been getting increasingly personal, I might as well talk about the fact that for the last four years I’ve been plodding my way toward an MFA at USC — one class per semester, because I don’t have time for more than that.

This semester my class is “The New Poem” with Aram Saroyan, whose recent book, Complete Minimal Poems, is currently #1 in the small press poetry rankings.  I’ve been familiar with Saroyan’s work for a long time, at least that from his concrete minimalist phase, but one week in my view of it has already been completely transformed.  A lot of that work has to do with the physical creation of a mental experience — while most poetry, traditional or contemporary, takes place simultaneously on the tongue and the internal projector of the mind’s eye, these poems act as the textual embodiment of thought.  For example:

something moving in the garden a cat

Or:

having

swum

Or this still-baffling piece:

ly   ly

ly   ly

Since the poems resist being “read” in the usual sense, I always assumed Saroyan was a deconstructionist, a precursor to the Language School, where the recurring point seems to be that there cannot be a point — the slippage between the signifier and the signified meaning no words, in the end, can have meaning.    Or perhaps more accurately, language dictates meaning rather than the other way around, so all texts are interactive.  Math has Number Theory, and poetry has the Language School.

When asked what his influences were, I thought Saroyan would have said Lacan or Derrida, or someone more obscure. Instead, he said Andy Warhol.

With that one comment it all suddenly made sense.  Warhol’s pop art was of course interested in mass production and repetition, but it can all be described with the concept of instantaneousness.  Warhol was responding to the broadcasting era, a million TVs all tuned to the same show at the same time: information at the speed of light.  The experience of his soup cans or Elizabeth Taylor isn’t just the repetition — its their appearance everywhere at once.

And what Warhol was doing on the canvas, Saroyan was trying to work into the page.  For a poem to be instantaneous, it can’t be “read” — because even a single sentence has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  An instantaneous poem tries to capture a single moment of awareness.  This is easy to see in the first example, where “something” moving in the garden becomes the specific “cat” before the thought is even complete.  And even easier to see in “ly” when you compare it directly to Warholishness.

So I’m learning already, and looking forward to going back and reading the minimal poems with a new understanding.

I’m excited for this class as a whole — I haven’t read much experimental contemporary poetry at all, let alone in a formal setting.  Hopefully I’ll be able to glean a new appreciation for other poets as well.  I’ll keep you posted.

The half-life of irregular verbs is proportional to the square root of their frequency.
–Erez Lieberman

There’s a whole sect of poets who write in pursuit of immortality. This has always struck me as unrealistic — a touchingly human attempt at postponing the inevitable — but still, many proudly proclaim this as their goal. They find solace in the idea of their poems outliving themselves.

Even in a universe destined for cold, black oblivion, it makes some sense to think this way. Our poems are our children — maybe not so child-like as a higher family pet, but at least as filial as a goldfish — and there’s certainly solace in the thought of our children outliving us. But children only live 70 years…Chaucer’s got 16 or so generations of little kiddies running around “Naked out of my fadres hous,” still close enough to modern English that you can kind of understand it if you read out loud.

Unforutnately it turns out that writing into eternity is harder than it used to be. In the March 29th issue of New Scientist (I know, I’m behind), the feature article explains why the English language is changing more quickly than ever.

The central problem for prescriptive grammarians is simple: More people now speak English as a second language than speak it as a first. 80% of English conversations now occur between two non-native speakers. As the dominant language in the global marketplace, it’s starting to follow the path of Latin, which spread through Roman imperialism, and then broke apart into regional dialects that form the modern-day romance languages–or maybe more like that of Arabic, which split into dozens of regional dialects, but remained cohesive through the Koran.

Linguists are still trying to predict what the results will be, as more and more people come to English through other languages. The best guess is a hyper-simplification, as our verb conjugations become more regular (the past-tense of “help” used to be “holp”, not “helped”, for example), and non-native speakers try to find common ground with a more limited vocabulary.

What does this mean for poets who want to see their fountain pen as a fountain of youth? In 500 years, will anyone even be able to read your poems? Maybe we can make like H.G. Wells and try to project our language into the future: “I runned to ze forests n finded all ze trees is gone.” Doubleplusgood?

Eh, maybe not. But it’s always interesting to think about the evolution of language, which breathes and grows and sings and dies like all of us do. You can think of it as a complicated meme, or a short string of genes. A generational telephone game. It’s temporal, but as with life, that’s part of the beauty.

The way this season is going, the Mets will probably lose tonight to Miguel Batista. A 37-year-old journeyman from the Dominican Republic with a putrid 6.26 ERA, Batista is often casually described as “one of the smartest man in baseball.” Why? Because he’s a published poet! He’s also written a novel, and is working on a second, but for some reason, in article after article, it’s the poetry that’s the one-line proof that Batista is brighter than the average ballplayer.

That’s not saying much, you might say, but there are plenty of Ivy Leaguers in the Show. In the opposing bullpen, Aaron Heilman graduated from Notre Dame, and up in the booth former pitcher Ron Darling duel-majored in French and History at Yale. Maybe we should take it as a compliment that poetry is seen as such an esoteric, eggheaded pursuit–at least French is useful, right?

But let’s take a look at Batista’s poetry. The book is Sentimientos en Blanco y Negro (”Feelings in Black and White”), published by MCB Producciones in Buenos Aires. Here’s a snippet, translated from the Spanish by the Seattle Metropolitan:

I would like the power to save
the souls in agony
who sustain the hope
of improving some day.

In a word: Yikes. You can find other selections of poetry if you care to dig, or you can read the beginning of his novel, and form your own opinion about the quality of the work. I’m not here to bash Miguel Batista.

What is worth talking about, though, is the frightening phenomenon of celebrity poetry. Stroll through your local Barnes & Noble and you’ll probably see that poetry is a shelf, not a section, and that the shelf is dominated by the already-famous–dead white men, and “poets” like Jewel, Billy Corgan, and Leonard Nimoy, who actually sounds a bit like Batista:

Today,
Time has stopped.
A minute is still a minute.
An hour is still an hour.
And yet,
The past and the future
Hang in perfect balance.
All focused on the present.
A sweet flow of excitement
Warms me.
You are near.

As I’ve said before, even using a baseball metaphor, I think everyone should be writing poetry. Just not everyone should be publishing it. Poetry can be an intimate form of communication between two people, like Nimoy and his wife or Batista and his ex-girlfriend, even when it has nothing to offer a general audience. But when you already have a “platform”, and publishers know that you’ll be able to sell books using your name alone, that private poetry becomes public, and suddenly sucks.

The tragedy is two-fold: Not only is it an embarrassment for poetry that A Night Without Armor outsells the Poet Laureate, but it’s also an embarrassment for the celebrities themselves, who are naive or egotistical enough to believe that their publishers aren’t just taking advantage of them.

It’s almost the same as those who fall for the Poetry.com scam, where every entrant is a finalist, every line of poetry, no matter how bad, is praised. The pride at having won almost always explodes into the depression of disillusionment. I’ve seen it first hand, in my own family, and I’ve even fallen for it myself, in a way, when the Who’s Who arrived in my mailbox as an aptly-named sophomore in high school. A day in the clouds isn’t worth the month in a dump that follows. I can’t imagine that the celebrities are so sheltered that they never realize, on some level, their own inadequacies.

Celebrity poetry is never going away. As long as there’s the opportunity to make a buck, some shady press will be willing to pluck it off the tree of self-respect. And as publishing becomes cheaper, book-selling more streamlined, and American culture ever-more celebrity-obsessed, it’s only going to become more common. I can already see a ghostwritten book of poems by Paris Hilton somewhere on the horizon, distinguishing her as one of the smartest women in…whatever it is she does. Brace yourself.

I’ve been reading a lot of formal poetry lately, thanks mostly – and perhaps surprisingly – to the upcoming Cowboy/Western issue. Cowboys love their meter and rhyme. Poetry sprung up 50,000+ years ago as a pneumonic device for people who hadn’t yet invented the ballpoint pen (not to mention the ball itself), and verse became the first medium for transgenerational knowledge. Tibetan monks still memorize hundreds of thousands of lines of sacred text by putting the words to a beat. (I never understand why people are surprised to see poets reciting from memory at readings – in many ways, that was always the point.)

Out on the range – and I hope I’m not being too much of a greenhorn with this explanation – ranchers and wranglers have kept up this oral tradition. Setting up camp at night in the middle of nowhere, with only the supplies you can carry on your horse, entertainment is hard to come by. Maybe you have a book to read by the fire. Maybe just a harmonica, a flask of whiskey, and the stars. So it’s no surprise cowboys started turning to poetry, much the same way I mumble poems to myself as I’m folding clothes at the Laundromat instead of watching Oprah. I read somewhere, though I can’t find the link now, that the tobacco companies started tucking poems into their tins, like the plastic prize in a cereal box. But if you want to keep yourself entertained for weeks at a time, you’re going to need a lot of poems, you’re going to need to write some of your own, then remember them, so you can entertain your friends.

The most common form in the west, like most everywhere else in the English world, was the ballad—think of your typical church hymn: quatrains alternating between four and three beats, rhymed ABAB. The ballad is so common, in fact, that it’s also called “common verse”—and with all the rhymes and repetitions, no form has more pneumonic cues. Fit a good story into the ballad form, and suddenly you’ve got a good storyteller. And the tradition is alive and thriving even into the Internet Age.

So I’ve been reading a lot of ballads lately. Not all cowboy poets write in form, but a lot of them do, and maybe a third of all submissions are suddenly fitting this mold. And it works. I’m a foot-tapping poetaster – I’ve never been intensely interested in adding accent marks and counting beats, but even in free verse there’s always a rhythm I’m listening to, and if a word is off, if there’s one syllable that doesn’t seem to fit, the poem makes a sound like The Gong Show, with similar consequences.

Now we’re getting to the point of this post, because I’m wondering if there are other foot-tapping poets out there, or if this is just something that happens to me:

I’ll be reading three ballads in a row, say, and then I’ll go back to a standard, contemporary free verse poem, one that might be quite good, and suddenly it sounds awful. I can’t stop myself from song-singing lines that weren’t meant to be read that way, from waiting for the rhyme that never comes. At this point, even a bad rhyme would sound better than no rhyme at all. I find I have to keep cleansing my ear’s palate – slap myself in the face, gurgle some mouthwash, run around the block.

It reminds me of another quirk of the brain, that’s either normal, or makes me a freak. If I’m walking or jogging, and I start counting my steps, 1, 2, 3, I can’t stop! I’ll get into the hundreds, doing all sorts of mental gymnastics before I can get The Count out of my head. Does that happen to everyone?

Anyway, it’s gotten to the point where I have to group the ballads out of a stack of submissions and read them last. As soon as I see a bit of meter or an end rhyme, I banish it to quarantine ASAP, lest I catch the sonic virus and contaminate all the others.

What’s even more interesting, though, is that it’s never unpleasant to go in the other direction – free verse never taints the ballad. You never trip over an expected foot. Couple this with the feeling of perfection in a really great sonnet, a purity rarely felt reading contemporary poetry, and I can’t help but wonder, briefly, if there’s a superiority to form.

But then I remember the kind of songs that get stuck in your head – what the Germans call “earworms.” They’re always commercial jingles, or the Village People, or the Macarena. They’re never Leonard Cohen.

Before I offend the cowboys or the formalists, I’m not saying ballads should be banished to Hallmark cards and television commercials. It’s just a reminder that memorability is not synonymous with quality. If something is worth remembering, and it’s easy to do so – hey, bonus points. But memory is a sword, not a knife.

I’d really just like to know – does formal verse get stuck in your head, too? Can you go from John Donne to Stephen Dunn without getting all screwy in the head?

Speaking of whether or not poetry can change the world, I couldn’t help but repost Salah al Hamdani’s “Baghdad, Mon Amour” as our poem of the week. If any one poet can make a difference, it’s someone like al Hamdani, who began writing in his twenties, while imprisoned for his opposition to Saddam Hussein’s regime. He’s been living as an exile in France since 1975. Thirty years after having to flee his homeland, he remains a steadfast anti-war voice, opposing even the removal of the dictator who caused him so much hardship.

There’s nothing we’ve done at Rattle that I’m more proud of than publishing “Baghdad, Mon Amour”–scrambling to find a translator at Sam Hamill’s suggestion, and squeezing it in to the seemingly random Poets Writing Abroad tribute. Molly Deschenes translated the piece in a matter of days, and though she claims not to be a poet herself, her ear for the musicality of language says otherwise. The poem has since been translated by C. Dickson, but I still prefer Molly’s less-embellished version.

As powerful as the poem is, as grateful as I am for the opportunity to share it with an American audience, I’m still unconvinced of its impact. If we took out a full page ad and featured it in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, then put up billboards of the poem on the highways, if we tied the war-mongers to a chair and made them read the poem over and over again until they could recite it in a drugged stupor–would anything come of it?

I doubt it. Those inclined to agree with al Hamdani would nod along, store it affectionately in the corner of their hearts, maybe read it to a friend. The friend might show another friend, and maybe there’s a wave of more eloquent pacifism. The greedy xenophobes and those regulated by fear would see only words on a page, and excuse away whatever love or logic they stoop to understand. But nothing else.

And if we didn’t go out of our way to give the poem an audience, if some pimply college student had miraculously written it for a class and posted it on his blog, we wouldn’t even see that meager result. Poems don’t spread on their own, not in today’s age of the sound byte, if they ever did.

Of course, in other countries, in other times, poets have been jailed for their politics, some of their families even murdered. But I’d still argue that it’s the poets, and not the poems themselves, that are sometimes a threat to the establishment. It’s the poets’ intelligence, and passion, and their ability to speak for and mobilize a crowd. It’s Salah al Hamdani and Sam Hamill and Jon Andersen and Anna Akhmatova. Not necessarily what they wrote, but how they wrote it, what they did with it thereafter.

Or maybe there is a subtle effect, en masse, on the receptive end. Ignorance and oppression go hand-in-hand. Having the words to understand and communicate your thoughts is a powerful thing. So, too, is the focused attention and fine perception of a poem.

This is where, in my mind, poetry becomes one of the most important things we can pursue. It’s the subject of one of my favorite books, Erik Campbell’s Arguments for Stillness — a way of using that word made suddenly popular by Oprah’s new dreadful sensation Eckhart Tolle. That focused attention, that empathetic concentration, can be seen as the greatest thing that’s missing in modern society. The Buddhists call it enlightenment; new-agers like Tolle call it awakening a new consciousness. Either way, it’s the critical component in moving beyond things like war and greed — and nothing embodies it better than poetry.

I really believe that if we all read poetry, we’d all be better people–that falling in love with poetry is its own kind of awakening. So maybe the poems themselves really can change the world, as a conduit of goodness. If that’s the case, “Baghdad, Mon Amour” is a great conductor. But even if it’s not, Salah al Hamdani is pure lightning.

In a story from last September, Alice Quinn, who had just stepped down as editor of The New Yorker, mentions that the magazine “regularly received more than 600 poems a week.”

First thought: If they can’t crack 1,000, Lyn Lifshin must not submit there. I kid, I kid.

Second thought: 20 submissions/day x 4.5 poems/submission x 7 days/week = 630 poems…we read more poems every week than The New Yorker!? No way. If I had to guess, I’d have said they’re missing a zero in that quote. I’d assume ten times the volume — which would match their circulation and prestige. They only allow three poems per submission, so their 90 poems a day is coming from 1/3 more people, but that doesn’t explain a factor of ten.

Try as I might, I can’t rationalize that number. Is there a glass ceiling of poets out there? The law of diminishing returns? There’s a finite number of poets actively submitting at one time, but I’ve never seen an estimate on what that number might be.

In his legendary essay, Can Poetry Matter?, Dana Gioia estimates that MFA programs are turning out a stunning 2,000 certified poets each year. That essay was written 17 years ago. If you fit his estimate onto a crude curve dating back to the handful of writing programs in the 1940s, you can see there are easily 60,000-100,000 MFA graduates. Most of them are probably no longer writing and submitting work, having moved on to whatever field poets move on to. But most poets don’t have MFAs.

If I had to guess, I’d say you could fit every active poet in the U.S. into The Big House–but there wouldn’t be a lot of empty seats.

(To cross-check this figure against something, we know that about 4,000 poets attend the AWP every year. One in 25 poets showing up sounds about right.)

So maybe with 100,000 active poets, 600 poems per week is all the production you can expect? Either that, or we’re almost as popular as The New Yorker. On second thought, let’s just say it’s that.

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Anyway, we’re interviewing Alice Quinn next week for an upcoming issue. Not only was she poetry editor of The New Yorker for 20 years, she’s also president of the Poetry Society of America, and probably the primary biographer of Elizabeth Bishop.

Is there anything you’d like us to ask her?