Sherry Chandler

Writing is a blessed life

A poetry discussion list recently pointed me in the direction of The Poetry Judge, a Garrison Keillor piece that first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and is now available at his Prairie Home Companion site. The piece, which is appears as “fiction” in Prospect, purports to describe Keillor’s experience in judging a poetry contest with 400 entries, all but five of them falling into categories like bad daddy poems, elegies to dead animals, or speaking out after long silence.

And there were about fifteen poems of Vietnam, all of them bloody, with mosquitoes and sweat and fear and stink in them, all of them angry about innocence violated and lives brutalized and an uncaring nation anxious to forget.

The question raised on the discussion list was whether Keillor was being vicious or just funny in satirizing these aspiring prize winners. (And the corollary question whether these were real poems or all made up by Keillor himself, and whether that mattered as much as the principal of the thing.)

But I’m going to by-pass that question. I’ve never been very good with satire. I think my mindset is too earnest. And I’ll admit Keillor made me squirm a little bit. How can you make fun of poems about Vietnam?

Still, what struck me in the piece was this passage:

There was no doubt in my mind that most of the poems I read were about the poets’ real lives, offered up as performances, hoping to win a prize for the quality of their suffering, like the candidates on the old “Queen for a Day” show, who told their troubles to the genial host, and audience applause determined who would get the Amana Radar Range and the weekend at Lake Tahoe.

I wanted to sit the poets down in a classroom and lecture them: self-expression is not the point of it, people! We are not here on paper in order to retail our injuries. For one thing, it is unfair to bore someone who doesn’t have the opportunity to bore you right back, and for another, we have better things to do — to defend the hopeless and the down and out, to find humor in dreadful circumstances, to satirize the pompous and pretentious, to make deer appear suddenly in the driveway.

Writing is a blessed life, no matter how hard it may be at times, and a person is lucky to be a writer

After my previous bloviating about Keillor, I’m embarassed to find myself essentially in agreement with this statement. It cuts to the heart of a problem I’ve struggled with for a while. How does one differentiate between what you might call a poetry of witness or even confessional poetry – how does one differentiate poetry from a sort of pornography of suffering. Americans have always loved their “Queen for a Day” type of schmaltz, but as Rochelle Gurstein says in her essay Mourning in America, “Being reduced to tears does not constitute an aesthetic experience.”

This question may reflect a sort of selfishness on my part. I’ve sat through many a poetry roundtable in which we were all reduced to tears several times. The experience evokes in me great sympathy but also a sort of despair. And, I blush to say, a little bit of boredom. As though my CD collection contained only Mahler.

In the vast scale of suffering, I register very low. I’ve come through life relatively unscathed. And such pain as I’ve had, I find myself reluctant either to share or to put out in competition. Does this mean that I can’t be a poet? Not a really serious poet.

Keillor says he judged this contest at the request of “the president of the poetry society.” As president of the poetry society, board chair of the writers association, I have judged a fair number of these contests and I have found that it can be very difficult to judge sincerity, to say this is all very well but it’s not poetry. To quote Keillor again:

It was hard to read those poems and imagine how possibly to judge them as writing, or how the writers wished to be judged. After you have read ten Vietnam poems by ten men so haunted by the war that twenty-five years later their poems are breathless with horror, do you say, “Thank you for sharing your horror, and I choose horror No. 5 because the imagery is more vivid and it is better structured and more original”? These are true life experiences, not literary pieces, and if someone tells you how he almost died when he was eighteen, how can you deny him the prize?

Or how can you compete? Is poetry not about emotion? about soul-searching and pain? What of all those elegies? Those fears that I might cease to be?

The answer I think is yes and no. Keillor answers it this way:

Experience becomes literature when it no longer matters to the reader whether the story is true or not. Stephen Crane wasn’t around for the Civil War, but you don’t wonder about that as you read The Red Badge of Courage, it’s all quite real on the page. Andrew Marvell could have been a Trappist monk in Kentucky and never had a coy mistress, but “Had we but World enough, and Time,/This coyness Lady were no crime” would still be a fine poem

I’m not sure I’d put it quite that way. I think maybe a poet becomes a poet when s/he stops trying to tell us something and starts trying to discover what it is s/he has to say. I think it is this aspect of discovery that makes us say poetry is about language, not message. It is this aspect of discovery that has caused me to explore formal poetry as a way to cut myself loose from the lecturer in me. Does this mean that, as John Martin accused the New Formalists, I am without talent or imagination?

I hope not.

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By the way, I think the most famous Trappist monk from Kentucky did have a mistress, coy or otherwise. And possibly not consummated. But enough to make his superior confiscate the letters and forbid the correspondence.

Possibly related posts:

American Life in Poetry

Green River Writers Writing Contest

Gabehart Prize for Imaginative Writing

Life, don’t talk to me about life…

Kudzu

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