Sherry Chandler

I, too, dislike it

Poetry

I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.

— Marianne Moore

This poem was once much longer, but Moore cut it to just these lines.

Here is the pull quote from an article, “Sing Softer: A Notebook,” by Michael Hofmann in the September 2005 issue of Poetry :

“I, too, dislike it,” are the immortal beginning words of Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry,” and they seem to me to be the only possible credentials for a poet and a reader of poetry. I sometimes wonder if there are any poets who “like” it, and whether I would like them.

This highly provocative statement follows a section of the “notebook” in which Hofmann has been explaining/boasting about what a slacker he is.

“Most days,” I once wrote, “I neither read nor write.” It’s still true. If not more so. I keep no notebooks, no dream journal, I have no ideas for poems, no sheaf of half-written drafts. A peculiar sort of life, really. The opposite of ergonomic or diligent.

So, we’ve established, Hofmann spends a lot of time Doing Nothing, a familiar theme here. Yet a glance at his bibliography seems to indicate a certain productivity. But I’ll leave that.

I am much like Hofmann. I am not an industrious poet. So I suppose, I both identify and bristle. Certainly, insofar as this essay is concerned, I’ve been following Hofmann’s example. I’ve been trying to read through these ten pages for as many months and still haven’t actually finished it. I ran across it again the other day, looking for treadmill reading (speaking of doing nothing at a great expenditure of energy), and only realized that I’d been over some of this before when I found some yellow highlights.

Here are some of the ideas I thought worth pondering. From the “I, too, dislike it” paragraph:

…I am hostile to the very idea of poetry, so to speak, in the plural, as a collective mass or enterprise. Poetry as a certain good. The laureates in this country and in England are busy promulgating something I wouldn’t care to promulgate myself. …There is room in the world for bad or middling novels, but somehow not for bad poems.

An assumption here that popular poems are bad poems? That occasional poems are bad poems? That “poetry as a certain good” will be bad poetry? How do you become a good poet if you don’t ever write any bad poems? And is it possible that it might be better to be downright bad than to be middling? How do you pull yourself up out of “middling?”

For me, “middling” is the big problem. Bad poems can sometimes charm — or at least provide a laugh. But the world is full of middling, of “good” poems, most of which don’t interest me much. I get worn down wading through them and then I ask myself why I should add to this great proliferation of well-crafted but somewhat dull poetry. Poems that Hofmann describes as having

…”vacation” written all over them, “part-time sublime,”"cultural tourism,” or “occasional wilderness fix.” …Little wonder maybe, that one persuades oneself that the noblest thing one can do is not to contribute to the poetry glut. Non servam.

I’ve found no positive answer to that conundrum. Especially as I am old and so unlikely to climb the heights. I quit every day.

Perhaps Hofmann himself gives me a sort of answer — it’s just all part of the deal:

You need to read to write. (That was my advice one year to students, read and walk…) Further, you need to change what you read to change what you write. You’re like a spider, rigging your net among what you take to be fixed points, and gradually bringing in new ones.

At any rate, it’s a charming image and something to get on with.

Possibly related posts:

Something to ponder

Mad Robert, Just Plain Bill

Richard Moore

58 & 79

Running across the log pond

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