Balance

One of the highlights — there were many — of the 29^th Kentucky Women Writers Conference was a panel discussion at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Lisa Williams, and Crystal Wilkinson. Subject: Poem or Story: Finding Your Subject’s Form.

I got a real impression that Oates had a prejudice for narrative. From my hastily jotted notes, I quote her as saying something on the order of (and not necessarily all at one time):

I’m sure many of you are poets. There are more people writing poetry than reading it. There are 40 million people writing poetry right now…outbursts of emotion…divorced from narrative…having little weight. …Prose fiction has to have something to say.

I don’t want to give the impression here that Joyce Carol Oates was completely negative about poetry. After all, it was she who picked Lisa Williams’s volume Woman Reading to the Sea (Norton, 2008) for the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Oates was witty, charming, and very intelligent on this panel. Still, such statements, which are not rare, make me want to burn my papers and break my pens. What point in adding to this glut of lightweight emotional indulgence?

As happens, however, this afternoon I picked up the winter 2007 issue of Rattle and opened it to Alan Fox’s interview with Arthur Sze and read the passage below, which restores the balance a little bit for me:

I think poetry has a crucial role to play in our society. We’re in such a hurry; we live in such a consumer culture. Yes, it’s a common complaint to say that the readership of poetry is small and to lament that. I can’t change much about the numbers; all I can say is, we as poets feel this is worth doing—we’re committing our lives to it. It’s not about making money; it’s about nourishing the human spirit.

If, like the monks who pray at Gethsemane to restore balance to the world, I choose to spend my life as an obscure poet, nourishing my own human spirit and with luck a few readers’, then who is to say that is not a worthy thing to do, whether or not I leave an individual mark on the world at large.

Added: This from William Stafford from Writing the Australian Crawl (Univ Michigan, 1979), an essay called “Writing:”

One doesn’t learn how to do art, but one learns that it is possible by a certain adjustment of the consciousness to participate in art—it’s a natural activity for one not corrupted by mechanical ways.

preceded by:

In my area, the coyotes are still the best poets.

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