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poetry hell
Tuesday, October 2 2001
Strom Thurmond collapsed on the floor of the Senate today. What the media isn't telling us is that about a minute before he fell, a suicidal ant commandeered a paper airplane and flew it into the middle of his back at maximum speed.
In the evening I walked down to New School University (at 12th Street and 6th Avenue in the Village) and waited around in front for Gretchen. She suddenly appeared out of a nearby pizza joint where she was eating with the woman Wendy
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whom she serves as a factotum. We'd all come down to the New School to attend a tribute to A. R. Ammons, a famous poet who had died earlier this year. Obviously, this was a Gretchen obligation and my role in all of this was that of her boyfriend.
The tribute was in the Tishman Auditorium, a large collegiate lecture hall that somewhat resembles a vast eyeball equipped with gill slits. Gretchen and I sat in the back with Wendy
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and Gretchen's poet friend Deborah while a dozen or so extremely famous poets (as much as poets can be famous in 2001) read sample poems from Ammon's prodigious career. Most of these seemed to deal with the ephemeral nature of the material world, or "dust in the wind" issues, if you will. As I noted with Gretchen and her friend Dean afterward, Ammon's poems didn't have the uniformly well-honed quality of, say, a Gretchen poem. They tended to ramble for several lines in a free almost prosy sort of way and then suddenly hit well-honed passages like patches of black ice on I-480. I liked some of the poems, especially the shorter ones. But some tended to drag on and on in ways that for me were either unworthy of my attention or unwelcomed reminders of my sobriety. Further subtracting from the experience was the quality of some of the reading. You'd be surprised how terrible some of the biggest names in poetry are at actually reading poems. Happily, it wasn't just me who was suffering. Gretchen turned to me at one point and asked, "Are you in Hell?" and I nodded emphatically that yes indeed I was.
Most of the reason we'd come was so that Gretchen could get a chance to meet the poetry editor for the Paris Review, who was one of the tribute's readers. After the tribute was over, Gretchen ran down to meet him and say hello. At first he had no idea who she was and it took some effort for her to remind him. But even so he was a busy man and had no time for idle chit chat. That's how it is with big shots in the poetry world. Talk about neglect; try having one as your faculty advisor. Here you are, supposed to be thankful to the gods that a world-famous poet has you penciled in somewhere on his ledger, but in actual fact you end up abandoned and raised, if at all, by teaching assistants.
Gretchen and I talked about some of these issues in depth with another of her poetry friends, a guy from Chelsea named Dean. The three of us went to a corner coffee shop for light food and beverages that even the Church of Latter Day Saints (or, for that matter, the Taliban) would approve.
At one point early in the conversation, Dean expressed dismay that poets had divided themselves into factions, that free-versers were now duking it out with the adherents to older, more rigorous forms. "Not many people even like poetry to begin with, and this in-fighting doesn't help us at all," he said. I agreed, saying, "When you're the Taliban, you need to stick together." This led immediately to a long discussion about how fucked-up things are in Afghanistan and, regarding the brutal oppression of Afghan women, "Where were we before September 11th?" "And how about Saudi Arabia?" I added.
For all their insane politics and inexplicable value systems, Dean had to admit that the Taliban do have a certain sense of style. "Not just the [hand motion indicating a turban], but the thing on the side-- now that's panache!" He did think, however, that they could stand to benefit from a few style pointers. For the most part, he thought the unruly beards had to go.
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