“Is American poetry at a dead-end?

Have American poets betrayed the

great legacy of modernism? Why or why not? What worries you about
the present moment? Do you see signs of life? Where is the most
promising new work coming from? What is your advice to a young poet
trying to make sense of the current poetry scene?”

First, just when one pronounces something dead is probably when one
should most carefully observe it, for then the greatest transformations
are possible.

Second, what we call a dead end is a problem for those in cars. If you
are walking, there’s usually an alley you can enter, a wall you can
climb, or a field you can walk into. Poets travel by foot. And so I worry
more about the state of commercial publishing, big house novels,
memoirs, “non-fiction” (those cars, SUVs, buses, trucks), than I do
about the state of American poetry. Since poetry, where it is most vital,
operates to the side of mainstream literary culture, it is protected, it
protects itself, from the pressures of that market. Poems find their own
readers, or give birth to them. They do not seek to serve a public who
has expressed little interest in poetry, little interest in its history or
(alive and thriving) present. Poetry does not proselytize; it offers itself
quietly to those who can use it. I am not worried about poets or
readers of poetry, but I am worried about those who don’t read much
at all, or read only what is most stridently marketed. I’m worried that
those blessed with literacy don’t use it.

Three things seem particular about now (though I’m sure that it’s
impossible to see the present; equally impossible is the task of
imagining the past). First, there is no longer any obvious difference
between poetry and prose. Baudelaire’s dream has been realized. The
decision to call something “poetry” arrives not out of any adherence to
forms (unless one wants to), but instead out of the desire the poet has
to be read in a certain way, within a certain context. Poems are open to
language as a mobile, mercurial imp. Poems acknowledge that each
word is greater in its travels, its histories and associations, than the
poet can ever know. To call something a poem is to invite the reader
into “word tunnels” (as a student of mine put it). But genre has nothing
to do with style, even less to do with rules. Genre is a gallery in which
we choose to place our work. If we are interested in joining a gathering
(living and dead) of poets, of others who have called their work
“poetry,” because those are the writers who have most interest us,
whose writing has seemed most brilliant, beautiful, moving, and
dynamic, then it makes sense to call our work poems.

If part of the legacy of modernism has to do with the experiments of

line, form, and page in the writings of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire,
Hopkins, Swinburne, Stein, Williams, Toomer, Olson, Oppen, Cage
(etc.), then we have carried (or are carrying) that legacy to its ultimate
end. Does this mean the end of poetry? Only in the sense that
suggests the greatest possible range of potentialities.

Second, there is no longer any meaningful difference between writing

and compiling, between authoring and quoting, between “mine” and
“yours,” between what Coleridge called “the imagination” (which
invents) and “the fancy” (which collects). The Internet makes found
material exponentially easier to find, exponentially more plentiful,
difficult, and rich, but Safari did not invent the use of sourced material
in poetry. The opposite is true: Internet browsers were invented to
satisfy a culture of hunters and gatherers. The death of the author was
never the end of anything, but rather an acknowledgement of what
was always true: the multiplicity at the core of the singular – an
acknowledgement (as every poet knows) that language comes from
elsewhere, is never something that we own. Again, far from betraying
the sourcing and enfolding of voices, texts, songs, narratives, and
rhetorics that we find in Pound, Eliot, Williams, Zukofsky, Rukeyser,
Niedecker, Hughes, Olson, etc., poets continue to carry such means to
powerful conclusions. The work of C.D. Wright and Rae Armantrout, of
Bin Ramke and Claudia Rankine, of Noah Eli Gordon, Carol Snow,
Matthew Cooperman, Caroline Bergvall, Tan Lin, Laynie Browne – all
offer examples (and varied ones) of gathering, revising, reworking, and
recycling material that is “ours” specifically because it came from
elsewhere and entered us.

While the above two situations might seem to offer a dazzling or

dizzying freedom of form and content (all content in, any form out), a
third situation presses on poetry, presses on poets as it does on
everyone. The world poets write into has never not been a world in
crisis. There is always violence and always injustice, at levels both
intimate and vast. But I don’t think it has ever been as clear that
economic injustice (on a global scale), war, and environmental
destruction are absolutely interconnected. And I don’t know that it has
ever been so obvious to Americans that our privilege spells our
destruction, the destruction of our “way of life,” which is to say, of our
planet. To write into this situation is to face a terrifying and necessary
challenge. Either we see what we are doing as a retreat into the
“personal,” a retreat into “art,” or we acknowledge that such retreats
do not now and never did exist. There is no absolute separation
between the personal and the political, for everything we do (turning
on the computer, driving to work, having a baby, buying food)
participates, for better or for worse, or most confusingly, for both.
There is no absolute barrier between art and “lived experience,”
because we live in and through representation; we “make sense” by
way of symbols (language, images), by way of metaphors. Poets
exploit only what is happening all the time.

It seems to me that of all literary genres, poetry is the one most

capable of and most accustomed to describing and inscribing crisis.
(Seek our recent work by the poets mentioned above as well as Joseph
Lease, Mark McMorris, Brenda Iijima, Peter Gizzi, Lisa Robertson, to
name just a few). Freed from any need to tell a story but able to do so
if it feels like it, freed from the ordinary logics of the practical day, and
so able to invent its own logics, its own structures of meaning, poetry,
by which I mean any writing that calls itself such, writes through its
pleasures directly into terror, culpability, hope, desire, and doubt. As
Lisa Robertson has written, “I believe my critique of devastation /
Began with delight. Now what surprises me / Are the folds of political
desire / Their fragile nobility” (“Utopia”).

Rather than learning by way of advice, I learned and keep learning by

the examples of those who have dedicated their lives to their art, those
I’d met in person and those I’d only met in their books. So I offer no
advice to young poets other than to remain as open as you can to the
possibilities of the work and to disbelieve any boundaries between the
past and the present: the histories of poetry are our current scene.
Which means there is now as always a very broad field within which to
walk. My advice to a poet trying to make sense of the scene is simply
not to try to make sense of it. Instead, make poems.