Who is a Writer?

When asked the question “what do you do?” who is entitled to reply “I’m a writer”?  That’s the question animating an essay by Tom Coyne in the most recent issue of Notre Dame Magazine.  There are many fine things in Coyne’s essay, but the most interesting part of the issue goes largely unexamined: it’s that strange misfit between the verb of the question—what do you do—and the verb in the answer—I am a writer.  We gloss over the slippage from doing to being, because we live in a society that largely equates work activity with identity, but that equation is not obvious everywhere.

One of my great touchtones, when it comes to how identity is defined, is a moment from a conference I attended years ago, in which the Tanzanian scholar Joseph Mbele rose up and asked the assembled scholars, who had been talking about identity, when we would consider the criteria for identity—family, clan, tribe—that applied in the world he came from.  One did not, in the village of his youth, define oneself through an occupational identity so much as through a kinship network.  Even in Western societies, the notion that one’s identity is primarily a matter of work activities is of fairly recent vintage.  The scholars Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, in their excellent study Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, note that even in what was then the nation most advanced into modernity, England, it is only in the early to mid nineteenth century that work activity began to displace other forms of identity (such as “gentleman”) as primary terms of identity definition.  To a degree, this was because the economic conditions that drive us toward specialization had yet to become dominant.  As they put it,

 …tasks which are now specialized and seen only properly performed by experts, were then still vaguely defined.  The task or function was the focus, not a full professional identity.  People moved between activities and used a variety of ways to support their livelihood…. Both men and women had to balance their time and energy between a wide range of duties.

What is more, family identity was still, as far as official documents were concerned, more important than individual identity.  The census itself did not account for individuals, but for families, and from 1801 to 1821 “roughly categorized families as agricultural or in ‘trade manufacture.’”  But by 1831, “families were abandoned and adult males were divided into nine major occupational groups.”  If you were a man, you were starting to be defined by your work, and by 1851 it had become standard to equate “masculine identity with an occupation” (if you were a woman, there was some question as to just what you were—a question that animated a great deal of conversation and fuelled a great deal of activism).

So to answer the question “what do you do” with “I am a writer” (or dishwasher, or bond broker) is to already declare “I live in a gesellschaft rather than a gemeinschaft world,” a world of abstract economic relations rather than a world of concrete kinship bonds.  You live in a world where you are defined by your profession.

But is writing a profession?  For Coyne, the first answer seems to be “no,” if being a professional means living off the money earned by writing.  “[C]alling oneself a writer,” he declares, “has nothing to do with whether or not you have been paid as one” (one hears the poets of the world cheering in the background, their voices faint like those of the slain warriors Odysseus visits in the land of the dead).  But being a professional has always meant more than being paid.  As Burton J. Bledstein puts it in The Culture of Professionalism, a profession involves a certain kind of background and a certain ethos.  Traditionally, becoming a professional meant something like this:

During a fairly difficult and time-consuming process, a person mastered an esoteric but useful body of systematic knowledge, completed theoretical training before entering a practice or apprenticeship, and received a degree or license from a recognized institution.  A professional person in the role of practitioner insisted upon technical competence, superior skill, and a high quality of performance.  Moreover, a professional embraced an ethic of service which taught that dedication to a client’s interest took precedence over personal profit, when the two happened to come into conflict.

It’s an interesting mix of regulation and autonomy, isn’t it?  A self-policing entity, a profession maintains standards through institutions and certificates, and in so doing places itself above the standards of a marketplace—good medicine trumps good commerce, for the true professional (although this principle is sometimes, scandalously, in abeyance).  The thing about writing, though, is that for the vast majority of its history it has been extra-professional.  Indeed, one reason for the great growth in the numbers of writers in the nineteenth century is that, unlike many other paths through life, writing did not require any particular qualification or license, so it became a refuge for educated youth shut out of other fields (César Graña’s Bohemian vs. Bourgeois offers an excellent discussion of these issues).  Even now, when universities have made the MFA a credential for writing, and when many writers, including Coyne, work at universities that issue degrees in writing, the idea of the writer as a professional in the sense outlined by Bledstein has not become fully dominant.  The very title of a recent book on what it means to be a writer—MFA vs NYC—indicates that there are two prominent cultures of writing in contemporary America, only one of them close to the traditional idea of professionalism.

Coyne eschews the idea that one is a professional by virtue of being paid, and does not discuss the culture of professionalism as it is seen by social historians like Bledstein.  He does, however, distinguish the professional writer from the amateur by virtue of the professional’s attitude toward his or her writing.  “If you write when you don’t want to,” he says, “if you go back when it’s hard, if you pry open the laptop when you would rather be watching BBC America”—if you do these things, “you don’t just write.  You’re a writer.”  This is a bit of a grim picture: it’s almost as if to count as a writer, you have to be alienated from your labor, experiencing it not as fulfillment but as drudgery.  There’s certainly a work ethic here, but it seems to be imported from the more exploited forms of labor.  And it is through this ethic of drudgery that one earns the identity of the writer.

One wonders, though: if adopting this alienated attitude is the cost of claiming a writer’s identity, is the prize worth it?  Or might we borrow a page from Michel Foucault, who argued in History of Sexuality, Volume One, that it is possible to conceive of sexuality not as an identity, but as a set of activities?  Could we, when asked what we do, reply in terms of activity (the terms of the question, after all), rather than identity?  When asked “what do you do?” could we reply not “I am a writer” but “mostly, I write”?

The Good Bad Poet: An Extinct Species?

George Orwell was many things—martyr, masochist, moralist, Etonian malcontent—but he was not a particularly scrupulous scholar.  So we should treat with caution his claim, in the 1945 essay “Good Bad Books,” that it was G.K. Chesterton who coined the phrase “good bad book” to describe “the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.”  The attribution has been much-repeated, but attempts to track it down founder.  To the best of my knowledge, the closest Chesterton came to defining a “good bad book” was to write in defense of the then critically-despised popular forms such as the penny dreadful and the detective story in essays collected in his 1901 book The Defendant.  The term “good bad book,” as Orwell uses it, appears to be his own coinage, perhaps attributed to Chesterton unintentionally through the vagaries of memory.

Orwell divides the empire of the Good Bad Book into two principalities.  The first of these is comprised of the various forms of escapist literature (in which he includes the Sherlock Holmes stories, Booth Trakington’s Penrod stories, as well as some thrillers and comic writings).  The second is made up of books that, “attain sincerity partly because they are not inhibited by good taste.”  The authors of books in this latter category generally identify so fully with their characters and invite such complete sympathy from the readers that they lack critical distance from those characters—they inhabit the sensibility of their characters “with a kind of abandonment that cleverer people would find difficult to achieve.”  Lack of self-consciousness is important to this second kind of good bad book—the author of such a book “only partly grasps the pathetic vulgarity of the people he is writing about, and therefore does not despise them.”  In this sort of book we enter into full and uncritical sympathy with the sort of figure we would normally recoil from—but because the author himself lacks self-consciousness, we go along for the ride with Dionysian abandon.  We’re not talking about something clever like Nabokov’s Lolita, in which the author plays complex games of sympathy for the devil.  We’re talking about the unselfconscious reveling in an odious or limited or pathetic ethos that we find in, say, Norman Podhoretz’s Making It.  The sincerity is everything.

The melodramatic mawkishness of Uncle Tom’s Cabin makes it a bad book, says Orwell, yet he finds in it a kind of righteousness that is essentially true and moving, making it a good bad book that, he predicts, will outlast “the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore.”  It has already outlived George Moore in the popular imagination.  Woolf? Well, we’ll have to wait and see.  And since Orwell gives no timeframe, we’ll never reach a point where we can say he was definitely wrong.

Orwell has precious little to say about poetry in “Good Bad Books,” except that there are some music hall songs that, while lacking in subtlety and conscious craftsmanship, nevertheless embody a real sincerity and power, as does this one:

Come where the booze is cheaper,

Come where the pots hold more,

Come where the boss is a bit of a sport, 

Come to the pub next door!

The sentiment may be little different from “Sometimes you want to go/where everybody knows your name/And they’re always glad you came” (that, for you young ‘uns, is from the theme song to the sitcom Cheers)—but simple and sentimental as that sentiment may be, it is sincere and endures.  Orwell tells us he would “far rather have written” a stanza like this than “The Blessed Damozel” or “Love in a Valley.”

If we’d like to refine our sense of what a good bad poet, we could do worse than to look to another of Orwell’s essays, “Rudyard Kipling,” written three years prior to “Good Bad Books.”  Here, Orwell assesses Kipling’s achievement by taking a look at what T.S. Eliot had said about the author of Barrack-Room Ballads.  “Mr. Eliot,” Orwell tells us, “says that what is held against [Kipling] is that he expressed unpopular views in a popular style.  This narrows the issue by assuming that ‘unpopular’ means unpopular with the intelligentsia…” At this point you probably think you know where Orwell’s going with this.  You probably think he’s going to say that Kipling expressed views that, while unpopular with the intelligentsia, were popular with the broad reading public.  But that’s not it!  Where we think Orwell’s going to zig, he zags, saying:

…but it is a fact that Kipling’s ‘message’ was one that the big public did not want, and, indeed, has never accepted.  The mass of people, in the ‘nineties as now, were anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic.  Kipling’s official admirers are and were the “service” middle class… In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, [i.e., the pompous reactionaries] having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as “If,” were given almost Biblical status.

This is fascinating stuff.  The reading public in Kipling’s day was both larger and less homogenous than it was in Tennyson’s heyday, and the poet could no longer presume to speak to, and for, the vast majority of the readership (this had huge implications for the development of poetry in the early twentieth century—it takes two chapters of the book I’ve been working on, Making Nothing Happen: Poetry in Society, Poetry for Itself, just to scratch the surface).  But for a part of that reading public, a part that felt itself misunderstood and taken for granted by the majority of the population, Kipling was a voice, a poet who articulated what they believed in and the codes by which they lived.  “The White Man’s Burden” expressed a bitter late-imperial sentiment that belonged more to them than to the British reading public as a whole.  

And this is where we can see Kipling as a good bad poet, in the sense of sincerely and unselfconsciously expressing an ethos that doesn’t stand up to enlightened examination.  To kidnap a phrase from Orwell’s other essay, Kipling, as poet, “only partly grasps the pathetic vulgarity of the people he is writing about, and therefore does not despise them.”  And we get to go along for the ride, because Kipling’s belief in the perspectives from which he writes is so sincere and heartfelt—he truly, madly, deeply loves the Empire!  He might not have been a good poet in a way that cultivated readers of poetry appreciate, but Kipling the poet resonated beyond the little valley of the literati where executives fear to tread.  He was a good bad poet.

But can we have another Kipling?  Can there be a good bad poet now?  The prospects for someone that serious poetry readers admire becoming truly popular are dim, and were already dim in the 1940s when Orwell wrote:

It is no use pretending in an age like our own, “good” poetry can have any genuine popularity.  It is, and must be, the cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the arts.  Perhaps that statement needs a certain amount of qualification.  True poetry can sometimes be acceptable to the mass of people when it disguises itself as something else…. But in general ours is a civilization in which the very word ‘poetry evokes a hostile snigger.

But what about a poet the literati do not care for, except perhaps with a kind of asterisk attached, and a little footnote saying “guilty pleasure” or “there’s something about the sentiment, but this is not to be entirely admired”?  We’d need a poet who could articulate for a large class of people the sentiment they hold most dear, but at present those sentiment tend to be articulated elsewhere: by popular culture (in commercially mediated forms) and by the new popular culture of video clips and social media.  It seems unlikely that a good bad poet will emerge in the West in our time.

Of course the question of the good bad poet, such as Kipling, raises another question, that of the bad good poet.  But I don’t feel the urge to write about P.B. Shelley.

No Brown M&Ms: A Model Contract for Literary Performances

Those of you who have booked me for a lecture, poetry reading, radio spot, celebrity roast, bris, or beauty pageant have been getting off easy—or so my attorney, Fallon McPhael Jr., Esq., of the firm Try & McPhael, tells me.  He and his team have racked up a phenomenal number of billable hours in crafting my new standard contact for performances, which I post here for the edification of all.  Please note that while the contract does not specify the presence of a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones picked out, my head security goon, Waldemar, gets antsy in the absence of such refreshments.  You do not want Waldemar to be antsy in the Green Room.

*

STANDARD CONTRACT FOR PERFORMANCE

WHEREAS, the organizer identified on the Signature Page (“Organizer”) wishes to procure certain services; and

                WHEREAS, Robert Archambeau (“Archambeau”) is willing to provide certain services; and

                WHEREAS, Organizer and Archambeau (each, a “Party” and collectively the “Parties”) intend to attach to their proposed transaction the appearance of legality,

                THEREFORE, the Parties agree to this Standard Contract for Performance (“Agreement”) as follows:

PAYMENT

Organizer agrees to pay to Archambeau $____________ upon execution of the Agreement.

Organizer agrees to cooperate with Archambeau in characterizing the nature of the Payment for tax purposes.  This includes (without limitation) documenting the payment as Payment for services OR, at Archambeau’s sole discretion, as any of the following (all listed on IRS Publication 525 (2013) as categories of “Other Income”):

• alimony
• a bribe
• an energy conservation subsidy
• Exxon Valdez settlement income
• a railroad retirement annuity payment
• an IRS whistleblower award

PRE-PERFORMANCE REQUIREMENTS

Organizer shall arrange Archambeau’s transportation.  This transportation must be so smooth and continuous that Archambeau does not realize that he is being transported.  He must be able to lightly hold a cup of coffee during the entire experience and be assured that not a single drop will fall outside the cup for transport-related reasons.

Organizer shall arrange for a private area where, upon arrival, Archambeau may shed all his clothes, be measured by Savile Row tailors, and have a suit manufactured for him on the spot before proceeding to the performance venue.

On the way to the performance venue, Archambeau shall be driven through the streets in a chariot, in the manner of a Roman triumph.  A sad-faced clown shall accompany him, whispering to Archambeau to remember that he will die.

Immediately prior to the performance, Organizer shall provide Archambeau with a small conference room, five (5) packs of index cards, a Pilot G2 black ink pen, and a xylophone, which if played properly will produce an air of melancholy that may settle over the entire world.  A crock of poutine shall be manned at all times, with a crooked sign attached saying “All You CARE To Eat”.

PERFORMANCE

In exchange for the Payment, Archambeau shall provide a Performance.  Any of the following may constitute a Performance, satisfying the terms of this Agreement:

• inaudible murmuring, mixed with beatboxing
• involuntary baptism of one or more audience member
• an a capella performance of the Squeeze hit, “Black Coffee In Bed”
• bare-knuckle boxing with former United States Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin, or other former United States Poet Laureate of similar girth
• founding a sovereign state
• popping a wheelie (bicycle)
• failing to pop a wheelie (unicycle)
• polling the audience on the Oxford comma, pitting sides against one another
• waxing nostalgic about library reference cards
• making innocent comments about other nationalities
• explaining in detail how to sort recyclables
• disparaging the manhood of beloved comedy icon Bob Newhart
• tearfully apologizing to beloved comedy icon Bob Newhart
• something about poetry

This list is provided solely for purposes of illustration.  A Performance will consist of any action or inaction taken by Archambeau during the designated time of the event.

REQUIRED MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT

Organizer shall make have ready to following songs to be played on pre-set cues before, during, and immediately after Archambeau makes his presentation:

• Gary Glitter, “Rock and Roll, Part 2”
• The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, “Shake Your Moneymaker”
• Bananarama, “Cruel Summer”
• Bing Crosby, “Little Drummer Boy”
• Deee-Lite, “Groove Is In the Heart”

ENTOURAGE

Archambeau shall require, and Organizer shall provide, an entourage (“Entourage”) to consist of the following members:

A Pursuer of Thieves to confront any audience member who may have stolen any personal item or idea from Archambeau, as determined in Archambeau’s sole discretion.  The Pursuer of Thieves shall be dressed in full military uniform, including with a spiked helmet of the style favored by the Kaiser in the First World War.

A Hype Man or Woman to exhort the audience with false promises and blandishments, to shout nonsense excitedly, to gibber and moan, such that crowd is in mass hysteria before Archambeau utters a single word.

A Fastidious Belgian with whom Archambeau may share private, disparaging remarks regarding the Organizer, the audience, and America.   The Fastidious Belgian shall also be in charge of the frites.

NOTE:  Belgian, not French!  Fastidious, not fussy!

An Adoring Biographer who Archambeau may intentionally disillusion by first refusing to answer questions directly, and then by bluntly stating the harder truths of a poet/critic’s life.

A Frenemy of Archambeau’s who may say, or to whom may be said, “we’re not so different, you and I…”

All members of the Entourage shall be employees or contractors of the Organizer.  While Entourage members will be subject to Archambeau’s direction, under no circumstances shall Archambeau be required to pay bail for any of them.

RETAINER

In addition to the Entourage, Archambeau shall bring, and Organizer shall provide room, board, and a stipend of $100 a day each for, a retainer (“Retainer”) to consist of the following members:

A Lila Archambeau Impersonator.  In the event of audience unrest, the Lila Archambeau Impersonator may rush onto the stage to plead for Archambeau’s life.  Due to the associated danger, Archambeau employs a variety of diminutive adult actresses to play this role.  Many actresses willing to play this role have a criminal background.

NOTE:  A designated indoor smoking MUST must be provided for the Lila Archambeau Impersonator.  

NOTE:  All Organizer employees who have backstage access must be cautioned not to in any way provoke the Lila Archambeau Impersonator.

An Illegal Cheese Mule.  Self-explanatory.

ALTERNATE DISPUTE RESOLUTION

The Parties agree that all disputes between them shall be committed to binding arbitration (“Arbitration”), as described below.  Organizer shall bear the cost of arbitration.

Organizer shall select an island, atoll, or archipelago for Arbitration (“Arbitration Venue”).  Organizer shall assure that the Arbitration Venue is without any human habitation, and is not accessible to anyone other than those involved in the Arbitration.

Organizer shall bring twelve (12) infants under the age of six months to the Arbitration Venue (“Jurors”).  Each Juror shall be assigned to one of three Juror Panels.  

The First Juror panel shall be the Deontologists, or Deons.  The Deon Jurors shall be trained to articulate and uphold moral imperatives, whatever the cost.  Their sigil shall be a man on fire, refusing to douse it with water that isn’t his.

The Second Juror panel shall be the Stenographers.  The Stenographer Jurors shall be raised to observe and record, expertly taking in all sense-data.  In all other matters, they should be lean and ignorant.

The Third Juror panel shall be the Whoopsies.  The Whoopsie Jurors shall be raised by a team of improv comics, who will teach them that life is a joke, and the only rational response to tragedy is to take audience suggestions and be ready to imitate a bicycle horn.

Until they every Juror reaches the age of 18, the Juror Panels shall be kept isolated from one another.  When each Juror is at least 18 years old, they shall be locked in a building with one another and a Henry Fonda impersonator.  The Jurors will then have one day to decide unanimously the dispute between the Parties.  Should they fail to do so, the Jurors will be deported from the Arbitration Venue and Organizer shall convene a new jury from scratch.

ENTIRE AGREEMENT

This Agreement shall be the entire agreement between the Parties.  This Agreement completely preempts and displaces all other legal relations between the parties, such as might otherwise be imposed by contract, custom, municipal or tribal law, state law, federal law, the law of the sea, the law of averages, or Murphy’s Law.    

/signatures, etc/

Twenty Poets Talking: Poetry & Its Communities

Gently Read Literature, the excellent little magazine edited by Daniel Casey, has folded up shop.  I only wrote for GRL once, in the form of a review of Tony Leuzzi's Passwords Primeval in the Winter 2014 issue.  Leuzzi's book, published by BOA Editions in 2012, is a collection of interviews with a laudably wide range of poets.  Here, with Casey's kind permission, is the text of my essay.  I focus on the interviews with Kevin Killian, Karen Volkman, and Billy Collins.  What fascinated me were the different kinds of poetic communities from which, and for which, they wrote.

Twenty Poets Talking

“Don’t tell me what the poets are doing, don’t tell me that they’re talking tough,” sang the Tragically Hip back in 1998, “don’t tell me that they’re anti-social, somehow not anti-social enough.” Editor and interviewer Tony Leuzzi has certainly managed to get the poets talking in Passwords Primeval: the transcripts of his interviews with twenty very different poets, taken together, run to close to 350 pages. The book is most likely to be dipped into rather than read straight through: one imagines its destiny involving resting on library shelves until people interested in the work of a particular poet pluck it down to read that poet’s contribution. But one of the most interesting things to emerge when one does read all twenty interviews back-to-back is the lack of anti-social attitudes among the poets. Most of them seem to speak out of, and to, defined communities, the sum of which make up the varied, fragmented, and (despite reports to the contrary) extensive readership of contemporary American poetry.

Leuzzi’s interview with Kevin Killian shows the clearest case of a poet speaking to, and for, a particular community. Some of Killian’s community orientation shows through in his choice of pronouns: “We wanted to infuse our lives with the rigors of theoretical discourse,” he’ll say, or “I think all of us in the New Narrative [movement] approached the idea of being in a movement, of working collectively, with various degrees of seriousness.” It’s we and us with Killian—with the collective pronouns referring to a group of writers and artists associated with the New Narrative movement which sought to bring poststructural theory and autobiography close together. The movement has very particular time/space co-ordinates: one feels, reading the interview, how very formative the San Francisco of the 1980s was for Killian and his associates. This was ground zero for the AIDS epidemic, and a time of great personal pain for Killian, who watched helplessly as friend after friend succumbed to the plague. “Every time I tried to write something it sounded ridiculous—hokey, sentimental,” he says. “It seemed the enormity of the crisis dwarfed any individual response.” On the suggestion of Kathy Acker, he began to use existing cultural artifacts—initially the films of Dario Argento—as a means to address the crisis, writing through them and treating them as if they were allegories of the epidemic. The resulting surrealism became, at last, a form befitting the tragedy of the epidemic: in Killian’s words, it “corresponded to the surrealism we lived through in the 80s and 90s.” Some of the comfort Killian felt in this form of writing came from the way it released him from his own conscious writerly will and allowed the poem to come forth from the encounter with another artist’s material: indeed, Killian’s poetics are clearly those of a writer who seeks to put the controlling intelligence in abeyance. Hence comes Killian’s love of Jack Spicer, who liked to think of poems as alien transmissions coming to him from space, and hence comes Killian’s statement that many of his poems “unrolled from a place outside my own will.” The impulse for Killian’s work clearly comes from the deeply felt needs of a man caught in the midst of a terrible disaster, and he writes very much for the benefit of people in the same circumstance: the goal he and his friends had, he says, was “to write for a whole, if limited, community, ourselves and our friends and lovers, and one or two benighted souls we imagined actually needed us in the hinterlands.”

It is to Leuzzi’s credit that his collection of interviews includes an experimental, often underground or alternative press poet like Killian along with former poet laureate Billy Collins, perhaps the best-selling American poet of our time. Collins readily acknowledges the many different readerships for American poetry, noting that he and John Ashbery “draw on very different audiences” and that “it’s not like I’m taking readers away from him, or that he’s taking readers away from me.” The audience Collins reaches is often one that lies outside the considerable one made up of other poets: when Collins tells us that he “is not predisposed to be interested in the psychic misery of the poet…. Who would be?” he reveals an orientation toward a very different community than the one that animates the work of Kevin Killian. Where Killian writes from and for an artistic and literary scene, Collins pitches his work toward a larger community, one we might find in any of the affluent American suburbs where copies of The New Yorker grace the coffee tables. While this audience might be considered more mainstream than Killian’s by any number of standards, it is not an audience with which we readily associate poetry. When Collins reflects on his early interest in poetry we see the tension between the modern (and, behind that, the Romantic) notion of the poet-as-outsider and Collins’ sense of himself as belonging to a broader community:

Ever since I came across a picture of Edgar Allan Poe when I was an adolescent, I wanted to be a poet. I’d never seen anyone who looked like that in my life! My parents didn’t look like that, that’s for sure. It suggested there was a realm inhabited by people completely different from the ones around me, that is, middle-class, suburban people. I wanted to be with them, find out who they were.

So far, we seem to be in the realm of Stephen Dedalus or a thousand other young men dreaming of escaping from a dull bourgeois life into the world of art. But there’s a twist:

But, as a poet, I was sort of hobbled by doubt, so I didn’t run with the pack. I didn’t go to poetry readings very much; I didn’t go out with poets; I’ve never taken a workshop.

The struggle, for Collins, was that of how to write for a bourgeois audience in a form that has by-and-large become dissociated from that audience. More than any other American poet of his generation, he has found a way to do just that by the use of humor, striking metaphor, and by (as he puts it) “simple diction” and “predictable” line breaks. We couldn’t be much farther than the world of Dario Argento pastiche that animates Kevin Killian’s work and speaks to his community. What Collins and Killian have in common, though, is the quest—ultimately successful—to connect with the community that matters to them.

No discussion of contemporary American poetry and its communities in our time would be complete without the mention of that 400 pound gorilla sitting at the poets’ table, the creative writing industry. Much-maligned, often by the very people who devote a great deal of time and money to gain their M.F.A. degrees, the world of the creative writing programs has nevertheless provided livings for many poets, as well as a context in which their works are read and appreciated. When we read Leuzzi’s interview with Karen Volkman, we also get a sense of how the world of the creative writing programs has had an influence on the creation of poetry. Volkman, who teaches in the prestigious M.F.A. program at the University of Montana, describes the genesis of her series of elliptical sonnets as part of her teaching process, coming about when she “started reading sonnets in preparation for a forms class I was scheduled to teach.” Just as we can see the qualities of Killian’s or Collins’ work as things rooted in the particular communities to which they speak, so also can we see Volkman’s formal concerns as connected to the poetry/academe nexus at which she and I (and, quite probably, you) dwell. While Killian’s poetry sought a way to reflect on the crisis of AIDS in San Francisco and Collins’ poetry worked to connect with a suburban readership, Volkman’s poetry, in foregrounding the elliptical, connects with communities that come to poetry for language and its ambiguities. Indeed, many of her lines can, she says, be read as “propositions for a poetics” and she is wary of the kind of reduction of language to statement that a poet like Collins courts, worrying that “putting the borders of particular reference” on poems “is a kind of violence.” This love of poetry for its polysemous multiplicity of meaning and its irreducibility to paraphrase has animated professors of poetry at least since the days of the New Criticism, and animates us still—Volkman even describes herself speaking to her students about how she’s been reading a certain poem for years and how she is “still not sure what to make of it.” Clearly Volkman loves this sort of ambiguity in poetry, and introduces it to a community of students and colleagues in many ways, including through her own works.

Leuzzi’s other interviewees include Michael Waters, Gary Young, Dorianne Laux, Gary Soto, Patricia Smith, Scott Cairns, Jane Hirschfield, Martín Espada, Gerald Stern, Nathalie Handal, Stephen Dobyns, Dara Wier, Bin Ramke, Mark Doty, Carol Frost, Robert Glück, and Arthur Sze. His methods involve both written and oral conversation, with the poets given the chance to revise the transcripts in consultation with the editor. The effect is in many ways impressive, combining the feel of spontaneity with a level of detail and consideration more often found in essays than in interviews. The method does give something like the effect of an authorized biography, though: there are no moments when the poets seem as if they have been taken off guard. This, itself, speaks of a kind of civility on Leuzzi’s part, a civility that has enabled him to travel comfortably to many different corners of the far-flung American poetry scene.