Coming After: Essays on Poetry

Preface

Preface These essays, reviews, talks were written during a ten-year period and, though often commissioned, to one of three purposes: to discuss a poet whose work hadn’t been discussed much; to take up topics which seemed neglected or badly discussed; to explain what I was up to, since no one else seemed to be writing about me (a circumstance that is probably changing). I wanted to be clear, and not consciously innovative in language: I had done that before in discussing poetry and probably will do so again; but I didn’t want to make, as much as to serve. However, I did want to invent a viewpoint in each instance according to what was required, that is, to see what was there without a predetermined terminology or logic getting in the way. Any contemporary poem or poet deserves to be approached without preconception . If it’s of now, who knows what it is? I was combating a climate of what I thought to be exactly preconception and jargon, the ways one is taught to read in school, the inBuence of critics and philosophers and writers one is told are great. Second-generation New York School Agures , and certain poets connected to them through friendship, interests, publication outlets, were neglected, partly because they tended to disdain criticism as a form, thereby not creating a way of talking about their work (as others were doing); partly because they could seem anti-intellectual (as if a poet weren’t by deAnition an intellectual); partly because their work was often humorous, ergo seemed “light”; partly because they tended to practice unsanctioned lifestyles; sometimes simply because they were humble or distracted, “non-careerist,” which is not the same as not professional. I discovered that, having kept in touch with the work of these poets over the course of thirty years, I could Anally see what each had been, and was still, doing. I was impressed by how different each’s life work was from the others’ and with the extent to which each had kept faith with it—the work, the life, the poetry. And it really had taken me this long to see. Poetry takes time, and poets and their critics, especially, should beware of facile judgments (one hears them every day, makes them, revels in it). In no case among the essays about individuals did I end up writing what I had anticipated: I Arst thought to write about Lorenzo Thomas’s poetic line, not his politics of the individual in society; I thought I would perhaps take on Ron Padgett’s francophilia or humor, not his visionary qualities. Had all the time I’d taken with these poets previously been too unreBecting? Probably. I had been learning from them more than reBecting on them, seeing what they could do, as poets, as opposed to what I could. But essays Anally get written so that someone does do the reBecting. In the years I was writing these essays and slightly before, I myself had become involved in making poetry which had little in common, at least superAcially, with the New York School or allied “schools.” I was writing unfragmented epics, Actional narrative verse, in one instance a book which took a hard look at my own life and at “schools” (Mysteries of Small Houses), in another instance an almost misanthropic disavowal of all esthetic and cultural association (Disobedience). Nonetheless I deeply appreciated these other poetries. I still love poetry for itself: it strengthens, protects, and teaches me, because it isn’t me. The pieces in which I explain my projects were partly meant to create a different way of speaking about poetry in order to make room for what I was doing. I felt slightly apologetic about changing —not that much but enough to try to explain myself to my friends. It’s often “change or die”: but one never says that, one says, “Poetry needs this next thing, which I will try to supply.” My own lifelong project, as it seems today, August 3, 2001, has been twofold: to be a woman poet taking up as much literary space as any male poet, but most especially through poetry to discover The Truth. What else is there to do? (Answer: “FEED THE HUNGRY. HEAL THE SICK. RAISE THE DEAD.” To quote Phil Whalen in “Minor Moralia.”) The book is divided into two sections, “Poets” and “Topics”; that is, Arst there are essays about individual poets and then essays about certain...