Coming After: Essays on Poetry

9. Lorenzo Thomas: A Private Public Space

95 From Poetry International, no. 1 (1997). Lorenzo Thomas A Private Public Space In a lecture, “The Blues and the King’s English,” delivered at the Naropa Institute in 1989 and printed in the anthology Disembodied Poetics (1994), Lorenzo Thomas discusses the difference between “court” poetry and “public” poetry. He explains that the former tradition evolved from European courts, was transplanted to the United States by poets such as Anne Bradstreet, was further utilized by those such as Emily Dickinson, and is now in the hands of any contemporary poet who writes for the limited educated world of poetry readers or for her/himself. Public poetry, by contrast, exempliAed somewhat by Beat poetry but much more by the work of, say, the Harlem Renaissance poets or the Black Arts poets (with whom Thomas is associated), purports to fulAll a community function, representing a community’s ideas or feelings. The poems come from, and are delivered back to, the street or the common space/mind of the community. (The court was a very different kind of community that encouraged “individual” poetry.) Thomas’s exegesis is, as usual, clear and amusing—learned, down-to-earth, and useful to the Naropa audience of potential professionals who would not necessarily understand the connection between speciAc poetries and speciAc audiences. Thomas is saying, Don’t complain that they don’t listen to your poetry in the mall if you’re not truly speaking to and for the mall—and you’re obviously not, because you’re not down at the mall right now; you’re here at this special school of poetics and Buddhist studies. With regard to Thomas’s own poetry, this advice is useful but also problematic. A deAnitive division of poetry into court and public types no longer seems true; there are other poetries, a spectrum of practice between those two words or worlds, including Thomas’s own. For Thomas has invented a form that allows for an innovative coincidence of the public and the private. And were poets like Bradstreet and Dickinson really some species of court poet? What difference did it make whether a woman was a “court” or “public” poet, since there was neither court nor public for her? What “special” audience might there have been for a Puritan poet in a minuscule colony? If Emily Dickinson wrote primarily for herself, what is the meaning of those lines “This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me—”? Isn’t Dickinson supposed to have been greatly inBuenced by that most public of forms, hymns? And Dickinson was always speaking to the future—she didn’t throw her poems away, she put them in a trunk. Many people on the street and in the mall know them now. My point is threefold: Arst, that poets often have an indistinct idea of who they’re addressing as audience; second, that there are many overlapping audiences; and third, that the future may contain the poet’s real audience, even though the poet is responding to the present’s pressures. Lorenzo Thomas’s approach to the “problem” of audience is a sculpted monolithic fusion of courtly and public tradition through the medium of an immaculate line. For the courtly line and the public line are both immaculate (in the lecture, among his examples of each tradition are Sir Philip Sidney and the blues): the lines of Bradstreet and Dickinson are not. Thomas’s “early” poem “Wonders,” written in an uncharacteristic consistently short line (and uncharacteristically “personal ”) is both a masterpiece by itself and an indication of how impeccable Thomas’s line will be, with its exact weighting of each word and consistence of pace. The nervous erratic possibilities , the way a music might freak out of where it was and become quasi-uncontrolled buzz or twitter or screech, will not be part of this poetry. There will be changes of pace in future poems, but these changes of pace will be strictly controlled: Thomas is a genius at taking his time. “Wonders” was written in the early seventies, while Thomas was serving in Vietnam, and conveys a “simple” nostalgia for New York and Harlem: 96 97 Sometime I wonder. Will I ever hear Nostalgia in Times Square Again, in some Avenue B Break-in 1/2 bath Bat Will I ever sit In the sun, high On a Lenox terrace And watch the Harlem River run Away from the...