What can a poem do? It can run through your mind and pull out the bullshit; it can eat at you; it can dig you out of thought. It can act as an arrow, a therapist, a finger pointing on a page to tell you where to pay attention.
People get stuck writing about the uses of poetry, like they get stuck arguing the uses of a forest. Everything must be sifted through the value system of capital. A poem can’t be milled into lumber. It’s not worth much monetarily. It’s not going to make a lot of money for a big company, or help make a mass of workers more productive (and poets’ small wages reflect that.) I can’t communicate (and really have little interest in communicating) a poems’ use value or argue its necessity alongside time saving mechanisms. Poetry makes me a worse worker; it makes me want to waste vast spans of time walking through my own mind; it makes me question time as a device altogether.
In The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner talks about every poem being a failure to communicate something incommunicable (paraphrasing). He wrote, “Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.”
What can a poem do? It can fail. It can reach towards the sky, a desire for depth, or “a transcendent impulse,” and fail to reach it. A poem is an attempt to communicate what cannot be held, and cannot be touched. A poem is a record of failure. It sinks into itself, and shows the gaps in what we want. What we want is to communicate with god, and to be torched by a sense of immense purpose. What we get are words–on a screen, a page, or from another’s’ throat to our ears.
A poem works on me the best when it is making me feel something. And feel what? Feelings are vast, and attempts to pin down their variances through language brings the same failures that poems do. We have words for “sadness,” “grief,” “fear,” and “love,” but think on how vastly these emotions show up in your own life. Language provides a way to paw at the way we feel. We can say, “I’m sad,” and those around us will have a small idea of how we may be feeling. They know something is wrong; they know a desire for comfort is needed. But they can’t know the immensity of that feeling, and having someone try to explain how they feel, in detail, can bring us closer to understanding, but it can’t fully hold that feeling.
A poem moves in the same realm as feelings do. A poem is a way to entrap an emotion so we can attempt to pass it to others. The poet’s emotions are gifted to a reader through language. I’m sad, and the only way I know how to communicate this to you is through metaphor, or imagery. You put a pin into it and try to fix it into a stilled state so others can look at it.
I like a poem which leaves room for the failures of my understanding. It brings discomfort, but I like when a poem reminds me that I can’t really understand it or who wrote it. What do I know? Only what I’ve been shown, and I like when part of what I’m being shown is the wide gaps in my understanding.
I’m writing this after finishing Elaine Kahn’s book of poems Romance or the End. I loved it. Ugh, so sharp and real. It’s a book about lies, romance, and disdain. It has multiple poems titled “Romance” in the book’s various sections, but this is not a highly sentimental book. The first word that came to my mind to describe it was “biting.” The poems feel like a blade coursing through a rock. What I’m trying to say is they’re cutting, but there’s also an immense tenderness beneath them. I felt like I was reading someone who is a master of their craft.
“Romance” by Elaine Kahn:
Love has turned on me
and now I am its liar
Here are some of the poems I wrote while reading the book. I love reading a book of poems and being so inspired that I write an armful of poems because of it. Usually, these poems are imitations of the writer I was reading’s voice, and so most of them don’t end up having a life beyond my drafts document (or this email). But sometimes, especially after writing a few poems, the poems I’ve read bring something out of me and my own voice cuts through.
Something of my own:
evaporation
oh my terrible husband
how can I expose myself today?
I scraped off my “I,” now this field
scrapes across the space I would
have written a self onto
wind pours through without distraction
tell me–what does one do for eternity?
attached
they say time and space are not real
they say these constructs are there to comfort us
I want to pick us all up and sway
everyone in my arms
oh baby oh baby coo coo shh shh now you got so attached
distaste
god is talking to me through the trees
I became a girl focused on god
I need god I am bored
with what used to bring me pleasure
I tap my foot and need to leave
I go to parties and my skin itches
there’s nothing incredible
about distaste
she’s so ornery, my dad would say
about my mother as she stood behind him in the pew
I love my little bitch tongue
like a sack of metal in my mouth
returning
standing in the back of a classroom alone
at 29 years old
it’s stupid to grow older and feel isolated by
those younger than you but god
don’t we all do it
problems people had in other centuries
16th century gossip, grocery lists, chores
we’re all special and unique until someone else
lets us into their head
irritation doesn’t cut it
simple mind meandering down
a path to desolation and disgust
searching, how to be
in a love vibration
you don’t want to write poems from this place
but this is the place where you are
Recommended books:
The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner (non-fiction)
Excerpt here
Romance or the End by Elaine Kahn (poems)
The Internet Newspaper by Adam Gnade (fiction)
Sediment by myself and Matty Terrones (audio)
The more one knows, the more one loves, if lucky.
Love this. That's all!