Cathy Park Hong and Adrian Blevins BROOKLYN, NY and WATERVILLE, ME Cathy Park Hong has, on the rare occasion, been known to beatbox. Adrian Blevins would pay a dear sum for what remains of Carson McCullers. Friday: 08.04.06 | Permalink | Comments (11)

A few months back, we asked Adrian Blevins and Cathy Park Hong to write about the music of sentences. We published Blevins’ essay “In Praise of the Sentence,” on April 10. Hong had a few things to say about Blevins’ essay in her piece, “How Words Fail,” published on Monday. This week, the two poets have agreed to continue their debate in our Journals.

Adrian Blevins / First Response to Cathy Hong

Cathy Hong’s essay favoring “a severed syntax out of a sense of cultural or political displacement” is built partly around a misreading of my speculations about poor dead John Berryman. So, first, to set the record straight: I do not correlate Berryman’s “progressively unraveling mind [to] his unraveling syntax.” Instead, I associate his inventive syntax with his genius. Then, in sideline guesswork, I wonder whether his increasing seriousness could have lead to his death. That is, if syntactical playfulness guides our great poets to what we call “the genuine,” couldn’t losing the will to lark linguistically about cause a fragile and probably drunk man to jump off a bridge? I don’t know why Berryman killed himself, but I speculate in this strange way in my essay because I am, like Cathy Hong, interested in the causes and consequences of—in all the minute particulars of—inventive poetic practice. But nowhere do I say that syntactical inventiveness is a sign of an impending suicide. I do say that the sentences of certain postmodernists “go stark-raving mad”—that seems undisputable—but not in order to insinuate that the postmodernists themselves “must obviously be bonkers,” as Hong proposes. The goal of my essay instead is to illustrate that the sentence—our most underestimated linguistic unit—can do anything.

Hong also assumes that I believe that “a poem represents a person who is a unified whole,” probably because I quote Louise Glück’s ideas about voice and the “the authentic being.” But everybody knows by now (or ought to know by now) that the sound of the “being” in the poem can’t be the same thing as the “being” who washes the dishes or dresses in the dark for work. In fact, the sound of the “being” in one poem is usually not even the sound of the “being” in another. Lyric poetry does not suppose that what is said in one moment can be true in another. Instead, it freezes the feeling of one (complicated and multiple) speaker in one moment in order to riot, if you ask me, against the silence of forgetfulness and death. I suppose it’s possible to use a focus on the “balance or reconciliation” part of Coleridge’s definition of poetry to assume that all who quote Coleridge must believe in the self as a “unified whole,” but I concentrate in my essay on the “discordant qualities” side of the equation, as for example when I praise Hayden Carruth for “his shifts in syntax and tone,” Berryman’s “famous syntactical transgressions,” and C.K. Williams’s 133-word strip tease. And while I associate poetry with talk and speech tones while praising Frank O’Hara and Hayden Carruth, I not only introduce C.K. Williams by saying that he’s “more psychological and cerebral than conversational,” but admit as well that “some poets are interested in dividing the sentence from what Robert Frost called “talking tones.”

One of these poets is obviously Cathy Hong, who also believes that our fractured experience demands a fractured syntax. This is where we do begin to part company. First, to suggest that the splintered self can only be “articulated” in a splintered syntax seems a realist’s take, and realism, by negating the imagination, seems the opposite of inventive. The idea that reality can only be aptly represented in “broken” language is nevertheless so popular that my call for the truly inventive and strange—the truly peculiar—seems even more important than it did last April. In the first place, the poetic practice Hong praises is derived, as she admits and smartly explains, from theory, and theory is a poor excuse for the eyes and ears and nose and tongue and naked thigh-upon-the-horse. (Even Hélène Cixous says that “theory . . . is altogether the opposite of life.”) In the second place, the broken sentence Hong praises in Celan and Taggart can be heard these days almost everywhere. It can no longer represent any kind of rebellion against those in power (whoever they are) because overuse has rendered it cliché. There are exceptions to this assessment, of course, but since so much of today’s poetry is being written out of the assumption that the multitudinous self must sever syntax because its feelings were hurt from being outside the political and cultural network of power, the only political point severed syntax is able to make is that almost everyone assimilates.

More to the point, I fear we are not really talking about the peculiar ways in which sentences can sing when we use poems that background sentences in order to somehow prove that sentences can be backgrounded. As I say in my essay, the sentence “can stand backstage so that smaller units of language..can take the limelight.” The sentence’s willingness to be the bridesmaid is not only one of its many virtues, but also, much more importantly, one of its most predictable lyric uses. The rupture of the sentence “In thy / spite” in Celan’s “Psalm” depends on a line break that is—this far into the 21st century—far from surprising. After all, we know, or ought to know by now, the music that can be made out of the “red wheel / barrow// glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens.” Besides, to praise the “haunting and terrifying music” of a translation, as Hong does when she speaks of the “propulsive cadence” of Celan’s “Psalm,” is to assume too much about musical correspondences between languages. The ruptures in the Taggart strike me as also making sounds that have already almost drowned us.

So even one more layer deeper down, I guess, is a difference of opinion as to what language can be made—by trial and error and blood and endurance and guts—to do. Hong thinks it’s a bad thing to think of the English language as “a tricky trap-filled activity that [she] had to somehow master,” while I think one of the greatest blessings on the planet is this “tricky trap-filled activity” we call the English language. That language is tricky and trap-filled and can’t possibly be mastered is, to me, its glory. That it’s tricky and trap-filled and can be made (in any case and anyway and in the right hands) to say two or more opposing things at once is—to me—what makes it magnificent. Take Nabokov’s idea that English is “artificial and stiffish,” to return to Hong. Does “stiffish” sound stiff? No, no, and heavens no. “Artificial,” being an idea word, does operate at a remove from experience, and it can connote the idea of something false if you ignore its meaning as something, like a sentence or a poem, that is made. But that Nabokov—that writer “of some of the most exquisite prose in the English language”—counters that potentially stiff “artificial” with a decidedly unstiff and talkish “stiffish,” thereby illustrating the language’s ability to swing and shimmy into shapes and sounds that are so ironically multiple they can’t help but incorporate us all into the song.

I mean, I believe that the language should—damn straight!—include us all. What's more, I believe it can.

A few months back, we asked Adrian Blevins and Cathy Park Hong to write about the music of sentences. We published Blevins’ essay “In Praise of the Sentence,” on April 10. Hong had a few things to say about Blevins’ essay in her piece, “How Words Fail,” published on Monday. This week, the two poets have agreed to continue their debate in our Journals.

Cathy Park Hong / First Response to Adrian Blevins

Thank you, Adrian, for your corrections. But although you clearly illuminate my misreading of your Berryman analysis, I don’t think you quite understand the general scope of my criticism. Whether or not you think it is his “unraveling syntax” or his “seriousness” that is correlated with his “unraveling mind,” I am more concerned with the correlation itself. As I say in my essay, my concern is that you give a causal relationship between the author’s psychological state with the author’s choice in syntax, as if syntax should serve as a diagnostic tool for the author’s inner life, as if syntax is a “direct mirror of the author’s psyche.” Of course, one can read Berryman anyway they want. But I am using your reading of the poem as a point of departure—to clarify my own point that the poetic sentence need not be a peg to personal experience. Thus I don’t believe in any kind of prescriptive formula where “fractured experience demands a fractured syntax.” Actually, the basis of my argument is how the sentence can have the freedom to be divorced from experience, or at least the kind of experience that is rooted in the biographical inner life of the speaker. Further down, you also critique poets such as Paul Celan because “multitudinous self must sever syntax because its feelings were hurt from being outside the political and cultural network of power. [italics mine]” Here again, you offer a diagnostic reading of the psychological self and syntax which drastically oversimplifies Celan’s poetry.

Another point I would like to linger on is your passing comments on theory. Your argument of theory muffling the process of genius is a criticism I’ve heard many times before. Many poets act as if theory is a pedantic party crasher that has barged in to shut off the lights of poetry’s imagination and to beat lyric down to a tone-deaf discursive exercise. Certainly, there are poets out there who ladle out soporific theoretical sap disguised as verse. But, other poets, though they may seek guidance from theory, do not use theory as their grab bag for inspiration and certainly do not use it as a surrogate for their senses. Rather, many poets, such as some Language Poets, use theory as a mode to question prevalent paradigms in poetry and to find alternative recourse in the manifold ways poetic language can be illuminative. Theory is a means (and one of many means) and not a practice. Besides, historically, poets have always hungrily sought out philosophers and theorists to help them grapple with their own aesthetic dilemmas on realism and imagination. Where would many Modernist poets be without Henri Bergson? Ezra Pound was deeply inspired by philosopher Ernest Fenollosa’s tenets on realism when he formed his ideas on Imagism. And the fingerprints of Imagism, (concision in line, focus on imagery, cutting out rhetorical fat) are still very palpable, maybe too palpable in typical craft suggestions that poets today believe are free of theoretical underpinnings.

As far as splintered syntax being a cliché: I agree with you. Splintering syntax is no longer transgressive. It might have been transgressive during Stein’s time but now it’s just another style. What I take pains to point out in my essay is that I am drawn to the poetry of Taggart and Celan because they are not just poets who reproduce Avant-Garde devices of syntactic play. Theodor Adorno famously said, “History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it,” a notion that applies to Celan’s work. Celan was aware that language was not a neutral terrain and wove into the tense fabric of his broken sentence a historical, cultural, and political presence. Yes, it’s impossible to detect all of Celan’s neologisms and fragmentations in translated English. But if you read Celan’s body of work (even in translated English), you would be hard pressed to call his poetry redundant. He’s been accused of many things—hermetic, difficult, obscure—but certainly not redundant. John Taggart is also not just interested in formal fragmentations; his interest is in how to energize the broken sentence through music, from Christian spirituals to John Cage. But whether or not you find Taggart’s language surprising is a matter of taste.

Perhaps I should clarify and revise my premise: I’m not interested in the fact that the sentence can be broken. I am interested in what happens after the splinter—how the broken sentence can be recovered. Here, let me use Harryette Mullen as an example. She is a poet who’s very much influenced by poststructuralist theory and syntactic play, but you can hardly say that her poetry is sapped of life. Her collection, Muse and Drudge, is more attenuated to the ears, has more pleasure in music and has more joie de vivre, than much of the inert, talky, free-verse poems that riddle American poetics today. It is a long poem that celebrates the very flexibility of English verse with its inclusion of hip hop, Spanglish, and black slang to illustrate a deeper awareness of the complications of voice and subjectivity. Perhaps the poem remarks on the “multitudinous self” but it’s not due to “hurt feelings,” but rather to celebrate what she terms “visionary heteroglossia.” Again, evidence to this is Mullen’s anecdote of reading Muse and Drudge: “One of the things I enjoy when I 'm reading that poem is . . . you know, the young people will get some things, the older people will get other things, the white people are getting one joke and the black people are getting another joke, and people who speak Spanish are getting some other joke, and the laughter ripples around the room.”

I do think we both share an appreciation in the inventiveness of syntax. But I don’t think it’s a “bad thing” that English is “trap-filled.” Rather, I am echoing my initial trepidation with writing poetry because of a hegemonic value system placed on a certain kind of eloquence that does not allow room for stumbles, hesitations, and spoonerisms, that does not allow room for broken English.
Lastly, I constantly emphasize to my students that the unpredictable breeding ground of one’s imagination is essential in poetry. Of course, imagination is paramount. But it’s short sighted to think that the only ingredients to poetry are your eyes, ears, and a capacious imagination. Genius does not come out of a vacuum. You are writing on top of other poet’s shoulders, you are following a palimpsest of historical models, whether you are aware of it or not.

A few months back, we asked Adrian Blevins and Cathy Park Hong to write about the music of sentences. We published Blevins’ essay “In Praise of the Sentence,” on April 10. Hong had a few things to say about Blevins’ essay in her piece, “How Words Fail,” published on Monday. This week, the two poets have agreed to continue their debate in our Journals.

Adrian Blevins / Second Response to Cathy Hong

Evidently Cathy Hong has gotten her ire up (as we say down home) because she still thinks I’m saying that a sentence’s syntax is “a direct mirror to the author’s psyche.” Why she continues to choke this chicken I cannot say, for I thought I’d killed it Monday. Nevertheless, to repeat: we know that the “self” in the poem (in any point of view) can’t really be the same “self” that pierces, let us say, the frightened nipple. We know that the so-called “self” that “articulates” a series of versions of some experience or feeling or idea in a poem has to be some kind of construction and even fabrication not only because we know, as Pablo Picasso says, that “art is a lie that tells the truth,” but also because we know, thanks to the evidence of the dog Spot, that the word “dog” is not equal to and not even really all that similar to Spot himself, as the noise of the bark announcing his accident in the living room also somehow confirms. (Even Sharon Olds, whose work is thought of as being overtly autobiographical, calls her own poetry “apparently personal” and “apparently autobiographical.”) We know all of this because we know that the “self” is a fluid multitude and because our experience and long years of practice have taught us that the pressures of the personal, whatever they are, cannot ultimately survive the formal pressures each poem must undergo in order to be a poem rather than a migraine.

Oh, yes, we know that “The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person,” as Czeslaw Milosz famously says. So at issue is not whether the real man Tomaž Šalamun, who begins a poem “I see the devil’s head, people, I see his whole body,” actually sees the devil’s head, but the way that imagined construct is able to represent or stand in for certain states of physic anxiety in us. Because we are beset by what we call the inner life or psyche as well as, somehow, a wounded nipple, we seek the voicings in poetry because it is comforting to hear even a construct “articulate” something along the lines of our own experience(s). When the song or the story works—when the music and imagery and, yes, even the rhetoric is apt—we suspend our disbelief, to evoke Coleridge again, because the poem, by overcoming the mechnization at its core, renders questions of actual reality irrelevant.

At issue also is not the insufficiency of language. To concentrate on what the language can’t do or say is to put the wagon wheel on one’s neighbor’s head rather than her mode of transportation. One of the greatest virtues of poetry is how it’s able to use an obviously insufficient medium to, again, fabricate the illusion, if you like, of sufficiency. (As the painter Lucian Freud says, “one of the things that makes you continue and is a stimulant is the difficulty surely.”) Poetry is able to make the top of one’s head feel pretty much blown off because it can move and vibrate despite the inadequacy of language as well as any other inadequacy one might name (such as the perpetually-erring human being and limited time and illness and the dog Spot’s accident in the living room and Wolf Blitzer’s hideous habit of saying “very, very” a million times a day on CNN as well as, far more seriously, the literal fact of having to live in a murderous and murdering world).

So why has Cathy Hong chosen to attack an essay that celebrates all sorts of discord in order to complain about “a certain kind of eloquence that does not allow room for stumbles, hesitations . . . and broken English”? (And how is “if he had a hundred years / & more, weeping, sleeping, / in all them time” not broken?) Is she motivated out of a residual outrage at having to write “confessional gems . . . like Sharon Olds” rather than apply the theories of “Stein and a whole lineage of poets” to poems that must somehow via this method manifest “historical, cultural and political presence”? And what kind of inner life—Good God!—is divorced from experience? How does that work?

Is Cathy Hong articulating a preference for a “severed syntax out of a sense of cultural or political displacement” or is she really interested in “how the broken sentence can be recovered”? If Cathy Hong is really interested in “how the broken sentence can be recovered,” why is she longing for poetry that sanctions “stumbles, hesitations, and spoonerisms”? And how can Cathy Hong turn an indictment of the influence of the broken sentence on current contemporary practice (I say it’s too common to be inventive) into an indictment of Celan’s work itself? Does the indeterminacy of language give our poets a right to turn even the discursive blog entry into an indeterminate babble of prescriptions against “the inert, talky, free-verse poems that riddle American poetics today”? (And how do Hayden Carruth’s “Oh, Maxine, how screwed up everything is” and Frank O Hara’s “Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies” not also “[celebrate] the very flexibility of English verse”?)

Could the real problem be that certain American poets prefer theory to poetry? Is this why they spend so much time trying to justify terms like “visionary heteroglossia”? Didn’t Pound (that hateful blathering elitist fucker, that Fascist) say to “go in fear of abstractions”? Yes, some “poets have always hungrily sought out philosophers and theorists to help them grapple with their own aesthetic dilemmas on realism and imagination.” More notably, others actually generated their own theories and philosophies. But what does a poet reading or writing theory cost American poetry? Does he not risk confusing himself for—let us say—Noam Chomsky? Did Chomsky ever write a great poem? How did I miss it? And hasn’t all this focus on theory ultimately lead, as we have seen in the case of the current debate, to more confusion than clarity? I mean, who benefits from terms like “visionary heteroglossia?” The “young people” or the “older people” or the “white people” or the “black people” or the “people who speak Spanish”?

The poets themselves?

Are you kidding me? We are far too alarmed by Tomaž Šalamun’s idea—by his truth—that the devil “licks everything before killing it” to be attracted to a phrase such as this. Besides, the nipple still throbs. We are functioning within the constraints of an inadequate amount of time. Oh, everyone, we have a sinus headache. The dog Spot’s accident in the living room summons our multiple noses and Wolf Blitzer’s hideous habit of saying “very, very” a million times a day has made us realize that our own phrase “murderous and murdering world” applies not only to all the verbal twaddle in the atmosphere, but also, much more ominously, to all the literal blood presently being shed because too many people apparently do not know how, though it’s one of poetry’s jobs to teach them, to think. To feel.

A few months back, we asked Adrian Blevins and Cathy Park Hong to write about the music of sentences. We published Blevins’ essay “In Praise of the Sentence,” on April 10. Hong had a few things to say about Blevins’ essay in her piece, “How Words Fail,” published on Monday. This week, the two poets have agreed to continue their debate in our Journals.

Cathy Hong / Second Response to Adrian Blevins

Hoo! A lot said. I fear that this blog will degenerate into mudslinging, which is the last thing I want. I won’t be able to respond to everything, especially since right now, in NY, it’s 100 degrees. Record breaker heat wave. Way too hot to think about poetry. A cold, clear lake. That I could think about.

—It puzzles me that whenever a critic looks at canonical poetic practices, the critic is tarred as being pent with outrage or ire (especially if that said critic is a woman or happens to be from some other marginal group). At any rate, my intention is not to attack but to have a discussion. I had more “residual outrage” struggling to open a bottle of ginger ale this morning than writing that essay.

—I don’t want to be a spokesperson for a certain kind of poetry. But in my defense of the poets you dismissed: read their work. Read Harryette Mullen’s Muse and Drudge and you will be surprised how colloquial and jargon free it is. “Visionary heteroglossia” was how she described her poetry but the term itself is nowhere in her poetry. I may add also that “heteroglossia” means a language which embraces diverse tongues. So who, you may ask, does the term benefit? Well, “the old people, and the young people, the black people, the white people, and the Spanish people,” who, based on Mullen’s clear anecdote, did enjoy her poetry. You might be surprised and enjoy her poetry as well.

—At this point, I’m not even going to touch the self button. We have certainly exhausted that topic and so I’m letting this so-called chicken rest.

—“How do Hayden Carruth . . . and Frank O Hara . . . not also [celebrate] the very flexibility of English verse”? I don’t think I once mentioned those poets. Am I mistaken? I haven’t read much Carruth so I cannot pass judgment and Frank O’Hara is a poet who I’ve always enjoyed.

—“Could the real problem be that certain American poets prefer theory to poetry? . . . But what does a poet reading or writing theory cost American poetry? Does he not risk confusing himself for—let us say—Noam Chomsky? Did Chomsky ever write a great poem? How did I miss it?”

Funny that you say this because I once confused myself for Julia Kristeva! It was awful. I was signing checks and leases under her name until I was arrested for identity theft.

Sorry. A bad joke. It’s very hot. Difficult for me to concentrate. Anyway, without you providing examples, I’m at a loss as to how to respond. These are quite reactive comments and I’m not sure I want to play the opposing theoryhead (Yay Chomsky! Boo Whitman!). But I’m a little confused: are you suggesting, then, that poets should only read poetry because theory is degrading poetry? Isn’t this a little censorial? I doubt reading theory will “cost” American poetry anything (Rising rent, lack of health care, and procrastinating tools like Internet gossip sites—that will act as a worse deterrent). Poets are not only inspired by poetry and the world around them, they are also guided by film, art, philosophy, history, politics, and yes, even theory. (And theory, by the way, is a vague monolith term you understand. It’s kind of like saying “Look what Science has done to American poetry!”)

—I am furthermore surprised that when I mention theory, or certain experimental trends in Contemporary Poetry, it still becomes a polarizing argument. We have more common ground than you think. We both agree that the aesthetic of syntactic fracture is now practiced widely. Sure, syntactic fracture is no longer new, but neither is writing in narrative free verse or villanelles. This shouldn’t be a reason not to “sanction” broken English. (I’m curious, here, about your strange and tad problematic word choice “sanction.”) As I said before, and which I think you agree with based on your defense of your Berryman reading, emotive urgency can be just as articulated through silences and faltering solecisms, as well as through seamless talk.

—I’m also puzzled by your evangelical call to feel. (Was I asleep when we all turned into Cyborgs?). You have beseechingly defended the need to “feel,” or as you say, to feel “the nipple that still throbs” or “the naked thigh upon the horse,” but no one’s arguing with you. If poets read theory, or practice a certain aesthetic, it does not translate to an alienation from their senses. It’s reductive to make such polarizing generalizations. All poets—including Language Poets—trust the primacy of their senses.

But, perhaps the quibble has to do with the huge range of poetic transactions of one’s actual perception. You see, there’s no one authentic way to inscribe feeling. Let’s go back to your “naked thigh upon the horse.” In the 19th century, “naked thigh upon the horse” would have been framed in trochaic meter, with some rhetorical flourishes. In the 20th century, someone like William Carlos Williams would have treated it as the following: “how naked / that thigh / on / that horse / besides the wagon.” Surrealists would have added an owl on the thigh. Maybe a language poet would have written it right justified. You get my point . . . There are varying modes of expression, aided by perception, aided by other poets, by war, by relationships, by conversation, by theory, and what I’m critical of is how certain techniques, and certain approaches, are “sanctioned” as more soundly authentic and more urgent than others.

—The blog dialogue is clearly constructed so that we have some kind of sparring match (and when referring to me in the third person, you’re free to just call me by my first name). But I think we’re recycling old arguments here. I’m also open to the possibilities of language and poetic praxis, including syntactic splinters, broken English, or whatever you want to call it, and I’m open to how language can be energized through music, through crossing genres, through epic declarations, through many forms of narrative . . . So, perhaps we should let down our defenses and agree on that. Now, I’m “feeling” terribly hot right now and would love to “feel” the cold draft of a properly working A.C.

A few months back, we asked Adrian Blevins and Cathy Park Hong to write about the music of sentences. We published Blevins’ essay “In Praise of the Sentence,” on April 10. Hong had a few things to say about Blevins’ essay in her piece, “How Words Fail,” published on Monday. This week, the two poets have agreed to continue their debate in our Journals.

Adrian Blevins / Final Response to Cathy Hong

Adrian Blevins sat upstairs in her hot study in Waterville, Maine and thought about American poetry and Al Gore and global warming and Cathy Hong’s most recent post. She thought about dropping the third person but couldn’t escape the feeling that it was more topic-centered than the second person, which had felt like a personal attack all week. The opposite, she thought, of intimate. She agreed with Cathy that the “blog dialogue [was] clearly constructed so [she and Cathy] would have some kind of sparring match,” and wondered if they looked like roosters in a cock fight. Since she knew she wasn’t a rooster and assumed Cathy wasn’t one either, she doubted it. The cliché was, anyway, cat fight. Adrian Blevins wondered why men discussing serious ideas were never likened to cats. She wondered if she agreed with Cathy that they were recycling old arguments. She thought she probably did. And yet she still sat upstairs in her hot study and thought about American poetry. She wondered if the problem of American poetry was too many poets sitting around thinking about the problem of American poetry.

All the same there was something she wanted.

Since she too seldom got it.

It wasn’t eloquence.

It wasn’t the first trochaic postcard.

The missing something burned some kind of hole into the center of Adrian Blevins.

The hole felt like a crisis.

She wanted to name it, but she was afraid of her own eye.

She was tired of her own tongue and throat, too: she was tired of birds and wings and dots and things. She wanted the right to talk about light—she wanted to call forth some not-planet-destroying heat. But she knew she’d be called a Romantic. Which made her desperate to say that she was not French. She wanted to talk about how speech was ridiculed rather than privileged in the American South, but she knew that even this fact could not pervade the divide. She wondered why there was a divide. She thought it was absurd, an outward rather than an inward spinning, and wanted to apologize.

Meanwhile except for the mouth she was totally sick of the head.

Meanwhile the body was all scatter and flee.

And that was the crisis, she thought.

That is the crisis, I say in the present tense. And in the first person. Cathy, I’m worried our bodies have spun too far away from us. Hey, Cathy, how will we live without them?

How will we die?

How will we love, Cathy?

How will we sing?

Cathy Hong / Final Response to Adrian Blevins

It’s been an edifying debate in that certain issues can still spark contentious argument. I hope, though, that we can reach some kind of understanding. I think the responses are on the right mindset—how can form continue to reinvent itself so that it further reflects our contemporary, splintered selves? Poets will always borrow from tradition, whether it is from the avant-garde tradition or the lyric tradition or both, but I wonder if we still become heated over these raked-over concerns, because, there aren’t enough “newer” schools of poetry to kick around. I do think there are glimmers of innovative poetic voices which lurk in emerging small presses and budding journals, both online and print.

What’s on the horizon I can’t say. But to be terribly vague, I do think that our definitions of borders are changing (nationally, bodily, linguistically), with the speed of technology, with globalization, with the war, with immigration, with our daily lives. With that, English is becoming deterritorialized and it’s molting, and I do hope our own poetic vocabulary will be a reflection, or perhaps a refraction of that. Poetry will always be questioned for its relevance. But history is currently being pressed into our faces and I do think, personally, that writers need to tend to history so that our songs will be both timely and timeless. I’m not anti-experience; my idea of the self is fluid—it overwhelms the singular, into the collective, and includes, yes, the messy and flawed bodily self.

How to transform into verse? I can only answer that with my own poems, I’m sure you Adrian will answer this with your own poems, and I’m sure there are other poets who will hatch their own ideas so that poetry will continue to be reinvigorated, appreciated, loved, studied, and maybe even piss some people off.