More on Community: Why We Do This

Kenneth,
One of the people who have most influenced me as a poet is a poet. But she is a peculiar poet. She is not interested in publishing her poetry. She is a good poet. She is well-trained—trained in an MFA program during the late sixties when MFA programs were few and far between and when only a select group of really gifted poets were in such programs. She writes poetry constantly—religiously. She reads poetry in magazines and journals and she is fully abreast of the poetry scene in America. She is extremely smart, of course, well-read and a gifted reader of poems. She understands how to diagnose a poem’s ailments and how to offer remedies to the problems faced by the poems. She has a sense of the big picture—a capacity to place amateurish poetry within the context of poetic movements and traditions and how to help poets see what they are trying to do and how well they are doing it.

She is not a casual writer of poems. She writes draft after draft of her poems, dreaming about how to strengthen the work, wrestling with the choice of diction, the use of verbs and so much else. We will sit for a long time and talk about the metrics of a line and to assess how it could be improved. Poetry is not a passing fad for her, a hobby. It is a vocation. She self-identifies as a poet. There is no ambivalence here. And she knows how good she is. She knows how bad she is, also. But she has no interest in publishing her poems, no interest in submitting her work to journals, no interest in becoming a part of the poetry scene. She is interested in learning more about writing poems. She attends summer retreats where she spends time working with established poets, and she hones her craft. She is not a young woman. She does not have a master plan to suddenly startle the world with her brilliance as a poet. She is juts not interested. She wants me to stay interested. She encourages other poets to develop ambition for the business of poetry and to submit work and be a part of the poetry scene. But it is not for her.
I have always wondered what the problem was. And in many ways, there is where my problems begin. I think there must be a problem here. I think to myself that if this woman is such a good poet why would she not want to see her work shared with the world? I wonder whether she is insecure deep down. Once, I took it upon myself to submit some of her work to a poetry journal. I did not tell her about this. The poems were accepted and she was contacted by the journal with the good news. I expected her to be elated by the news, to thank me for my efforts. First she told me off and then she did not speak to me for weeks. She felt somehow betrayed. I think now that she felt insulted by my almost patronizing disregard for her ideas of what is important about being a poet. She made me promise never to do something like that again. She made me have to reassess my understanding of what a poet does, of who a poet is and what makes a poet a poet.
Is she a poet? Of course she is. These days I am convinced that her idea of the poet, her ritual of being a poet is quite pure, almost holy, and deeply admirable. Perhaps most poets are like her—given to the art itself regardless of what others think of it. But I know myself to be far too vain for that. I know that were I to not have an audience for my work, I may likely stop doing it. And this sounds like a terrible confession to make. I should be able to say that if I was stranded on a desert island, I would write poems just so that I could enjoy the pleasure of making poems. But I can’t say that I would. I would want to do something else. And if I did so, I would be doing so with the still quite vain idea that someday, someone will find my bones in a bed of sheet of paper covered with the most stunning poems in the world. I would be made to live on beyond the span of my mortal flesh—live on through my art. And yet, if I was asked whether I wrote with an audience in mind, I would say no. I write for myself. Is this not a fiction? I don’t write for myself. I write in community. I write with the hope that others will see what I have written. I want to be affirmed.
I am also suspicious of those who claim to write exclusively for themselves. After all, if I read their work it will make me something of a voyeur, an eavesdropper, a kind of peeping tom, really. And it worst, I become an intruder, an uninvited guest to someone’s indulgent experiences. As a reader, I am not sure I want to have that experience. And I have met very few poets who are like that. Even my friend is not that kind of poet. While she is not interested in the conventional ideas of how to reach the community with her poetry, she is certainly interested in sharing her poetry with others. She will send me copies of her poems, send the poems to other friends of hers and enjoy the dialogue or the act of just sharing the poems. Her resistance is to the whole system of publishing in contemporary American culture. She would see Kenneth and I as belonging to the same community—people who put out books, publish poems in journals and travel around doing readings. She enjoys those poets but she does not see herself as that kind of poet.
And yet, I am grateful for her as a poet and as a reader and a friend. She reminds me of the value of writing as a vocation, the kind of priestly act of writing that James Dickey has talked about. Indeed, for me that has been one of the most redeeming features of Dickey—in fact that has been his only redeeming value to me—that, and perhaps some of his work. Dickey humbles himself to few things or few people, but he seems to be humbled by the vocation of poem. It may be self-serving to do so, but one senses something of a religious humility in his statements about this art. For Dickey it does translate into an elitism that can at times be offensive. But there is something affirming about coming to poetry with what Nikky Finney calls reverence—she says, “Do not come to the page lightly” when she is admonishing poets. It is another way of talking about the terror of the page, I suppose, but some are better at side-stepping the cliché than others.
While wrestling with a poem, with the anxieties about a poem I am writing, I do find comfort in the fact that others experience this pressure, this self-imposed pressure to make something meaningful and beautiful happen on the page. Very often, it is this shared sense of the relationship between the artist and the art he or she is trying to create, regardless of what will be done with this art afterwards, that I call community. And yes, it is not just about poetry, it is about art—that thing that can sometimes be seen as a national treasure and at the same time as a national indulgence and an irrelevant waste of time and resources. Finding people who will at least engage with the idea that these rituals of making art are meaningful at some level is the meaning, then of community. Perhaps this is what I call community, Kenneth. Do you belong in this community?