Advice From and on Poetry

Like many embarrassing poets, I’ve been working on a “novel.” No, it’s worse than that: I’m working on “a novella in two parts,” Shit Advice for Today’s Men and Women, the first half of which is “Shit Advice Columnist,” in which the protagonist/narrator writes an advice column about defecation.

I started this book when I was in Berlin in 2012, with both a terrible case of writer’s block and (what I would soon learn was) the beginning of a few years of anxiety-induced IBS; my body and my writing were having opposite responses to the same problem, I guess. I went to a café and said: “Come up with the worst idea possible for a poem, and then don’t leave the café until you’ve written a few pages of it.” The worst idea I came up with was “list poem of every shit you can remember taking,” which turned into this longer book, in which Shiv Kotecha stalks, harasses, and tries to replace the titular Shit Advice Columnist. The latter returns to Berlin for an at-home-fecal-transplant that involves, somehow, frozen stool samples prepared for a scat party at Berghain.

Now, you’ll believe me that this “Poetry Advice Column” is somehow related to a focus on “fiction” in contemporary poetry, where “contemporary poetry” just means “unpublishable book I’m writing.”

But along the way, I found myself returning to other books that seemed to offer advice. This was, in part, a side effect of teaching first-year writing, where students often told me that literature was meant to teach you how to live, how to act, that art should make us better. I asked them to identify a book, film, video game, song, some other aspect of culture they really liked, and to then think about whether it really modeled solid life choices. They laughed as they realized they all, for some reason, were watching and/or reading about really sad things; one student wrote a ten-page paper trying to determine why we read sad books (I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to said student for giving him a copy of Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime).

I was exhausted the week this came up, and I remember giving a bizarre rant about how novels actually teach you how to cheat on your husband (by taking up horse-riding), to become too sensitive (by reading novels), to die (by your own hands).

Some of my favorite poetic advice comes from the titular advisor of Kenneth Koch’s “Talking to Patrizia,” who recommends the jilted speaker hide in the bushes:

Then when she comes out
You jump out
You confront her. You will see
If there is love
In her eyes or not. It can’t
Be hidden. You will know It can’t be mistaken

This works This has always worked
For me. It won’t work for me. I can’t
Go and hide there It is true
Patrizia says when there is love everything
Works when there isn’t nothing does.

Bernadette Mayer’s “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica” directs the advice to herself (“Be strong Bernadette”), but it’s a poem whose advice I actually take: “Do not be afraid of your own heart beating/Look at very small things with your eyes/& stay warm.” I missed her recent reading at Columbia, but Corina Copp told me on Twitter that Dorothea Lasky asked Mayer how the poem came about, and that Mayer said: “it started because I had a panic attack, and didn't know how to keep going.”

For the most part, though, the idea that books give good advice is itself a weird fiction. It takes many forms—in novels, a protagonist who navigates narrative struggles in a way with which we’re meant to identify—but in poetry, the operative “fiction” seems to be that the poem’s speaker is going to talk themselves into doing better by writing the poem itself; the more self-aware speaker makes fun of even the attempt at this kind of advice.

I thought of inviting you to ask for poetry advice not because of all of the above context, though, but because Jameson Fitzpatrick sent me a new poem this week, “How to Feel Good.” I wrote back with feedback, but I realize now that the email did not ask for advice; it only gave it.

As I read it, I thought about whether and how writing a poem, or reading a poem, or this poem specifically, could show us how to feel good. For one, I felt good reading it, as I always feel reading a poem I love, especially by a friend I also love, but I also did not leave the poem feeling as though I had learned how to “feel good” (the current last line is “You have to choose what to feel bad about”). This is similar to how I feel rereading the Mayer poem; while I have used it to stave off panic attacks, it was the act of reading and the memory that I love to do so that calmed me down, more than any actual advice.

I want to quote the whole thing, but I know he’s still working on it, so I’ll talk “about” it, which is a bad way to write about poems. Here, among those things that might make one (it’s unclear if the speaker or the reader is meant to take the poem’s advice) “feel good,” poetry and novels are both recommended:

novels if you want to feel smart
though feeling smart only feels good
if you’re not. Better not to feel
too much or too little of anything
to feel good. Balance is recommended
unless you hate balance
because, like me, you have a personality disorder.

According to this poem, my emphasis on fiction either suggests I’m not so smart, or that I’m going to make myself feel bad (even while smart) in the process of writing this month. This is extremely useful advice, actually.

Here’s to feeling smart and bad. More advice from and on poetry to follow, here and soon:

***

Dear Poetry,

This older guy I like keeps making fun of my poetry. I'm happy he at least reads it but he keeps saying that I'm “playing tennis without the net”. What does this mean?? Should I include more Nadal references in my writing or something? Thanks.

Yours,
Nervous in Iowa

I’m worried this man is trying to find out if you’ll have unprotected sex with him. Will you have unprotected sex with him? If not, say, “There’s a net, it’s just ultra-thin.”

What you don’t need is more references, to Nadal or to anything (here’s where I admit that, the first time I read this question, I thought it said “Nerval,” because I don’t know anything about tennis, but I think the following advice stands). If he thought you needed more references, he would have said, “You’re playing tennis without the ball;” the net is the structure, demarcating sides and forms or whatever.

What this man is telling you is that 1. he has a crush on you, and thinks flirting should be playfully condescending, 2. he thinks you’ll look up him, boy to man, for advice, 3. (the worst news for you) he is uncomfortable with young writers believing they write “poetry” when they don’t use familiar forms. He thinks you’re out there just hitting balls around with a friend, that you lack respect for tradition.

If you wanted to write the poetry he wishes you would write, you could start by asking him to send you a “poem where the net is respected.” You could then imitate it, show him, like many artists have to by getting fancy MFAs, that you’ve developed technical skills you’re transcending, rather than making work that permits you not to have developed those technical skills.

That’s a mistake, though. He’s put you in the role of younger-person-who-needs-to-learn, and the best way to occupy your position in that fantasy is to act up like the teenager he’s making you out to be. Write things as far away from poetry as possible and send them to him, with an inscrutable “wuz thinking of u when I wrote this poem?” Say pretentious, obscure things that show you think you’re better than he is: “Some of us are capable of imagining the net.” Quit sharing your poetry with him at all, and instead mock whatever work he does.

FWIW, he sounds like a dick?

Yours,
Poetry

***

Dear Poetry Advice:

I don't have a lot of money but do have a lot of poems. What are some things that poems can be exchanged for + Are they eatable things? Wearable? Takeable? 

Best Wishes + Highest Regards

I wish that I could offer you some relatively stable exchange value for poetry. But I promised myself this answer would not rely on SNLT, so I'll answer as simply as I can.

You might read Eileen Myles’s “Times I’ve Gotten Paid,” but then things get tricky, as the poems Myles has might be worth more than yours. (When you say you have a lot of poems, do you mean your own, or someone else’s? You can definitely trade all of the books you own for some small amount of money you can then exchange for food/clothes/drugs).

An “anonymous source” recently informed me that she traded a chapbook for a large nug of weed. The dealer, when he came to deliver, found out she was a poet, and asked for a book. She suggested he give her about 1/16 oz in exchange and he said yes.

Once, I transcribed the menu of the Grand Central Oyster Bar in exchange for 20 copies of my own book for Kristen Gallagher’s Grand Central. This was a very satisfying exchange.

You can also always offer poems to people who would like to be charitable but are embarrassed to be so outright.

Yours,
Diana

***

Suppose I need my students to enjoy something patently repugnant. For example, Arthurian legend. Or sports poems. Or poems about Baby Jesus. How can I trick them into liking this stuff, without recourse to my own “infectious enthusiasm”? My infectious enthusiasm doesn't do shit.

Infectious enthusiasm, when it fails to infect, is like watching someone rich come into work with the flu, though nothing stops them from taking a sick day.

Why do you need them to enjoy sports poems? (Do give them Mayer and Anne Waldman’s The Basketball Article, though.) It’s hard to break “enjoyment” down into imitable skills. It’s also sort of a trap. We beg students to be enthusiastic, and then tell them “this poem is great because ____” does not constitute a thesis statement. They turn to “this poem sucks because ___,” which seems more “critical” or “argumentative.” You can give them “the poet uses [literary device] in order to [purpose],” but then you’ve gone a long way from enjoyment, and you get a bunch of papers on how similes help us find out what things resemble.

Are you asking for engagement because it will make lesson planning easier, or because your class will actually do something in response to their engagement?

Of course, I get why we need students to enjoy things; otherwise, class doesn’t really work. If you have any power over what poems you assign, let them make choices. If they hate every choice you offer, ask them to bring in something they don’t hate and tell you why. If you don’t have any power to change the syllabus, teach them how to enjoy their disdain. It also sucks to do something you don’t feel good at, and not many students have been taught how to read poetry. Give them some ways in. Try showing them 4-5 conflicting interpretations/responses to a poem from other writers; they’re often able to tell you why each is (or is not) convincing, in a way that helps them see they have ideas of their own about the poem. Let them write imitations of the poems they most hate; students often find a “creative option” easier, but the struggle to imitate helps them to find the identifying features in a text.

Explain why you want their investment: that the best research we have on learning suggests student engagement is a necessary precondition (not just because profs are out of touch). One benefit of teaching grownups is that it’s a lot easier to be straightforward about how learning works. We know that it’s really hard to learn a thing you don’t care about, don’t participate in, don’t work on at length, don’t collaborate with others on, or don’t get a chance to develop your own perspective on. Apologize for not having created these conditions. Find a way to teach the thing you “have” to, but to let them study it in the context of something they already value. Teach them how to be engaged—let them write nonsense and don’t grade it, promise them they can mess around as long as they're looking for the site of their own engagement, and then follow through on that promise. Don’t assign grades based on how rich they grew up, and don’t punish resistance to the canon.

Finally, if you teach early college students, remember that almost nothing in high school followed through on this promise. The tests that serve as gateways to college are racist, sexist, designed to encourage conformity, and specifically written to prevent any emotional reaction on the part of students other than test anxiety. Rather than tricking them into liking things, help them see that cultivating their own engagement is a super useful tool for learning, and give them strategies for finding sites of possible enjoyment/identification/trust.

If all else fails, give them poems with sex or shit or cursing in them. It’s often fun to watch a professor swear. For example, I think students enjoy the first time they read Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” especially if it takes them a bit to realize where the poem’s going. It’s a good way of teaching the relationship between rhyme and suspense/anticipation, given that, by the time you get to the word “fits,” you know the next line will end in “shits”:

So things, which must not be expressed,
When plumped into the reeking chest,
Send up an excremental smell
To taint the parts from whence they fell.
The petticoats and gown perfume,
Which waft a stink round every room.
Thus finishing his grand survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous fits,
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!

Yours,
A Teacher