Making it New: Poetry as Plurality

We live in a communal experiment called the world. We were born into architectures of thought and art and culture that have been being built for millennia, shaped by all the people of their times into new shapes, which new people inherit and shape themselves. Jerome Rothenberg, in Technicians of the Sacred, writes “no man today is newly born,” meaning that every people, every skill or art or tradition has been being formed, informed, crafted over time (similar to the way also there is no “less evolved” species, every species on Earth has had the same amount of time evolving, if it has selected generation after generation to stay the same, that is its own evolution at work, it has been continually evolving to stay the same on purpose and for reasons). But we do, also evolve new and novel forms like Pants and Electricity and the Internet. I think there is a field of all the things one can do with language, and a subset of that we call Poetry, or Literature—the question is in each moment in time where on the field does one’s culture’s magnifying glass lie, and in which structures of thought and craft do people choose to work.

I was thinking how Hafez feels closer to our post 1970s poetic sensibilities than, say, Coleridge, and how there is a nice sort of thing to that, how different things come into their different seasons in different cultural moments, how we practice both with our own necessities as people and with the tools and models before us, in our time which is now, and the material of the field is both the same and different. My friend the poet Nick Gulig said about how “the ecosystem is also historical” and that seems necessarily true of our artistic and literary ecosystems too, even as we shape the future direction by what we choose to plant and build, by what we make from what’s in front of us. I don’t know how to write this essay on “Experimental Writing Now” because I kind of do not really believe there is such a thing as “experimental writing” or, maybe, even, “now”. 

One thing that is interesting about The Now is the proliferation of access to many more parts of the field.  In The Unwritten Song, Willard R. Trask quotes from a 19^th century study of the Andaman Islands: “Every one composes songs. A man or woman would be thought little of who could not do so. Even the small children compose their own songs. Each person composes his own.” Later, of course, Trask adds “But in all things involving technique there are differences in aptitude and accomplishment.” Here we have the human drive towards creativity with language combined with skill, a cultural toolset of how to craft the Impulse into a Thing. (Maybe, for example, we no longer write in metered verse, to do so would be, now, “experimental” as in outside of the current fad or purview—that tool is out of use—but the material of our language is still made of rhythms, and people that work with that, work with that.)

We have also, in the now, opened up the field; certain people in their insistence have opened up the field, in various directions.  It is a joy to have a bigger field, to see what everyone’s doing out there. It is a joy to have a field loosed from a particular conservatism so that we can use it in the different ways different people might want to or need to, and in every direction people are doing something interesting. “Poetry” is flexing its muscles right now, at this, containing its multitudes. Braithwaite, in History of the Voice; The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, writes:

But by the time we reach Chaucer, [in the history of English verse] the pentameter prevails. Over in the New World, the Americans–Walt Whitman–tried to bridge or to break the pentameter through a cosmic movement, a large movement of sound. Cummings tried to fragment it. And Marianne Moore attacked it with syllabics. But basically the pentameter remained, and it carries with it a certain kind of experience, which is not the experience of a hurricane.  The hurricane does not roar in pentameter  And that’s the problem: how do you get a rhythms that approximates the natural experience, the environmental experience.

Here we have a traditional mode, in this cased imposed through the violence of colonialism, being broken on purpose at its necessary cracks, a language being made to work—to sing, even—for the people who use it, in their own exploration of diction and expressions of self and ideas, critically, intentionally and also toward more and more energetically exciting forms. Maybe it is the human vitality that delights in new forms, and we do, with our pattern recognizing brains, get attuned to one thing and go searching continually for another, think of fashion, and music.

Quoted by Trask, this time from a study of the Gilbert Islands: “[The poets] songs are polished and repolished with loving care, according to the canons of a technique as exacting as it is beautiful.” And­ yet— also—as an elderly Inuit woman told the Greenlandic-Danish anthropologist and explorer Knud Rasmussen: “Worn out songs must never be used.”  In his introduction to God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, James Weldon Johnson writes about watching, and hearing, a skillful preacher talk of his “conscious and unconscious art.”  So before us we have first the learned skill of traditional modes, second the necessity of the new, of invigoration, especially in significant moments, and something else I think is important, which is the poet as between those two, as if reining Plato’s worn-out horses. 

“Songs are thoughts, sung out with the breath when people are moved by great forces and ordinary speech no longer suffices,” said the Netsilik Inuit poet and shaman Orpingalik to Rasmussen, explaining the need and the feeling that call forth new songs. In each generation, and culture, there is a kind of language set off from other kinds of language—which we call poetry—or writing-as-art, and to which, I would argue, also belong ritual and song. A place in language where we don’t expect things to be in the same register as an ordinary conversation, a receipt or even a diary entry, a different mode, and there are many mechanisms of and for this in the field, some rusty, others polished, that makes the form and function of the writing different, and they all can be called on in various ways to rise and meet the moment when “ordinary speech no longer suffices.” This is probably the most fundamental job of “Poetry.”

But what mechanisms will rise to our—all of our—different, “natural... environmental experience(s)” of this inherited Now? That seems necessarily also an answer of multiplicity. All the way back in 2010 the CEO of Google said we as humans were creating more data every 2 days than all the data ever created in all of human history up until 2003. I can’t even imagine what that means for The Now. And it is all at our fingertips, flooding into our eyes and minds, horrible, sometimes beautiful and always chaotic, allowing us access to each other, each other’s thoughts and ideas. What kind of writing can we even come up with to try to grapple with it? In my favorite Gwendolyn Brooks poem, “The Second Sermon on the Warpland” she writes “[...] not the pet bird of poets, that sweetest sonnet / shall straddle the whirlwind.”  “Nevertheless, live” she commands us, now un-sonneted, and ends the poem: “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”