The Professional

Editor's Note:
This is the second installment in a three-part essay. To read the first installment visit this link.

Here’s a distinction I try to honor: criticism may sometimes have a professional agenda, but poetry never should.

Occasionally, I use essays to boost the poetry that means most to me, the poetry I take as a model; I make a case for what is most difficult to do in poems and who has done these difficult things well. I used to think of this kind of criticism as “working the refs,” like a crafty basketball player. Then I realized my metaphor was flawed, because poetry has so few independent referees. Nearly all of its judges are also practitioners—everyone’s got skin in the game. And the game isn’t two-sided. So, this kind of criticism is more like tilling the soil for a crop you hope will flourish. (Let’s say it’s a crop of pumpkins, since those resemble basketballs, and let’s imagine that prize ribbons, awarded by small juries of fellow farmers, get pinned to a few pumpkins at the state fair each year. Does the metaphor check out now? Only a skilled critic could tell you.)

In most essays, though, I’m not consciously working to boost anything. I’m working through a tangle of feelings, impressions, and questions, just as I am in poems.

In poems, any professional agenda is deadly. A social agenda? By all means, amuse or provoke your friends. A romantic agenda? Go ahead, write that flirtatious sonnet. A moral agenda? If you’ve got the depth of character and the lightness of touch, you might pull it off. But the day you press your poems into the service of your career, their hearts will shrivel even as your C.V. blooms.

This is a special danger in the era of “professionalized” poetry. Poets constantly apply for jobs, grants, prizes, and so on, and all of these applications require writing samples. A natural temptation, then, is to tailor poems to committees’ standards rather than your own, and even to write whole books as a candidate rather than an artist.

Poetry that yields to this temptation becomes dutiful and wary. It follows trends in the field. It takes on “projects” that sound suitably utilitarian. It handles taboo subjects formulaically, if at all. It stops implicating the poet, except in minor ways. It resembles those job applicants who say their greatest weakness is caring too much.

I try to steer clear of this little patch of quicksand.

Of course, “professionalization” has helped many writers over the years. I’m one of them. I can’t point to some other, utopian system under which poetry should operate. Poets often find needed and meaningful work through writing programs. But I think poems should avoid affiliation with programs, professional or otherwise. They should even avoid programmatic rebellion. Art is the underground of the underground, and its affiliation should be with the truth as the artist sees it. That will be the source of any value it might have.

So: best for poets to play the “professional” only outside of poems. Even then, the role will be awkward. Good professionals respect decorum; poets resist it. Good professionals exude self-confidence; poets thrive on doubt. (Some poets aren’t even confident that they have a self.) Submitting poems for professional purposes should always feel a little farcical: the poise of the cover letter should promptly be shattered by the frivolous, irascible, haunted, or just plain wild voices that follow.

Poets seek “acceptances,” but poems shouldn’t try to be acceptable. They should try to be truthful, so that what’s finally “accepted” is some kind of truth, no matter how many rejections pour in first. It helps if many of the colleagues in your imagined audience are long dead—quiet, hovering judges with no prizes to dispense. That way, the focus is on becoming a decent writer, not an esteemed Fellow.

As soon as I float these rules, I have to amend them. What about the ars poetica? True, that’s a way of importing criticism—and, with it, a professional agenda—into poetry. Even then, the stuff is best imported as contraband, hidden somewhere below deck.

These days, I’m more tempted to import poetry into criticism. Not versification, but other techniques of the lyric, like fragmentation and disjunction. I believe a critical essay can also be a lyric essay, a personal essay, or an unclassifiable trip. Zadie Smith once wrote a tribute to Joni Mitchell’s Blue in which she riffed on jazz records, “Tintern Abbey,” Seneca, Kierkegaard, and a dozen other things, but never quite got down to analyzing Blue. Her detours said everything that needed saying.

What I’m getting at is: criticism doesn’t need a professional agenda. It can decide that its only agenda is pleasure. It can walk away from the conference panel, the scholarly symposium, like Whitman dipping out to gaze at stars. But it can also walk back in at any time. Poetry, I think, is better off staying away. It should be more comfortable addressing salmon than symposia.

That’s not to say poetry should shrink from the public sphere. Poets and critics (and poet-critics) are members of our broader communities. We have every right to address the proverbial town hall. Others might snicker at us—other writers, even. Our words might be misheard or unheard. Still, we can step forward, speak out, and hope we come off more like the upstanding guy in Norman Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech than the crank haranguing the mayor about nudes in the art museum.

And what, in this setting, might we have to say?