Jason Guriel's recent post about acknowledgments, and all the places its comments spun, got me thinking about acknowledgments in a deeper sense. When we read a book of poetry, aren't we just as alert to the unspoken acknowledgments--the poetic influences that surround a book like a halo, like roots, like an attic—as to those written on the acknowledgments page? Don't those influences shape our reading, just as much?
I've recently seen two movies that were worth seeing: I've Loved You So Long and Synechdoche, New York. With the former it wasn't until the movie was almost over that I realized how much it owed to one of the favorite movies of my adolescence, Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers. What a deep, soaring rush of pleasure that realization gave me. It was as if Bergman's film were alive again, as if it had been pulled into its place in a great, teeming, worm-filled, humming ecosystem, and I was part of the ecosystem too, just by understanding a connection. With Synechdoche, New York (which I'm still watching), it's been a more conscious process, watching with excitement what seems to be a new tradition forming: it seems to be influenced by many of the movies I've enjoyed in the last decade, from Magnolia to I Heart Huckabees to David Mamet's movies, but to be combining them in a new way, both building on the tradition and extending/transforming it simultaneously. I know that, in thinking about this movie, placing it among influences is going to be an important part of how I finally come to terms with it.
How rare it is to encounter a film, or a book of poetry, that actually forces one to think about its influences. Inevitably, when doing so, we are given the gift not only of the new work of art, but also given the gifts of its influences again. Perhaps, for all our attention to novelty and so-called artistic progress, we haven't really gone so far from the Augustan age when the mark of a true poet was willingness to apprentice oneself to the themes and modes of the past. On another Harriet thread not long ago, there was a conversation following an article by David Orr about greatness in poetry. I said there and I still believe, with Eliot, that engaging actively with the changing and building of poetic traditions is an essential part of that definition.
So what a far-reaching tragedy it is to fail to recognize any vibrant, important poetic tradition simply because it doesn't fit with one's personal tastes, or the tastes of one's culture, at the moment. If we block out the contributions of Gertrude Stein or Langston Hughes or Alexander Pope or Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale , not only are we losing the possibility of appreciating the work of those poets themselves; we are also blocking ourselves from appreciating the great poems that are engaging, reworking, and changing those traditions, morphing them, perhaps, into poems that might have a great deal to say to us.
Annie Finch is a poet, translator, cultural critic, and performance artist. She is the author of seven...
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