La Vida Poetica: aka Can You Community?

Last week I went to a celebration for the life of Maya Angelou. On Friday, September 19, I went to a birthday celebration for Sonia Sanchez. My mother, may she be happy in heaven, always said give people flowers while they are alive, they're useless when they’re dead. She was right. And Sonia received many roses and other flowers. She’s 80 and so is Sophia Loren. It is good to think about the vitality of older women. I am on the cusp of “elder” which is weird when I think people think of me as “mid-career” and I have no idea what the fuck that means. There are times when being a poet, being an artist is just plain weird. We live in a nation where everyone wants to discover the hot new thing, meanwhile what does experience mean. ARE YOU EXPERIENCED? asked Jimi Hendrix. Now he might ask ARE YOU A NEOPHYTE? I have rarely entered contests, but when I see them listed, it seems as if 90 % are for first books. So if you win and are published, what happens for the second book? Few poets have long-term relationships with editors and publishers—want to really get jealous: Robert Loomis edited Maya Angelou’s work for 40 years. Most poets are lucky if you can get the same editor for two books. So it is hard sometimes to think of poets as having a career in the normal sense. First book, solid publisher, sustained intellectual relationship with editor/publisher, royalties, consistent income, the adoration of thousands of fans, all would really express a wonderful life in poetry. But with a few exceptions, I don’t think this career trajectory is working for most poets.

Which is another reason why Sanchez’s life and work is so interesting. She studied with Louise Bogan—you must hear her imitate Bogan’s accent, it’s hilarious. On the strength of her writing, she was offered a job with a newspaper, but when she showed up they kicked her to the curb—too brown, you know. She found her way to Harlem, to Black culturati, the Schomburg, etc. She wrote. She taught. She married. She had children. As with many Blacks in the 50’s and 60s, she seriously agitated for social justice and civil rights. She divorced. She went on several spiritual paths. She wrote and wrote and wrote some more. She’s still writing. Other than the adoration of her fans, she has been published by many different publishers. She’s tried her hand at critical anthologies—a new one on the Black Arts Movement is just out. She has stayed in the game and on her own terms and in a community composed of long-time friends, students, fellow activists around the globe, and family.

I think about this when I look at younger poets. So many leave MFA programs with expectations that are not likely to be met, namely because there are many graduates and few slots for teaching, editing, whatever. The competition is fierce and of course stacked. There are a handful of programs that give writers the leg up; sometimes because of the name factor; sometimes because of the true rigor of the program—no names mentioned here. If you’re outside that core of programs, opportunities will have to be created because they will not come to you. But why are we as poets in such a pickle. Maybe it’s because I am a 70s girl, but my education as a poet took place in literary centers and in private workshops (Write Poems Women with Honor Moore); listening to maybe hundreds of poets from a variety of “schools”; deep reading of those poets I found of interest; and trial and error in front of others. St. Mark’s Poetry Project was not for the faint of heart and the teachers were rigorous in their own way. Lewis Warsh, Bernadette Mayer, Maureen Owen, et al were exacting, inspiring teachers and poets, and so were the many “babypoets” who were also trying out their way with words. Some of us have remained friends for 4 decades. And while St. Mark’s which was (still is in many ways) mostly White, the original version of the Nuyorican Poets Café—back when it was on E. 6th Street—was Latino-based, but open to all poets. It was a bastion of words and drums and decadence. The idea that poetry only happened in the academy seemed odd and contrived. What has changed is that cultural production of all kinds has moved into the academy: visual arts, filmmaking, dance, musical composition, poetry, theater, culinary arts. The apprenticeship of poets is in the hands of the academy which extracts a great deal of time and/or money or both from the disciples.

What happens with community? Why are younger poets desperate for institutions? Two years ago, I was privy to review applications for poetry mentoring programs. The range of applicants was broad, but 98% had completed MFA programs. The applicants all spoke of the need for community. And yet many of them had started reading series, edited/published zines and/or presses, and participated in ongoing in-person or on-line workshops. I read these statements and tried to understand why they didn’t see that they were already in community. But they seemed to think that community was something else, more like the weekly workshops and professor/student relationships from which they had graduated. Beneath the question was one that haunted too many: How to keep writing once you have a MFA. These comments made me sad. How are you to have a “career,” a life of writing, if your sense of community is so narrowly defined, if you do not form strong bonds with your friends? Mentorship programs and workshop are tools, but a poet’s life should be so much larger.

Poets are not small people. It is as ridiculous as thinking that your “writing life” is somehow separate from your “life.” You know that one that each of us lives. When my lovely feminist friends back in the day said the “personal is political” they were trying to shake off the layers of hypocrisy that surround public, political lives. I would suggest that we began to shake off the layers of hypocrisy that surround poets’ lives. We need to stop pretending that every award, fellowship and book contract is going to bring joy, happiness or even tenure for you teaching types. All kinds of hindrances are out there: you may be a young mother, Black, Chinese, a White man from Appalachia, gay, the son or daughter of a carpenter or clerk at Walmart. That acceptance by this school or that will insure your place in the pantheon or at least in Poetry magazine. It might. But who are your peers, how do you relate, how can you make your wide acceptance useful for others and vice versa—where are your friends and is that community?

I think the poetry world like the art world is made of really interesting, thoughtful, risk-taking people who are working in a risk-averse situation. As Thomas Sayers Ellis puts it “all their stanzas look alike” and while he was being fabulously sarcastic—that often seems true. But it also goes back to that workshop/mentoring model—the best are ones in which the writers leave with their voices heard and distinct from the mentor teacher. One of the reasons I loved working with Lewis Warsh, was that none of his students: Maggie Dubris, Robin Messing, Bill Kushner, me, et al, wrote alike or like him. And yet, we all learned how to find that space/pace in our own work and others. When I teach, I try to give participants that kind of firm motion toward their own voice. “Find your own voice,” Jayne Cortez said. It is great to see where younger poets find ways to share their “voice(s)”—the Belladonna* Collective; Adam Fitzgerald, Dorothea Lasky, et al, bring together diverse poets under the John Ashbery umbrella; the Black Took experimentalists out of Cave Canem; Terence Degnan’s experiments with reading and storytelling in Park Slope; the ongoing Poetry Slam community—now global. Time is made for these communities to flourish.

“It is a common human longing to want utterly/ to vanish from life and arrived transformed/in another,” from “Magical Thinking” by Lynda Hull. When I went to Lynda Hull’s funeral in Newark, what struck me was the range of people in the gloomy Cathedral—poets of course, but all of her Newark friends, her loving family, the priests she knew. She had a life that allowed her deep insights into the human condition and gave her the power to write poems that live within me, one of her many former students and friends. Her obsession with fashion, fabrics, music, drugs, transcendent states, spiritual paths, and mental pathologies—mortality thrums through her poems and underscores her considerable scholarship and risk. I met Lynda at Vermont College—she was my first-year adviser. It was the same year I met Tim Seibles, whom I quoted in my blogs back in 2006. Tim is very much alive and well and richly rewarded for his work, but he too found many communities to explore once he got his MFA. He is a teacher, but he was a teacher before he got that degree. What strikes me about him is that he has assiduously sought ways to grow as a person and as a poet—I love the early work, but as you go from book to book, you see a writer expounding on more knowledge and more uncertainty as our lives in this nation become more volatile. Hull too had profound friendships, many with women of color which is unusual in the poetry world. Had Lynda Hull lived I can imagine her too becoming deeply sagacious, while staying quite sassy, wearing something floaty or velvety at her birthday celebration. Where dancing and singing and praise songing would take place. Oh if only.

I am grateful to the many friends I have, long standing ones and more recent ones. I have been involved in diverse creative communities—the experimental theater world through my work with the great group of people at Mabou Mines. The Poetry Worlds—St. Mark’s; Bowery Poetry Club; Cave Canem. The Brooklyn poetry world—Janet Kaplan, great poet whose Red Glass Books are terrific; Rachel Levitsky and the wonderful women of Belladonna* Collaborative; Cheryl Boyce-Taylor and JP Howard who are making huge ways for writers of color to thrive—all amazing. My fellow teachers throughout the CUNY system including Dean Kostos and Wayne Moreland—brilliant, hard-working, amiable. Over the years, real friendships and creative cousins have found their way to me or me to them. It takes work and time and sometimes you’re the mentor and sometimes the disciple. Had I not had those bonds, my books would still be in piles of paper or files that I look at and weep over.

Peter Covino literally told me that “Painkiller” was a terrific poem because I was ready to ditch it. Stephanie Brown, whom I met when I read with her at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, unbeknownst to her, put me back on a spiritual path that I needed to take. Fay Chiang and I are fellow Aquarians and lovers of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens—she works with at-risk youth; I try not to. Steve Cannon lets me write essays on the artists I really admire–Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weem,s etc. Betsy Sussler and Mónica de la Torre at BOMB seem to love my weirdest poems and have given great assignments. Angela Jackson has probably read every poem I’ve written—her eye on words is precise and truthful. Charles Bernstein and Anselm Berrigan have been encouragers, pushing me to try out new things, seek new avenues. Lee Bricetti, Stephen Motika, the whole Poets House crew have my back. And I find myself in community with many younger poets/activists via social media—all of us are writing, writing, writing. I am wiser and sillier and more adventurous as a person and writer because of these and many other wonderful poets, writers, artists and activists. We are in each others lives and we give each other love and help and good food and drink. So I leave you with a funny picture from the summer before the talk of war became war; while the sun was bright and the air cool. From that outing I wrote a very interesting poem which I hope will find publication. Let’s just say, men who perform capoeira are inspiring. They “arrive transformed”.