Jonathan Farmer Speaks With Stephanie Burt About Definitions and Process

Puritan Magazine hosts a conversation between Jonathan Farmer (poetry editor and editor in chief of At Length, poetry critic for the Slate book review) and Stephanie Burt (Professor of English at Harvard University, co-editor of poetry at The Nation, and author, most recently, of Don't Read Poetry) spanning subjects like "funny poets" and "poetry goals." Burt asks Farmer, "[a]re there kinds of poetic goals you admire which that thesis leaves out?" On from there: 

JF: I’m not sure I agree with all of this. I think reading some poems (emphasis on “some”) is a way of getting to know someone. A poem includes all kinds of artifice and mediation and even misrepresentation, but so does conversation, so does touch. It doesn’t give us everything we need from another person, but neither does joking around, or sex, or praise, or a road trip. Poems aren’t friends—full stop. But they are the sum of the choices made by an individual human being, and those choices, in most cases, have to do with trying to communicate with other humans. And I think we can often learn a lot about another individual by paying attention to that—we can, that is, get to know them, albeit partially.

That brings to mind one of the many passages I underlined and starred from your book: “Of course, we can’t ever know [what it’s like to be another person]—we are not telepaths—but we can’t be sure we know our real-life, in-person friends either. We can, though, get the sense that we have come close…”

I’m most often interested in poems that seem to be presenting a version of the poet, and that of course leaves out all kinds of good and great poems—too many kinds to list, including many of the types you discuss in your book. But whatever the type of poem, it seems to matter immensely to me that it was made by a single person—in a way that it might not matter as much with a song, for example, or even a movie, with its collaborative and corporate origins.

Each of Don’t Read Poetry’s chapters focuses on one thing that poems can do well, and you occasionally suggest that there are other things that poems can’t do well, or that will make a poem less effective. That seems to imply that there is something that poetry is—certain qualities that are inherent to the art form.

Though you also write: “Poetry is not always anything except a name for a complicated history in which many people use words in many ways, making patterns that give readers and listeners pleasure, listening and changing many conventions and rules.” So maybe what you’re describing has to do with the dominant conventions?

Do you have a sense of what poetry is, or isn’t, that you can articulate?

SB: “Poetry is a name for a complicated history…” I stand by that. Patterns made of words with emotions behind them, maybe. That means some novels and nonfiction projects in prose also count as poems, if you read them that way. The Souls of Black Folk. Mrs. Dalloway. Engine Summer. Of course, there are fiction and nonfiction projects in verse, almost all from before about 1820, that count as poems, if you read them that way: The Loves of the Plants. Crabbe’s The Village. By some definitions (Arnold’s, for example) they are not poetry. But those definitions restrict poetry to interior states and spiritual projects (chapters one and four in my six-chapter scheme). I prefer a wider definition.

There are certainly some things for which you wouldn’t turn to poetry first, or fourth. Conveying complicated directions through three-dimensional space, for example, or proving a mathematical theorem. We have CGI and architectural blueprints and math for that. And there are kinds of personal experiences—physical, tactile, culinary and gustatory, say—for which, if you want to represent them adequately, poetry might not be your first choice. Or it might. Try it and see.

You say you almost never like funny poems, but your examples of not-quite-funny poems you do like (Hayes, McDonough) are all contemporary. Do you like the funny, or the satirical, poets of the past? Do you have time, in particular, ever, for Pope?

Continue reading and find out at Puritan Magazine.