THERE WILL BE SELTZER: Diana Hamilton Defines Poetry

Make sure you get to this interview with Diana Hamilton at the Ugly Duckling Presse Tumblr. "Someone said that poetry was a little hedgehog that you nuzzle against your heart. Put that little hedgehog in its place, if it makes you feel better." They've also included an excerpt from Hamilton's forthcoming chapbook with UDP, Universe. The truth will set you free:

What is poetry?

The easiest way to know if something is a poem is to find out if anyone has called it one. This is not sufficient, but it helps.

“I wrote a poem,” someone says, hoping that someone else responds, “Yes.” or even, “Yes, but the tension of this image is lost by [etc.]”

Or, someone says, “This thing that did not think it was a poem turns out to be one,” and someone on the internet says, “No, it’s not, you’re wrong” and then some angry men post links that prove their or others’ points, and no one quite agrees, but it’s clearly possible that poetry happened. Just then, someone notes that the voice of someone underrepresented may have been appropriated, literally or figuratively, by the thing-that-did-not-know-it-was-a-poem but which, now that it is, shows us that poetry is just another shitty tool of oppression.

Or someone else says “If this is a poem, I don’t want to be a poet,” to which some asshole responds, “That’s a relief!” And their friend says, “I’m not writing poems any more; I’m just thinking about all the cultural detritus of my childhood in the hopes of recapturing a time before I found out my life would be just as stupid as my parents’, even if I call myself a poet and someone agrees.”

Or someone writes an a essay about a group of writers, acknowledging only the existence of the young straight male white poets in the group, even though there are many others, and then criticizes said group for 1. Its homogeneity and for 2. Failing to have written anything that counts as a poem, allowing someone else to Bravely suggest that the very resistance to seeming like a poem proves that it is one, and that, furthermore, the aggressive performance of the straight-white-male voice is, In Fact, the most effective critique of straight white masculinity (because, again, it is very important that both sides of this argument ignore the non-white, non-male, or non-straight poets).

People like to define poetry by only one of its many functions at a time: poetry is whatever resists translation; or poetry is lyric address, an essentially monologic form; or the lyric’s address to some other suggests that poetry has always been dialogic, that it calls at the very least to the self-turned-second-person, or to God; or poetry always involves a greater degree of connotation over denotation, or some less specific lack of utility, enabling us to recognize poetry in prose; poetry is a naming function; it’s a truth process; it’s one output of the movement of Spirit.

Hamilton also spills the best writers. She's reading in New York's Floating Library Sunday at 4:00. See you there!