On Contempt: I Want to Be Liked

I’ve always admired poems that dare me not to be there, as if my being there was of no consequence; poems that fail to notice me; poems that even actively deride me.

Take Emily Dickinson. There is a situational, architectural truth to her poetry as entirely its own thing, existing on its own terms. When I read one of her poems, I have the feeling that it goes on with or without me, in part because her private syntax and willingness to skip steps in an argument betray a kind of disregard for her audience—which is really a regard for their intelligence, that they can be trusted to think for themselves. Dickinson’s indrawn attention to her world allows for this disregard, perhaps accidental, perhaps constitutive: I have a strong sense that she does not need me, has never needed me—and I am just damn lucky to have read her.

Lately I have been rereading Reginald Shepherd, whose poem “My Mother Dated Otis Redding” ends: “ my mother standing in the hallway/with a paper cup of Tanqueray, or lying/in the hallway in a pool of her own shit.” These lines allow the audience to judge him for including degrading details of the mother’s drunkenness—and simultaneously interrogates readers’ discomfort at the inclusion of such visceral detail. Would it be more palatable, the poem need not ask, if the mother were rich and white and lying in shit at the Four Seasons? I love Shepherd’s pitilessness.

Antipathy can be an act of discernment, of love, a challenge to readers, a push against them that can paradoxically bring them closer. I want a poem that is radically present with itself, creates its own landscape, seems to shut me out as a reader in the best, most charitable way—a kind of erasure of me, a push against comfort and coddling. The contradiction is in the distancing, in the poem’s lack of need (neediness, after all, is repellent). One sees this aesthetic of disdain in the work of Audre Lorde, Frank Bidart, Frederick Seidel, and Louise Glück. As Seidel writes in his withering “What One Must Contend With”: “There was a man without ability./He talked arrogance, secretly sick at heart.”

At some point, after years of getting a thrill out of being ignored, or eviscerated, by certain poems, and gleefully watching syntax deride itself; after years of asking my students over and over again to be ruthless or relentless, I realized, spoiler alert: I’m something of a masochist.

I want reading a poem to be a bit like risky sex, the kind when, after X leaves, I turn on the bright bedroom light to check for choke marks. But the choking felt so good. The risk of damage, of unknown mild internal injury, is the joy.

I like to press the audience against the wall, and to feel that pressure.

I used to think that my ideal audience was, as James Merrill put it, “one perfect reader.” But I’m not so sure.

There are times when, reading my poems aloud to a crowd, I am reminded, if only superficially, of why I’ve invested my life in writing—and in poetry, of all things: the connecting to the imagined reader; the little dopamine hits that come from murmurs of approval; and, of course, the applause. It is a window into what can only be imagined when I’m at my desk, writing for no one.

And yet.

There are other times, much of the time, when not only do I not really believe in you as an audience, but I have contempt for you. For your gaze; for the threat of concessions that I may make to cultivate a readership; and mostly for the fact that, if I’m honest, I want to be liked. I’m sure it has to do with my own insecurities—the idea that I might betray a poem by writing one that scores at a poetry reading. You know the sort: adversity + endurance + joy + winged epiphany = the poetry of feeling good, the kind that brings the house down.

It’s joyful, playing to the crowd. It’s also cheap.

Maybe a decade ago, I was at a writing conference, and as I went to the readings and panels, I had an overwhelming sense of a kind of performative listening in the audience’s reactions, of claps and snaps at cross purposes with the hectoring clichés and limp personal histories and lines sans music. Call me cynical, or maybe I was just sleep-deprived and more sensitive than usual, but I took note. I paused. I felt a bit enraged.

Look, I’m probably uncharitable.

I’m probably a bad person.

I probably have a dysfunctional relationship with my own art.

But I hate poetry because I love it so much—and because maybe I feel like I’m not doing enough, or others aren’t taking things seriously enough. Anxiety rooted in my own anxiety, that old circle of life. I don’t know. So I went home and wrote a poem about the experience, just like the poetry world told me to do. I am going to end with it here. And if ending this essay with one of my own poems isn’t good cause for contempt, I don’t know what is.
 

First I want to thank you all for coming,
for standing so patiently in line.
I know these are difficult times.
I know some of us hold the system in contempt.
So it’s a helluva time for poetry to be in fashion.
Most readings, I aim to undermine things with pronoun

slippages and rot. I’m very pro-noun.
I often sing about the joy of coming,
how much I secretly love adverbs and fashion,
and walking pensively at dusk on the High Line,
filled with just the right amount of contempt
for my own deceit. Good times.

But this is not one of those times.
Tonight, I’d like to talk about one pronoun:
you. And one noun: contempt.
I have seen you coming
and going at this conference, debuting your line,
checking your font in the mirror. Fashion

is important to people who write in fashion.
I’m not saying I don’t: the times are the times.
But I have watched you nod at a terrible line.
I have watched you sit stone-faced at pronoun
confusion, and, though you saw it coming
a mile away, smile at a dull allusion to Contempt.

Tonight I reserve my contempt
for you, audience. Per the fashion,
a few insurgents are coming
to take care of you. Sign of the times.
Trust me, I’m a pro. Noun?
Verb? Object? Casualties of the line.

Now you’re near the end. I cut the line.
The gas is seeping in the vents, like contempt.
The blood is as slick as a pronoun.
Your bodies will be arranged in the latest fashion.
Your friends will read about you in the Times.
The doors are bolted. You can’t stop what’s coming.
—Untoward Occurrence at Embassy Suites Poetry Reading, after Marilyn Hacker