Docu-poetry: I too, no, it isn’t that I
dislike it, but it troubles me. Maybe
I feel threatened by it? I mean, I mean
no proscription or buzzkill or any dis-
respect of those who practice it, just that,
what, I see it… grasping for mimesis
and reportage at the expense of verbal
imagination, I feel in it a kind of
shoehorning of didactic social message
into poetic forms that have no intrinsic
connection to, or maybe add no value to,
the often compelling and important
narratives that are being conveyed in these
pieces. Maybe the added value is entry into
the still privileged aura of the category of
“poetry” and the [sometimes] warm
communities that form within it? Anyway,
the poetic devices in these pieces, it strikes me,
if anything, distract from the reportage, which
in itself is genuinely heroic, making it sound,
to my ear, a bit preciously or artificially heroic.
Poetry, by definition, is precious and artificial.
The preciousness and artifice can be dealt with
in many ways: with an embrace, or with mockery,
or with attempted rejection. Still, the preciousness
and artifice are always there, I mean… here.
Am I just too reactionary? The poetics stances
I have taken in my decades of “practice” and
in the seven years of Ululations certainly
should make it clear I’ve no objection to
artifice. Artifice is the riotous center of my
work, for better or for worse, but then I don’t
aim to be particularly heroic, and my approach
to social message is, like my approach to
everything else, never head-on. So no, it’s not
the artifice per se that I “have issues with”; it’s
the mismatch, maybe, between the flat reportage of the
information and the form of verse itself, whose very
lines serve as little spotlights to the lexis and
the syntax; if they are broken, they should, I guess,
be broken for some reason, as Milton broke his lines
to keep you reading breathlessly throughout
his mighty saga. It’s not, you know, that I believe
information does not belong in poetry; I’m all
for data. I write, a couple posts down from here,
my mantra: “everything is material for
poetry,” and I do quite earnestly believe that.
So what’s my beef exactly? Is it resistance to
didacticism? Because it imparts to docu-verse
what I experience as a kind of deadness of
the already decided, the foregone conclusion,
a kind of “positive capability”? It’s funny,
when I think about what docu-poetry is not,
I think of Keats. When I read Keats, and even,
oddly, when I read about Keats, I feel almost
as if I’m reading porn, except that I don’t really
like porn, so that would mean something much
better and much more effective than porn, if by
effective we mean not perhaps creating ripples
of social change but rather making one’s heart race,
one’s senses stir with transferred longing, with
beautiful “slippery blisses.” Perhaps my pupils
dilate, too? I haven’t checked. How does he do
this to me? Like a lover! The answer is simple:
he does it with form, as any artist does, with form
so organic to the content and content so organic
to the form that really there is no duality.
I don’t mean to wipe the rust off that old
Olsonian saw as there, sure, are plenty of
examples of form and content that very
interestingly conflict, and I don’t like absolutes
of any kind. It’s just that, what, when I come
into contact with, uh, docu-poems, especially
on the page, I ask myself, why are they line-
ated? Just to buy into the impotent validity
of “poetry”? Because the category is hallowed,
somehow? And I ask myself, how does en-
jambment work in the poems, and repetition?
Why so much anaphor? I guess that’s a nod
to Stein, yes, but without her libidinal force,
the sense of words massaged in the brain into
new shapes and other syntaxes, without, so often,
a forward rush of rhythmic necessity. Why, I ask
myself, am I lineating this? should be the question
you are asking of me right now. Do you have any
questions? Anything you would like to ask me now?
If I were you, I would ask, what poems, exactly,
are you talking about, what do you mean, how is it
you have got this far with all these vague cat-
egorizations and no exemplification? Right.
Well, what occasioned me to write this was
Juliana Spahr’s poem, “The Incinerator,” that appeared
today at the top of Ron’s link list. And I am think-
ing of a reading I saw in San Francisco of C. S. Perez,
as well as sections of Stephanie Young’s film narration
she performed here last Saturday. I suppose we can
deduce from this that there’s a kind of coastal split
in operation here, a facile explanation of which may
well be the actual physical environments: here
in the grimness of wintry Brooklyn, sick in my room
(did I mention I’m sick?), I only want the consolation
of fantasy. There, where iceplants cover sandy slopes
and pop out bright pink blossoms, where rosemary
bushes bloom all year round, where the very breezes
smell sweetly of peppery nasturtium or the most
girlish alyssum, perhaps there’s nothing to do but
“take the beauty down a notch,” inject some flat
realism into all that sea air and florabunda. OK,
I’m doing here what I said I wouldn’t do maybe
five posts down, I’m not describing, I’m eval-
uating, I’m conjecturing, I’m being categorical,
and that’s a problem. That is not a good way
to proceed. So here, more or less, is my experience
of reading Juliana’s poem, “The Incinerator.”
In the first section, a narrator describes a sex
scene in a garden. Naturally, I liked this part,
and I liked it even more as I continued reading
and discovered that her sex partner was in fact
either her Appalachian hometown or a namesake
of her Appalachian hometown. It was her TOWN
upon whose face she seemed to be rather enjoyably
writhing. A metaphor! Cool! I thought they were taboo!
Really an engaging start to the poem, I felt. From there
it moves into data that piles up to form the narrator’s
(clearly, at this point, Juliana), self-awareness with
regard to class, race, gender, Appalachia, and global
politics. All of this information interests me. As an
essay, it’s brilliant, and as a memoir, too, but there’s
something about its sheer factuality that, to me,
rejects “poetry” even while inhabiting it as a mode.
In fact, the piece is mostly not lineated, (so much
for my objection above) except in its epilogue,
and mainly is composed in sentences. There is,
however, a lot of repetition. I could just as well
call it prose. Do I care about genre? It seems here
that maybe I do. How backward of me. Why?
I guess I want to preserve poetry as some kind
of autonomous extra-rational struggling space? Why?
And what IS docu-poetry, anyway? I throw this open
as a question, as I’m beginning to confuse myself.
Mayer’s Moving? Kenny’s Fidget? Maybe even
Swoon is docu-poetry; I don’t know. What about
Ed Sanders? I have to admit that most of his work
bores me, except when it’s sung, and I love “Yiddish
Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side,” not least
because it’s an operetta. Can I even say that any of
these pieces are not didactic, or that they are didactic
in a different way than Juliana’s poem? Is her
political materialism incompatible with my aesthetic
materialism? Is that a twain that rarely if ever meets?
Oh god, my fever’s going up again, 101.4. Did I mention
I’m sick? And writing this in bed, Dante curled beside
me satisfyingly fleshy like a big raccoon, cherry Ricola
on the night table. I really do want the information
these writers impart: whether it’s C.S. Perez’ family
history during the Japanese invasion of Guam or the scary
data on BART tunnel construction and disaster scenarios
that Stephanie included in her film narration last weekend.
And I want also the sharp, smart lens of Juliana turned
in this way onto her own life and onto the world. It’s
just that, it’s just that, there’s something else I want
from poems, something not so controlled by the superego
(thanks, Toni) or by external conditions, something that rolls
about in language and gets covered with its secretions,
something undeliberate, unrefined, unplanned, something
that foils the message instead of making it more
transparent, something that forefronts cadence.
Think of cadence as a kind of skipping through
a little bit of time, just that much duration and the
sound and meaning and syncopation in it. Material.
I mean I think my poems have themes and motivations,
too, they are not “just cadence,” but I don’t think
that in any discernible way they have lessons. Are people
longing for lessons? Grasping at them? It struck me
reading the new magazine that Andy Gricevich kindly gave me
last Saturday, Cannot Exist, that every poem in it seemed
to include some sort of heavy-handed socio-critique.
Isn’t, um, aren’t the lessons already in the fabric
of the language? Can’t we just assume that, and write
inductively, forefronting the senses? Or am I just clinging
desperately to my schtick? I don’t know. Look, I’m not
proposing something so simple, despite all the Keats
and porn stuff that precedes this, that we should only
write “for pleasure.” That would be boring, finally. Just
like Juliana, and C.S., and Stephanie, and Bernadette,
and Kenny, and Ed, and all the rest, I write to navigate
my existence, to explore my mental contours and the
nuances of language and experience. But the poetry I see
coming out of this west coast tendency is so different
from the poetry I am moved to make that I can only
stop and ask myself, What’s going on here? Why
so different? And what’s next?
