Life is Short, Art is Long: Poetry
The day poetry finally got to me and the poet who helped it get there. May 18, 2013. The Ann Arbor District Library. ML Liebler. He was electrifying, gruff, and realistic. I bought his book. I had it signed. I had been there because I had to be, for work. I went to CVS and bought a notebook and then sat at Amer’s cafe on State St and wrote this:
Poetry,
I underestimated you again.
I forgot the way you glimmer and are gone.
I forgot your smell, the smell of summer. I
missed you, but here I am.
I made a plan to change my life and pursue poetry. I decided that’s what I would be, a poet. I took it on right there like it was a beautiful thing I found in a thrift shop and had to have. That’s my own moment of poetic epiphany, how sudden it was, how thorough, how intense.
Like a beautiful thing I found in a thrift shop and had to have, poetry had a history before I got to it. Of course it did, it’s poetry! Its history is everything. But poetry sits in the world like a knockoff Tiffany lamp, a discarded electric organ, a long paisley silk bathrobe, an old political poster — anybody can find it and have it as long as they see it for itself. It only takes that one moment.
Poetry is scaffolded by thousands of years of its own existence and by those same thousands of years of people trying to understand its existence. Like any art form it has its absolutes, its brushes and paints and its masters and its tools, but modern poetry has so few of these that anyone can agree on. It’s made of words and you feel it. Who is a poet? Someone who writes poetry and has it read. That’s maddening. We want rules. Show us rules so we can follow them. Show us how to measure what we’ve done.
There is nothing more embarrassing than bad poetry. We all know it and fear it. That’s why I say a poet writes poetry and has it read. That’s the courage of it. That’s the threshold of it. There’s the knife.
I did write poetry before my poetic epiphany. I took one class in college in it because I needed Creative Expression credits. Then they told me poetry didn’t count as Creative Expression because I was already a writing major, so I took a hula class too.
My class was with Ken Mikolowski, who knew and knows so much about poetry because he wrote it and published it on a letterpress from his house in Detroit. Ken Mikolowski is what we call a poetry BAMF. He wears a lot of denim and made us read John Ashbery and told me something I have never and will never forget which was, “you have the right attitude about poetry — a bad one.” You can spot him at the farmer’s market in Ann Arbor looking jolly and buying vegetables but don’t forget! Ken Mikolowski, he’s a poetry BAMF.
Of course the poems that I wrote in that class were terrible, how could they not have been, I was twenty years old. I wrote one about watching Fiddler on the Roof with my grandmother, the non-Jewish one. There was probably more than one about the wonderful beauty of Oregon, where I’m from. There was most certainly at least one about my world-weary feelings of having conquered all of romance because I was attracted to someone who occasionally did hard drugs. That’s what you write about when you’re a poetry student in the modern era, when you read more Ginsberg than Keats. You deconstruct. You write about your identity. You hyper-focus on specific moments and sensations. Some people do this very well and those are successful poets — the rest of us are imitators, searching for a voice, as lost and without direction within that unstructure as we would be within the rigid structures of the past.
Successful modern poets shine a light on the reality of the world; they connect their moments and sensations to police brutality, the AIDS epidemic, globalization. These are the good ones. The best ones connect police brutality and the AIDS epidemic back to beauty, back to specificity, back to rotten flower petals on the sidewalk and the smell of grandmother’s cooking, back to everything embarrassing and mockable about bad poetry. The saint and the sinner are always closer together than either is to the normal man. There’s the electricity.
Ken Mikolowski told us about the performance artist Chris Burden, who had his assistant shoot him in the arm. Who crucified himself on the hood of a Volkswagen. That was the only poem I wrote in that class that I truly thought was any good: I Know Why Chris Burden Crucified Himself On The Hood of A Volkswagen.
I’ve been in and out of poetry for a long time. I’ve always been a writer but of many different things. If you look for my poetry in publications you won’t find it, because it’s not there. Because I haven’t been ready. Because I’ve been scared. Because I’ve been hurt. Because I’m not a finished person. Because I’m still on a white-water rafting trip inside. But the fact of the matter is, I still know why Chris Burden crucified himself on the hood of a Volkswagen.
Do you ever walk down the street on a sunny day and hear a phrase of music and feel your sternum crack open just a tiny bit? Do you know what I mean when I say that? It’s a feeling. It’s not a theory. It can’t be pinned. It’s what I want to capture every time I write a poem and I keep writing poems because I never think I’ve captured it.
You could call it “openness to experience”, “lateral thinking”, “lust for life”. Zest. Spiciness. The transcendent. The impulse. I call it the poetic. I wish it could happen more often to me. It’s the feeling in the back of my arms along the hot metal of a car, that says — take me, here I am.
