Considerations, Part 4: The Writer's Social Responsibility

This is the fourth installment of a ten-part series exploring the thoughts of important essays on poetics.

In this 1984 essay, "Responsibilities of the Poet," Robert Pinsky addresses the question of  the responsibilities of the writer. While he speaks directly to poets, we believe the same ideas commute to all creative writing. The entirety of the essay is well worth reading. We present here excerpts that illustrate his main ideas.

Certain general ideas come up repeatedly, in various guises, when contemporary poetry is discussed. One of these might be described as the question of what, if anything, is our social responsibility as poets.

That is, there are things a poet may owe the art of poetry---work, perhaps. And in a sense there are things writers owe themselves---emotional truthfulness: attention toward one's own feelings. But what, if anything, can a poet be said to owe other people in general, considered as a community? For what is the poet answerable? This is a more immediate---though more limited---way of putting the question than such familiar terms as "political poetry."

[A]s poets...one of our responsibilities is to mediate between the dead and the unborn: we must feel ready to answer, as if asked by the dead if we have handed on what they gave us, or asked by the unborn what we have for them. This is one answer...to the question of what responsibility the poet bears to society. By practicing an art learned partly from the dead, one keeps it alive for the unborn.

So one great task we have to answer for is the keeping of an art that we did not invent, but were given, so that others who come after us can have it if they want it, as free to choose it and change it as we have been. A second task has been defined by Carolyn Forche, in a remarkable essay, as a "poetry of witness": we must use the art to behold the actual evidence before us. We must answer for what we see.

Witness may or may not involve advocacy, and the line between the two will be drawn differently by each of us; but the strange truth about witness is that though it may include both advocacy and judgment, it includes more than them, as well...Witness goes further, I think, because it involves the challenge of not flinching from the evidence. It proceeds from judgment to testimony.

[Forche] realized that what had seemed "unpoetic" or fit only for journalism, because it was supposedly contaminated with particular political implications, was her task. The "contamination" or "politics" was her responsibility, what she had to answer for as if she had promised something about it when she undertook the art of poetry. A corollary realization is that "all poetry is political"...

The need to notice, to include the evidence as a true and reliable witness, can be confused and blunted by the other, conserving responsibility of mediation between the dead and the unborn. And just as society can vaguely, quietly diffuse an invisible, apparently "apolitical" political ideology, culture can efficiently assimilate and enforce an invisible idea of what is poetic.

Two nearly paradoxical formulations emerge from this conflict. First, only the challenge of what may seem unpoetic...can keep the art truly pure and alive. Put to no new use, the art rots. Second, the habits and visions of the art itself, which we are responsible for keeping alive, can seem to conspire against that act of use or witness...

To put it simply, and only a little fancifully, we have in our care and for our use and pleasure a valuable gift, and we must answer both for preserving it, and for changing it.

The McPoem: Product of MFA Programs.

This excerpt is third in a series of ten pieces examining the thoughts of great poets on poetry.

Donald Hall's essay, "Poetry and Ambition," (1988) is a rallying call to poets and a lament at the plight of contemporary poetry.

In all societies there is a template to which its institutions conform, whether or not the institutions instigate products or activities that sui such a pattern. In the Middle Ages the Church provided the model, and guilds and secret societies erected their colleges of cardinals. Today the American industrial corporation provides the template, and the university models itself on General Motors. Corporations exist to create or discover consumers' desires and fulfill them with something that satisfies briefly and needs frequent repetition. CBS provides television as Gillette provides razors---and, alas, the universities turn out degree-holders equally disposable; and the major publishers of New York City (most of them less profitable annexes of conglomerates peddling soap, beer, and paper towels) provide disposable masterpieces.


Thus: Our poems, in their charming and interchangeable quantity, do not presume to the status of "Lycidas"---for that would be elitist and un-American. We strive to write the McPoem---ten billion served---which becomes our contribution to the history of literature as the Model T is our contribution to a history which runs from bare feet past elephant and rickshaw to the vehicles of space. Pull in any time day or night, park by the busload, and the McPoem waits on the steam shelf for us, wrapped and protected, indistinguishable, undistinguished, and reliable---the good old McPoem identical from coast to coast...

And every year Ronald McDonald takes the Pulitzer.

To produce the McPoem, institutions must enforce patterns, institutions within institutions, all subject to the same glorious dominance of unconscious economic determinism, template, and formula of consumerism.

The McPoem is the product of the workshops of Hamburger University.

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time they ought to stop moving on you; by that time you ought to have them right. Sensible advice, I think---but difficult to follow. When Pope wrote "An Essay on Criticism" seventeen hundred years after Horace, he cut the waiting time in half...By this time, I would be grateful---and published poetry would be better---if people kept their poems home for eighteen months.

If Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Robert Penn Warren publish without allowing for revision or self-criticism, how can we expect a twenty-four-year-old in Manhattan to wait five years---or eighteen months? With these famous men as models, how should we blame the young poet who boasts in a brochure of over four hundred poems published in the last five years? Or the publisher, advertising a book, who brags that his poet has published twelve books in ten years?

Abolish the M.F.A.! What a ringing slogan for a new Cato: Iowa delenda est!

The workshop schools us to produce the McPoem, which is "a mold in plaster,/Made with no loss of time," with no waste of effort, with no strenuous questioning as to merit. If we attend a workshop we must bring something to class or we do not contribute. What kind of workshop could Horace have contributed to, if he kept his poems to himself for ten years? No, we will not admit Horace and Pope to our workshops, for they will just sit there, holding back their own work, claiming it is not ready, a bunch of elitists...

The poetry workshop resembles a garage to which we bring incomplete or malfunctioning homemade machines for diagnosis and repair...We advance our nonfunctional machine into a circle of other apprentice inventors and one or two senior Edisons. "Very good," they say; "it almost flies..."

It is from workshops that American poets learn to enjoy the embarrassment of publication---too soon, too soon---because making public is a condition of workshopping.This publication exposes oneself to one's fellow-poets only---a condition of which poets are perpetually accused and frequently guilty. We learn to write poems that will please not the Muse but our poetic contemporaries, thus poems that resemble our contemporaries' poems---thus the recipe for the McPoem....If we learn one thing else, we learn to publish promiscuously; these premature ejaculations count on number and frequency to counterbalance ineptitude.

[T]he workshop answers the need for a cafe. But I called it the institutionalized cafe, and it differs from the Parisian version by instituting requirements and by hiring and paying mentors. Workshop mentors even make assignments: "Write a persona poem in the voice of a dead ancestor." "Make a poem containing these ten words in this order with as many other words as you wish." "Write a poem without adjectives, or without prepositions, or without content..." These formulas, everyone says, are a whole lot of fun. They also reduce poetry to a parlor game; they trivialize and make safe-seeming the real terrors of real art. This reduction-by-formula is not accidental. We play these games in order to reduce poetry to a parlor game. Games serve to democratize, to soften, and to standardize; They are repellent. Although in theory workshops serve a useful purpose in gathering young artists together, workshop practices enforce the McPoem.

The separation of the literature department from the writing department is a disaster; for poet, for scholar, and for student. The poet may prolong adolescence into retirement by dealing only with the products of infant brains. The scholars of the department, institutionally separated from the contemporary, are encouraged to ignore it. In the ideal relationship, writers play gadfly to scholars, and scholars help writersconnect to the body of past literature. Students lose the writer's special contribution to the study of literature. Everybody loses.

Sigh.
If it seems hopeless, one only has to look up in perfect silence at the stars...and it does help to remember that poems are the stars, not poets. Our disinterest must discover that last week's nobility was really covert rottenness, etcetera. One is never free and clear; one must work continually to sustain, to recover.

There is no audit we can perform on ourselves, to assure that we work with proper ambition. Obviously, it helps to be careful; to revise, to take time, to put the poem away; to pursue distance in the hope of objective measure. We know that the poem, to satisfy ambition's goals, must not express mere personal feeling or opinion---as the moment's McPoem does. It must by its language make art's new object. We must try to hold ourselves to the mark; we must not write to publish or prevail.

Considerations, Part 2 of 10: Louis Simpson on Narrative Poetry

The following is an excerpt from the essay "Reflections on Narrative Poetry" by Louis Simpson, 1981.

Why tell stories in lines of verse? Isn't prose a more suitable medium?

It would be, if poets only had ideas and wished to convey them. But feeling is more urgent, and their feelings are expressed by the movement of lines. In poetry, the form, more than the idea, creates the emotion we feel when we read the poem.

In everything else the poets share the concerns of the writers of prose, and may indeed learn more about writing narrative poems from the novelist than from other poets, for in the last two hundred years it has been the novelist whose labor it was to imitate life, while the poet prided himself on his originality, his remoteness from the everyday. "Life" was the business of the middle class and the novelists who entertained it.

As a result, poetry has been impoverished. In the theory of poetry held by Poe and his French translators, poetry is lyrical and intense, the reflection of an unearthly beauty. Many people believe that poetry is a language we do not speak, and that the best poetry is that which we are least able to understand.

I wish to discuss another kind of poetry, that which undertakes to be an imitation of life. The aim of the narrative poet is the same as for the writer of prose fiction: to interpret experience, with the difference I have mentioned: his writing will move in measure. And this measure evokes a harmony that seems apart from life. I say "seems" because it would be impossible to prove that it exists. Readers of poetry, however, feel it. This harmony is what poetry is, as distinct from prose.

What else can one possibly say on this subject? There is one thing: one can say, as an absolute rule, that poets must not use words loosely.

When I was a young man I wrote a poem in which I said that poetry had made me "nearly poor." I showed this to a friend, himself a writer, and he advised me to change "nearly poor" to "poor"---it would be more striking. I kept the line as it was, and never again did I pay attention to anything this critic had to say.

Poets try to think of new images. But it does not matter whether the image be new or old---what matters is that it be true. Poets who think that by producing far-fetched images they are changing our consciousness are doing nothing of the kind. One comes to expect the unexpected.

As the painter Margritte points out, everyone is familiar with the bird in a cage. Anyone can visualize a fish in a cage, or a shoe. But these images, though they are curious, are, unfortunately, arbitrary and accidental. If you wish to surprise, alarm, and alert the reader on the deeper levels of consciousness, visualize a large egg in the cage.

Imagine that you are reading your poem aloud, and that two or three people whose intelligence you respect are sitting in the audience. If you say something banal, or try to conceal a poverty of thought in a cloud of verbiage, you will see them yawn, their eyes beginning to close.

"Most artists and critics," said Susan Sontag, writing in the sixties, "have discarded the theory of art as representative of outer reality in favor of art as sujective expression."

Critics define movements in art just as they come to an end. For twenty years we have been reading poetry that expressed the personal feelings and opinions of the poet. The movement is exhausted---this is apparent in the visual arts as well as poetry and fiction. People long for understanding and a community of some kind.

Considerations, Part 1: Dana Gioia on Poetic Criticism

This is the first of a ten-part series of selections from major essays by poets about poetry. These are not offered as representative of our own views, though some may be; rather, we believe they are important thoughts that bear rethinking.


From Can Poetry Matter by Dana Gioia, 1992

Reviewers fifty years ago were by today's standards extraordinarily tough. They said exactly what they thought, even about their most influential contemporaries. Listen, for example, to Randall Jarrell's description of a book by the famous anthologist Oscar Williams: it "gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter." That remark kept Jarrell out of subsequent Williams anthologies, but he did not hesitate to publish it. Or consider Jarrell's assessment of Archibald MacLeish's public poem America Was Promises: it "might have been devised by a YMCA secretary at a home for the mentally deficient." Or read Weldon Kee's one-sentence review of Muriel Rukeyser's Wake Island: "There's one thing you can say about Muriel: she's not lazy." But these same reviewers could write generously about poets they admired, as Jarrell did about Elizabeth Bishop, and Kees about Wallace Stevens. Their praise mattered, because readers knew it did not come lightly.

The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty, even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility, they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.

Like all genuine intellectuals, these critics were visionary. They believed that if modern poetry did not have an audience, they could create one. And gradually they did. It was not a mass audience; few American poets of any period have enjoyed a direct relationship with the general public. It was a cross-section of artists and intellectuals, including scientists, clergymen, educators, lawyers, and, of course, writers...The public enjoyed their efforts. Poetry anthologies were an indispensable part of any serious reader's library...read and reread by a diverse public. Favorite poems were memorized. Poetry mattered outside the classroom.

Today these general readers constitute the audience that poetry has lost...However healthy poetry may appear within its professional subculture, it has lost this larger audience, who represent poetry's bridge to the general culture.

Gioia goes on to posit six prosposals for the improved health of poetry with this preface:

If I, like Marianne Moore, could have my wish, and I, like Solomon, could have the self-control not to wish for myself, I would wish that poetry could again become a part of American public culture. I don't think this is impossible. All it would require is that poets and poetry teachers take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public.

As most relevant to the portion of the essay discussed above, we point out the third of his six proposals:

Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively. Poets must recapture the attention of the broader intellectual community by writing for nonspecialist publications. They must also avoid the jargon of contemporary literary criticism and write in a public idiom. Finally, poets must regain the reader's trust by candidly admitting what they don't like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.

The questions we raise are these:

1) Have we poets today willing to take the risks of offering serious and negative reviews? In other words, have we poets of moral courage? Who are they?

2) Are there voices today who "charge modern poetry with cultural importance?" Whose voices are these?

3) Do poets concern themselves with regaining the reader's trust? If so, how? If not, why not?

4) Does there exist a "public idiom" about poetry? Should there exist such an idiom?

5) Has professional courtesy, in fact, taken the place of honesty?

Our Mistake and Our Thanks

We announced last week in our "Toward a Richer Aesthetic" post that we intended to use a soft leather cover for our first issue. That choice was one made for novelty and a love of old leather-bound books.

We've heard from several people that such a decision is offensive to their sensitivities to animal rights, and we respect that principled position.

Since the choice of a leather cover was not based on any part of our editorial philosophy, we feel free to rescind our decision to use leather.

The goal of Four Branches Press is to put high-quality, rich, accessible poetry and short fiction into as many hands as possible. This is our small effort to re-ignite a passion for these in the lives of people outside literary circles. Anything that stands in the way of that goal must be discarded.

We didn't think through the decision for leather covers, and now we realize that there are other philosophies that Four Branches embraces and can further in our small way.

We are now looking at our budget and seeking sources for ecologically responsible papers and cover for the first and subsequent issues. Any recommendations from our supporters would be appreciated.

We thank those who brought this carelessness to our attention, and we will always gladly change our minds when we see that we have strayed from our intended course.

Gathering the Kindling: Naming Our Poetry Award

As stated on the Four Branches Press website, we intend to offer a small cash prize for one poem published in each issue, but do not require entry fees.

These facts reflect our editorial philosophy. The work of writing a poem has been done: we do not want to be paid for the honor of publishing it. We know how painful the work of writing can be, despite its joy.

In recognition of the profound nature of good poetry, we have given careful thought to the naming of the poetry award.

Allow me to slip into my personal voice. When I lived on a farm and used a woodstove to heat my house, I cut my own firewood, gathered my own kindling. In these earthbound activities, I found many metaphors for poetry.

Gathering the kindling was the most apt.

Bending to pick up the branches, holding them in my hands and knowing the life they represented, now scattered and detached from what had once nurtured them, I saw the ideas and thoughts and images of my own life.

Breaking them into a size for the stove, arranging them by length in the kindling box, I saw randomness becoming meaningful order, like the arrangement of words into the first rough body of a poem.

In the frigid dark of winter mornings I bent before the cold stove, my breath clouding in front of me, my fingers numb as I laid the kindling to build the fire. I struck the match. The kindling flared; as I held my hands to the warmth, I saw poetry come to full life, bringing light and vital heat into the lives of those who read it.

And so we have decided to name our our poetry prize for each issue the Kindling Award for Poetry.

We are still contemplating the name for our Fiction Award. When we know, so will you.

Mothers, Aunties, and the Accessible Poem

"I felt we were always in the position of having to defend ourselves. We got cheesed off at being referred to as small-town Mantovanis, or the pop brigade. I suppose because we didn't do English at university, or because the poetry I was writing could be appreciated by my mother or my aunties. " (Roger McGough, in an interview by James Campbell in The Guardian, Saturday 22 August 2009)

This is a remarkable idea: accessibility as a synonym for less-than-literary.

Here's a sample of McGough's work:

The Identification by Roger McGough

So you think its Stephen?
Then I'd best make sure
Be on the safe side as it were.
Ah, there's been a mistake. The hair
you see, its black, now Stephens fair ...
Whats that? The explosion?
Of course, burnt black. Silly of me.
I should have known.
Then lets get on.

The face, is that the face mask?
that mask of charred wood
blistered scarred could
that have been a child's face?
The sweater, where intact, looks
in fact all too familiar.
But one must be sure.

The scoutbelt. Yes thats his.
I recognise the studs he hammered in
not a week ago. At the age
when boys get clothes-conscious
now you know. Its almost
certainly Stephen. But one must
be sure. Remove all trace of doubt.
Pull out every splinter of hope.

Pockets. Empty the pockets.
Handkerchief? Could be any schoolboy's.
Dirty enough. Cigarettes?
Oh this can't be Stephen.
I dont allow him to smoke you see.
He wouldn't disobey me. Not his father.
But that's his penknife. Thats his alright.
And thats his key on the keyring
Gran gave him just the other night.
Then this must be him.

I think I know what happened
... ... ... about the cigarettes
No doubt he was minding them
for one of the older boys.
Yes thats it.
Thats him.
Thats our Stephen.


This poem has a certain voice, of course, that will please some ears and not others. That's a matter of preference, not quality.

But from a literary standpoint, within this poem are forms and rhymes and cross-rhymes, concrete simplicity that carries grave weight, a palpable movement, a top layer of immediate accessibility, and beneath all that, layers left to be unpacked and studied by those who wish to do so. It deals with important and wrenching human experience. All of this exists within an elegantly simple, accessible poem that our "mothers and aunties" could understand on Main Street while on University Avenue literary critics delved into its structure and syntax.

We posit that building a poem that turns on so many layers requires a very high level of craftmanship, harder and deeper than the superficiality associated with the label "popular."

We would love to see poetry become "popular," and skillfully so.