lyric persuasion

I visited Poet’s House at the new location in Battery Park City. It was a beautiful afternoon, cool, sunny and breezy along the waterfront. I had time to walk and was stress-free enough to give away my map to a family that was visibly and loudly lost.

The attraction was Norman Fischer and Rae Armantrout speaking on the lyric. The presentation and following discussion touched on my concerns, but did not provide much in the way of answers.

The topic of “the personal” came up. Norman noted that the personal was “quite unfashionable” in his poetry circles. I wonder how this happened. A reaction to confessional poetry? Must be more at work than that. He also expressed an opinion that I share – that everything is at root personal and then again, not personal. Here’s the way he said it:

Aren’t you always and ever talking about yourself? And when you talk about yourself, aren’t you always talking about something else?”

That is a very neat way of putting it.

He also noted a difference between the western lyric impulse (examples from Artilochus, Sappho, Shakespeare) and the Hebrew model (the psalms). Contrasting the elaborate, tricky entertainment value of the former with the anguished cry of the psalmist, addressing the abyss. I think there are other models, but those were the two he covered.

Rae used the word “solipsistic” regarding a concern for her own work – apparently it’s a special concern of poets. Visual artists would never wonder if their work was too solipsistic. She experiences writing poetry as an attempt to work out something for herself. She used an interesting term – “Bad Closure.” Premature solutions, killing off mystery. Also the concept of a poem into which anything can enter.

I asked a question about personal writing and strategies for doing what … avoiding it? countering it? making it acceptable? Rae’s response was that her poems did incorporate personal experience, and she pointed out the correspondences between her poem “Whole” and life events. The way I see it, her strategy is to strain the personal element out of the poem, and leave a sort of metallic-feeling framework that might resonate with readers, or might not. I was left with an interest in reading more of her work.

Neither poet expressed particular concern for the audience when the inevitable question arose about whether they felt they were communicating. There is a theory out there that poetry can represent, or defend, or protect language against the abusive encroaches of propaganda and advertising. I don’t know if I buy that. (heh) Seems like saying I will defend beauty by defacing myself and thereby defeat the popularity of cosmetic surgery.

Maybe none of this matters very much. I like that edge of meaning, mystery in poems, “artful self-erasure” (Rae’s description of a Michael Palmer poem). It’s just a matter of reading what you like.

Missing pieces:

The tribal (maybe that is what makes something not-a-lyric)
Collaboration (what is the Grand Piano all about anyway?)
Zen (completely absent, which was odd, considering Norman Fischer’s Zen credentials, and the readily available dharma solution to the question of self)