I’d been told that some former Colorado Springs poets laureate were going to read at the old Knights of Columbus hall. Some of them were old friends, so I’d overcome my distaste for public gatherings and come down to hear them.
When I’d walked into the hall, I’d found a bank of folding chairs set out, mostly unoccupied, and eight or so big folding tables on each side of the room, at which a collection of groups I’d never heard of were offering books or promotional merchandise. I stopped to peer at the books on the first table, and a large young woman genially accosted me. She represented, she told me, one of the alphabet soup groups, whose mission was to print up books that showed the positive side of being a letter in the soup. I smiled and moved on to the seats, where I watched the people at the other tables for a while.
Some were talking to each other, and I wondered what would become of them should their hands be bound behind their backs; would they be rendered mute? Others were consulting their hand-held Devices. I suppose they could have been reading poetry on them, though I doubted it. I’d arrived early, as usual. I left to run an errand.
I got back in time for the introduction, made by two members of the entity sponsoring the event, something called Poetry 719. The louder of the pair announced her affiliation with Poetry 719, and at her grunted prompt other members of that group scattered around the hall cried out an incomprehensible phrase in unison. Nuremberg came to mind.
The most recent former poet laureate went first, and informed us that she had fucked fifty women but only made love with two. She went on to express hope that her next bout would lead to her third, rather than fifty-first, such encounter. You had to give her credit for perseverance, I thought.
She was conveying this intelligence through a sound system that would have been adequate for Yankee Stadium, and was so overly adequate for the large, uncarpeted, high-ceilinged space we shared that I wasn’t quite able to make out how the fucking differed from the love-making. The differences were explained in abstract sociological terms that seemed occasionally to rhyme at unpredictable intervals.
After the first former poet laureate wound up her turn, my two friends came on. One read a long catalog poem about the possible uses for the billions of dollars various billionaires have recently expended proving they have the biggest rockets. The next recited a very great poem he’d written that showed life in the mountains renewing itself by lifting up its last year’s detritus to the morning sun.
Both of these guys have spent their lives learning to love and shape our common language, to make it say more than it first appears to say, to make the words chime against each other until the overtones enter the listener’s body, shake it, change it. That’s what used to be required if you were to be called a poet. You’ve got to score, as Robert Frost said. Like most writing, it took a lot of time spent with no company but that of the long train of writers who’d lived before you. You needed that time alone to clear your head of the incessant chatter that infested your head from the times you weren’t alone. Poetry isn’t a team sport, except for all the dead people on your team.
Or it didn’t use to be. But the tables that surrounded that hall were full of people who belonged to one club or another, and whose writing seemed to be a communal activity. I’d heard representative samples at other events. They all sounded alike, and they all seemed to be trying to sound, not like themselves, but like black urban rappers. Or hip hoppers, or whatever the latest monicker might be. A representative sample, from Jigmastas, an “underground hip hop group” composed of DJ Spinna and MC Kriminul:
“We at the next level you tryin’ to find that each and every day
It’s gettin hard for you to grasp my speech
The class I teach
Make you cram to understand lyrics so dope
They oughta cut me up in grams touchin’ my hand
Before me and my man rushes to jam, crushing why’clan
No time for you to execute your plan next to shoot a man . . . . ”
I will readily admit that It’s hard for me to grasp such speech. Does “that” in the first line refer to “the next level” I’m trying to find, each and every day? Have I failed to cram hard enough? Do I have a plan to shoot a man? How do he know? Or should I plan to cut the speaker up in grams before he rushes to jam any more? Goodness, I certainly am more violent than I thought. And stupider.
This excerpt demonstrates a lot of the common characteristics of the new group Performance Poetry: long strings of iambs or trochees, the punchy feet, good for aggression, to show how tough the speaker is; arbitrarily placed rhymes and half rhymes, chosen from a bag labeled “hip hop clichés;” the sole subject the lyric itself, its genius and its superiority to the listener’s understanding; the diction utterly predictable, abstract, moribund.
After each laureate finished reading or Performing, Ms 719 corralled her or him back on stage to talk about what “the experience of being a poet laureate” had been like. The first laureate seemed happy to recount at some length how she had felt about it. My two friends, both born before the Age of Narcissism took hold, talked about some of the things they’d done with the gig, and some of the people they’d met in the course of it. The MC announced the afternoon’s lineup of workshops. My friends and I split.
Thinking about this event later that day, I was suddenly reminded of Hemingway’s story “The Light of the World.” I hadn’t read it for many years, so I dug it out.
The anonymous 17-year-old narrator and his traveling companion, Tom, come into a town as night is falling. They stop in a bar but leave it pretty promptly after the bartender, for no reason, bathes them in cold hostility, calling them “punks” (in those days slang for “homosexual”). The two go on to the train station, where they find a motley bunch of lumbermen, prostitutes and Indians waiting for the ticket agent to show up. The mouthy lumberman punk-baits the camp cook, two of the prostitutes begin spinning elaborate bullshit about their love affairs with the great middleweight boxer Stanley Ketchel. They both call him “Steve,” and the cook is the only one who tries to correct them. All the details about “Steve” they weave into their bathetic stories are glaringly inaccurate. The room is awash in narcissism, self-pity and unmotivated cruelty. The cook asks the narrator and Tom where they’re headed. “The other way from you,” replies Tom.
I don’t want to put anyone down, and I can understand the need of people with unusual wiring or terrible histories to band together with others like them, and to take courage from their numbers to assert their human dignity. But I don’t believe such assertions, couched in lazy, sloppy slang and minimal structure, constitute poetry.
Poetry is an attempt to use every element and technique of the language that its long development has given us as well as possible to tell the truths at the heart of experience, to make the reader or listener come more alive to the world we all share. It really doesn’t care how many women you’ve fucked.
