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Poetry in a Coffin: The Past, the Distant, and Always the Safe

G. Tod Slone

Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.

—Hemingway

    Editor Bill Henderson’s introduction to the 2010 Pushcart Prize: The Best of the Small Presses is truly amazing in its aberrancy and begins thusly: “Despite the election of a president who can actually read, write, feel, think and govern, it can be tough to find hope these days.” A thinking citizen—where are the thinking citizens?—, as opposed to a smiley-faced Pushcart nominee, would have to wonder: when did poetry become an organ of the Democrat Party? “As the conglomerates have taken over (and destroyed) much of publishing, it falls to small presses to carry on,” notes Henderson. Yet clearly the small presses included in his anthology mimic the large presses: marketing of name-brand writers and unquestioning support of the academic/literary established order.
    To no surprise, Henderson’s introduction serves to inflate the anthology with base, self-vaunting. Donna Seaman of Booklist is quoted: “Open the latest Pushcart gathering of the best of the small presses and enter a cosmos of candor, humor, conviction and lyricism... generous, glimmering and hopeful.” It is amazing to think that a whole class of upper-crusty, well-educated bourgeois* types lay comfortably indoctrinated with the same mindset of faux-candor, humor, Democrat-party conviction, and absolutely no questioning and challenging of the established order. That’s what you’ll find in the pages of this anthology. Indeed, while the selected poets wallow in their cocoons of financial and job security, they exude plenty of glimmer and hope.
    “Hopeful, I think, because small presses remain close to the human heart and not lodged in hedge funds,” continues Henderson in his self-vaunting ramble. “Our universe of presses [which of course does not include any presses like The American Dissident daring to question and challenge] does not depend on money...” Yet what to think of Kenyon Review with its $1,000 tuxedo-dinner parties in New York City, Poetry Magazine with its $100,000,000-plus foundation, and any number of other upper-crusty lit journals possessing six or even seven-figure annual budgets like Agni and Ploughshares. How can one read the words of Henderson’s introduction without feeling personally insulted?
    “Bloated business giants were said to be too big to fail,” notes Henderson. But what about the bloated tenured professor poets weeping about high unemployment, while sipping their cocktails? “Well, small presses are too small to fail. We are at rock bottom now and we are grounded there.” Yet how can that possibly true? Rock bottom, while Henderson and others in this volume drown in money and security? How can Henderson write such inanity?
    “The behemoths of banking, insurance and automobiles and their publishing clones worshiped growth,” he continues. Scapegoats, of course, divert attention away from the fat-cat Hendersons fed on thousands and thousands of dollars in public grant monies! “As I said years ago in this annual sermon [appropriate word!], the Pushcart Prize is to me ‘a small good thing’—the title of my favorite Ray Carver story. [Yes, small, but found in every library across the nation, generating thousands of thousands of dollars, and distributed by W. W. Norton $ Co.] We will stay small because we and now all the country can see the horrors of money lust. A computerless shack in the back is our World Headquarters and we intend making no expansions or office upgrades...” Henderson’s introduction is truly incredible and truly unacceptable!
    My decision to critique only the poetry in this anthology was made because of the relative short length of the poems. I know I couldn’t have possibly forced myself to read through the essays and short stories. In general—overwhelmingly and unsurprisingly—, the poems in this volume are characterized as art for artsaking in the words of George Orwell, who wrote: “In cultured circles art for artsaking extended practically to a worship of the meaningless. Literature was to consist solely of the manipulation of words. To judge a book by its subject matter was the unforgiveable sin and even to be aware of its subject matter was looked on as a lapse of taste.” Evidently, I willingly commit here in this review “the unforgiveable sin.”
    Most of the poems are characterized by ramble. Perhaps ramble is the new poetry? Most of them begin as Maxine Scates’ poem, “Not There,” with a banal scene, then ramble and ramble on. “Sometimes late at night/ around 11:05 when I’m watching the local news,” writes Scates. James Richardson’s “Metallurgy for Dummies,” a three-page poem set in two columns, appears as a jumble of words and begins [column 1]: “Faint bronze of the air/ a bell I can’t quite hear,// [column 2] “stop-quick stop-quick/ of sweep hands,” and on and on it goes. Who in their right mind would even wish to try to read and decipher the thing?
    On the back cover of the anthology is more self-vaunting: “63 brilliant stories, poems, essays, and memoirs...” and “the most honored literary series in America.” But says who? Do the facts back the assertions? Well, let’s see... The first poem in the anthology is by professor/state-poet Louise Gluck and was nominated by a friend of the established-order, Philip Levine. “Midsummer” is a descriptive prose poem about Gluck’s childhood (boys and girls playing)—nothing more, nothing less, nothing experimental, and hardly anything at all on the edge. “On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,/ the boys making up games requiring them to tear off the girls’ clothes/ and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last/ summer”. Is Gluck’s a great poem? Certainly not! Indeed, how could it possibly be considered the “best” of the “best” written this year in America?
    “Why Some Girls Love Horses” by Paisley Rekdal, nominated by the editor of Missouri Review, is about why some girls love horses and begins with the boyfriend or husband snoozing in bed, then quickly melding into Dandy, the poet’s horse and a description of it in the past. How this poem can be considered the “best” is anyone’s guess. “Sunflower,” by Henri Cole, another recognizable name, is a short poem about “When mother and I first had the do-not/ resuscitate conversation, she lifted her head,/ like a drooped sunflower, and said,/ “Those dying always want to stay.” Now, that reminded me of Johnny Ray Johnson, executed by the State of Texas, who said: “Nobody knows what it’s like on the other side. But, you know, nobody’s in a rush to get there.” For me, Johnson’s wisdom beats Cole’s and Cole’s mother’s by a mile.
    “O, Elegant Giant” by Laura Kasischke is a very short poem apparently about her father, who perhaps has Alzheimer’s, and begins: “And Jehovah. And Alzheimer.” Nothing much to it really at all. Perhaps if one dwelled on it a tad, it might manage to sadden a person. But that’s easy to do. The “best” of the “best”? Come on! The next poem, “Rain,” by Peter Everwine, is also of the “poignant” variety and mentions his dead father. But again, the “best” of the “best”?
    The poems in this anthology really do possess a comfy, bourgeois aura of sorts. Everwine’s poem seems to want readers to think that he is a sensitive, perhaps even, dainty man. “Collector” is written by Frank Bidart, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and proponent of censorship. The poem occupies four pages, though with a lot of space, and appeared in The American Scholar. It begins: “As if these vessels by which the voices of/ the dead are alive again.” Holy shit! I mumbled to myself. It is really terrible stuff. Here Bidart shows us how the bourgeois poet is completely out of touch with everyday realities and conflicts. “Your new poem must, you suspect, steal from// The Duchess of Malfi. Tonight. Alone. Reread it.” Well, I don’t recall who that particular duchess was, nor did I give a damn. Clearly, to be the “best,” a name like Bidart helps, but also the verse must somehow exude a kind of bourgeois ambiance. Bidart’s piece fails to compel me to read through the entire four pages.
    “Daddy, 1933” is the next poem and written by Geoffrey Brock and nominated by, once again, Philip Levine. It is a poem about a poem written by the father of the famous poet who stuck her head in the oven. Need I go on? Well, over one-half of it is quoted from that poem. “...he wrote it the year after/ Sylvia was born/ by the long foraging/ [...].” Brock bows to the established-order icons, rather than standing apart to actually question and challenge them. Open wide, say ahh, and swallow Sylvia.
    “A Poetics of Hiroshima” by William Heyen jabbers on and on, while Paul Muldoon’s “Hare at Aldegrove” begins with a hare standing up on its hind legs, moves on to Marilyn Monroe, and jabbers on and on. David Moolten’s “Cinderella” jabbers: “And this stepsister of sorts, maybe she doesn’t appear/ Cruel or ugly, doesn’t even know when she waltzes/ about her kitchen to Strauss on the radio”.
    What is in the skulls of these queerish bourgeois poets? They are really destroying poetry in America. Far too much comfort has rendered them flaccid wordsmithies, as opposed to strong, individual combatants. Why would a man wish to write a poem around Cinderella? That surely must be the very crux of the problem why poetry has ceased to matter at all with the exception to the flaccid wordsmithies occupying wainscoted university offices.
    Ted Kooser, another state poet, writes about a “Zinc Lid” of a discarded Mason jar: “But its cucumber summers, dill and brine, are over”. Oh, my! In “Epithalamium,” Bob Hicok rambles on in good wordsmithery right up and through the final vow: “The marriage/ of light: particle to wave. Do you take? I do.”
    At least two of the poems in this anthology mention Emily Dickenson: Alison Townsend’s “The Favorite” (about her favorite writing student) and Bruce Smith’s “Devotion: Fly.” The latter is not about a zipper, but rather about “Fly buzzes in the blown-open pages of the tiny novellas, everyone carries like scattered dreams...” Indeed, most of these “best” poets are writing in and about some dream world as in “this dream the world is having about itself” (William Stafford), quoted by Carolyn Wright in her poem “This Dream the World Is Having about Itself.” “That summer in our late teens/ we walked all evening through town—let’s say Cheyenne—,” notes Wright. Kary Wayson in “I Turn My Silence over” contemplates “O underbite!/ With your mailbox of a jaw/ O nothing when I ask what’s wrong.” One would like to give Wayson a large overbite in the rump! “Let’s ask the throat what the mouth wants tonight,” she continues. Wow! The “best”? It is as if the 232 staff contributors who worked on this anthology went out of their way to choose the most innocuous poetry they could possibly find. Several of Poetry Magazine’s nominations are, of course, amongst the “best,” including David Yezzi’s “The Good News,” which, unsurprisingly rambles on: “A friend calls, so I ask him to stop by./ We sip old Scotch, the good stuff, order in/ some Indian—no frills, too fine for him/ or me, particularly since it’s been/ ages since we made the time.”
    Joel Brouwer jabbers on about Crazy Horse in “For What the Hell They Needed It for.” Fleda Brown’s “The Kayak and the Eiffel Tower” begins with “The white sheet I remember, flashing across/ the bed, and I was watching my mother and the crying/ and the bed disappeared and all was white” and on and on in dreamitude. At least Jill McDonough’s poem, “Accident, Mass. Ave.” takes us into the real world of (oh, my!) anger and vulgarity: “Look at this fucking dent! I’m not paying for this/ shit I’m calling the cops lady [...].” But immediate material damage to ones possessions is as far as anger and indignation go in the “best.”
    One might wish to give to the “best” poets the advice that they try beginning a poem with a good hook sentence. “The Homing Device Comprehended at Last” by Liz Waldner illustrates the opposite: “When my god leaves me—/ She doesn’t leave you/ When I don’t know she’s there, then/ and now?/ She’s here,/ and now?” Why is “best” poetry seemingly rarely if ever straightforward poetry? Henderson clearly presents political criticism in his introduction. Why is his “best” poetry void of political criticism, even criticism he favors a la rah-rah Obama? Well, one of the poems, “Beautiful Country” by Robert Wrigley does present such a view, though after a long flurry of army/drug ramble. Still, his view was positivist.
    Another piece of advice would of course be to limit the rambling, which Marie Howe seems to exemplify in her poem, “Why the Novel Is Necessary but Sometimes Hard to Read.” Yikes! Do we really need a poem about that? Another piece of advice might be for poets to stand up, fight a little bit, risk angering someone with truth telling, and wrench the cap-and-gown ostrich head out of the sand even if only once in a while. Christ, America is far from perfect. The academic/literary milieu is far from perfect. Yet, here we have Rita Dove, another state poet and proud Pushcart nominee, writing about the frost of 1814 in “1814: The Last Frost Fair.”
    One might conclude from reading these poems (and in fact to no surprise at all) that the poets “honored” by Pushcart are comfy, well-educated, well-versed in good manners and polite formalities, and of course far, far from the edge of conflict with power. Indeed, quite contrary to Hemingway’s’ insightful thought (see quote above), these writers are not forged by injustice at all, but rather by tea-and-crumpet discussions at four in the afternoon in some college or university. The writing is too smooth, silky clean and absolutely aseptic. WARNING TO STUDENTS: READING PUSHCART POEMS MAY EUNUCH-IZE YOU!
    The evident absence in this anthology of clash with power, struggle, and battle really pains me. If these poems represent the cutting edge in literature, they still wouldn’t be able to cut a stick of soft margarine. Some of them are written by poets who seem to relish in dainty weeping, yet somehow cold-hearted and incapable of actually weeping. If the poems in this collection are going to go down in history—indeed, “best” makes that suggestion—then in the not so distant future, only academics in little cocoon offices will be reading them.
    “To read poems for the Pushcart anthology is to discover how strong and vital the poetry scene in this country really is,” notes Henderson in his introduction. “Poetry in the United States seems in a vigorous state,” notes Rosanna Warren, tenured-BU professor and one of the anthology’s two poetry editors. Yet, if the poems in this anthology are truly representative of the “best,” then one would have to conclude the contrary. The themes of the poems in this anthology, with the exception of the poem about the car accident and the one on drugs in the army, can be summed up as coffin-like. What is sad of course is that many if not most of the poets in this anthology are teaching college students to write with plenty of fluff and as little substance as possible and always about the past, the distant, and the safe. Now, would there be any point at all in The American Dissident nominating this essay for next year’s Pushcart anthology? Silence!

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    *The term bourgeois was always a pejorative one in the Sixties. Since so many who used the term pejoratively back then now have become bourgeois, the term has gone out of fashion. But The New York Times isn’t afraid to use it, though with a more or less positive connotation (“On Location: Above Paris and Bourgeois Cares,” 1/15/10), so why should I should I be? For me, bourgeois is more a mindset—a suburbanitic comfort zone—than money in the bank. For me, it implies forming an integral part of power no matter how small or local, as opposed to questioning and challenging power.

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