Poets are terrified of their poems’ seeming too dated, specific, sententious (esp. to other poets); and yet when they’re not writing poetry, all they want to talk about is politics and news. Their attention span isn’t any greater than those of the general population: if it was in the headlines last week, it doesn’t get much comment this week. And yet, when we go back to the desk, we want to write news that stays news — eternal poesie — rather than “mere journalism.”
It seems to me our writing practice on the one hand, and the painfully historical details of our everyday lives on the other, both might make more sense if they were more closely aligned with one another. We need to name names. I tell my students that I view a work of literature as an individual writer’s response to their circumstances, and that those circumstances are (perforce) historical. If we want to read something written in the middle ages or ancient world, it’s because we can see some similarity between that writer’s situation and our own and can perhaps empathize with their reaction. This can, of course, lead to some anachronistic readings: it’s just as likely that we are projecting our concerns onto theirs or articulating their concerns to our quite different ones. But that’s what happens when we look at any artifact, precisely because its creators and its later viewers are embedded in different historical moments. The difference between them may be a nightmare from which you are trying to awake, or it may be a gap that inspires creativity. But literature is not a time-machine. I don’t think there’s any easy equivalences via ahistorical universalist dogmas — or via use of a magnetic-poetry set of vaguely lyrical words, devoid of proper nouns. The epic poet lists names of persons about whom we know nothing but their names. “So-and-so was at the walls of Illium, too.” That’s the kind of ineluctably specific detail that lends a kind of integrity to the story — look: there were actual people there, with names -- a whole army of them! The poets themselves probably didn’t know who the hell those people were or whether they did or said anything notable. But the epic reciter damn sure had to memorize the names correctly, in order to graduate from bard school. Meanwhile, “Homer” was probably a lot of people; the name got the monument, the actual composers’ names really were writ in water. Many have noted the paradox that, in order to write something “universal,” you have to write something that is specific. If you want your writing to be “relatable” to many other people, you have to write a credible account of the peculiar set of circumstances within which and with which you live (and which, to some degree, you help to create). Nobody is an abstract, punctual individual. Nobody living in the world of language is universal. Indeed, when I read nineteenth-century poetry that strives to be universal (or “merely human”), I find that it seems very dated and culture-bound. Old-fashioned, quaint. Things have changed. Perceptions have changed; they’re radically different among different people even at this moment. And now geophysical circumstances are changing, too — faster than we know. We don’t have any writing from the end of the last ice age, but if we did, I’d venture to say that its concerns would seem vastly different than our own. Studies of literature of the “little ice age,” or even “the year without a summer,” show that people’s perceptions were significantly altered by those climatic events. How are writers responding to them now? One way to deal with these things is by ignoring them. Formalist, non-representational, modernist poetry was a response to World War I just as much as Siegfried Sassoon’s. Poets at the tail-end of the western Roman empire were writing about heaven, not barbarian invasions, political corruption, and decaying infrastructure. And I’d venture to say most poets today don’t refer to George Floyd, the novel coronavirus, or climate catastrophe by name. I would like to think that people a couple of hundred years from now will recognize Floyd’s name and know what COVID-19 was. They made need footnotes, but that’s OK (provided there are such a thing as footnotes, then). But I have a feeling no explanation will be needed for the climate thing. They won’t be wondering what it means; rather, as Amitav Ghosh speculates, they’ll wonder why we weren’t talking about it more. The peripheral “issue” of one generation becomes the defining feature of the next. And I have a feeling that whatever readers there may be will be shaking their heads and smiling ruefully, thinking, “If they only knew.”
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |