I would like to make clear what exactly is going
on here. Friends and colleagues are asking everyday what the mêlée
is all about. In the first sentence of an article entitled "American
Poetry in the New Century," John Barr, President of the Poetry
Foundation, writes, "Poetry in this country is ready for something
new." Conversely, in the first sentence of "Who Keeps Killing
Poetry?" by D. W. Fenza, Executive Director of AWP, we get the
following response to Barr’s Declaration of Impotence: "Every few
years, the experts decide that she is moribund, comatose, wounded,
infected, deranged, or dead." I find both of these statements to be
true, but it’s a pity to say so on such a grand scale.
Sometimes clarification is best achieved through
negative terms. The abovementioned debate is not, in my mind, what
the mêlée is all about. As the poet Bob Haslam phrased it to me,
"the inclination to passionately evince an aesthetic position often
leads to petty arguments and the digging of imaginary trenches." I
was defending a different position then. However, when I see two of
the most powerful people in the American poetry business squabbling
about whether "the next Walt Whitman [will] be an MFA graduate," I
am reminded, with a shiver, of my freshman year philosophy debates
over the necessity of a god’s existence. I would like to thank John
Barr and D. W. Fenza for helping me to gain some perspective here. I
wish we could take this defensiveness and this emotion to where
something is actually at stake. Walt Whitman found a place in the
real battlefield of his day. But the battlefields of our day seem to
be camouflaged by the ambivalence of too many writers who consider
themselves members of the poetry community. After all, isn’t poetry
more like AA than a country club? You’re a member when you say you
are. And I say, here and now, I’m a member (of the poetry community
that is). I would like to seize this opportunity to deny the right
of corporations like the Poetry Foundation, or AWP—or any
university, for that matter—to dictate what the state of poetry in
America ought to be.
People often talk vaguely about "freedom of the
press" without giving a clear description of what that looks like.
However, I heard the poet Amiri Baraka give a compelling definition
in a lecture once, and I now agree with him. In essence, he said
that we are all free to become the press. Isn’t that what we do when
we write a poem and let someone read it, or when we publish a
magazine and ask people to buy it? Baraka is one of a few enduring
poets who shy away from nothing. When a poet is willing to put his
security and reputation on the line day after day, year after year,
decade after decade, then that conflict seems worthy of my
attention. Doesn’t a poem serve as a proxy for the poet in the
reader’s hands? I consider every poem to be a résumé and a purpose
statement, each one being an artifact of who I was and a decree of
who I claim to be. I am not saying that all poetry should be
political, but I am saying that all of it is. So we, as poets, can
choose to keep playing hide and seek with our political selves, but
it is a choice.
In this magazine the poems will speak for
themselves. They will not be enhanced by commentary from the editors
or propped up by the poet’s credentials through contributor’s notes.
The poem is the only credential you need to publish here. Guru Jack
told me once that true freedom comes from the willingness to take
responsibility for one’s actions, as well as one’s product. But I
had learned this lesson years ago when my older brother and I fought
at my aunt’s house about whether professional wrestling was fake.
Instead of getting upset, my aunt moved the furniture and said we
should finish the brawl to discover who was right. I have never been
more terrified. There is nothing scarier than permission to fight
for your beliefs. And so here I guess it is time to say that we have
finished moving the furniture: Welcome to the Mêlée.
John Barr, "American Poetry in the New Century,"
POETRY, September, 2006; Vol. 188, No. 5. Page 433.
D. W. Fenza, "Who Keeps Killing Poetry?," the
Writer’s Chronicle, December, 2006; Vol. 39, No. 3. Page 16.