SINGING WHERE WE LIVE

Like all of the arts, poetry has a long tradition of speaking for the marginalized and disenfranchised. Just look at a lot of the Psalms (even those attributed to David the King!) or Isaiah, for starters. That, as well as the court poets throughout antiquity. Or Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive. We sing where we live.

As for the review, remember: being a writer requires a thick skin when it comes to criticism – and, as Gertie Stein said, every writer wants to be told how good he is, how good he is, how good he is. Now, let’s look at the depth of this “criticism”: adjectives like dumbest, dumb, dumb … how many times? To say “I didn’t like this” is not criticism, O Wondrous Publisher, but the lowest form of consumerism.

Much of the most powerful art we find unlikable in our initial encounters – only through repeated exposure and exploration do we finally begin to see it open in its fullness and awe, and to appreciate its scope. (Not that everything that’s unlikable is great art, or even art, mind you – just that candy in and of itself can leave one seriously malnourished.) So don’t invite this cad to the opera, Shakespeare or Shaw, the symphony, art museum, jazz, a wine-tasting or brewpub, wilderness camping/backpacking, or your next edition. I once counseled a photographer I know in the Pacific Northwest to go beyond the obvious, superficial beauty there and to instead capture the real nature of the landscape.

Last time we talked, he said his work had taken on a breathtaking intensity, but that none of the galleries would touch it – because they didn’t believe it was real! It isn’t what the owners and collectors think they see in the outdoors – it’s the reality, in its naked majesty, instead. That’s what art is about! Or should be.

Or, as Gary Snyder once argued, all poetry is nature poetry – even if the closest the poet comes to nature is his old lady’s queynt.

Another thing to remember when it comes to publishing: not everyone will like everything. Back when Doonesbury was the “hot” comic strip, one newspaper was astonished to find in a survey that the strip was both its most popular – and the most hated! Please the latter subscribers and you might not be selling copies to the former; but please the former, and the latter will still be onboard, to get whatever it is that they like. Or. if a restaurant removed every item that any of its clientele found objectionable, there would be no menu. Even McDonald’s has detractors.

Of course you’re going to tinker with each edition! Every poem is different, too – or should be. (I could name some writers who are repeating the same formula they struck upon ten or twenty years ago, but that’s not for me – Eskimo artists, I’ve heard, will do a subject only once and then move on to another. Good model, methinks, although the “once” might mean a work within a series of sixty to a hundred poems – kind of like a novel, I guess.)

Maybe you’ll even have a stretch where the personal life and upheaval and discovery and adventures quiet down, and you feel it’s time to do a mostly-poetry issue – go for that, too!

Right now, what’s singing where I live is the mockingbird. Ever so gloriously, with a song that’s rarely the same.