GROUP POETRY, Conclusion

Left: A Writing Workshop Round Table

Here again is Grace Paley's humble, strong, dignified, soft-spoken "Walking in the Woods." After reading it a dozen or so times for its own sake, try substituting "writing" or "art" every time she says "tree" or "life." It would conclude, "If you've liked art, you do it."

Grace Paley: Gone | The Ruth Group

As for M.F.A. programs, many people serious about writing have expressed concern about the formation there of a single, homogeneous brain and spirit, formed perhaps by a single megalomaniac of a poet-professor’s influence on (intimidation of?) vulnerable students and colleagues. Maybe a single jackass in authority or widespread neglect cannot kill the future of an acolyte if he’s a genuine writer-in-waiting. Emily Dickinson. Gerard Manley Hopkins. J.D. Salinger. But what if that’s not true? What if he can be killed?

And even if those three icons and other soft voices survived some tyrannical authorities and doctrinaire influences—teachers, peers, pillars full of migrating ideologies—why should they have to? Conversely, why should a bellicose, doctrinaire student be permitted to make life more complicated for honest, earnest classmates or a well-intentioned, competent teacher, who might be the next Hopkins but is working here to pay the rent, along with spreading The Word?


Left: Walt Whitman?


There’s no magic formula for the right mix of community and solitude in improving artistic expression. My concern about an excess of community and fawning over celebrities as well as each other is based on impressions I’ve gathered at dozens of readings and several conferences over the last two or three decades.

However, I’ve also met some very nice people at various levels of experience in the writing game. I entirely understand and cautiously agree with the arguments for a greater sense of community among writers; it can be educational and good for the enterprise. But it’s also important to keep our eyes on a prize that's a shape shifter. One thing seems certain: it does not need to include so much Hollywood hero worship and poetry circle chit chat in the garden club tradition.

Now listen, for I mean this: I have been very pleasantly surprised by the relative absence of flagrant egomania I’ve perceived among celebrity writers. When I was just starting to attend these affairs, I expected to see a series of wannabe Hemingways strutting in with a big game rifle in one hand, a fifth of whiskey in the other, and boxing gloves draped around his neck. His reading partner might be Sylvia Plath, hands tied behind her back so she could not get to the oven gas.



In fact, I’ve seen almost none of such histrionics,

(left: histrionics)

at least from the writers themselves--almost no Famous Dude Syndrome and lot of Agreeable Regular Folks looking for the right porch swing. (Though I do wonder what the writers think about each other and The Work once the gatherings and fawning are finished).

So it’s apparently the “students,” the apprentices (again, ages 18 – 80), at these venues that make me need to play Killjoy and re-assert the obvious: real art is not a party. It's lonesome, hard, painstaking work. Like caring for a child, you do it out of love more often than you do it for fun. For occasional, exquisite hours, it's both. But worthwhile talk about writing is more likely in living rooms and coffee shops than self-celebrating galas. When wine, cheese, clatter and flattery enter the room, good thinking, talking, and writing run the other way.

Grace Paley: Gone | The Ruth Group



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Coleridge Again and the Question of Group Poetry

So much for Elkhorn city. Back to poetry we go. I intend this to continue some of the ideas posted last Tuesday, February 15, so here again is Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight."

Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

How important are quiet and solitude in the self-exploration and study of the world required for creative writing? After all, serious writers—even the funny or entertaining ones—are aiming for some kind of larger Truth, among other targets. (Don’t ask them to admit that; it sounds embarrassingly self-important. But good writers and good readers alike know it’s a fact).

So I guess my concern grows from the groupiness I see—or imagine—in today’s American literary scene, where M.F.A. programs and writers’ conferences proliferate like bacteria. Some bacteria are good for us, and I’m not about to argue against pairs or groups thinking and talking about what writing should and should not be. If you hear enough responses, your own amorphous answer will be forming, whether you want it to or not. (If it’s not amorphous, if you think it has solidified, it’s not the answer).

Also, I’m hearing over and over at conferences and readings how writers gathering at a site form a “tribe.” I’ve heard “You are my tribe” more than once in the last few years. I guess that’s guess cozy and supportive, but it also feels uncomfortably trendy.

(By the way, I'm not very worried about these tribes being exclusive—it’s anybody’s guess which came first, the tribes going off to their own corners, or mainstream society’s drop-kicking them there).

So, yes, writers and artists are isolated, under-valued people who need group support, a sense of family, and a community of benevolent but frank critics. What I see or imagine at these events is a social bonding that might be worthwhile and reasonably honest, but is also deceptively kind—students and teachers alike. It feels like collective flattery, an inflated, artificial sense of excellence and self-importance among beginners and veterans alike. I'm not sure when meaningful collegiality becomes frat-boy chumminess, but I think we ought to be asking the question.

Can I prove it's a problem? No, but I try to remember that the prolific Yeats, who is surely on everyone’s Top Twenty List, probably has no more than 20 poems that are indisputably great. Of the writers who are celebrity teachers at these events, how many have produced a body of work or single poem that will be read, remembered, studied, admired 50 years hence?

I say that only to add some realism and perspective to the discussion, not to be mean. The writers themselves are probably all too aware of how tenuous their current status is, but I'm not so sure about the students, who might be ages 18 - 80 at conferences. Are they grounded in the reality of how mortal their work probably is? And even the work of their esteemed mentors?

Around ten years ago, in some office, I came across a year's worth (1969, I think) of Poetry Magazine, then and now one of America's most prestigious places to be published. I was amazed to find that only about 5 - 10% of the poets represented in that year's twelve issues were names I recognized. Other, more serious poetry scholars and zealots might spot more, but even so, it's bitter food for bitter thoughts.

More tomorrow or soon.

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