My obsession this week has been a dismissive review of one of my favorite poems, and of course, I feel compelled to write a response. I’m going to take my time in doing so, and am not going to get into the specifics yet. But the experience has gotten me thinking about how we sometimes approach poems that either fail to excite us or even push us away, and I want to say something about taking a scathing stance in general.
I had started writing this trying to anticipate all the counter-arguments, going into endless qualifications and digressions. But I’m just going to try to focus on the center of what I want to say. The elaboration of the argument can come in time.
Life is short: read with love. Put the faults of the piece aside; there may be reason to come back to them later, or there may not be. Instead, read with a love that asks what there is to be enjoyed about the work at hand. Try to enter into the moment that compelled the poem’s creation. The poet, no matter who they are and who you are, likely knows something you don’t, feels something you haven’t. Will the poem tell you? If it feels opaque to you, consider learning more about the poet and their context. You can’t take that time with every poem, but perhaps when you most feel anger or like the poem is a dead end, that may be a clue that you could really benefit from learning more.
If you try to read with love and you find that you still don’t enjoy a particular poem, that it’s too distant from what you want poems to do, then leave it for someone else. It’s not meant for you. Go and spend your time reading what you do love. Poetry is not any one thing, as the poet and critic Stephanie Burt says, and poems aren’t going to all follow the same set of rules. Wars are fought to protect our worldviews from contradictory worldviews: choose peace, especially considering that we’re talking about poetry worldviews.
Let love and joy be your compass. The poets we cherish, whether that’s our poetry friends in the here and now or poets long gone, have already given us more than we could read adequately in several lifetimes lying lazily in the grass, let alone in the few precious years we have left when we also have to and choose to tend to so many things beyond poetry. Some poems unfold for us over decades and need to be reread. It’s not a bad idea to choose a favorite or two to be read every year. I don’t understand why any poet would be threatened by AI, even if it evolves to write with a nuance that currently eludes it. Unless you love AI, unless its output matters deeply to you the way you might anticipate a new or new-to-you book by a poet you love, the poems it produces will always lack the quality of coming from a particular human. Maybe I’m starting to get old and I don’t understand how people coming of age right now think, but I have too much from humans to read already to care about what a machine is doing.
There may be times when it’s productive to call out a particular strand of poetry, when a critical mass of writers or readers go in a certain direction that ignores something important. But if something corrective needs to be said, take the time to make it good by really knowing what you’re criticizing. Get a friend who will be honest with you and who doesn’t share your biases to help you find your mistakes. Refine your skill with the knife for mercy’s sake. Hacking away inefficiently with poor tools only prolongs everyone’s suffering, including your own.
Also: if you want to fight, fight for what you love. The way to fight bad writing is with good writing: then those who admire bad writing will correct themselves. If they don’t, it’s probably not likely that an attack was going to be much more effective anyway. Share what you see in the poets you love, generously pass out the tools that will help others appreciate them. You may or may not win them over, but you’ll spend your time immersed in what amazes you.
If you’d like a model for what reading with love looks like, search for Robert Hass on YouTube: there’s an abundance of videos not just of him reading his own work, but also talking about poetry. It is perhaps not so much what he says, but the attentiveness and openness you can feel in his disposition. This 4-minute interview with him about Whitman’s Song of Myself might be the best starting point:
It may seem to be easy to praise a poet so established as Whitman from our 21st century vantage point, but keep in mind that Song of Myself caused an uproar when it was first published, and you can still find people who dislike it without too much trouble.
I’d like to compile more examples of reading with love and will be on the lookout for them. If you know of one – in video, audio, or text – please do share.
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