APRIL 1997
Phoebe Bosché
Poetry:
Art or Anarchy?
POETRY: Art or Anarchy?
by Phoebe Bosché
During the mid-1980's, up through 1989, I co-edited a couple of literary magazines, based in Seattle, and based in a vibrant poetry/lit/performance scene. This was before Poetry Slams, before an explosion of performance/poetry venues. There weren't many places to read your work in front of an audience: U.W. series run by Nelson Bentley (for students); Bellowing Ark's series (for Bentley graduates); and then there was Red Sky Poetry Theatre (for poets who enjoyed reading in taverns and moving on to the Comet afterwards). Stephen Thomas had his Cabaret Hegel; Jesse Bernstein had has mouse in his mouth; Joe Keppler had Greenwood Gallery; and there were plenty of benches on Broadway, and sitting on sidewalks and postering were legal. And fun.
One of the
mags I co-edited, along with Jim Maloney, was "SkyViews", sponsored
by Red Sky Poetry Theatre (previously edited by Trudy Mercer and Charlie
Burks). One of my favorite issues was the "Random Images" issue,
Vol. 2, No 9, November, 1987. Besides the heated semi-exchange between
Sharon Doubiago and Stephen Thomas in the letters section, and the cover
(500 copies were printed of this issue, each one with a found photo pasted
on the cover--photos found near a dumpster by Maris Kundzins), notable was
the feature: "Art or Anarchy?" We asked writers/poets to
respond to the following:
"Poetry,"
somebody said in a recent interview, "is the most accessible of art
forms because anyone who has even the barest rudiments of a language can
produce something that someone at sometime will call poetry." Maybe
this explains why there are so many poets at the parties we attend. And,
from careful observation at these parties, we have noted that what one person
calls poetry can differ greatly from what the next person refers to by the
same name.
This raises
some questions. What is the function of poetry? How is poetry different
from other uses of language? Is poetry a personal or public art? On what
basis can you claim poetry is either good or bad? In other words, What the
hell do you do?
As you can
imagine, we got all kinds of responses, mostly serious, many irreverent--poking
fun at us for asking silly questions--but all were thought-provoking. I
thought it would be of interest, during this month officially designated
as National Poetry Month, to republish some of the responses, written
in 1987, by poets who are still writing, still active in the Northwest
Poetry Scene (or others). First, here is what the editors had to say on
the subject:
Jim Maloney:
1987:Writing (any fiction, poetry or prose) is an experiment in consciousness. It is an examination and crystallization of what the mind constructs. Writing is a journey of the imagination with the left hand furiously taking notes. These notes are reworked, sharpened, crafted into art--an image, a communication. This process changes writing from a personal into a social act.
In contemporary
writing, the standard separation of genres (the novel, as distinct from
the short story, as distinct from the poem) becomes meaningless. I write
longer, more flowing pieces that are commonly termed fiction, and generally
shorter, more sculpted pieces that are commonly termed poems, but the distinction
is tentative. The distinction between fiction and non-fiction is also tenuous.
(A point that is easy to accept critically but difficult to appreciate.)
A piece of writing creates its own form (reality).
"Make
it new or don't make it." I wish I'd said that.
Phoebe Bosché:
1987: Function, meaning what is deemed natural and proper. Uh-huh. The natural and proper uses of poetry, like the natural mating habits of caged parakeets or the proper uses of nuclear weapons. No, I'm not suggesting that we should do art for art's sake, which is not the same thing as beauty for beauty's sake, which is really for all our sakes. But that, somehow, poetry (as an art form, therefore as a form of communication) unearths the missing link which connects all forms of life together, inextricably. No, not a link from one life form to a supposed superior, tail-less form. But, yes, a link to the way a squirrel's tail twitches, just so; to the brown falling of that green-gold leaf now touching the cracked pavement around the mother tree's twisted root; to the same cycles of sun-rise, moon-fall, light rising and falling continually into dying dark. It [poetry], more than any other art form (because the act of reading is, ultimately, an intellectual act), expresses the paradoxes inherent in being alive:
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Dylan Thomas
As to goodness
or badness, can you judge a poem or a painting or a musical composition
the way you judge a well-behaved dog or a faithful butler nearing the end
of her useful serving days? What if you say, "yes, this poem by Ms.
Burlington is wrought well. It says what I think it should say and means
what I want it to mean. It has good politics. Yes, by gum, this is a good
poem and we will give Ms. Bur a grant to produce a chapbook of more poems
like these. But, if in the future Ms. Bur strays a bit, say, mixes her metaphors
too erratically, well, . . . ."
1997: Well is right. I wonder if I wrote that after seeing a Fred Astaire movie, or maybe I was reading too much Virginia Woolf at the time. All I can do is shake my head, and move on. I still think those 15 words by Dylan Thomas--just 15 words--capture the whole history of the human predicament. The struggle to be human and humane.
We'll be
posting a few more of these essays from 1987 later this month, but we'll
end now with this, from Steven J. Bernstein, who died, by his own hand,
in 1991:
Steven Jesse Bernstein:
1987: A friend read Art or Anarchy? (Or "What is Poetry") over the phone. Indeed. At its best art is the final kick in the gut that is the inspiration of anarchy--a falling away of slivers of glass and rubbery sheets of paint, a noisy caving in of walls that leads to the whistling clear and lawless out-of-doors. Or it is a vision of life beyond confinement. Hopefully, art releases someone from somewhere they didn't want to be; maybe someplace they didn't know they were until they got away from it.
Poems are
often notes of escaping laboratory animals having been experimented to luridness
by keen pickle jar scientists. It can be said that these desperate screeches
and groans are entirely subjective and are too sweaty and unstudied to be
called art. Yet I will refer even to the tracks leading to the open window
as poems.
Poetry,
as such, as a term of definition, is a wild card. It is permissible, and
even encouraged, to consider any and all collections of words as poems.
Or to think of single words as poems. Or to regard things that aren't words
as words and, therefore, conceivably, as poems.
This elasticity
of denotations of cultural significance is true for art, in general, it
seems. We hear the professor's shoes, the clattering of scalpels; we are
chewing on the metal cages, anxious to try anything.
The test
of the integrity of a poem, or any work of art, may be, simply: does it
lead, in the end, to freedom, or does it merely expand the arena of confinement?
A voice from the outside, truly, is what we need to hear. Even a single
word. Even something that is not a word, but suggests such a word.
Indeed.
Tune in same time same www next week for more. MORE
POETRY.
Phoebe Bosché
© The Raven Chronicles 1997