Someone passed this article on to me, and I’m thankful: Stephen Dobyns describes the kind of poetry I’m not looking for (and the kind I am). He’s a fine poet, too. His third book of verse, Heat Death, will be published next year by Atheneum.

We’re grateful to Kayak magazine, in which this piece originally appeared as “the poet as refugee,” for permission to reprint. Kayak is $5.00 a year from Kayak, 325 Ocean View Ave., Santa Cruz, Ca. 95062.

— Ed.

 

More than a year ago I read a short poem by Bill Matthews which I have been mulling over ever since. I no longer have the poem but the general idea was that we should not regret too much the passing of such poets as Stevens, Williams, Pound, etc., since it gives all us smaller poets the chance to know each other better. I seem to remember a comparison between mountains and hills, perhaps mole hills.

I have come to see this short poem as the proclamation of a movement that could be called “The Jes Plain Folks School of Poetry.” This is poetry in which there is no passion, no good or evil, but much of merit. I am not making Matthews head of this school — he has written some fine poems — but his poem could be printed on its banner. Make that T-shirts.

The members of the Jes Plain Folks School of Poetry are often rabidly egalitarian and anti-intellectual. They think that after having reached a certain competence in writing everyone is the same. Mostly they would rather write than read. They believe there is no greater equalizer than a general level of ignorance.

The poems of the Jes Plain Folks School can be broadly categorized as “Remark Poems” and “What If Poems.” There is nothing necessary about them, nor do they give the sense of having needed to be written. They may be whimsical.

The Remark Poem consists of the intelligent human being remarking on his breakfast, his child, his students, his birthday, on the influence had on him by his great aunt, his relationship with his butcher, druggist, neighbor in the split level to the right of his own. The apparent point of the poem is to reflect credit on the writer; so that the reader might say, “What an intelligent and sensitive writer this writer must be.”

The poem is usually written in a language so smooth that its prime sense of logic comes from the flow of the words themselves. One is drawn forward by conjunctions rather than argument. The reader’s response may be called How-Something; that is, he will say, “How true,” or “How interesting,” or “How nice.”

Sensitive, introspective, expressing a soothing intelligence, Remark Poems are basically a form of journalism. They are like many non-fiction books being published today: books which tell us about our own times; books that don’t surprise us, that verbalize what we always suspected or would have suspected if we had known anything about; books which express a mild concern for the quality of our lives.

The What If Poems of the Jes Plain Folks School are the sort where the writer states a premise which may be vaguely surrealistic, then proceeds like a soldier through all the variations: “What if animals could talk?” “What if poems fell from the sky?” “What if the elm trees turned into dark-eyed lovers?”

There have always been Remark Poems. Surrealism probably developed as an antidote to the Remark Poem: against the banality of the sensitive man commenting on his thirtieth birthday is set the train coming out of the fireplace. Unfortunately, there is a kind of American surrealism, closer to whimsy, that can deteriorate into Remark Poetry, although it may be more amusing.

In the past 15 years, Remark and What If poetry has proliferated to the extent that one might say there is an actual school. A partial reason for this has been the growing popularity of creative writing courses. This is not to damn such courses. They have, however, turned out a large number of writers who have reached a certain technical competence, and can turn out strings of words that look like and may occasionally be good poems. Mostly they are good the way a chocolate sundae is good, and one is left with a final feeling of “So what?” The Jes Plain Folks answer this by saying, “We are all equal and therefore anything that one of us says is of importance and who are you to say otherwise?” That last bit is always said in a loud voice.

Along with the workshops there developed an emphasis on a type of writing that became easy to parody. For years Robert Bly went around (he may do so still) calling for a certain kind of image that he was attempting to achieve, that he saw in some of his contemporaries, that was found in much Spanish and South American work and probably evolved from 19th century French symbolism.

What Bly found difficult, because of his own integrity, many younger poets found easy. It was not hard to write a good looking deep image. They were functional because they were surprising, and they carried a poem the way spectacle can carry a play. It was not hard to string together a series of evocative statements that sounded vaguely like late Merwin.

 

Jon Anderson, a poet I admire, once closed a poem in Kayak with a line something like, “And the geese fly north into 1929.” After one had calmed down it was possible to wonder if it meant anything. The poem, after all, was not about geese. But it doesn’t matter if it was gratuitous or not; the line simply reeked of meaning. It was also easy to imitate.

The leaves stir among the maples.
I remember my mother washing
The kitchen floor: the red sponge
is the body of a robin. In Pittsburgh
the last Model T falls to its knees.

A hint of regret, a touch of nostalgia, a mild feeling of anxiety and what-shall-I-do-now, these poems could be made from plastic molds. And it is difficult to say “So what” to something which you suspect might mean something. I don’t mean that their authors are practicing a conscious deception. They too are deceived by the reek of meaning. But there is nothing necessary, nothing that touches my life. They are a kind of Remark Poem.

In “Sailing to Byzantium” Yeats begins a typical sort of Remark Poem: “That is no country for old men.” And it continues that way until the end of the second stanza: “And therefore I have sailed the seas and come/To the holy city of Byzantium.” At which point the poem becomes about the poet’s desire to transcend his own nature.

“Among School Children” also begins as a Remark Poem: “I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;/A kind old nun in a white hood replies.” And it continues as such until the Yeats persona has a vision of Maud Gonne as a child among these schoolchildren. At that point the shock again allows the poet to transcend himself: “And thereupon my heart is driven wild:/She stands before me as a living child.” It is because of that transcendent state that the poet gains new understanding of the nature of love.

In these poems the poet is attempting to go beyond his human nature to reach some terrible beauty or place of knowledge, but of equal importance is the state that is left behind: the poet becomes more than a “tattered coat upon a stick”; he escapes “the foul rag-and-bone-shop of the heart.”

I think most good poetry, Non-Remark Poetry, is written from a position of apparent dissatisfaction or discontent. Dissatisfied with his present state, the writer is apparently trying to change or transcend his nature in order to reach some more attractive state. This discontent may be caused by some strong emotion or event that has disrupted the writer’s normal life. Much love poetry comes out of that sort of disruption. Equally disruptive can be grief, anger, a sense of loss, spite, even indignation as in Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”: “a savage servility/slides by on grease.” Or joy as in Wright’s “A Blessing”: “Suddenly I realize/That if I stepped out of my body I would break/Into blossom.”

The poet’s understanding of the discontent may be emotional or intellectual. He need not feel discontent in order to write, nor should the poem be seen as reflecting the emotional state of the poet.

Nor is the poet’s apparent desire to transcend himself as Faustian as it might seem. Often the place being escaped from is a stronger motivation than the place being sought. Basically, the poet is a refugee. Take one of Berryman’s last poems, “He Resigns.”

Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts.
Her having gone away
in spirit from me. Hosts
of regrets come & find me empty.

I don’t feel this will change.
I don’t want any thing
or person, familiar or strange.
I don’t think I will sing.

any more just now;
or ever. I must start
to sit with a blind brow
above an empty heart.

If much good poetry is written out of discontent, then the cause of that discontent is often “the foul rag-and-bone-shop” or the “blind brow above an empty heart.”

Charles Simic is another poet I admire. In his poems there is a lot of food, a lot of eating. But in the visual memory of those poems I am always aware of a group of ragged and dangerous men in the background, waiting at the edge of a snow-covered field. It is the sight of those men which sustains much of his work.

As important as the discontent can be the posture the poet assumes before the cause of the discontent. This posture is basically fraud: the yawn of the gambler who has lost all his money. There is a Dahomey song translated by W. S. Merwin that goes:

We were dispersed one by one and the dry season came.
And we will come back again and we will meet.
The man who has no field, when he dances nobody knows it.

The dancer may have no shoes. He may be motivated by fraud, frivolity or bravado, but he has my complete admiration. He becomes the small man thumbing his nose at the awfulness.

Alan Dugan is especially good at expressing this in poems ranging from “Orpheus” (“Singing, always singing, he was something/of a prig, like Rilke, and as dangerous/to women.”) to the camel in “On Visiting Central Park Zoo” that pisses between its “splayed seemingly rachitic legs”: “Whatever he is, he goes on being what he is/although ridiculous in forced review/perseverant in not doing what he need not do.”

It was also what originally drew me to William Carlos Williams. For example, “Danse Russe.”

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

What irritates me about the Jes Plain Folks School of Poetry is that it is decorative poetry. In that it comments on what exists, it becomes a celebration of banality. It is written to display its creators in a favorable light, and often printed because it allows editors to feel superior to it. It may be witty and well-formed; it may have genius, intelligence and be suitably spiced with the more genteel emotions such as nostalgia and regret (the effluvia of greed); I may admire it as I would admire a well-wrought eunuch, but it does not affect my life.

Such poetry is bourgeois in that it honors the status quo. The followers of the Jes Plain Folks School write safely from positions of content. As in “The Cocktail Party” where those who don’t have it in them to be crucified on an ant hill can hang around the hearth and be chummy, the followers of the Jes Plain Folks hang around the charcoal grill and snicker.

What I find disturbing is the tremendous growth of the Jes Plain Folks. Because the poetry is easy to write, it attracts would-be writers. It is the poetry of K-Marts and Woolco’s. Those who wash their hands before they write submit to Poetry magazine; the unwashed try APR. Reviews in the New York Times have applauded a return to formalism, while lamenting that we have no one in this country to equal the British poets. In a recent Times review of nearly 20 books, all the examples of the “bad” books contained physical and/or sexual references while the examples of “good” books referred to nature or the mind.

The Jes Plain Folks School hates any kind of rating. It’s like water to Oz witches. But if I were to choose a recent first rate book, it would be Mark Strand’s The Story of Our Lives. And I would praise other poets: Merwin, James Tate, Simic, Bill Knott, Dave Kelly, Philip Levine, AI, Jon Anderson, and others — all writing with a sense of the dancer, the rag-and-bone shop. The Jes Plain Folks will praise lines, rhythms and turns of wit, but there is no talk of the simple necessity of poems. They believe that desperation is a trifle melodramatic in these days of group therapy and transcendental meditation.

Another poet who I believe is one of the best we have is Donald Justice. I can think of no one else whose language is so precise. His poems seem sculpted rather than written. Even his punctuation is eloquent.

In a fairly recent Ohio Review interview, Justice said, “One of the motives for writing is surely to recover and hold what would otherwise be lost totally — memory or experience. Put very simply, so that one might not wholly die. . . . I guess I like to think of poems as, ideally, objects of contemplation. . . . I would like to make as much sense out of things as possible. And not to go through art, even if I may be obliged to go through life, confused. I would like to make efforts toward clarity and perceptions truly registered.”

Justice ended his last book, Departures, with the poem “Presences.”

Everyone, everyone went away today.
They left without a word, and I think
I did not hear a single goodbye today.

And all that I saw was someone’s hand, I think,
Thrown up out there like the hand of someone drowning,
But far away, too far to be sure what it was or meant.

No, but I saw how everything had changed
Later, just as the light had; and at night
I saw that from dream to dream everything changed.

And those who might have come to me in the night,
The ones who did come back but without a word,
All those I remembered passed through my hands like clouds—

Clouds out of the south, familiar clouds—
But I could not hold onto them, they were drifting away,
Everything going away in the night again and again.

 

From Kayak 42
© 1976 Kayak Books