It’s true there’s no “purity” (of any kind) to be had in the poetry community, but that’s little surprise, as there’s no purity to be had anywhere, really. None of us are clean. I worked in the criminal justice system (as a public defender) for years, and I considered the work I did a noble calling, but not everything I did associated with that calling was noble. Some of the things I did I would classify as “tiny corruptions” -- gradually widening impurities of the spirit which must be indulged to live sustainably in a rarefied environment for a long period of time. I could accept certain of those impurities because the work I did every single day was work done on behalf of others; I wasn’t making a lot of money, I wasn’t accruing any professional prestige, I wasn’t necessarily even treated all that well by many of those (for instance, judges and prosecutors and family members of clients) I had to deal with on a regular basis, but fundamentally I could sacrifice a piece of my spirit if I knew I was doing it, in the long run, to help secure the dignity rights of others.
We’re poets; very few people read our work and even less care about it, we do very little to directly impact the political direction of our communities or the individual rights and opportunities enjoyed by our fellow citizens. So when we allow widening impurities of the spirit to work themselves upon and through us, it’s not entirely clear to me how we (or how I) can justify it. I love writing poetry, and sometimes I love reading it. I love teaching poetry, and sometimes I love individual poets. But if I allow writing poetry, and reading it, and teaching poetry, and knowing individual poets -- in short, if I allow living in America as a poet -- to corrupt my spirit, how am I going to balance those accounts years from now and say, well, it was okay because the cause was noble? The cause wasn’t noble; art is beyond (or outside) questions of nobility, it’s merely a personal imperative. And personal imperatives probably shouldn’t ever have the word “merely” placed before them, I realize that -- it’s oxymoronic in a sense -- but fundamentally I’d still say it’s true: I can’t believe, and don’t believe, that being a poet in any way justifies or will ever justify me being a shit or becoming more and more of a shit as time goes on. Yet as a poet, I realize that I regularly indulge a few of the “tiny corruptions” listed below and therefore am precisely, no more and no less than, in those particular ways, what I would have considered “a shit” when I was growing up -- that is, when I hadn’t yet had my values distorted by being in a community whose strongest function against / upon individuals is to diminish rather than ennoble them.
In any case, I was thinking recently about some things I’ve seen in the poetry community of late -- particularly a couple of dishonest essays and interviews by a poet whose literary work I admire very much, but whose critical writing is largely inaccurate, disingenuous, and based on data its author knows damn well are bad data -- and I couldn’t stop thinking that there’s a need, perhaps, to catalog the tiny corruptions we as poets on occasion indulge and see whether (and ask ourselves whether) those tiny corruptions add up to a more substantial corruption of the self over time. If they do, what’s to be done? I don’t know. Whatever we can do to stop it, I suppose. Which will differ for each person.
I am corrupted; several of the items below apply to me. And no doubt several of them apply to you. No doubt, too, many of these could be (and perhaps will be) justified on some ground or another, all of which justifications will likely fall under the “cost of doing business” excuse or the “personal prerogative-cum-personal necessity” excuse, neither of which excuses explains how the cost of doing business or any necessity of the self could ever be -- in any endeavor -- one’s integrity, one’s decency, one’s sincerity, one’s generosity, one’s compassion, one’s empathy.
If I say that I sometimes read Facebook and see what everyone who is a poet -- all of us who are poets, myself included -- are doing and saying, I find myself disgusted, it should be absolutely clear to anyone reading this that my disgust is as much for and toward myself than anyone else and that, as importantly, I do not forgive myself for it. Which so often seems to be the first recourse of the poet, to forgive the self its abscesses and excesses and false congresses because it is those very impurities and infirmities which make Art possible. And to an extent that’s true. If we weren’t weak, we couldn’t produce or appreciate beauty, nor would we have any will to innovate. But if we don’t at least mourn the tiny corruptions that have beset us, we are doomed to a) accept those which really we need not accept in order to make Art, and b) lose that part of the self which is so often incapable of stopping a bad thing from happening but at least “holds in reserve” a piece of what’s good in us by regretting the fact that a bad thing is going to be done or said or permitted one way or another.
The list below isn’t ordered in any particular way -- for instance, from smallest to largest corruption -- as only the last item necessarily must appear in the position it appears. I mean, if it comes down to it I probably do think that (that some of these corruptions are graver than others), but this list hasn’t been created or ordered with that sort of micro-analysis in mind. Here are my two cents, then:
1. If you teach, and select texts for your courses on the basis of which poets (not poetry) you like personally, or owe a favor to, or are part of an organization with, or want to impress, and not on the basis of a text’s pedagogical utility -- its value to those you were hired to teach and whose intellectual welfare is partly your responsibility -- you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
2. If you slander or libel poets you don’t know based not on information you actually have but your own personal guesses about what type of person they might be, and / or a disagreement they had with a friend of yours many years ago, and can’t find it in yourself to forgive and / or forget but instead only to pass your bitterness on to others down through the years, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
3. If you can’t take joy in the successes of friends and / or those who are not friends but whose work you recognize as having substantial artistic merit, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
4. If you choose when and where to write a poetry review on the basis of personal allegiances and not genuine admiration for the work you’re reviewing, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
5. If you choose which poets to read based on anything other than your admiration for their work -- their clothes, their haircut, their power and influence, their friends, the extent to which you see them or their lives as a mirror of your own, their physical proximity to you or to someone/ something you want -- you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
6. If you are an editor and advertise publicly that your press runs an open and fair contest or open reading period, but in fact you are using funds mailed in by hundreds and hundreds of people you don’t know to publish a book you’ve pre-selected, either due to a personal affiliation with the author or to a prior judgment you made regarding the quality of the manuscript that you don’t permit new (unsolicited) manuscripts to challenge, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
7. If you routinely make decisions which operate to the detriment of the most vulnerable and least advantaged members of the literary arts community -- for instance, students, unpublished authors, those who live far away from any major bohemian community, the socially awkward -- or if you find that you can spare no generosity for anyone from one of these groups because you consider them immaterial to your advancement in the poetry community, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
8. If you make a habit of self-promoting, as nearly everyone does and must, but pretend that you don’t -- or if you attack those who self-promote when you yourself, in their shoes, would (and have, and will) do the very same thing -- you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
9. If you try to use your pedigree (whatever that may constitute for you, whether it’s a particular publisher you have, a particular series of laurels you’ve won, an educational institution you’ve attended) to act like you’re better than anyone else -- either professionally, personally, or artistically -- on that basis alone, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
10. If you participate, in any fashion, in any kind of McCarthyesque blacklisting -- whether while acting as a magazine editor, a first reader for a book contest, a coordinator for a reading series, or a member of a hiring committee -- for any reason other than a sober and objective assessment of the professional capabilities of the targeted individual, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
11. If you’re afraid to speak your mind on a topic that significantly affects the lives and well- being of other people because you fear doing so will damage your professional prospects in the field of creative writing, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
12. If you fudge data or twist information at your disposal or in any way indulge intellectual dishonesty to advance your own private political agenda, and then widely disseminate that data or information to others in a further effort to advance that agenda, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
13. If you actively seek to limit the professional development opportunities of others -- either through direct action or merely by acting as a demagogue on an issue to chill others from courses of action they might otherwise take -- simply because you yourself did not develop as a literary artist in a particular way, and therefore don’t want to see others do so whether or not it would benefit them, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
14. If you believe that giving back to your community means owing a debt only to a small subsection of the contemporary literary arts community, or to a small cadre of individuals, or -- worse -- if you believe that the primary way to give back to one’s community is to simply a) write poetry, or b) coordinate presses or events which will then almost exclusively be orchestrated to the advantage of a small subsection of the contemporary literary arts community or a small cadre of individuals within that community, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
15. If you believe the magazines you’ve published in, the books you’ve put out, the reviews you’ve gotten, the residencies you’ve attended, the educational institutions which have admitted you or hired you, or the poets you personally know make you at all special and worthy of special attention from your peers -- in short, if you think anything other than your poetry makes you at all special and worthy of special attention from your peers -- you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
16. If you spend even 10% of the energy you spend on your writing on efforts to be a hipster in dress or manner or behavior or social proclivities, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
17. If you think being a poet, or writing poetry, or literature generally, is a matter of life and death --when in fact only life and death is a matter of life and death -- you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
18. If you can’t see the inherent value and genius in any aesthetic approach to poetry other than your own, and habitually attempt to enforce your own aesthetic values -- or simply force them -- in your dealings with others, whether as a teacher or an editor or a peer or a reviewer or a student or a hiring-committee member or a reading series coordinator or a publisher or even as a book- purchaser, you may not be ill-intentioned and you may not be corrupted in a sense with substantial ethical dimensions, but nevertheless in a broader and simultaneously less literal sense you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
19. If you are false with others or yourself in any way not yet listed here because of a desire to secure for yourself some portion of the cultural capital available in the contemporary literary arts community, or if you cannot see any of the faults in yourself which appear on this list because you instinctively resent anyone else ever pointing out for you the things that you (and they themselves) are actually doing, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
20. If your joy in writing poetry is in any way diminished by considering the prevalence of all of the above modes of proceeding in the contemporary literary arts community, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
Seth Abramson is the author of two collections of poetry, Northerners (New Issues Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize, and The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009). In 2008 he was awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize by Poetry, and his poems have appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Best New Poets 2008, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Boston Review, and New York Quarterly. A regular contributor to Poets & Writers magazine and The Huffington Post, his essays on poetry, politics, and higher education have been cited online by The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Economist, The Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
So, I'd like to start with a comment made near the end of your Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, in the poem "Jawbone." You express real fear and anxiety over the prospect of having your life and love be objectified, turned into summary, a bowdlerized rendering that "[leaves] nearly everything out." More than that, though, you are worried about how we ourselves are complicit in this sort of exclusionary act. I guess what I'd like to ask first, then, is: do you imagine poetry as a means of letting things in rather than keeping everything out? And what are you aiming to let in, exactly?
I really do think of poetry in that way, in terms of providing a space -- an opening -- in which it might be possible to say the things that are hard, and perhaps impossible, to say otherwise; in which to express that inarticulate feeling that you get sometimes...continue reading
Steve McOrmond's new collection of poems begins with a caution. In the style of TV content warnings, "Advisory" lists potential disturbing content to come: "themes which could threaten the viewer's sense of security," "Evidence of fatalism and irreligion," and the typical forewarnings about sexuality, violence and "language." Here McOrmond displays the dual cautionary and playful perspectives that interact throughout the book, switching from warnings about a drowning and an animal attack to the line, "The following program may contain scenes not suitable for language."
The poem raises the expected questions about what we censor and screen in popular media. What is considered objectionable, and why? Placed at the start of a collection whose title references Armageddon, "Advisory" leads the reader to expect a certain discomfort.
With that warning, the book moves to the title...continue reading