Whenever you enjoy finding your way through a writer’s entire work, reach the end of it because he or she is no longer alive, and you can only look back now, though wishing there were more, it seems inevitable that you will want to know something about the writer’s life. Have you ever wondered, for example, whether Wislawa Szymborska had any children?

In any event, I asked myself that question, a bit facetiously, when I finished reading “It’s a Genre! The Overdue Poetry of Parenthood,” by David Orr, published on the NPR website. Orr is a new parent, he tells us and I can well imagine the glow on his sleepy face. He has also been reading some recent poems about infancy, especially by young mothers. It wasn’t always so easy to find such poetry, he tells us; “until relatively recently, the poetry of birth tended to glide past the whole ‘birth’ part, usually skipping the newborn bits as well and sometimes giving childhood a miss for good measure.” He provides us with some exceptions to this rule from the Norton Anthology, avoiding for obvious reasons, I suppose, Ben Johnson’s “On My First Son.” Orr laments the fact that there is no poetry that depicts an infant for what it is: “a voracious poop machine.”

About the paucity of poems relating to birth, I really can’t quarrel. The younger generation of mostly female poets he cites no doubt have stumbled upon a new poetry of early parenthood. And there’s little doubt they owe a good deal to Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, whom Orr cites, though I think of these two as far more cautionary examples: one a suicide, and the other a critic of the very institution of motherhood.

Plath’s “Metaphors,” “I’m a riddle in nine syllables,” is a tiny, comic, and formal tour de force on pregnancy, but “Nick and the Candlestick,” with its apocalyptic imagery borders on the despairing. That the Nick of the title and the “you” addressed in the poem was Nicholas Hughes, a suicide in 2009, raises a very painful, perhaps unfair, issue about the relationship between art and life. As Faulkner is supposed to have said to his daughter on her twelfth birthday, when she asked him to forgo the drink that day and spend his time with her: “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.” Or put it yet another way: the poem “Nick and the Candlestick” and its subjects, pregnancy and progeny, may make a similar claim: life is short, art is long. But really, must art expose those who are, even in this case, more vulnerable than the artist?

Rich’s Of Woman Born was the most influential writing I read about parenthood thirty years ago, when I was a young parent. Two unsentimental moments from that book come immediately to mind. Why, Rich asks, do we congratulate a father whenever he is seen in public caring for his own child, when we would not expect a mother to do anything less? No one would ever think to congratulate her. That certainly resonated with my experience, and if it didn’t exactly shame me, I learned to regard my own parenthood with a healthy degree of self-irony. Then there is what the French woman said to Rich when she was in public, protesting the Vietnam War with her three young sons: “How long have you been working for the military?” Rich’s topic is the institution of motherhood; in this case, how the institution provides a patriotic service to the Military Industrial Complex. Yes, there is that aspect of parenthood, too, the State’s Selective Service claim on the lives of our children as defenders of morally dubious adventures or more accurately, as perpetrators of collective violence.

Plath and Rich were hardly alone. Why not include in that list of precursors Alicia Ostriker’s The Mother/Child Papers, much of Muriel Rukyser’s best work, and any number of Second Wave feminists who also wrote of parenthood? What about the fathers of previous generations? Kenneth Rexroth may not have written about birth, but many of his poems are for or about his children. Theodore Roethke and Richard Wilbur both wrote delightful poetry for and about children that suggests plenty about their experiences as parents: “We Biddly’s are Pee-culiar Bears.” Robert Bly’s children appear in a good number of his poems, and like Stanley Kunitz before him in “The Quarrel,” Bly addresses a child after a moment of apparent rage in “For My Son Noah, Ten Years Old.” Galway Kinnell dedicates The Book of Nightmares to his children and several of the best known poems in that collection are about being the parent of infants during a period of political violence. And then there are Kinnell’s old crowd pleasers: “Fergus Falling,” and “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” the latter never failing to evoke a gently knowing, “Aaaah!” among readers who are parents or aspire to be.

Don’t even imagine that I’ve forgotten “The Bath,” by Gary Snyder. Reading it years ago caused me to go misty eyed with the warmth of mammalian pleasure. Long ago, too, in the Virginia Quarterly Review, “The Bath” was praised as: “a joyful and dignified corrective to bodily shame, and the over-extended incest taboos that induce it.” Uh-huh. Today I’m more reticent about the liberties Snyder takes with the most intimate aspects of his family’s private lives.

As with sex, so with its primary purpose, childbirth: every generation discovers it as though for the first time. But in every generation, too, what seemed like a good idea at the time—in my own, for example, that the personal is political and intimate self-revelation brave—later feels more like a source of ambivalence if not outright embarrassment. Being the parent of a young child is in some ways the most shocking and sustained intensification of personal experience we will ever know in our lives, short perhaps of our own births and deaths. Marriage or becoming grandparents come in perhaps a distant second place. Sure, there are other largely negative extremes, but these that tend toward the affirmative are the more common. Such experiences certainly suggest themselves as likely sources for poetry. One moment we are young, in love, freer than we realize, and then in the next there is suddenly this third living human being who is dependent upon us for virtually everything related to its survival and success. Or its complete and miserable failure. Either way, we unambiguously enter into the instinctive life and the meaning of generation.

We don’t anticipate, though, how brief this episode of parenthood is, any more than we anticipate how all-consuming parenting will be from the moment we carry our baby into our home for the first time. We figure it out, usually, as the formal expectations of this role are fairly narrow and few, though we might protest that claim while caught in the midst of it all. But given the intensity of those demands, plus the additional demands of making a living, I’m surprised anyone has much time for a great deal of good writing about their children. That’s not to say there aren’t those who do, somehow, find the time, but one is just as likely to hear, “I haven’t a great deal of time now to write.”

For most of us today that intensity of parenthood begins to subside after 20 years, give or take. After which, children successfully launched, Nature is pretty much done with us. Prideful and often disastrous efforts to the contrary, our fertility declines and finally disappears. We’ve accomplished the one task Nature assigned. Now we are redundant. And though we’re often given a role later as grandparents, whatever else our lives might become, we must largely invent. We’re free again, but it’s a little crushing to our former pride of purpose. Plus, there’s no guarantee that adorable infant and toddler whose love for us is so innocent and absolute won’t turn into a venomous teenager, before getting that Neo-Nazi tattoo on her neck and decamping permanently for the opposite coast. Nor is there any guarantee that we don’t bear the blame for this state of affairs. Babies are the easy part. The making especially. “This Be the Verse,” comes later.

That is one reason for my own reticence about a poetry of parenthood, though perhaps not the strongest reason: wisdom comes later, if at all, though I’m sure my younger self would have disagreed. There is yet another caution that we ought to consider, and that I’ve already hinted at, and that even my younger self reluctantly allowed himself to be guided by.

After wondering about Szymborska’s status as a parent, a status for which the poet’s work gives little evidence, I began to wonder, too, about an essay Denise Levertov wrote on this subject long ago. It took a couple days of looking through bookshelves, but finally I put my hand on it. “Biography and the Poet,” from The Ohio Review, Number 48, 1992. Not precisely the same topic as Orr’s, as Levertov is concerned with privacy and restraint, though she touches on children as a subject of poetry. Late in the essay, she quotes Robert Creeley approvingly: “My love’s manners in bed / are not to be discussed by me.” Levertov comments on this at length and makes the crucial pivot to our topic here:

I’ve read many a poem that made me feel the author would have done well to profit by this maxim. But adults can object and defend themselves if they feel exposed and exploited as characters in someone’s drama of self-revelation; children cannot. Yet there are many poems in which a parent—and I have to acknowledge that, in my observation, it is most often a mother—writes of a child in ways liable to cause acute, even traumatic embarrassment when that child sooner or later reads that poem. These are poems—or images in poems—which focus on the child’s body, and in particular its genitalia. Imagine a shy adolescent finding in print a graphic description of his little penis at age five, its color and shape! Worse, imagine his schoolmates reading the poem and teasing him about it!…the poem should remain unpublished—at least until the child is an adult and his consent can be requested.

Someone might argue that Levertov is just old-fashioned and a prude. We are so much more honest today about our lives in this enlightened age that has made Sharon Olds’ poetry not only possible but popular. When Olds is writing in her most winning, comic, extended metaphor mode, “Blow Job (Vulgar Slang),” “Topography,” or in her hapless and hilarious poems such as “Adolescence,” or even at her most self-lacerating, “I Go Back to May 1937,” I can stand by her words, and defend them against any assault. But when the kids come up as a topic, I know I’ve walked into the wrong room. In a recent interview in Vogue, Olds expresses similar scruples, having waited a decade, “out of deference” to her children, to publish a book about the end of her marriage. She also wonders about how her frankly autobiographical writing might have contributed to the breakup of her marriage.

So, yes, Levertov is making a case (and I guess so am I) for a degree of restraint and self-censorship, but only as an act of sensitivity and consideration toward those who can’t yet defend themselves. I don’t know if the following is true or merely apocryphal, but I’ve heard that Gary Snyder’s son asked him not the read “The Bath” in public. If that’s true, I think we can be certain why.

Sure, there are poems that must be written, they are forces of nature, and one might wish that this were so of all poems. Still, Levertov’s point is clear. One could, for example, read David Orr’s blog and conclude that his daughter is “a voracious poop machine.” That’s no big deal to anyone who has spent several years of his or her life changing diapers, but to an 11- or 12-year-old classmate of Orr’s daughter it could be a tool of adolescent mortification. Worse, he’s made his own newborn available for public discussion here. It’s really kind of appalling in a way, despite the fact that he intended no harm by bringing up this happy topic. Hence, Levertov’s point seems well taken. It’s really not such a benign act to expose those innocent ones we love, assuming that the whole world will treat them with the same love and kindness as we do.

My own teacher, Richard Hugo, was a bit more blunt. He was speaking here about poems that assert unobjectionable personal virtues, among which we may include the category for the noble intentions of young parents and their especially gifted offspring: “When a guy turns to you in a bar and tells you he ‘loves’ his wife, you know he’s a god damn liar.” From an editor’s perspective, I know that the rash of blogs, interviews, and essays about the New Poetry of Parenthood will spawn a wave of well-intentioned imitators. In the next year or so I’ll read piles of poems by young parents (I wrote the same poems 30 years ago!) and what I will learn is that poets by and large are good enough parents, though sometimes they make hilariously stupid judgements, but no harm done, and their kids, too, turn out really terrific.

My own children made an uncomfortable point about this topic in their adolescence. I’d written plenty about them in poems, but fortunately published little of it. They, though, had come to recognize poetry as little more than an opportunity I took to exploit our personal lives as meaningful subject matter for poems. Until one day they squawked about it: “So, are you going to write a poem about this?” They were correct to mock me and I quickly learned my lesson from them. Which brings us back to Szymborska, from whom we might learn a similar lesson, and about whose personal life we might expect to know a great deal, given her fame and that privacy has become something very quaint. Reading her work I can assume a good deal about her concerns, the quality of her mind, her sense of humor, the regard she has for life and its inexhaustible absurdities, even her personal philosophy, but I know nothing about the intimate details of her personal life, as she betrays little or no information about those she loves. She is hardly alone in this. Her countryman Czeslaw Milosz similarly shied away from revealing the intimate details of his personal life. And yet, does anyone feel that their work is lacking for want of such detail? Perhaps the similar reticence of earlier generations, such as Levertov’s, is not a sign of anything other than respect for privacy. There’s really nothing wrong with that. Maybe some things should remain private. Not because we are ashamed or repressed, but because exposing others can have the unintended consequence of shaming them. This in no way diminishes us. After all, as writers we are hardly limited to close observations of our personal experiences as personal experiences, though that is the siren song of our cultural tendencies. Our eagerness to share, however, can have the opposite effect. It leaves little room for others, readers perhaps, and can, in its worst excesses (The Beats) lead directly into solipsism.

Kay Ryan is another poet whose reticence on this issue is made clear in poem after poem. Look far and wide through her new and selected, The Best of It, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a first-person singular pronoun. More often you will stumble upon a first-person plural pronoun, or a third-person or second-person pronoun, but even this is rare. A friend of mine commented on this phenomenon in her work: “We know absolutely nothing at all about her personal life, even as she writes poems that seem to be about grief. Was she ever in love? Does she ever make reference to her sexuality? Nope.” We really do expect to be able to find answers to such questions. Despite this, her poems, stripped down to the essentials, nevertheless are full of riches, and though they are spoken in a quiet, even private voice, they allow readers enormous space. As is “Relief”:

We know it is close
to something lofty.
Simply getting over being sick
or finding lost property
has in it the leap,
the purge, the quick humility
of witnessing a birth—
how love seeps up
and retakes the earth.
There is a dreamy
wading feeling to your walk
inside the current
of restored riches,
clocks set back,
disasters averted.

Ah, yes, there it is. A kind of perfection, generous and open, that averts the disasters of sealing off human experience into categories, or worse, into specific genres. The birth imagery is certainly the most vivid in the poem, but it connects itself to a broad swath of the experience of human affirmation.

It’s difficult to read David Orr’s blog, too, without seeing it less as a call to explore the territory of a “new” poetic subject, than as a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon: the always conflicted territory of women’s bodies. After all, this is a political season that has been weirdly focused on the biology of women, from the Catholic Church’s conniption fit over insurance coverage for contraception to Rush Limbaugh’s grotesque attacks on Sandra Fluke to the “testy ideological exchange” between Hilary Rosen and Mrs. Mitt Romney to Todd Akins’ bizarre theories of “legitimate [sic] rape,” and all the outrageous claims in between. A recent review by Diane Johnson in the New York Review of Books, “Mothers Beware!” examines no fewer than four recent books that argue in part that, “women are being menaced by a new wave of maternalist fundamentalism.” Even a supposed third wave feminist like Naomi Wolff is making strangely retrograde and ridiculous claims such as the vagina’s neural connection to “the feminine soul.” Good grief, she goes so far as to detail her spiritual experiences with a yoni therapist, a retired investment banker who, for a “workshop” fee, massages female genitalia and in necessary cases performs sexual intercourse to heal the needy vagina, proving once again that there’s a sucker born every minute. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

In his NPR blog, David Orr cites two poems from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, “Infant Joy,” and “Infant Sorrow,” by William Blake. The Blakes we know were childless. And yet, working together, they made, early in his poetic career, these two enduring books of poems, editions of which were completed between 1793 and 1794. They were not his first illuminated books, rather they were preceded in 1788 by All Religions Are One. That is to say, the oppositions, the “Contraries” that organize the Songs, are built on the philosophical foundation of the earlier work, a “vision,” that Blake would continue to elaborate throughout the remainder of his life and work. The Songs are emblematic of his larger philosophical and spiritual concerns. Poised between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and a witness to the end of pastoral England, the demographic shift toward urbanization, and the economic shift to industrialization, Blake’s poems, even for (or about?) children, seethe with political and social content. This is hardly news to anyone. What concerns us here, though, is the poetry of parenthood, of infancy and childhood. Aren’t we standing today at the end of a historical era that Blake stood at the beginning of? Hasn’t the the pastoralism of Songs of Innocence given way to the industrial era of fossil fuels, the experience of which is global climate change? Be honest, given the political and social inertia of the past generation (ours), don’t our children have the bleakest future? Aren’t the savage ironies of Blake’s poems an ontological critique of the unholy alliance of religion and capitalism that betrays the vulnerable? Wasn’t he warning us? Blake wasn’t a parent, and yet children and their future remained a primary concern of his imagination. And it’s imagination and its philosophical foundations that make much of his work so powerful still. I think David Orr aims too low and children aren’t shit factories. Theirs is the only future any of us have and, from an environmental perspective, it’s a grim one. The stakes are huge for them, and our poetry at the very least must address that challenge. This sounds apocalyptic, I know. Or as Leonard Cohen would sing, “There’s a mighty judgment coming, but I could be wrong.”

I’m not, however, arguing against a new poetry of parenthood. Only that it isn’t new, it isn’t ethically neutral, it isn’t without unintended consequences that we ought to consider first, and it isn’t free from being culturally determined by race, class, or gender. And the consequences for our children and our children’s children are so grave that we might need an equally grave approach to these matters. After a decades-long slog in the furrow American poetry has plowed through smothering domesticity and self-disclosure, I hope for the emergence of a poetry more engaged in the condition of lives other than our own private, atomized personal lives. We have the powerful imaginative skills of the heart to accomplish this. Our circumstances require nothing less. Let’s give the kids a break.

In his recent blog posts to this site, “Is Myth Still Relevant to Poetry,” James Crews revisits Tony Hoagland’s essay, in Real Sofistikashun, about the “skittery” poems of the present—oblique, fractured, discontinuous, and, moreover, distrustful of language’s and narrative’s ability to represent reality. In a separate review, Crews also quotes this very welcome passage from Lynn Emanuel’s new collection of poems Noose and Hook:

I will never again write from personal experience.
Since the war began I have discovered
(1) My Life Is Unimportant and (2) My Life Is Boring.
But now as Gertrude Stein wrote from Culoz in 1943,
 Now, we have an occupation.

That small “o” occupation puns on the Nazi Occupation of France and the poet’s “real work,” as Gary Snyder once called it. In these five lines Emanuel captures perfectly the suspicion of personal narrative that Hoagland describes as, “tainted by overuse…sentimentality and narcissism.” She also points the way forward toward the moral imperatives of the engaged imagination that may show us the way out of the disillusionment with language and story.

The “dissociative” poem, as Crews calls it, intends a critical mimesis: for better or worse technology has created new forms of communication that distract us laterally and at such speeds that the slow unfolding of linear narrative seems quaint. As Crews suggests, dissociative forms mirror the distracting flood of mediated information, but don’t necessarily liberate us from suffocating domesticity, self-dramatization, or clever self-consciousness of solitary minds.. Under such conditions we don’t engage much beyond the borders of ego. Emanuel signals an entirely different, far more hopeful way forward. Her occupation is others, and her most powerful tool, the imagination. If the mimesis of the dissociative poem reflects our retreat from the social (rather than the so-called social network), Emanuel points us back toward an instinctual faith in our ability to imagine our way into the conditions of other lives and experiences.

How does Emanuel’s vow suggest a way forward toward the construction of a reasonable notion of truth and accountability? How is this an act of imagination?

In Zadie Smith’s beautiful, hopeful lecture, “Speaking in Tongues,” reprinted in both the New York Review of Books and The Best American Essays 2010, Smith goes to great lengths to demonstrate the “gift” and the risks of being “double-voiced” rather than “single-voiced,” terms that ultimately identify different magnitudes of imagination. Specifically, she discusses how individuals who may be socially upwardly mobile or who have mixed heritages, African and European for example, are, depending on cultural biases, caught in “the middling spot,” or are expected to choose between one identity and another, that is, limit the boundaries of their identity, rather than embracing both. She uses herself as a negative example of someone who has lost the “double-voice” of her youth, but goes on to discuss Barack Obama’s ability to cultivate both his cultural inheritances, and the ease with which this allows him to move between and speak to audiences that are often segregated one from the other. Consternating as some Americans find Obama’s “double-voice,” trying to delegitimize it as inauthentic, disingenuous, even dangerous, this ease with which he speaks to diverse audiences that we might say don’t watch the same cable networks. Smith says the gift of speaking in tongues is precisely what Shakespeare possessed, the ability to imagine the language and experience of men and women of different races, religions, and stations in life, and do so so convincingly that his character seem complexly, humanely drawn. “He understood,” Smith writes, “what fierce, singular certainty creates and what it destroys. In response, he made himself a diffuse, uncertain thing, a mass of contradictory, irresolvable voices that speak truth plurally.” Smith also cites Keats on this point, reminding us of how he describes this phenomenon as Negative Capability: “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” More telling for us in our fractious society, Smith cites Stephen Greenblatt: “There are many forms of heroism in Shakespeare, but ideological heroism—the fierce, self-immolating embrace of an idea or institution—is not one of them.” Open Shakespeare’s plays, and we are astonished anew at his ability to live imaginatively beyond the limits of his own era and its “atmosphere of equivocation.” Instead, in the medium of his plays, “he lived in freedom.”

After a passage in celebration of the joy of being “double-voiced”—Smith turns here naturally enough to poetry, to Frank O’Hare—she concludes describing the process of contemporary alienation: “A hesitation in the face of difference, which leads to caution before difference and ends in fear of it. Before long, the only voice you recognize, the only life you can empathize with, is your own.” This is exactly what Emanuel seems to be resisting: autobiographical, numbing self-absorption. This is also a sad commentary on the pressures of ideological conformity that our discourse and to a significant degree our technologies assert on us. To live beyond the narrow borders of the self, is, however, just the stuff of poetry. Czeslaw Milosz says this very directly in his “Ars Poetica?”: “The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.”

Whatever our doubts about language and narrative, these are the tools we have to stave off chaos and brutality, and keep us humane. Which brings us back, I think, to Emanuel’s rejection of personal experience and eager acceptance of Gertrude Stein’s notion of occupation. What is our occupation? Must we continue to mirror the “skittery” qualities of contemporary life, the distraction by floods of information, popular culture, and the carnival of lurid celebrity? Must we doubt narrative’s imposition of order on what is the chaos of competing url’s, mock the power of gadgets to disrupt our attentiveness to unmediated physical reality? Must we continue, in a high cultural sense, to despair, as Robert Hass’ friend does in “Meditation at Lagunitas” at language’s

tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds
a word is elegy to what it signifies.

As an alternative, consider Milosz’s Lecture 4 from “Six Lectures in Verse,” in which he begins by asking a question that is all too familiar to us: “Reality, what can we do with it? Where is it in words? / Just as it flickers, it vanishes.” What follows is a catalog of cities and, especially, of nameless individuals living, suffering, and dying often under horrific, tragic circumstances. All of these are illuminated for a moment before us on the page and then are gone. But not quite, as the residue of memory persists, even as the poet describes himself, disparagingly, as “an instructor in forgetting.” The remainder of the poem contrasts the individual case of “trying to save Miss Jadwiga, / A little hunchback, librarian by profession,” and the abstractions of history and ideology that buried her alive

…in the shelter of an apartment house
That was considered safe but toppled down
And no one was able to dig through the slabs of wall,
Though knocking and voices were heard for many days.

As narratives go this is not an elaborate one, occupying only six lines. What’s more, the poem admits to the insufficiency of its language to fully evoke this and other lives and fates like Miss Jadwiga’s. Milosz takes to task the alternatives to this tiny narrative.

The true enemy of man is generalization.
The true enemy of man, so-called History,
Attracts and terrifies with its plural number.

He concludes in the strongest possible terms with a declaration of his allegiance:

The little skeleton of Miss Jadwiga, the spot
Where her heart was pulsating. This only
I set against necessity, law, theory.

I’m reminded here, in the context of our own recent history, of the conclusion of Linda Perillo’s poem, “Juárez,” in the course of which she takes herself to task, as a younger writer (“who wrote this poem many times”) for drawing a too familiar portrait of the violence of the border. The younger women “suspect[s]” the violence of Juárez is the curse of “the dirt itself.” That’s a nifty Romantic diversion from ethical consequences, attributing mystical powers to the landscape. This turn toward nature, to the so-called “spirit of place” as a means of accounting for what seems an intractable human catastrophe, she realizes is flawed, facile. To cross the border, literally and metaphorically, the mature poet tells us,

you will have to pass by a large pink cross
made out of such spikes at the border station,
and here’s the main thing, forgive me, I missed in my youth:
how from each spike hangs a name.

The names, the lives they stand for, their suffering, is precisely the point. The many ironies we devise to distract ourselves and evade this point are moral hazards.

At the end of his essay, “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of the Moment,” Hoagland quotes Hass, “‘It is wrong to have an elegiac attitude toward reality.’” And Hoagland glosses: “[Hass] suggests that it is unethical to consider reality decisively outside the reach of language. To exclusively practice an art of which this is a premise and implication—that language is inadequate, that the word cannot reach the world—is a bad idea, one with a price tag attached.”

Our popular discourse in anger, mockery, incivility, confusion, and cynicism are symptoms of that “bad idea” applied to an entire culture. The consequence, “the price tag” is almost too horrible to contemplate, though we’d all be liars if we said we had never considered the direction this is heading. As writers, we are under no obligation to collaborate with fractious ideologies that deploy corrosive discourse. Our allegiances should be as clear as those Milosz and Emanuel declares. This is our “occupation.”

On a flight from San Francisco to Chicago a few years ago, I happened to be reading a book of poetry—Charles Wright’s Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems. I was absorbed, but the woman next to me—maybe bored by her own copy of The Da Vinci Code—felt compelled to strike up a conversation about her college-age daughter.

“She’s in school to be a teacher,” the woman said. I caught her eyeing the book now resting facedown on my lap. I was looking down at it too, trying to figure out a way to break off the talk. I didn’t want to hear about how smart her daughter was or that she was single. I didn’t like where this was going.

“Are you in school too?” she asked brightly. She had begun toying with her iPhone as if ready to flip it on any minute and enter my number for her fabulous, well-educated daughter.

I explained that, yes, I was in an MFA program for writing. “I’m a poet,” I confessed. (Why does saying that to strangers always feel like such a confession, a “coming out”?)

“Ohhhhhhh. A poet.” A hand fluttered to her chest. She let out a sigh, seemingly relieved that we might finally enter into a real conversation now that this mystery was cleared up. “I was wondering why a man would be reading poetry on a plane,” she said with a smile.

Her comment floored me, though I concede she could have meant any number of things by that. She could have been wondering why anybody would be reading poetry on a plane, which is a valid question: who would want to consider his mortality so far above the earth? Who would want to read something that demands so much attention with so many distractions at hand? Her hair was tied back and she was wearing a blazer over a crisp white shirt, gray skirt, black nylons, everything about her suggesting business trip. I’m not sure what kinds of associations she had with poetry but her own choice for airplane reading (am I judging?) and her well-spoken manner suggested to me that she’d probably read the required stuff in college—Shakespeare, Donne, Eliot—but had maybe never taken to something that took so much work to get through. And who could blame her? Most Americans would never read poetry for pleasure, linger over lines like Charles Wright’s while hurtling through the sky: “Into the chaos of every day/ go quietly, quietly.” I politely ended our conversation, but couldn’t let go of what was implied in her surprise since, about four years out of school now, I continue to read and write poems no matter where I am—in loud cafes, at bus stops, on trains. Her comment begs the question: Do we still see poetry as somehow feminine? Or, to co-opt one of the more unfortunate terms of our time, I’d like to ask another, overly provocative question: Is poetry gay? Was my seatmate suggesting not only that poetry is slight and worthless, but also that it is still thought of as mostly “women’s work” by those outside of literary circles?

A few months back, in a small town in Oregon, I was holding a poetry workshop for a roomful of grade-schoolers; I recited Emily Dickinson’s “There’s a certain slant of light” and after my reading, many of the boys commenced to rolling their eyes back in their heads with the torture of it, wriggling in their chairs, ready to leap out the windows as if their hair had caught fire. But the girls’ faces, I couldn’t help but notice, brightened. They sat up a little straighter and reached for their No. 2 pencils when I announced we would be composing our own poems; the boys, of course, groaned as if suddenly confined to a ring of hell. What’s the source of such conditioning? I imagine their knee-jerk behavior is mostly the result of lack of exposure to the kind of poetry being written today, kinds that do not focus solely on one’s feelings. And though I wouldn’t bring them into elementary school classrooms, there are scads of poems being written by rugged, hard-drinking, swaggering, Manly Poets, as bent on reinforcing their own heterosexuality as they are on writing a good poem.

Spencer Short and his first book, Tremolo, come first to mind. The collection was a winner in The National Poetry Series back in 2000, chosen by former U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, and it is a fearless and energetic book, resurrecting Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and others of the New York School. Short should also get an award for Most Poems in a Book that Refer to Drunken Acts. Consider this from “There Is Nothing Not to Be Amazed At”:

What strange algebra all this seems, now.
The drunken, hot-rodding kids. The drunken poets.
The waves slowly erasing the shore with
their tiny, salty hands. It’s enough
to drive you batfuck, C.D. said, talking about
metaphors I think. I’m batfuck for X,
it’s only been three days, & she’s got a boyfriend.

What makes a Manly Poem manly in the first place? I believe poems like Short’s have an untamable hubris, what we’d call guts; their speakers probably spend most mornings recovering from a hangover. The Manly Poem is obsessed with a girl who isn’t good for him, a girl who’s already taken—the “X,” for instance, who recurs throughout Tremolo. And you won’t catch a Manly Poet writing about the usual suspects of poetic subject matter: no epiphanies or pining, and if there is grief (there is almost always grief) it is temporarily relieved with the speaker lighting up a cigarette, having a drink and writing something mysterious and inscrutable.  The poet-speaker introduces himself toward the end of “There Is Nothing Not to Be Amazed At,” “I’m Spencer. I’m three fingers gin,/ one finger tonic. I’m one stiff drink./ Morning comes on like an ulcer.” I’m poking fun at Short and his ilk—Matthew and Michael Dickman, Zach Savich, and Matthew Zapruder—but there is a heady exuberance here that’s hard to pass up, a persona for whom the reader easily falls. I think if I could have (if only I could have!) read one of the poems from Tremolo to that woman on the plane, she might have changed her tune, at least in terms of thinking poetry a feminine enterprise. She might have run the other way.

I’d also like to consider a very different poet’s first book, partly because I happened to read both books back-to-back and partly because they offer such stark contrasts to one another. Mark Wunderlich is the author of The Anchorage (1999) and Voluntary Servitude (2004), and he has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship. He is a gay poet (or a poet who happens to be gay), and though I hate to place labels on any writer, the poems in his first book, The Anchorage, do not shy from this personal truth. The many dark pieces are haunted by mortality and violence, and they trace a young gay man’s journey into a new life, far from his boyhood home in Wisconsin, near that “highway that cuts the Midwest into two unequal/ halves.” He too is a poet who drinks and smokes in his poems, but could we call him a Manly Poet? Of course, a man can be both “manly” and gay in my humble opinion, but I suspect there are still places in America (and many other parts of the world) where this is simply not the case: a gay man is marked as effeminate, no matter his gender performance, and that’s the end of the story. For our purposes, the speaker in The Anchorage is just as divided and conflicted about love as any of the characters in Short’s poems, craving unattainable affection and “leaning against walls in bars” to find it.

I admit it’s a little unfair to compare two poets whose projects are so wildly divergent.  Perhaps my bias shows: I can’t help but see Wunderlich’s poems as somehow more valuable and legitimate, manly or not. They seek something deeper, a tenderness not found in the hook-up as when a “hugely muscled” trick, on top, begs him, “Please kiss me.” There are drugs and sex and yet, the reader senses that these are not mentioned to cultivate a persona, lay claim to a voice, or play the part of the “drunken poet”; they are simply part of the life of a young man coming to terms with his own sexuality, ways to escape a self his upbringing has perhaps taught him to abhor. The poems in The Anchorage turn elegiac as the specter of AIDS—and the more literal-seeming ghost of a lost lover—begin to overtake them. They find a quiet power here where no pizzazz is needed, no posturing allowed. Wunderlich traffics in mystery (which is not to be confused with abstraction), and simply doesn’t want to give up all his secrets at once. The last lines of “Unmade Bed,” which reference one of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ prints that appeared on billboards at the height of the AIDS Crisis in New York City are quietly affecting: “Forgive me. There will be mornings, waking alone, when a print of me in the bed is laundered and pinned on a line, is gone.”

As a gay poet who grew up in the rural Midwest and went to school in Wisconsin, I have been deeply affected by Wunderlich’s work, intoxicated with his utter honesty in speaking about love, sex and attachment. He is fearless too, but there is more at stake with his speaker than there is with Short’s. Wunderlich explores life-and-death issues while, reading Short, I picture a graduate student whose troubles lie mostly in stumbling home alone, drunk, still “batfuck for X.” Though I’m taken with Wunderlich, something just under the surface also troubles me a little, and I think it has to do with how he and other gay poets tap into a common language and visual vocabulary to write what we might call The Gay Poem. I think of his prose litany in “Fourteen Things We’re Allowed to Bring to the Underworld”:

L. says Fire, and I understand that, and would take that too. Architecture, fretwork for structure. The miniature tea set for delicacy. Opera for blood. Iron for fortitude and weight. Linen as a reminder of skin. Crystal for simple music. Tin. Leather for harnessing. Paper. Milk. A boat. I’ll stop one short.

When I read these lines, I bristle. This poet’s work creates its own versions of masculinity, but (although he is certainly being playful here) the lines sound somehow fey at the same time. “The miniature tea set” and “crystal” and mention of “opera” bring to mind the stereotype of the erudite gay man, obsessed with style, image and entertaining. And because the poems in The Anchorage do take risks with more openly homosexual subject matter, let me also ask a rather prudish question: If any poet ventures to write explicitly about her or his sex life and the trappings thereof—whether those include whips and harnesses or phalluses—does she/he risk losing more than a few readers who’d prefer not to go there? Do gay poets, who so often (rightfully, I would argue) write about their sexual lives, the pleasures and mutinies of the body—do we risk turning off straight readers? Can poetry afford to lose any more of its readership?

Recently, I was sitting in a café leafing through a copy of Carl Phillips’ Speak Low. I’ve been in love with Phillips’ philosophical musings and lush language for years, taken with his fluid lines that have often (tellingly) been called “athletic” and “muscular,” and which frankly explore the emotional and sexual lives of gay men. A writer-friend stopped by my table as I was reading and asked if he could see the new book. He flipped it open to the Table of Contents and started cracking up.

“What?” I asked. A Carl Phillips poem may make you furrow your brow and sigh, but it will likely not make you laugh.

He read the titles of the poems aloud to me; a partial list: “Conquest,” “Captivity,” “To Drown in Honey,” “Gold on Parchment,” “Porcelain,” “Topaz,” “Volition,” “Reciprocity,” “Sterling,” “Husk.”

“He’s so gay,” my friend said.

Since his statement is literally true, and my friend happens to know Carl Phillips personally, I can’t indict him too much. In his work, Phillips does often fall into the stereotypical role of the erudite poet—intellectual, unafraid to allude to esoteric mythology and history— referencing knowledge the average reader probably doesn’t have access to. So, though I wouldn’t have called the poem titles “gay” per se, he has a point. Phillips stakes out much of the same territory as Wunderlich in that he examines not only the inadequacy of material objects in our world—“Gold on Parchment,” “Porcelain,” “Topaz,” “Sterling,” “Husk”—but also, obviously, the body—“Conquest,” “Captivity,” “Volition,” “Reciprocity.” I can bristle all I want, but the idea of transience arises in the work of so many gay poets (and so many poets in general). Even if we don’t all use quite the same imagery, the legacy of AIDS and the necessity of hiding our desires has made the body’s insubstantiality a constant theme, an obsession. I think of the opening stanza of Phillips’ “Night Song” from Speak Low:

Servitude. Conquest. The one who, from the hip, keeps
pushing himself up into the other’s mouth. The one who
takes from behind . . .

Or these lines from “Captivity”:

Oh, sometimes it is as if desire itself had been given form, and
acreage, and I’d been left for lost there. Amazement grips me,

I grip it back, the book shuts slowly: Who shuts it? You?

Though becoming a poet certainly didn’t make me prefer men, the two are related. When I think about my first encounters with poetry, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson instantly spring to mind. They were outsiders, and that stance appealed to a nerdy kid who already felt excluded from the social structures of junior high school. Dickinson and Whitman had fallen in love with the things of the world, and there was a real loneliness in those lines I could relate to. My inexplicable attraction to men had already set me apart from everyone else, and so when poetry came around, I found a way to make use of the loneliness I reasoned I was going to feel either way.

Poets are outsiders, even among outsiders. Dana Gioia says of us in his famous essay,“Can Poetry Matter?”: “Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige.” That “prestige”—as faded as it might be nowadays—was part of what attracted this misfit to writing. If you grow up gay in the Midwest, or other small towns, especially, it doesn’t take long to register that what you’re looking for in this life does not jibe with what the culture says you ought to want. You don’t fit in. But poetry and the other arts lend credibility to that separateness and the contrary lifestyle that must come with it. Since poetry itself is a myth-making process, a “queering” of personal experience, the life of the poet is a further queering, inviting poverty, heartache and a constant crisis of faith in the life and on the page. I’m being hyperbolic, but poetry can help legitimize the outsider’s life to the wider world and bring with it at least some measure of acceptance, so the poet can stand apart and—gay or straight—look in on life like a voyeur, taking fastidious notes. Or like Charles Wright, often holding forth from the vantage of his backyard, separate from the world, yet steeped in it too:

Hard work, this business of solitude.
Hard work and no gain,
Mouthful of silence, mouthful of air.
Everything’s more than it seems back here. Everything’s less.

If I could do over my conversation with that woman on the plane, I think I’d now act as a better defender of my own art. I’d gently call her out on her assumptions about poetry and men, and I wouldn’t need poems like Short’s to do so. Maybe I’d say that, with so many writers of both genders attending MFA and PhD programs in Creative Writing, we no longer need to question the masculinity or validity of poetry: everyone’s doing it, and it’s thriving. Ultimately, I would kindly explain to her what power I find in poetry, how much I have inexplicably come to love it over the years (and how much I enjoy sharing it). The question is not whether poetry is particularly gay or not; it is, as always, why we choose to fill our time with the things we do, how often we have no choice in the matter of what calls to us. I think she would have understood.

 
I mean, could you imagine NBC’s Nightly News with Robert Pinsky, Forbes Magazine: “The Poetry Issue,” or Sean Penn winning an Academy Award for his portrayal of “the speaker” in the film adaptation of Ilya Kaminsky’s, Dancing in Odessa? Of course, Pinsky did appear as a token judge of a Metaphor-Off on an episode of the Colbert Report, James Franco played Allen Ginsberg in the 2009 film Howl, and the film The Hurt Locker, which borrowed its title from a poem by Brian Turner, won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2010. And currently, PBS and NPR provide many occasions for contemporary poets to reach the larger American audience. I’ve seen Terrance Hayes reading a poem on the Charlie Rose Show, an episode of American Experience on Whitman that featured big names like Yusef Komunyakaa, Martin Espada, and Billy Collins, and no doubt The Writer’s Almanac has introduced contemporary poets big and small to an average audience of over two million listeners. But aside from these infrequent, quasi-mainstream surfacings, poetry still almost exclusively lives and breathes with the rest of the high arts on university campuses across the country.

 
Some might feel compelled to blame America’s public education system for poetry’s limited readership, and no doubt the system often obfuscates the craft by neglecting to teach poets who haven’t been fully vetted for more than 100 years. But then again, maybe it’s foolish to even imagine an American poetry readership that isn’t decidedly small in stature. I remember reading an interview with Robert Hass on Guernica Magazine’s website where he compared publishing figures from American poetry’s heyday at the beginning of the 1900’s (when Emily Dickinson’s first book of poems became a best-seller) to present day standards and found that not much has really changed in terms of audience. As Hass says, “her first book of poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400…for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that’s a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example” (Read full Guernica Interview with Robert Hass).

 
But if a liberal education has at least some connection with building a poetry readership (as it surely did a hundred years ago), then with so many more American’s graduating with four-year-degrees from universities across the country, shouldn’t there be a respectively larger readership than there was in 1900? Maybe the problem then is not educational but cultural. Maybe entertainment, which used to be defined as an occasion to “better oneself,” was permanently redefined by the rollercoaster to suit more passive amusements like radio, television and cinema. Maybe the uniquely empathetic experience that poetry provides is asking too much from the still championed rugged individualism that gave birth to this country. Maybe the more gifted a person is with language in America, the more likely they are not to be trusted. Maybe poetry is bound to suffer the same fate as the internationally beloved sport of futbol—try as they might to repackage it, some connections were never meant to be forged.
Let’s be clear, I believe there will always be a want for connection, for community, at the very heart of the act of writing poetry; but as a poet I can say it’s also true that during the loneliest, most unshaven hours of composition or revision there already exists a private dialogue with the universe: a codified pattern of human experience falling apart into lines. And despite the familiar April cry for the American public to reinvest in their literary present by attending readings, buying books and supporting the literary arts, poetry will always have very simple desires; as Eliot said: “it remains, all the same, one person talking to another.” Poetry is intimate, wary of communal ballyhoos and calls to arms, and it usually waits for the air-raid sirens to whir quietly down before opening its mouth to speak. Poetry is, without a doubt, the purest and keenest handler of language; the best of it seeks a larger community without ever despairing for one.

 
Last night before bed, I read aloud a few of the early sections of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (the 1855 version, and “the purest text” by Malcolm Cowley’s estimation) to my very sleepy and pregnant wife and our little, sex-yet-undetermined-bun-in-the-oven wunderkind. The prenatal poetry readings have become a hallmark of our bedtime routine, Regina turning her belly towards me while I prop up on one elbow and read. Last night, I had the good fortune to rediscover (mid-recitation) a beautiful moment that could exist no place other than poetry: “I and this mystery here we stand” (I remember imparting the slightest pause between mystery and here, as though Whitman had crafted a doorway at that exact spot in the syntax for me to enter into the poem). And when I read it, I did so, slowly, with great pains taken towards pronunciation and clarity. Call it my humble attempt to precoddle our unborn into language.
In those intimate moments with Whitman my wife and our unborn child, I’m all but convinced that the American poetry community is right where it needs to be; that it is greater than the oases of intrepid publishers, independent bookstores, MFA programs and AWP conferences scattered across the American wasteland; that it is actually growing and stretching out across centuries at an alarming rate. So this April, I’m choosing to include all the dead American poets into my estimation of the community’s overall health. Dead poets like Whitman are a curious and perpetually blossoming group that is literally ignored in such discussions. But I charge you to go to your bookshelf, open any Norton Anthology and see what a community they make. They were writing for all of us, their community, the same as they were writing for their contemporaries; and so what if the dead Whitmans, Dickinsons, Frosts, etc, aren’t coming to your next poetry reading and book signing? At least they’ll be powerless to stop you from raiding their coffers in the latter hours of revision.