{"id":357,"date":"2012-03-09T00:03:40","date_gmt":"2012-03-09T00:03:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.basaltmagazine.com\/?p=357"},"modified":"2012-03-09T00:03:40","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T00:03:40","slug":"practical-advice-to-aspiring-poets-living-in-the-21st-century-by-travis-mossotti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/2012\/03\/09\/practical-advice-to-aspiring-poets-living-in-the-21st-century-by-travis-mossotti\/","title":{"rendered":"Practical Advice to Aspiring Poets Living in the 21st Century by Travis Mossotti"},"content":{"rendered":"

And so it was I entered the broken world<\/em>
\nTo trace the visionary company of love\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

~from Hart Crane\u2019s, \u201cThe Broken Tower\u201d<\/p>\n

I suppose I could offer up nuggets of wisdom to you like: use number two pencils, write outdoors, listen to Bach\u2019s Aria variata in A minor<\/em>, look at the sky for the thing that\u2019s missing, etc. Or I could argue that you should read everything by such-and-such poet, that such-and-such MFA program has a higher ranking and is therefore where you should definitely go, or that such-and-such publisher will give your work the attention it truly deserves. Don\u2019t get me wrong, all of that is very nice and some of it might be helpful at times, but what I\u2019ve been thinking about lately is \u201cthe vast gap between talent and genius,\u201d as B.H. Fairchild put it, and what practical advice could possibly be offered to aspiring poets in the 21st century to help their work transcend mere talent.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to travel to Southern Illinois University Carbondale and listen to Sandra Beasley read from her new book, I Was the Jukebox<\/em> (2010, Norton), at the Little Grassy Literary Festival, and I had the added luck of traveling with writers James Crews and my sister Lindsay Mossotti\u2014two wonderful writers in their own right. Beasley\u2019s reading was spot on. She opened with the poem, \u201cOsiris Speaks,\u201d which tells the story of a dismembered king Osiris and Isis, his queen, gathering his remains in order to make him whole again. In the myth, Isis finds all \u201cbut his most kingly part,\u201d as Beasley said in her introduction to the poem, which was believed to have been swallowed by a fish. Her delivery was nothing short of perfect, and the last four lines stayed with me long after the reading was over:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u2026Every king, in the end, is his only <\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0audience. Every queen picks up the pieces.<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Isis, every fish in that river is a child <\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0of mine. You are my net. Hold me.<\/em><\/p>\n

On the two hour drive back to St. Louis, we ended up talking at great length about what single quality can make a poem greater than the sum of its parts, can make it transcend aesthetic concerns, schools of thought, and even time itself. We resolved, more or less, that the quality lives in its emotional resilience, lives somewhere in the raw viscera of it, or as James put it: \u201cit has to have the animal stink of human emotion.\u201d With Beasley, that emotion was palpable. Even now, just look at how the king\u2019s cold admission of culpability in those first two lines gets rounded off by his tender plea: \u201cYou are my net. Hold me.\u201d True emotion is complicated like that. The truest emotional response is always going to possess that uniquely human blend of intimacy and insecurity.<\/p>\n

But how does one learn to replicate that \u201canimal stink\u201d in his or her own work? Can it be taught, or is it something that can even be actively sought after? Dana Gioia\u2019s infamous 1991 essay that appeared in The Atlantic<\/em>, \u201cCan Poetry Matter?\u201d says that poetry demands \u201cindividual suffering,\u201d and that even the threat of suffering provides \u201cthe collective cultural benefit of frightening away all but committed artists.\u201d But if suffering is the key ingredient in producing emotional resilience, Gioia fails to specify exactly what kind or how much produces the best result (which makes for a terrible recipe really). Instead, he goes on to romanticize the days when poets were academically trained but were not institutional fixtures; when poets were visionaries; when poets were poorly paid critics and editors, or worked outside of the literary world altogether like Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams. Gioia\u2019s twenty-year-old essay ends up having much in common with a present-day, right-wing conservative speaking nostalgically about the \u201cgood old days\u201d\u2014times when miscegenation laws were still in effect; when the vast majority of American\u2019s never attended college; when homosexuality was considered a psychopathic, paranoid, and schizoid personality disorder; when a woman\u2019s rightful place was at the helm of a vacuum cleaner; when the world was indeed anybody\u2019s oyster (that is if you happened to be educated, straight, white and, of course, male).<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t want to pick too much on Gioia\u2019s unfair comparison of the present to the past because I\u2019m still curious about his claim that individual suffering is the moniker of the true artist. There\u2019s great precedent for his argument. Just think of all the \u201ccommitted artists\u201d who were often committed to institutions or ended up dying lonely, painful deaths believing in their hearts that they failed. Keats did so at only twenty-five years of age. Whitman wrote confidently in his thirties: \u201cI am the man, I suffered, I was there,\u201d but then on his deathbed in his seventies was reduced to: \u201cI suffer all the time: I have no relief, no escape: it is monotony\u2014monotony\u2014monotony\u2014in pain.\u201d And these are only cursory examples. So many artists have suffered, and the hallmark of that suffering seems to be a deeper understanding of humankind\u2019s emotional and physical fragility. But the question remains: how could one translate suffering into practical advice to aspiring poets in the 21st century?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s imagine for a moment the single word \u201cSuffer\u201d written on the chalkboard on the first day of undergraduate workshop, the quiet murmur as one student wonders if the word is a prompt for a poetry exercise: \u201cMaybe we\u2019re supposed to write a sonnet about suffering, how should I know?\u201d Then the teacher rises slowly from his seat, points to the word with one long, crooked finger and demands: \u201cIf you have never suffered from bipolar schizophrenic rage, third world poverty, violent drunkenness, racial and sexual bigotry, dengue fever, tuberculosis\u2014if you have never been stabbed in the heart in a knife fight in Tijuana, trampled to death by a herd of angry bulls in Pamplona, lynched by a lynch mob in Alabama, dragged through the streets of New York City stark raving mad, then get the hell out of my classroom and stay out until you have!\u201d Oh, what empty classrooms we all would have, and still the question would loom: can Gioia\u2019s assertion be quantified in order to determine how much suffering is enough suffering to produce great art? The short answer is no.<\/p>\n

The long, more clinical sounding answer would say something like: the severity and duration of the pain (psychological, emotional and physical) that one must experience before the supreme and enduring perspective surfaces in the art (an end which is by no means guaranteed) is something not consciously determined or controlled by the artist. An end can be determined of course, meaning, Sylvia Plath can keep sticking her head in that oven, Weldon Kees can forever launch his body into San Francisco Bay, and Frank Stanford can pump bullet after bullet into his sodden heart, but the cause of the torment cannot. So the suffering must be organic in a sense, or at least unavoidable, which means the imaginary \u201csuffering assignment\u201d proposed earlier is out of the question.<\/p>\n

But maybe we don\u2019t need any disorders, diseases, violence, assignments or gimmickry at all. Maybe \u201cto live,\u201d as Nietzsche said, \u201cis to suffer\u201d and \u201cto survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.\u201d Following his logic, we could argue that to have survived the genetic lottery, to have been yanked screaming into this world and to have lived the sum of a life in the face of disease, war, and natural disaster, is to have suffered. And don\u2019t we already assume the collective burden of humankind\u2019s suffering every time we open a newspaper or open a history book whose pages may as well have been printed with the blood of martyrs\u2014the trick must lie somewhere in its meaning, in our ability to make sense out of all that suffering.<\/p>\n

In truth, that imaginary, undergraduate workshop teacher could have just as well written the word \u201cLove\u201d on the board and berated his students for their lack of experience in that department; for, as Ezra Pound wrote in Canto 116 (Pound, a life-long sufferer of psychotic-organic depression as the clinicians dubbed it), \u201cIf love be not in the house there is nothing.\u201d But finally, what I\u2019m talking about here (what Gioia should have talked more about in his essay) is not suffering or love at all; I\u2019m talking about life, plain and simple; I\u2019m talking about the cumulative kind of experience Ron Wallace jokes about in an essay where he discusses a poem that only took him half an hour to write: \u201cDid [it] take thirty minutes to write? Or thirty years?\u201d I\u2019m talking about the boldness and bravado of Whitman\u2019s claim: \u201cI am the man, I suffered, I was there.\u201d I\u2019m talking about the \u201canimal stink of human emotion\u201d that saturates the best poems of every generation.<\/p>\n

So here it is: the boiled-down, real, and practical advice I\u2019d give to aspiring poets in the 21st century: go out and do something, anything! You needn\u2019t drive across the country to a literary festival or board a rocket ship bound for one of Jupiter\u2019s moons in order to achieve this\u2014think local, think love. There\u2019s something timeless and universally palatable lurking in the most trivial of human interactions, in even the smallest eyelash of human emotion, but it\u2019s your duty to gather and organize them into lines. Elements of craft can be learned. Life can only be experienced. Now, go out and experience it, get the hell out of my classroom!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love\u2026 ~from Hart Crane\u2019s, \u201cThe Broken Tower\u201d I suppose I could offer up nuggets of wisdom to you like: use number two pencils, write outdoors, listen to Bach\u2019s Aria variata in A minor, look at the sky for the thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}