Well! Wednesdays@One is on to the third decade of the century!
I've been reading an essay in the Times Magazine for this week (1.5.20) about "The Irishman," but more generally about how older people--Baby Boomers--retain a stranglehold on all things American: culture, art, politics, governance. The author drily points out that our president is over 70, as are the leaders of the Senate and the House, not to mention the top three Democratic candidates for president. "The Irishman," and this is the point of the essay in the Times Magazine, was made by a writer-director in his late 70s and stars a cohort of aging--make that old--actors: Al Pacino (79), Robert DeNiro (76), Joe Pesci (76), Harvey Keitel (80) . . . and on.
That's a lot of old folks!
One place I don't feel that my (our) generation has a stranglehold any longer is in poetry. What makes me say this? The best books of poems that I read today, the most complex and artistic poems, don't appear to be coming from people born around or before 1950. No, the really innovative work that I see is coming mostly from Gen-Xers and Millennials, and lately, kids born after Y2K (to use an already antiquated acronym!).
And I must say this: I find their poems, so many of them, unreadable!
A little clarity needed. By "unreadable," at least among the best of these poems, I mean not readily accessible to the easy scan; not merely expository writing done up in lines and rhymes; and decidedly not pop music. By "unreadable," I mean poetry that is verbally dense and opaque, where language crowds the surface of the text and refuses to let me "see through" it to a "meaning," at least not without getting over the hurdle of words first. By "unreadable," I mean poetry that invites (forces?) me to stop "reading" and start listening; start noting artistic decisions that have been made from phrase to phrase and line to line and image to image; start feeling the emotive quality of pauses and leaps, jump-cuts and sly codas, or their opposites: unexpected linguistic disjunctions.
The best of these poems can't be read as expository essays with wide margins. Or as memoirs in clipped form. They are verbal artifacts in which the writers take risks (inaccessibility, "difficulty," meaninglessness) that people of my generation stopped taking nearly a generation ago.
The best of the poets writing these poems aren't trying to give a lecture or even share an insight. At least, this isn't their first impulse. They are working the material (language) into fresh artifacts of sound and sense, where the "sense" might be something like this: "That line you just read that made you scratch your head? It means 'don't get too comfortable with what you think this thing means!'"
We at W@1 rarely write this way. We aren't trained to anymore, if we ever were, and we don't have the intellectual stamina any longer to learn how to break rules (and get by with it. On this last note, I think we try to break artistic rules sometimes, but most of the time we fail miserably; we're just too far along with our lives to live as rule breakers anymore.) We write about memory, stuff we've seen and done, places we've been, people we've known . . . roundups and summations about, about, about. Our poems appear, by comparison to the really innovative work of the younger generations, gabby and kind of pathetic, not really poems at all, but little "heartfelt expressions."
By "pathetic" I don't mean the pejorative "to be pitied," but rather, feeling-forward. We wear our lives and our years on our sleeves. We are generally less concerned with making pieces of art, more with writing over and over again versions of "Those Were the Days, My Friend." Even the poems we write about this morning's walk with the dog or tending the garden or how the sun illumines a leaf outside our window have that "those were the days" feeling to them.
And that's okay! Innovation is for youngsters. It's hard to do and it often fails. We Boomers have run out of time for failure. Memory and "gathering up" are for us oldsters. It's not always easy, but it's safe.
So what's all this got to do with the title I've given to this first blog of the year? I'm looking forward to 2030 tonight, not back to 2010. That's a good thing. I've got projects in mind, and some are even in gear. But they are old poet projects--summings and gatherings--and I feel time running out. My youth is gone. LONG LIVE MY YOUTH!
I've been reading an essay in the Times Magazine for this week (1.5.20) about "The Irishman," but more generally about how older people--Baby Boomers--retain a stranglehold on all things American: culture, art, politics, governance. The author drily points out that our president is over 70, as are the leaders of the Senate and the House, not to mention the top three Democratic candidates for president. "The Irishman," and this is the point of the essay in the Times Magazine, was made by a writer-director in his late 70s and stars a cohort of aging--make that old--actors: Al Pacino (79), Robert DeNiro (76), Joe Pesci (76), Harvey Keitel (80) . . . and on.
That's a lot of old folks!
One place I don't feel that my (our) generation has a stranglehold any longer is in poetry. What makes me say this? The best books of poems that I read today, the most complex and artistic poems, don't appear to be coming from people born around or before 1950. No, the really innovative work that I see is coming mostly from Gen-Xers and Millennials, and lately, kids born after Y2K (to use an already antiquated acronym!).
And I must say this: I find their poems, so many of them, unreadable!
A little clarity needed. By "unreadable," at least among the best of these poems, I mean not readily accessible to the easy scan; not merely expository writing done up in lines and rhymes; and decidedly not pop music. By "unreadable," I mean poetry that is verbally dense and opaque, where language crowds the surface of the text and refuses to let me "see through" it to a "meaning," at least not without getting over the hurdle of words first. By "unreadable," I mean poetry that invites (forces?) me to stop "reading" and start listening; start noting artistic decisions that have been made from phrase to phrase and line to line and image to image; start feeling the emotive quality of pauses and leaps, jump-cuts and sly codas, or their opposites: unexpected linguistic disjunctions.
The best of these poems can't be read as expository essays with wide margins. Or as memoirs in clipped form. They are verbal artifacts in which the writers take risks (inaccessibility, "difficulty," meaninglessness) that people of my generation stopped taking nearly a generation ago.
The best of the poets writing these poems aren't trying to give a lecture or even share an insight. At least, this isn't their first impulse. They are working the material (language) into fresh artifacts of sound and sense, where the "sense" might be something like this: "That line you just read that made you scratch your head? It means 'don't get too comfortable with what you think this thing means!'"
We at W@1 rarely write this way. We aren't trained to anymore, if we ever were, and we don't have the intellectual stamina any longer to learn how to break rules (and get by with it. On this last note, I think we try to break artistic rules sometimes, but most of the time we fail miserably; we're just too far along with our lives to live as rule breakers anymore.) We write about memory, stuff we've seen and done, places we've been, people we've known . . . roundups and summations about, about, about. Our poems appear, by comparison to the really innovative work of the younger generations, gabby and kind of pathetic, not really poems at all, but little "heartfelt expressions."
By "pathetic" I don't mean the pejorative "to be pitied," but rather, feeling-forward. We wear our lives and our years on our sleeves. We are generally less concerned with making pieces of art, more with writing over and over again versions of "Those Were the Days, My Friend." Even the poems we write about this morning's walk with the dog or tending the garden or how the sun illumines a leaf outside our window have that "those were the days" feeling to them.
And that's okay! Innovation is for youngsters. It's hard to do and it often fails. We Boomers have run out of time for failure. Memory and "gathering up" are for us oldsters. It's not always easy, but it's safe.
So what's all this got to do with the title I've given to this first blog of the year? I'm looking forward to 2030 tonight, not back to 2010. That's a good thing. I've got projects in mind, and some are even in gear. But they are old poet projects--summings and gatherings--and I feel time running out. My youth is gone. LONG LIVE MY YOUTH!
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