Gentility

While I remain, as many of us do, a student in advance of a poet, I have yet to gain the sort of shrewdness and experience to form even a working opinion on the art and making of poetry. Despite this, I would like to talk, here, about craft. Or rather, a kind of theory of craft – a poetics I suppose, nonetheless.

Recently I had the brief fortune of attending a poetry workshop under the instruction of Aaron Kunin, a poet, novelist, critic, and brilliant if somewhat daunting professor at Pomona College. Near the end of that course, Kunin, himself a student of the poet and critic Allen Grossman, had offered me a sage warning – or perhaps it might be better put as an appealing problem – with regard to the trajectory of my work in his class. Echoing Grossman, he apprised me of the term “gentility” in poetry, a term Grossman had pronounced as early as 1981 while in conversation with Mark Halliday, a dialogue later to be published in book form as Against Our Vanishing.

Grossman has this to say about “gentility”: “I feel that in poetry today there has arisen a criterion, even among the reputed wild men of civilization, of gentility; and I detest that gentility…I feel it as a sense of internalized constraint. Gentility manifests itself as a set of rules defining what can and cannot be said; and I believe these rules are internalized by the poets of our generation. They speak neither very loud nor very soft, nor very passionately nor with great sadness…At the same time, and this is another matter, I feel that the subjects of poetry have not changed with sufficient ingenuity and courage in accord with our changing sense of what constitutes truth about the social world.”

And my confession: There is an immense portion of my world that certainly remains unsayable in poetry, at least for me. For instance, rarely, if ever, do I speak to what makes me laugh. There are poets who are capable of great humor as well as sobering insight – and there are those who seem somewhat incapable of approaching one or the other spectrum (e.g., Jorie Graham is not a funny poet). To the degree that I assume a voice other than my own social and political one, my poems are manifestations of precisely this gentility. Some of this has to do with tone, certainly, and the questions I imagine I should be asking myself are: What can’t my style accommodate without becoming an irony of itself? How resilient is it? What language can’t I use, what form couldn’t I impose, etc?

As an editor of Foothill: a journal of poetry, one of my goals will be to keep an eye out for poems that accomplish their character without falling to the dangers of gentility. Mostly because I don’t – as of yet – know how to do it myself.

cryptomnesia

Just read Jonathan Lethem's very interesting article "The Ecstasy of Influence" in Harper's Magazine (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387). It touched on how T.S. Eliot, Bob Dylan, Vladimir Nabokov and others may have succumbed to cryptomnesia. Makes me wonder how many other poets have consciously or unconsciously 'lifted' a concept or turn of phrase.

Masthead and logo design

As evidenced by our blog’s whiteboard background, deliberations over the design of Foothill’s masthead and logo were lively. To our credit and my (pleasant) surprise, while everyone expressed strong opinions, proceedings remained civil.

The whiteboard brainstorm was especially amusing. Like its name, we hoped the journal’s design would somehow echo its concept (a publication for poets who are laboring toward the far off pinnacle of their careers). Moreover, we realized that for some mysterious reason the word foothill reads foo-thill when written in certain fonts. For at least an hour and a half we anxiously and creatively explored ways to set off the two syllables from each other while retaining design integrity. The entire effort was almost crippled by Jordan’s hilarious pictograph of a foot beside what I presume to be an anthill (bottom right of background photo).

I later approached our graphic designer Shari Fournier-Oleary with a headfull of vague and half-baked ideas that she magically made design sense out of. She gave us over twenty options, which resulted in yet another multi-hour discussion at our next meeting. Fingernails were bitten, brows furrowed, opinions advanced and retreated, drinks were drunk, and the white board was again left splattered with absurd graffiti. But decisions were made. 

And after a few minor tweaks submitted to Shari, we had a masthead and logo (below).

What drew us to this masthead is that there is an expansive, almost lonely quality to the emaciated letters fleeing each other across the line. As you may know, the Foothill Avenue that runs along the north border of CGU’s campus is the final stretch of Route 66, a highway that encounters landscapes we felt were echoed in the ambiance of the design without being distastefully literal.

In the logo, this same spirit is preserved along with a kind of playful Modernist e.e. cummings/Charles Olson/Robert Duncan word/line break.

And yes, the design references the journal’s concept not very much. This is probably for the best.

I don’t know that anyone one of us editors got everything we wanted in the deliberations and we were pained to jettison a lot of other great designs, but what we individually compromised compromised nothing in quality. Acclaim for this goes to the incredible work of Shari. And our mothers’ training in civility. And maybe too to the generous donation of several boxes of Dale Brothers 22oz. bottles we received from the Office of Advancement (left over from an alumni event I wish I’d been at).

Gateway poetry

Like most Americans, I was introduced to poetry in public school. And like many people, I didn't much care for it. To my recollection, nothing we read was younger than 300 years old, and the purpose of reading a poem seemed limited to just to finding out what was going on in the text. For years I thought of poems as just flowery riddles.

That is, until the summer of 1999. I lived in Los Angeles and commuted from Westwood to West Hollywood every day for an internship. Since I didn’t have a car, I had to take the bus; the trip took about two hours each way. I have a lot of fond memories of that summer, but few of that commute. In fact, only one.

I stayed out late most nights. Most mornings I was exhausted and despondent – all while surrounded by people like myself: residing in Los Angeles and unable to afford a car. Not a cheery lot. (There were the occasional European tourists, but they usually took one look at the ragged humanity that rides public transport in LA and quickly disembarked.)

But one morning I scanned the notices lining the walls of the bus and found one from some poetry awareness foundation. The ad featured the poem “Encounter” by Czeslaw Milosz. I wasn’t familiar with the poem or the poet, but the piece is so short it took less than a minute to read. And unlike what I was forced to appreciate in high school, this poem wasn’t opaque. It is profound, and becomes richer upon examination, but I felt a lump in my throat after only my first reading. That certainly didn’t happen with “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Reading “Encounter” on that bus instantly changed the way I thought of the form. It wasn’t dry and inscrutable – or at least, it didn’t need to be. I realized poetry could produce an emotional response. And realizing that, I began searching out more poems, discovering favorite pieces, authors, and journals. Later I did go back to the classics, and only then could I realize how incredible “Dover Beach” is.

The idea that young people are being introduced to poetry with the wrong poems is not radical or original. (Hollywood even made an overwrought movie about it.) But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. When I talk to teenagers about poetry they usually respond by making a face like they just bit into a lemon. And I don’t blame them. Shakespeare’s sonnets are awesome, but I don’t think it’s realistic to think the average highschooler will respond to them. Or at least I didn’t – not until I read Milosz first.