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.