Kwame Dawes

On NPR today, I heard a gender medical specialist (whatever that is) say that men, after age 30, begin to diminish in their capacity to understand verbal communication or to even interpret body language or facial expressions. Like their sexual capacity, this skill diminishes with age. My assumption is that by age 70 men have no ability to understand a thing that anyone is saying to them. Women, she pointed out, are quite the opposite. Their verbal skills keep growing. Men, on the other hand, become increasingly more dogmatic, more doctrinaire and less interested in discussion and extensive dialogue around feelings.

This idea bothers me. It does for two reasons. For several years I have hoped that I would become far more dogmatic about my tastes in many things, but particularly poetry. I had hoped that as I grew older, I would be able to speak with absolute authority about what is a good poem and what is not. Indeed, I anticipated that by age forty, I would be able to write reviews in Poetry with the kind of assured confidence and doctrinaire articulation that I see in many of the reviewers. “This is a bad book of poems,” “This is a great collection of poems.” Or most impressive: “This is the greatest collection of poems written in fifty years.” A reviewer once wrote of me, “he writes poetry the way it ought to be written.” I was flattered, but I have never trusted that statement because I can’t imagine who could have the kind of authority to be able to say, without equivocation, that so and so writes poetry the way it ought to be written. But I have secretly hoped that I would one day be able to make such statements. So the news that my maleness will aid and abet this dream of mine seems like good news. The problem is that rather than grow more doctrinaire about my ideas of what is good poetry and what isn’t, I have become far less assertive and decidedly uncertain. Am I a man?

The second reason the idea bothers me, ironically, is that I would hate to think that my capacity to speak with authority about poetry would be merely a by-product of my genetic make up—my biology, if you will, and not because I have learned over the years what is good poetry and what is not. In other words, it may well be that all these men who speak with such assurance about poetry are merely very male folks who have stopped listening to other people, and who have lost the capacity to really dialogue and understand what others are saying. This is not a promising basis for wisdom and understanding.

But it is more complicated than this. Yesterday, a woman returned a book I had let her borrow after a workshop I conducted in Columbia, where I live. It was one of the 130 books I had been sent when I was judging the National Book Award in 2003. I took the whole business of judging these collections seriously. I read each book with care, making notes on the poems and on sheets of paper. After reading the book, I would write two “reviews” and a score on a sheet of paper. The first review was a straightforward assessment of the work, pointing to some of the strengths, and really, relying on a gut feeling to drive me. I would note the poems that really impressed me and include a page number in case I wanted to go back to see the genius work again when I was making my decisions. These “reviews” were rollicking, free flowing, and quite forthright assessments. No one else was going to read them so I said what I felt like saying. The second review was an odd thing. I played the game of cricket seriously as a young man and I have long felt that the game could serve as a metaphor for just a whole lot of things. So the second review treated the book as an innings by a particular batsman (namely the poet). I would describe the quality of play, the authority or lack thereof in the shots made, the athleticism, the attitude behind what was happening on the field. I even gave the book a score, using cricket as the metaphor. So a stunning book would have scored 130 or even 200 hundred runs. But not all centuries were the same. Some could be edgy, full of missed chances, and quite uncertain for most of the way, but they had done nothing so tragically bad to cause them to lose their wicket (or be out). I would even include details about the number of scoring shots made and that kind of thing. If you don’t know anything about cricket, much of this will not make sense. But with some imaginative work, you could imagine using golf as a metaphor for the book or some other sport. Cricket batting is a very individual activity, even if the game is a team sport. The battle between the batsman and the bowler is as impressive as that between pitcher and hitter in baseball, but in cricket, an innings could last as short as a minute and as long as three days. While it is possible to imagine an epic in a cricket innings, one can't think of baseball hitting in those terms. Perhaps pitching, but not hitting. So for each book, I wrote a batting report on the “innings.”

When the woman handed me the book, she thanked me and added that she had read my notes and had agreed with everything I said. I smiled and panicked a bit. I did not mean for anyone to see those notes, but I now wanted to see what she had agreed with. I was startled at how doctrinaire and very, very vicious my notes on the work by this poet were. I mean, I was scathing. I called her work pretentious, noted that it embarked on a project that justified itself by the fact that it had classical allusions, but that the work did nothing with the allusions. I was so astounded by how cruel I was and how clear I was about how much I did not like this work.

I did not recognize myself. My cricket commentary was more entertaining, but equally scathing. In retrospect, it was all quite amusing and clever, but I started to ask myself whether I have been only pretending that I am not doctrinaire about what I know about poetry or what I think about poetry. Maybe I have just been polite because of fear, or polite because I don't want to hurt people's feelings. But there was another possibility: I was direct and scathing in my private notes because I had made a pact with myself that I would select these books on the basis of a gut response—regardless of what drove that gut response.

The truth is that I do not yet trust that my gut response, even when supported by everything that comes in my gut, like my learning, the thousands of books I have read, the thousands of poems I have read, the many opinions I have heard about poetry, my own peculiar discourses in life—the music I listen to, my faith, my fears, etc.—and all the things that make up what is in my gut, is entirely trustworthy as an authority.

I have been around long enough to know that poems that don't move me, that don't engage me, can be viewed by others as simply brilliant and amazing. Does this mean that we must return to the very comforting and wholly useless idea of beauty being located in the eyes of the beholder? That relativism would argue that there is no absolute authority, no absolute meaning and there is no absolute way to even speak of taste. Yet even the greatest purveyors of such a liberal and democratic view do not buy it for an instant. After all, so little would get done in the poetry world. Anthologies would never be published, prizes would never be won, journals would have to stop doing business, and MFA programs would have to close down.

Of course, the polite among us have arrived at another way of dealing with this matter that allows us to be both doctrinaire and open at the same time. We are up-front about bias and set out the parameters of our tastes while allowing that others can hold to other tastes. In fact, recently, I heard Susan Ludvigson say something that I have heard again and again about poetry publishing in this country and in the U.K. She said, “It is pure.” What she meant was that without the pressures of filthy lucre, the pressure to make money, resting on the poetry publishers, such publishers are most likely to be pure in their decisions because they make selections purely on the basis of art, and on the basis of quality and hardly on the basis of sales potential or anything crass like that. These publishers publish what they value. They don't anticipate making money off their sales, and so they will publish purely for taste. Hence, “pure.” The hope is that there will be enough editors with enough varying tastes to ensure that all kinds of poets are published. The problem with this idea, however, brings me back to what I started off talking about. There is a sense in which the purity of tastes is refined the older folks get and if they are men, it is even more refined into an inability to listen to or to engage with anything anyone else is saying. Thus, the very premise of tastes grows narrower over time, until there is little room for it to embrace change and other voices that may emerge.

I realize now, that my problem is not so much that I don't have opinions, but that I want to remain open to discovering more about what other people are seeing in their art, and I want to be able to engage with their art in ways that might enrich my own sense of art. Which is why I get deeply suspicious of and impatient with those reviewers and critics who seem to speak with such authority of what is brilliant work. More often than not, they are bluffing. More often than not, they have not read enough to grant them that authority. More often than not, when they do attempt to justify their judgment, what emerges is so thin and so unconvincing that you wonder how they arrived at such an authoritative posture.

I did not plan to begin my blog with something that one could call un-authoritative and largely uncertain in its conclusions. But I am writing this week about the things that continue to swirl around in my mind, as I do all the things that have do with poetry. I write poems. I read other people’s poetry and tell them what I think of the poems. I judge contests. I teach poetry and assess the poems of my students. I program readings and major festivals and I make decisions about who should read and who should not. I edit my manuscripts. I decide whether I have any poems worth salvaging or not. I read my work at many events. I charge people for my readings, suggesting that my poetry is worth what they pay me. I get calls from people who just want me to hear them read a poem to tell them if they should stop writing or continue writing. I run a statewide program that is premised on the notion that everyone should write a poem at least once and should always read poems. Given all these things I do, I am constantly faced with this question of what is good poetry and what is not. I have my opinions, but I remain less doctrinaire than I imagined I would be at this stage of my life and my maleness. Perhaps I am too anxious. I may soon become quite doctrinaire. After all, I know that reggae music is the only great music in the world. Only fools would think otherwise. So at least in some things, I have evolved into quite the man.

A most articulate curmudgeon poet complained several issues ago in Poetry, that there were just too many people writing poetry. He lamented the glut of poetry on the market and blamed the proliferation of MFA program for this state of affairs. He went on to say that in the last few years he had found only a handful of poets worth reading. His solution: find a way to ban people from writing poetry. He ran out of space before he could lay out clearly his program for the culling of the poet herds in the Western world.

I imagined, though, that his plan would involve preparing a list of the acceptable poets and establishing a quota for the number of books of poems they would be allowed to publish in a given year. I imagined also, that he would arrange to have a very clearly established limit on the number of poetry books that could be published in a given year. He would reduce MFA programs to a very manageable number of only the very best and somehow convince the students already enrolled in MFA programs to change their degree to something quite safe like Composition and Rhetoric. This would keep them further away from any poetry—a taste of which could awaken in them the misguided need to return to writing poems. He would target all the community writing programs and order them shut down. Grants for writing workshops would be redirected into healthy and useful pursuits like sports and music appreciation.

I have to say, though, that I read his column with a sense of guilt. He was talking to me. He was telling me that I was part of the problem. It is true that I had quit directing an MFA program for a while, so I could not be blamed for the MFA factory product that really annoyed him. But I was certainly running around the state of South Carolina telling people that everyone should write a poem at least once in his or her life. Yes, it was me preaching the good news of poetry and suggesting that poetry was for everyone. Not for everyone to read, but for everyone to write. I was asking business people, lawyers, tax collectors, short order cooks, and even novelists to write poems. And now he was letting me know the damage I was causing him and the rest of the world. I was part of the problem: too many bad poets.

I had to admit also that I entertained many aspiring poets in my office and on the telephone and at workshops all over the country and in fact outside the country. I was inviting people to write sonnets, haiku, sestinas, and confessional verses while giving them an impossibly varied range of sure-fire workshop exercises that I had pulled from so many books on the subject. I had invented my own workshop exercises. And I had started with children. I was going to grade schools and getting little children to rhyme, to make up stories and put them in a form that I promised them was verse. It was a matter of time before I would he hauled up before a council to explain what I had done to fill the world with bad poetry.

But it got worse. Not only was I encouraging ordinary people to write poems, but I was actually writing far too much poetry for any one person to be writing. And what was worse, I was publishing these collections and hoping people would read them.

I asked myself whether he was exaggerating the damage that all this activity of mine would be causing. For him, too much poetry dulled the ability of people to see what good poetry really is. With so much poetry out there, it was impossible to know where the good stuff could be found. It would be totally unreasonable to expect anybody to go searching through the shelves of bookstores to find the few gems among a crowd of very bad poetry. But the greatest sin was that people would
start to have the idea that anyone could do what only well-trained, gifted visionaries and wordsmiths could do properly. At best I was leading people into a false sense of their own ability as artists and at worst I was encouraging bad art to be inflicted on the world.

Well, I am guilty. I am guilty as sin. I did it, and I continue to do it. But why? I doubt that it is a negative reaction to the elitism inherent in his attitude and position. My egalitarian sensibilities are well-honed but they remain committed to very pragmatic things like several square meals a day, good jobs, a roof over the head, and access to art—access to art, mind you. No, I do it because I have come to see the business of writing poetry as in many ways connected to the idea of playing a sport. I think participating in some sort of sport is healthy, enjoyable, and extremely entertaining for everyone involved. I have never imagined, however, that everyone should believe that he or she will become a professional athlete or would even care to be one. But even the most amateur of athletes can appreciate a good game and can find some joy and sense of fulfillment in playing the game, at whatever level.

Americans should understand what I am saying here. A hallmark of the American Dream is for children to imagine that they will become world class at some sport or the other. Aided by the vain imaginings of parents who have seen the great work done by the parents of the Williams' sisters and Tiger Woods, these children cannot be blamed for believing that even they could be both President and a figure skating legend at the same time. We know that 99.9 percent of these children will not go on to be presidents or great athletes. What keeps them going is the uncertainty about which will be the one to make it. But at some point, it becomes quite clear that a future in pro sports is out of the cards for most of these people. Does that mean that these folks should stop playing the sport? Hardly. Does that mean they cannot enjoy the sport? I can't imagine why it would. So why not poetry?

It is good for you. It allows you the capacity to think of how language works. It pushes you to be aware of the dynamics of the senses. It can lead us to see the world with care. It compels us to start to search for beauty and meaning in the things around us. It engages the motions and the intellect. It can be quite cathartic even as it serves as an intellectual exercise. It offers pleasures that may not be easily defined—the sound of words, the music of meter, the complexity of wit. It is part of an ancient and timeless tradition that has been part of human experience for as long as anyone can imagine. It is riddled with allusions and cultural meanings that proliferate all language used in society. It is a great way to impress lovers, spouses, friends, and enemies. It becomes a splendid and reliable marker of time, of important occasions and the emotional journey of the individual. More people than we imagine have the sense that the poem is a considered and stylized way of expressing ideas in a manner that will be memorable and beautiful. And here I am not talking about reading poems, but about writing poems. So why must the world be deprived of this opportunity?

My curmudgeon poet, I realize, is not a hater, just a man who has read more poetry than he wants to. He has reviewed more books of poems than he cares to. He has read one too many reviews of poems and is convinced that no one is keeping watch, no one is doing quality control, no one is standing at the gate. He is worried that there are no fresh thoughts emerging. A great Jamaican deejay used to chant, "Sing annadda song for me..." as he lamented the sameness of all the new hits coming on the airwaves. But our poet, I am sure, would not want people to be deprived of the chance to simply make poems and to reap the benefits of making poems.

I hope not. But he might be convinced if I pointed out to him that the more people write poems, the more likely that they will be to share his high taste for the art. It is not unlike, say, classical music. Until I saw my children rehearsing classical pieces for their orchestras, I had no useful way of fully grasping the nuances and complexities of much of classical music. Hearing them move from the horrible screech of beginners, to the delicately balanced nuances of musicians, and observing the casual intelligence with which they spoke about various pieces of music, taught me that they are far more appreciative of the best of classical pieces because they have had to learn to play many pieces in their short lives. I never had formal lessons in music, and I know that a great part of my engagement with classical music has been affected negatively by this gap in my life. And yet, having played in several bands, having learned to play a guitar from friends and by my own efforts, I have come to appreciate better what is happening in the work that musicians do.

So yes, curmudgeon poet, the world must write poems. I will continue to walk the streets and say this to everyone. I will continue my crusade as long as I can or until you send your poetry police to come and arrest me and lock me up in a cell. And even there, I will encourage my fellow inmates to write haiku in their minds and declaim them to the heavens.

Okay, that last ending was a tad over the top, but I will continue to encourage the sport of writing poetry. It is good for you, notwithstanding the curmudgeon poets of our time.

Despite what they might say to our faces, people generally don't like poets. Now, let me quickly explain what I am trying to say. Some time ago, I volunteered to chaperone my son's seventh grade class on a field trip. My roommate on that trip was an executive for a headhunting firm that specialized in industrial hiring. He was fairly young—at least younger than me. He dressed neatly, packed like a careful traveler with his socks in a special compartment, his shirts always neatly folded and so on. He came prepared for the trip, for the long stretches of walking with special orthopedic socks to go with his special orthopedic shoes. I was not sure how it would work out since I have never quite roomed with someone who I might safely call a tad preppy. But he was friendly, very friendly, and we seemed to be hitting it off quite well. Somehow it came out that I was a professor and that was bad and not so bad. But the moment he found out that I was a poet, things changed. . . .

Suddenly all his frat boy instincts began to emerge. At last he had something to pin on me. A poet. A real life poet. Talking about my being a poet became his most reliable way to make conversation. Every joke was about my being a poet. The jokes were mild and quite good natured, but the ease with which he would say after a day of walking up and down with tired children who were filling in booklets in an effort to justify the educational purpose of this fun trip, “So, you must have been inspired today. Any poetic words to share?” I would chuckle and say, “Nope, nothing.” He would ask this question at least once, sometimes three times each day for five days. My answer was always the same. Sometimes he would offer a variation, he would even attempt his own mock poem. Like I said, it was all friendly ribbing, but I have to ask, “What was that about?” In a sense, he was dragging out from his arsenal of male banter, the kinds of jokes reserved for weird people, for nerds, for odd folk. For some reason this was how he found himself responding to someone who called himself a poet.

Now, I don't think the man disliked me as a person, but there was something mildly antagonistic about his constant ribbing of me. After all, I can imagine a whole line of humor about his job as a headhunter, but these jokes would not be funny, and anyway, his job was legitimate, familiar and did not have that smell of elitism of being special that being a poet has. Underlying much of his manner and tone was a certain self-deprecating sense of humor. In a sense he was saying less about what he thought of poets, than about what he thought of his relationship with poetry. I think he did this knowingly. He found a way to tell me that he was just not into the poetry stuff, and that people who write poems were from a different world from his own world. Things could have gotten ugly, perhaps, but they did not largely because this was a nice guy, and he was genuinely trying to make me feel comfortable as his roommate. But he was doing so out of a latent, and probably hard to articulate distrust of poets.

Much of this may sound quite unfair, but I think I have a point here. I have, over the years, constructed something of a narrative of the way that people encounter poetry in their lives. I do believe that at some point, the relationship between the individual and the poem/poet undergoes a tragic and radical change that leads to what I would call and passive aggressive distrust of the poet.

Now people will tell you that they appreciate poets. But they will always want to know what kind of poet you are. If you are a modern poet—one of those contemporary poets who write the kinds of poems that they may have had to learn in school, they come to you with a long list of complaints and about you and about your fellow poets.

Here is my narrative in brief.

We begin with sheer pleasure. Nursery rhymes are often quite silly rhyming stories that generally make little sense. But they are lovely and they appeal to our sense of rhythm, our sense of the absurd and in many ways our sense of the peculiar drama of the world. Some of these rhymes are familiar to us, describing in verse things we too would love to do:

Jack be nimble
Jack be quick
Jack jumped over
The candlestick.

Splendid vocabulary and a rhythm that corresponds with the subject matter we are exploring. And even when the narrative is absurd or when the language somehow leaves us nonplused about meaning, we happily hold onto what we can and enjoy the rhyme for its energy.

Tom, Tom the piper's son
Stole a pig and away he ran
The pig was eat
And Tom was beat
And Tom came running down the street.

As children, we enjoy these rhymes. We look at the pictures—if there are pictures to see—and find pleasure in the sound of what we are saying. We learn the words by heart. Nobody asks us why Tom stole the pig. Who cares? Tom just happen to steal pigs. It is what they do. What is a piper? Who knows, and who cares? The drama remains completely accessible and we find pleasure in it.

At that age we even make up our own rhymes. We run around repeating these rhymes, teasing people with our rhymes, laughing at teachers with our rhymes. I remember a friend of mine and me running through our elementary school after class shouting and shaking our nine-year-old bodies:

Pri-ivate lessons
Hey, hey, hey
Pri-ivate lessons
Hey, hey, hey!

This was our extra lesson song. The lessons were grueling, but we ushered in the occasion with our madly pleasurable song. When we discovered limericks, we thought they were the most amazing things: a cluster of rhymes and rhythms that could be funny and that could be about anything we wanted them to be about.

I have seen this giddy pleasure in elementary schools today. When I do poetry workshops with teachers, the most innovative teachers, the ones who are constantly finding complex and sophisticated ways to get students to write are the elementary school teachers. While these bouncy primary school teachers wax eloquent about how “awesome” teaching poetry to children is, the middle school and high school teachers scowl away in the corner, muttering, “Yeah, you just wait till they get older, till they discover cool, till they are no longer cute, till they know what poetry is really about, you will see how exciting and awesome it all is.”

And they are right. Something does happen with poetry somewhere in the late middle school years and in high school. The most troubling question is asked of students. It is a question that is rarely asked of elementary school children: “What does this poem mean?” Suddenly, the poem must mean something. And that meaning is supposed to be buried in the poem somewhere. A poem is no longer experienced and enjoyed, it is to be understood and talked about. Of course, there are all kinds of implications lurking around this question and these have to do with issues of understanding, of power, of control and above all, of intelligence. Where a poem may have been enjoyed and responded to viscerally and emotionally, now it had to be responded to intellectually. Meaning. Meaning. Meaning.

When a teacher asks a student what a poem means, the teacher is suggesting that there is a meaning inside the poem. The teacher is also saying that someone knows the meaning of the poem. By dint of him or her asking the question, the teacher becomes the first power broker in the poetry game. The teacher would not ask the question if the teacher did not have an answer in his or her head. In other words, the teacher, too, thinks there is a meaning behind the poem. Often, the conversation unfolds with the student trying his best to make sense of the poem. He offers an opinion and the teacher says, “No, Tony, Susan, what do you think?” A kinder teacher who has already embraced some principles of self-affirmation for the students might say, “That is interesting, Tony, I have not thought of it in that way, but perhaps Susan has another take . . . “ proceeding to ask as many students as possible until the “right” answer is arrived at. No one is fooled by the politeness. There is a right answer. It will be marked as such in the exam. The teacher knows the right answer, and the teacher will entertain some conversation for a while, but will eventually offer the right answer. Often, the teacher will get the right answer from reading the right book that lays out all the right answers about the meaning of the poem.

The student, however, has already begun to feel somewhat betrayed by the poem. After a teacher has spent a half hour explaining what a poem means, offering interpretation after interpretation and pulling allusions and devices out of a hat, and magically deciphering the complex of language for the student, it is not unusual for a student to say, “So if she wanted to say that, why didn’t she just say that?” And in that instant, something happens between the poet and the student—the poet and the future citizen who is walking around with a hidden distrust for the poet. The student realizes in that instant that someone is withholding information from her. The student understands that somehow language is getting in the way of meaning. The student comes to the understanding that the person who made the poem is smarter, cleverer and decidedly more devious than the student might be. That person has offered a poem so full of obscurities, allusions, difficult diction, and convoluted turns and starts that are hard to follow, all for what? To make their lives miserable, to embarrass them in front of the class. What used to be pleasurable has become a detective game. And the problem is that when one does find the meaning, it often does not feel like it was worth the effort. Consciously or unconsciously, the student or young person begins to form a clear opinion about the poet: She is bright. She knows more than me. She controls the extent to which I will understand what her poem is saying. She is making my life miserable. She has intentionally obscured her meaning so that I have to work hard to grasp it. She is just not my friend.

A good teacher can recognize when this moment occurs and may be able to halt the decay with some suggestion that poets are nice people and that they are not trying to do this. But many, if not most of the teachers went through the same system as the students and always felt the same way about the poet. They take pride in the fact that they have managed to read enough to allow them to speak with authority about the poems. But they also feel that same sense of being embattled and constantly trying to find meaning where meaning is hidden.

The sad tragedy is that many of these students actually find their way to meaning and do well in their essays, do well in articulating the secret of a poem, but they also become poets and many of them assume that the good poem is the one that makes it really hard for the reader to get the poem at once. They rally behind Pound in his celebration of the hard poem. Thus they write poems that are about hiding behind language rather than poems about opening meaning with language. They can't be blamed. They are like second year students in a school that allows hazing. Having been slaughtered and embarrassed in their first years, they look forward to getting back at their bullies through the bullying of the young children.

This is why people often run to poems that are “easy.” It is why they will find the pleasure of a good song lyric but not pay much attention to the poet. It is also why when people talk about their favorite poems they talk about those poems that are most easily explained by a teacher. This is why people make jokes about poets. For them, the poet is playing a game. They have long given up on the whole business of trying play that game because they always lose that game. It is likely why people will not give any of the “school” poets much attention, leaving them to folks who think like them and who are bright like them. And many poets enjoy this position a great deal. It makes them feel special, assures them that they are embarked on a vocation that is just not for everyone and that this is not a bad thing, but just a fact of life. For them, the hardness of poetry is just not a bad thing, at all. Indeed it is a good thing, the desired thing.

To be honest, I almost agree with them. I say almost because while I do think that the challenges that can come from a poem can be quite healthy, I don't think the issue of hardness or easiness is what is at stake here. The real problem is that it has somehow seeped into the collective imagination of our society at large that the poet is actually holding back information and obscuring meaning intentionally and is given to trying to seem brighter than the reader, the listener. The sad thing is that while this may be true of many poets, it is not true of most of the poets that I know. Most of the poets that I know are difficult, not so much because they want to make things hard for the reader but because they are trying to express difficult issues and want to do so with accuracy and with the attendant complexity that they believe the subject might deserve. Most of them want to be fresh, they want to come at their ideas in ways that will enliven the reader, make the reader think of things that he or she had never thought of. But that message does not easily penetrate the rupture of that first moment when the question was asked, “What does this poem mean?”

It would be irresponsible of me to lay out what I see as the problem without offering some solution. There are many possible solutions, but I really think that there has to be a way for us to maintain the same giddy quest for pleasure and connection in poems that we see in the younger children in school. Meaning is surely an important pursuit, but the quest for meaning, for getting to the heart of what a poet has offered is often undermined by the very pressure to find the meaning that I have spoken about. The best “readings” of poems tend to come from people who have found a way to connect with the poem and who have come to the view that the poet is very interested in communicating—in finding fresh ways to pass information to others. So I suggest that every course in poetry should be supplemented by a session in poetry appreciation—a forum in which young people are encouraged to read a lot of poems, and to simply enjoy them, and try to find ways to discover connections with at least one of the many poems they will read.

Maybe poets are not disliked. Maybe it is worse than that. It may well be that people don't even care that poets exist. Neither of these possibilities will stop us from writing poems. However, I can imagine a better world, a world that actually exists in many places: a world in which the poet is valued for the right things—for the capacity to see the word and to use language to turn that sight into something that moves us and challenges us and gives us pleasure. Perhaps, then, poets could be as ordinary and knowable as headhunters, psychologists, dry-wall specialists, and leather workers.

A confession: I am a gossip. Gossiping, I have read somewhere, is a sin. But I don’t think what I do is sinful. A rather archaic definition of gossip is a sponsor or a godfather or godmother. I am not that kind of gossip. There is also the definition of the gossip as a friend, a close chum. This is closer. The sinful definition is a sexist one, really. More often than not, it is referring to women who engage in idle talk—tatter-tales, if you will. The challenge is to define idle. What I enjoy has something to do with talk, but I would never describe what I enjoy in gossip as idle. After all, I am not drawn to gossip because I have nothing else or better to do. The gossip is the main event. Still, a part of me does feel that what I do enjoy is slightly decadent, transgressive, and hints of sin. It is really about getting the dirt on people and on things. I like the insides of a story. I like hearing the unfolding of the tale—and the tale must be worth something; it must, somehow unmask a secret or offer something that is not easily available. And it has to be scandalous. In Jamaica, we use the word, “Labrish”. I like that word.

“Labrish” is such a broad-sounding word—it hints at labial, labyrinth, lashing—all words that evoke what I like about that kind of talk. Labrish involves some scandal, it is story, the ritual of telling a story, but not just any story—it is the story that will titillate, excite, make you laugh, and make you feel happy that it is about someone else. So I like stories. That would be a palatable way to say it, but it would be something of a lie to suggest that I am simply confessing a penchant for stories. Stories can be invented. Labrish cannot be invented in the same way. Labrish is rooted in truth. At least the listener or reader has to believe that it is somehow connected to truth. The only invention is how the story is told, but the story has to be about something that happened, something that the listener feels might be true. However, I should add that gossip, or what I am now calling labrish has an inherent quality that can be translated to even invented stories. Labrish is about people, about what happens to people, and at the end of a piece of labrish, one must be entertained and one must feel as if something has been revealed or exposed in the telling. Surely, some of us look for this in a good story, invented or not.

There are challenges that come with this vice of mine. I tend to be rather undiscriminating about stories, especially fiction. Oh, I think I am a splendid critic and I do have the capacity to say that a piece of fiction is quite badly written or quite well written, but what I can’t do is walk away from a story. I want to know what happened. And I am more seduced by the story when the question of what happened has some salacious possibilities, some quality that smacks of pure labrish. So when I am asked, “Well, did you enjoy my novel?” I often say, “Yes.” What I don’t mean is that it was a good novel or even a good story; what I do mean is that I found the gossip in it irresistible.

I wish I could say that I don’t bring this hunger for scandal to my reading and enjoyment of poetry—that pure form that does not justify itself by story, but by image and idea. Alas, if I am to be quite honest, I have to say that the poets I enjoy reading are, at some level, engaged in the business of labrish. This is not simply an issue of confessional poetry or narrative poetry, although those are elements that lend themselves to labrish. It has to do with an assumption that I have, which is that no matter how hard a poet may try, whatever she writes is going to reveal something about who she is to me. So when I receive a manuscript from someone who has heard that I have a habit of looking at the manuscripts of strangers and of offering notes and comments on that work, my great anticipation is to find what labrish I can about the poet in the poems. I am trolling for gossip. That is a crass way of putting it. A more appealing way to put it is to say that I am searching to find the person—to meet the person—in the poems.

I am uncomfortable about this confession, however. The reason is that I have sought to convince those people who are close to me that much of my poetry is not about me, that if they want to know who I am, they will be led astray by trying to find me in the poems that I have written. I explain, with sincerity, that writing is often about invention, about play, about speculation, about shifting personas, about the imagination. Sometimes I get away with this half-truth, but people know better instinctively. They know that while it may be true that reading a poet’s work may not lead to any reliable biographical understanding of the details of that poet’s life, there is an exposure of some deeper part of the poet that invariably happens no matter how hard the poet seeks to employ Eliotesque acts of disassociation. Yes, my poems are a clear reflection of what I think about, what occupies me, and how my mind works in a peculiar kind of way.

Such revelations about the way a person’s mind works, however, do not always rise to the delicious heights of genuine labrish. You see, labrish, as I have said, should have a whiff of scandal. And I am now admitting that it is this whiff of scandal that I enjoy. I immediately took to Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” because I was being allowed in class to read a poem about a man who is going to go to all ends to have sex with a woman. The pleasure was greater because of the discomfort I could tell my teacher was feeling about how to explain this somewhat crude idea without seeming to be talking about sex. Now there is the stuff of great art. Not so much the sex, but the tension of values, or pretense, of social order being disrupted by art. That was one kind of labrish.

There were others. John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” always struck me as deeply pained admissions of his vulnerability as a believer. I was drawn to the constant wrestling with God, the very idea that he contended with his sinfulness and his failings as a believer struck me as intriguing and scandal rich. Then when I read some of his love sonnets and his longer poems, I realized that Donne’s holiness came through fire. Not as rich or unsettling as say watching Jimmy Swaggart implode on television, but equally effective in reminding me of my own capacity for failure, for doubt, and for fear.

I tell people that I started writing poems because of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and it is partly true as most statements that seek to explain why one writes are—all partly true. Hopkins was responsible for me writing more than five poems in succession. Prior to that, I probably wrote one poem a year or every two years in some class assignment or out of some need to write some words down. I don’t recall much of those years between 12 and 16. But at 16, I started to write imitations of Hopkins with a group of classmates who, in the most lax and idle year of the school career of people educated in the British colonial education system, namely, the first year of the two years of sixth form—a year without the pressure of a final exam, a year when you are now officially senior and assuming responsibilities at school, a year during which you are still congratulating yourself at having passed the major exams of the year before that got you into sixth form, a year when your body is starting to feel adult—had to invent various forms of distraction from the idleness of that school year. We started an impressive gambling “club” hidden away from the authorities, where poker was placed as a spectator sport. We fought elaborate battles with densely wadded pieces of paper across barricades formed by overturning desks and chairs throughout the classroom. We ritualized the business of teasing and insulting each other, taking great care to find fresher and more demeaning insults for each other. We tested the boundaries of familiarity with teachers now that we were adults, no longer just ordinary schoolboys. Writing imitations of Hopkins’ verse was a sport. We compared the work to see who was better at it. It was an act of intellectual nimbleness, of technical virtuosity, and constant parody. I enjoyed this. I was not good at it, but I enjoyed it. Part of the pleasure had to do with what I was learning about Hopkins himself.

Like Donne, Hopkins liked to talk to God earnestly. By then I knew a good deal about the way sinners talk to God—feeling inadequate, constantly aware of death and fearing it, hiding confessions of terrible sins behind the euphemisms of the faith, and so on. I found it intriguing to slowly unearth the labrish around Hopkins that was buried inside these poems. When I read his letters to his friend Bridges—those curmudgeonly letters of a man who felt he was not getting any respect for his art, of a touchy man who bristled at criticism, of a man who felt that his greatness as a thinker and an artist was being wasted in the clearly frustrating world of what he saw as something of a backwater area of the world where he had been assigned—I began to read the poems with an even greater fascination. There was something labrish-like about the earnestness of his commitment to inventing new forms, to slaving as an artist without much recognition for it. This angst, this sense of struggle, this narrative of the artist intrigued me. It still does, in Hopkins.

With such a start, I have to say that my pleasure in poetry continues to be shaped by the desire for labrish. I can identify the pleasures I get from poems around that basic issue. This may mean that I have a propensity for the narrative in a poem, but here, I am not speaking of narrative in that rigid manner of convention—a story with a beginning, middle and end. But I am drawn to the risk of exposure. Yes, I am. I am drawn to the tightrope walk between sentimentality and emotionally risk. I am seduced by secrets and the way that a poem allows them to be revealed in beauty and with the tension of the desire to be protected.

It is this quality that moved me the most in Derek Walcott’s last book of poems, “The Prodigal.” It is as if with time Walcott came to care a great deal less about flirting with scandal. The book is replete with labrish. Not indulgent labrish, not salaciousness for its own sake, but a willingness to contend with sharply honed formal skills and his trademark wit, the vulnerability of the self. At once he allows himself to be something of a sleazy philanderer—a dirty old man with the ability to gaze at this self and accept it as a human quirk of his. The effect is disarming, even as we imagine what hurts he may have caused with this vice. But that is not so much the point. The point is the unfolding of all of this in verse. Yet, most moving for me, is the stunning stretch of lines near the end of the book, in which the dolphin and the sighting of a dolphin becomes a metaphor for his lamentation for the loss of his twin brother. There is something startling about this movement of “the Prodigal” that reveals Walcott’s power as a poet, but that engages me with the sheer labrish of his story telling. It never seems self-indulgent, because at some level, labrish cannot be self-indulgent. It must first be a story, and it must first be enjoyed as a story. The idea is not so much the confession, but the capacity to see in the experience a story worth telling.

Yes, I do give even the worst written stories a chance to take me on a trip—that is my sin—an overgenerous faith in the miracle of a story emerging no matter how badly constructed. But what I am in search of is the well-told piece of gossip, the labrish that is beautifully executed, that relishes its own power and fascination. Poems that have something to say to me in this way, appeal to me in lasting ways. That must count for something. If this is gossip, if this is sin, I hereby confess now and beg for forgiveness.

I realize now that one of the things that has sustained me as a writer has been a sense of wanting to carry on a tradition of putting in words the experience of a culture, of a generation, of a society. This amounts to a certain kind of conviction—a prompt for writing that is, in some ways, outside of just the need to express oneself. This broader sense of being a part of a long tradition is one of the things I do envy about longstanding literary traditions like the Japanese and Indian traditions of poetry. The perceived absence of such a place in tradition has haunted and traumatized many writers who have emerged from post-colonial societies, who were educated to value the traditions of their colonizers, but rarely allowed to feel any right to be a part of such a tradition. West Indian literature is still relatively young, but it at least has something of a tradition, one that my father and his generation could not claim to have—not in a tangible and reliable sense. There is something to be said about being “born at the right time,” as Paul Simon sings. My work has a writer is rooted in what I see as the good fortune of being born at a good time and being located a good place for a writer. We can’t plan these things. But we can work on making these elements of who were help to shape some clear-eyed rationale for making art. I like to call this “conviction.” And yes, I think that artist must have convictions.

Conviction impresses me. It frightens me, sometimes, too, but it does impress me. When Yeats laments about those who are without conviction, I understand his concern. I have always felt it to be important to have convictions, to have a framework of ideas that will constantly test action. Perhaps unfairly, I will read poems by people and end up with the question, “So what?” There is a rich tradition of art that really does not want to answer the question, “So what?” And I enjoy such work and I can be engaged by such work, but I do not ever trust that such work is void of convictions of some sort. One of the lessons I learnt during my three years of immersion in the field of literary theory while a graduate student in Canada in the eighties, when theory was the new black, was that discourse is ubiquitous—that no idea is neutral. I should have learned more, but this was complex enough for me to grapple with. I realize now that my inclinations as a writer are shaped by convictions—convictions that relate to how I view the world, but most telling, to how I manage to work through the, for me, quite tough question of why am I speaking publicly—what do I have to say?

When someone comes to see me or writes to me about their writing—someone whose work is unfamiliar to me—I usually have a standard set of questions that I ask them to answer. The list has been distilled to a few key issues over the years largely to avoid protracted and fruitless discussions that take place because the writer and I have not understood each other enough. But I ask these questions because I am convinced that people write out of a set of assumptions (or convictions) about the world and about the function and role of art. I ask also because I have found that people tend to know why they write and everything they do as a writer grows out of that impulse. The toughest person to deal with is the one who appears to be completely assured of his or her importance as an artist/poet, but appears to have absolutely no interest in the work of others or even in the tradition of the genre. Such a person is big on conviction—almost to the point of hubris—but very weak on perspective. And more often than not, this is reflected in the work.

A red flag goes up when someone says to me, “Man, you have to read my stuff to see what I am talking about. There is nothing like it. It is unique because everybody tells me that I have a unique way of seeing things.” I have never seen that turn into a stunning encounter with a fresh new voice. I am sure it happens, but I have not seen it yet. That statement is usually the answer to my question: “Who do you read? What poets do you like to read?” At first there is a pause, and then, “I don’t read poetry, you know—not a whole lot. For two reasons. One, I prefer to read stuff that is real—history, politics, you know, that kind of thing. And two, I really don’t want to be influenced by another writer when I am writing.” That is when the person will declare how unique his or work is.

My response has become standard:

“So you want me to read this manuscript of . . . how many pages is it?”

“A hundred and twenty, but I put a poem per page, you know? I think it looks better that way.”

“Yes, you want me to read your poems.”

“If you don’t mind. I think you will like it.”

“Do you know me to be a writer, a poet?”

“Oh, yeah, I have heard good things about you.”

“And you have not read any of my work, right?”

“No, no . . . “

“Because you don’t read poetry as you don’t want to be influenced . . . “

“Right.”

“But you would like to publish your work, yes?”

“Oh, yeah, people tell me I have to get this stuff out there. I mean, I show folks my work and they are like, man, this is really good work. You need to get it out there.”

“So you want people to read your work.”

“Oh, yes.”

“But you don’t read other people’s work.”

“It is just the way I work, you know.”

“So why should I read your work? I mean, shouldn’t I be worried about influence, too?”

“What do you mean?”

There is a fine line between hubris and faulty thinking in these moments. This person has not wrestled with the question of why am I speaking publicly. This person is completely assured of his or her right to speak even when such a person has no clear sense of whether others have said what they are trying to say already and better. The conversation usually unfolds as a study in the logic of uniqueness.

You will never know how unique you are until you have a sense of what is out there. Chances are you are not unique, but as common as most people out there who think they are unique. If you don’t like reading poetry, chances are that I may not like reading your poetry. But even if I do, simply on principle, I just won’t read your work. Finally, I view the business of writing and putting work out as a rather serious thing. Maybe I take it more seriously than I should, but because I do take it seriously, I do not presume that because I have written something, that I should, without some consideration, presume that everyone else should see what I have to say. I call it the responsibility of the artist to the contract with the reader.

In my contract, I will try not to take for granted the opportunity that I have to communicate with a larger public. I will always ask myself whether I really have something to say. I can’t guarantee that my answer to that question will be shared by everyone or by anyone, but I will ask that question because I should at least be able to believe at some level that what I have to say has some value.

Yet, having said that, and even after giving the non-reading writers such a hard time, I must say that I understand their instincts. Perhaps not in the same way that they do, but I suspect that much of what makes reading other people’s work troubling for me is what underlies their unwillingness to look at other work. There is comfort in ignorance. If you find your thoughts being expressed well by someone else, you are less inclined to want to try and express your thoughts yourself. Why engage in such redundancy? Thus even when I would spend a great deal of time reading Caribbean literature during the years when I was starting to write in search of ideas and tutoring for other writers, I was always trying to see if they had already written me out of a job. I was, without admitting, reading with the hope that I could see a gap, a failure, a space that allowed me to justify my own art.

It is a peculiar kind of motivation for making art when one is of the view that art should grow out of the convictions of the soul, but there was something pragmatic about this process that eventually led to conviction of sorts. I found ample gaps. Few writers had managed to create a complex West Indian art that was unafraid of embracing Christian faith. It was important to me—this faith, and so I thought of ways of bringing such conviction to my work in a direct and honest way. Then I found so little written by the next generation of West Indian voices—there was a gap, a gap that I was going to have to fill because of my age—I was the next generation. So I had something of a mandate, a rationale. Finally, I could tell that something significant was happening with the reggae music in the 1970s when I really started to come into an awareness of the world. I could tell that this decade would become an historically and culturally important one in Jamaican history and, as it happened, in the rest of the world. I knew that my work would grow out working through the aesthetics and convictions that came out of that period. I could see models of narrative—plays, poems, novels, short stories—that engage a period, a movement, political change in other literary traditions that had not yet happened in Jamaican writing. Another space to fill. And much of this has kept me working.

The impulse to write is not so calculated, and it is clearly driven by other things that could even be described as pathological. All of those apply to me, but I do know that the feeling of being a part of something outside of myself, part of a tradition of art, plays a great role in shaping what I write, and more, in making me want to keep writing.

Recently, a very close friend of my late father, was generous enough to send me some 20 or so letters that my father had written to him over the span of some 30 years, between the early ‘50s and the early ‘80s. My father would have been in his mid-20s and fresh from completing his studies at Oxford University, when he wrote the earliest letters. The last letters were written two years before he died suddenly after an accidental fall. There was something strange about meeting my father as a young man—working through his thoughts, anxieties, humor and the details of his day to day existence. Yet the thing that struck me the most about my father at the time, was his earnestness as a writer—his full conviction that his life was dedicate to art, yes, but above all, he was dedicate to his ideology, his way of understanding and contending with the world. I have always known that my father was a Marxist. He told this to us often enough as we were growing up. He was also a Pan Africanist and committed to the idea of a common narrative of people of the African Diaspora. But in these letters, I began to see that his convictions were not just fanciful ones. He was serious. For several letters he talked a great deal about his first novel. It was still in manuscript form, and he would give a ball-by-ball account of how things were progressing with it. At the time he was teaching in Ghana. The novel he wanted to write, had to serve as part of some expression of the need for a revolution in the context of West Indian society. But he was acutely aware of the fact that he was embarked on a task that would seek to bring about political and social change through art. He was skeptical about this, but he also felt that he could not write his fiction without somehow ensuring that it became part of the cause, part of the struggle.

I read him now, and I understand that my desire to find my own place as a writer would lead me in different directions from him. But there is something comforting about reading of his struggle to locate a sustaining impulse to write in a series of convictions that will shape his art. When I fought not to be like him, to write plays instead of poems, to not be a novelists, I was searching for my own place. When we quarreled about my faith and when I stayed faithful to what I believed, we were contending with convictions, but beyond that I was working my way towards art, towards what would be my art for my time. This is what it means to be a part of a tradition, and there is something reassuring about it. This is why I tell people to read something before they come to talk to me. As delicious as it might be to want to feel completely unique and alone, it is just not happening for me, it is not realistic. We are surrounded by a host of witnesses. Deal with it.

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