If I drive 30 minutes north of my home, answer all the correct questions about citizenship, provide all the proper papers, and am cleared to proceed across the border, I will effectively land in another country, Canada! And if, per chance, I have some poems in my brown leather satchel, suddenly, my poems become international. Just that simple, I could shrug off my saline consciousness.
Or I could enroll in one of the international summer writing workshops that transports me to some castle on a scenic hillside with views of the Italian Alps or the post-cold war cobblestone streets and medieval towers of some Central European city or some sleepy fishing village in the Caribbean.
Having been exposed to an exotic life I could ill-afford, likely, I would want to teach half the year at an American university, then work and live leisurely and humbly during the other half of the year in some French village in the south of France or on an island in Greece. I wonder if the local inhabitants of my little hamlet would welcome me as an international writer and write me up as a local celebrity in their daily newspaper in a language I could barely read or speak, then, honor me by biking up to my stone cottage with copies of my books to sign.
I would be so lucky to have Deconstructionist theorists and literary critics of my host country hail me as, not the GNP, but the GLP (greatest living poet,) then when I return to my native country, I would be hailed here, too, as the GLP (greatest living poet). Then, throughout the rest of my days, I would write poems occasioned by the latest theory. Hopefully, the poems would be adaptable to future trends and high-ranking shifts of literary thought.
Or instead, I could host a conference in my native country of exiled poets, and when they return to their native countries after inevitable liberation, they could invite me to spend three months in the toppled, former dictator’s summer home, which would be converted into an International Executive Retreat Center and Day Spa.
I would then write stunning letters on parchment paper to my friends and family and include four stones to hold down the corners of my letters. I would tell them that I am an exile. And I would write poems so exquisitely oblique and metaphysically transcendent everyone would be convinced of my oppression and their own complicity in the assault of my interiority. Then, I would send those poems to World Literature Today who would grant me the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for my worldly intellect, my cosmopolitanism, my staunch awareness of the human condition. How mannered and orderly my literary ascension.
Or I could, like Langston Hughes, write poems that appeal to the common man, poems that are about struggle, poems so celebratory of humankind, it influences writers on three different continents, poets in Africa, China, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, South America and the West Indies. Langston Hughes was so global, he spawned his own movement: the Negritude Movement whose founding poets included Léopold Sédar Senghor, Leon Damas, and Aime Cesaire. In Cuba, poet Nicholas Guillen caught Langston-fire.
Should not global influence rather than hyped presence in anthologies signal whether or not a poet is considered a truly great international poet?
Like Hughes, Frank O’Hara qualifies as a truly great international poet. He may be the only American poet whose name announces a poetic school. Polish poets who published in a journal titled bruLion found inspiration in O’Hara’s view of poetry, and are thusly named The O’Harists.
Interestingly enough, compared to Hughes and O’Hara’s era, we have greater access to world poetry and the world has greater access to American poetry, but ironically we lack not only awareness but global relevance. This might be debatable, but only time will tell.
I strongly doubt if I will spawn a poetic school on some shores far away from Vermont. (Mr. Hall: that’s what I call “Poetic Ambition.”) But, maybe, just maybe, I could win the Griffin Prize, again being only thirty miles from the Canadian border.
So what Canadian poets are you reading? I had fun (last month) teaching Mary Dalton…
Right now? George Elliott Clarke and Susan Elmslie recently caught my eye. I’m diggin’ both of their projects.
Clarke’s Saltwater Spirituals is available in a digitized version here. Other poems can be sampled here.
Susan Elmslie’s website is here.
Heck–I’d like to spend half the year teaching at an American University and half of it living on a Greek island!