Monday Manifesto

I’m proofreading this before posting by reading it out loud to my husband while he does yoga, at the same time that Maisie is grabbing at me and crawling all over me to get me to read her Dr. Seuss’ The Foot Book: “Up feet, down feet, here come clown feet!”
Is there a goal more foolish in politics than unity, or a phrase more hateful than “in the spirit of bipartisanship?” Why should we want unity with pro-lifers, war-and-torture-mongers, gay-hating religious nuts, etc.? We may have to put up with people who aren’t everything we want in order to get rid of the worst—but only put up with. I am voting for Obama since Kucinich and Edwards have dropped out, because we have to get rid of the savages that have been running this country, but I won’t do more than vote begrudgingly for a guy who, discussing his ideas for health care reform, announces that “the HMOS and insurance companies will have a seat at the table, but only a seat…” (quoted from memory). That’s like letting murderers sit on their own jury.
Jim, upside down at this moment, says the best way to mishear The Foot Book while reading it to the baby for the 200th time this week is to substitute the word “cock” for “foot” or “feet.” Silently, of course. “Small feet, big feet, here come pig feet!”
But poetry isn’t politics. In poetry, people who hate your work, or who think you’re doing everything wrong; people whose ideas about poetry you think are meaningless, or whose work doesn’t interest you—are not the enemy.

A distressed woman at the AWP conference on Friday told me she hated a reading of younger poets who only wrote “fashionable grad student poems.” I don’t know who they were or what they read; she didn’t say and I didn’t ask. But they can’t possibly have been entirely wrong in their approach to poetry. Any approach, any school, any third-hand workshop theory, can and does lead to good poems. Any great idea or approach to poetry can and does lead to bad poems. Her distress is a sign of life. Calvin Trillin said you can tell we Philadelphians care about our cheesesteaks because every one of us knows exactly where you can get the best one (ask me!)—and we don’t all agree. Poetry matters when it upsets people.
A little while ago, a supposedly conservative critic (who is not, I think, nearly as conservative as people believe) reviewed a Louis Zukofsky volume. I overheard, at a party, some poets whose work is language-based, post-avant, whatever you want to call it, complaining, “Are we going to have to fight for Zukofsky the way we had to fight for William Carlos Williams?” Hooray! Poets are even pissed off about the dead!
“His feet, her feet, fuzzy fuzzy fur feet!”
I’m glad C.K. Williams, a narrative poet, and Ron Silliman, a language poet, are not trying to write like each other. Why would anyone want them to? Why would anyone want to wipe out either one? I mean, I’m glad that there are people opposed to Williams and other people opposed to Silliman, because that means you can tell we really care about poetry—we think we know the best poem. I find the work of both poets dependably exciting and hope they’re both read in 200 years—when it’s quite possible that hipster grad students will be writing dissertations demonstrating their similarities.
Unless we fail to reject political unity and political bi-partisanship and the world ends because of it.
“Left foot, left foot, right foot, right, feet in the day! Feet in the night!”