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Episode XI: "There are maybe two (dominant) approaches to any type of art"

Published 12/26/16
In this installment, Charlotte Shane talks about Bill Knott, form poems, jazz, Kars-for-Kids, the dominant approaches to art & more.

Today I’m with Charlotte Shane, a writer and Twitter provocateur, in discussion of The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans, a collection by Saint Geraud, who supposedly killed himself two years prior to publication (in 1968), but is actually the nom de plume of Bill Knott, who passed in 2014. The book is short, as are the poems; many take up just a few lines and are titled “Poem”. When did you first read it?

Sometime during or right after college, so early 2000s. I sort of "discovered" poetry late-ish in life for someone who had an early sense of herself as a writer. It wasn't until I was 18 that it started to make sense to me as a form of communication and art. I guess that's not unusual—like, how many kids are into poetry? But I remember the sense of revelation and also a little bit of irritation, like something had been kept from me. You know that feeling when you fall in love with someone and you have some angst about "why didn't we meet sooner?" I had some of that with poetry.

How did poetry resonate with you before that point? Was The Naomi Poems the one that flipped the switch?

I grew up in a small town with one (small) public library, and part of how I read was roaming the stacks and picking out whatever caught my eye. That was how I found “The Poetry of Surrealism”, which is what I think of as the book that changed everything. I hated form poems, and still do, and of course that’s pretty much all that you study in high school. A bunch of canonical form poems and “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Once I realized there were poems that didn’t rhyme or follow a strict meter or stanza arrangement, I couldn’t get enough.

I first read Bill Knott's work in an anthology with a bunch of other contemporary American poets. His work was so striking that I looked for a book all his own. I think Naomi was part of my college library's collection and then one year my mom bought me a copy for Christmas. It's been out of print for ages.

That a book could be seminal, in your poetic upbringing and many others, and yet out of print—that speaks to the state of poetry, but of course that doesn't really need to be spoken to. It's about as outmoded as jazz in the modern public consciousness, or more so, seen as a quirk or a mark of pretension. Was that a barrier to your own path to it? What was it about "The Poetry of Surrealism" and then Knott that seemed true to you, or addictive, or both?

Oh no but poetry is great and jazz is terrible!

And yet so many would say the opposite.

Wrong people, maybe.

The Poetry of Surrealism threw that out so completely, as did the Naomi poems. That was very exciting to me, as was encountering short poems—like Knott's—that are potent and complete in their brevity. It's ballsy to write a poem that's only three lines. Even "The Red Wheelbarrow" has 8!

If you're a person who's ever been deeply moved by a piece of music, you understand being stirred in a way that language can't capture or evoke on its own, even if language (as lyrics) are a part of what moves you. That is, the lyrics alone are not going to evoke the response that the lyrics and music does. Some of the best poetry reaches for that, for inspiring or articulating an internal response that straightforward language can't touch. But I also love funny poems. I don't expect or want them all to provoke some profound feeling.

Actually you know, it might also be useful for me to quote Bill Knott in Poem on Poetry, when he says it is "an electric." That's what it is, or can be. That's what those early books were like for me. A current to enter into.

That all sounds right. I personally hate any attempt at humor in literature, but I see that as some shortcoming of my own. A poem titled "Secretary" in The Naomi Poems: "McNamara the businessman sits at his desk / And stamps ‘PAID’ on the death-lists". This comes close to the humorous, or at least the facetiously banal, and I wonder if humor in some way is used to hedge poems that are more straightforward attempts at the profound, like the poem you just referenced, which goes "Poetry, / you are an electric, / a magic, field—like the space / between a sleepwalker's outheld arms . . ."

Right, and that's exactly what poetry is! I think about "the space between a sleepwalker's outheld arms" all the time, it's one of those darts that just sunk straight into me and will never leave, the way some people feel about, like, commercial jingles. "The space between a sleepwalker's outheld arms" is my "1-877-Kars-for-Kids".

The Naomi Poems are really a collection of love poems, and the political poems—which are the weakest ones, I think; it's so hard to make durable political art—can be understood (and perhaps, excused) in that context.

But isn't that Kars-for-Kids mindset, or the sort of morality it suggests and draws from, what gives the public its allergy to poetry? That is: you guys like media that appeals to the senses in the most basic of ways, an earworm, whereas the dart that stays with us, the artfolk, is something we'll never truly understand. They're both abstractions but they come out of opposite ends of the concrete. Perhaps I'm being antagonistic, but you should know I'm also playing devil's advocate to my own interests.

Oh well to me it's not a dichotomy. I have room for Kars-for-Kids and Bill Knott. Also it's not like I'm part of "the academy" or that anyone seriously involved in poetry knows I even exist, so I guess that sense of being pretentious for liking poetry is foreign to me. I also think maybe it's a gender thing, a man who's into poetry seems more affected than a woman who is, because poetry is sometimes seen as sort of limp and weak-hearted and fragile.

I like that thought, because it's honest. I think it's easy to invert the stereotypes of the art and gender, and to say, 'well actually, poetry is only for the strong and fearless', but that's so wildly unrealistic as to be the farce imagined by those who aren't interested in poetry. What could even be considered the poetry "academy"? And isn't any semblance of it what turns off everyone (us included, who find lit but late) in formal schooling?

Poetry is maybe like cooking in that in some ways it's a feminized sphere but the experts, the figureheads are men. And durable voices, like Sylvia Plath, whose poetry is still so read and loved (albeit mostly by girls and young women) are ignored. Then we get this notion that most people are hostile to poetry or just don't care about it. But sometimes people who otherwise never read it or think about it still want poetry to have a place in their lives, particularly a ceremonial one, at funerals and weddings. Or when they give someone a greeting card, and they make a selection based on which of the Hallmark poems feels truest or kindest.

I think of the poetry world as poets with tenure, poets who've won national awards. Typical hierarchical distinguishers. I wonder if the notion that most people don’t like poetry comes in part from its unprofitability. It usually makes a poor commodity but that doesn’t mean people don’t like it. (And every now and then a book like “Citizen” comes along and upsets both notions.)

I’m thinking about how I don’t judge someone who doesn’t seem interested in poetry, or doesn’t read it, but I do think less of someone who doesn’t have any opinions about music, for whom music is just aural scenery. There are a lot of people like that! But it’s easier to consume music because it doesn’t require your concentration and attention the way writing does, so I think they escape detection.

If they made everyone study music in school the way they often make people study poetry, I bet there would be a more obvious contingent of people who resent music. You really can't force art appreciation any more than you can force sports appreciation.

Ha. You must've known I was going to invoke jazz again (which, for the record, I am not a fan of). Isn't it also thought of, at least historically, as a minority (black) enterprise that stays in the public consciousness in the worst majority (white) way (Kenny G). It also makes its way into omnipresent rituals (customer service call waiting, elevators), but you're right—no one really 'resents' jazz because we didn't have to learn about every day for a year in 11th grade. But how would removing poetry from the curriculum help? How else could it be taught but the way it is?

I don't really have any complaints about my education, particularly since it seems like it turned out all right in the end. I wouldn't be surprised if years from now I start to appreciate form poems, and once again feel vaguely frustrated or irritated at all the time I wasted not loving form poems. Sometimes the artifacts that provoke us or enrage us the most are challenging us in the right way. For instance, I became obsessed with Rae Armantrout's poetry in grad school, because it made me furious. (It's fragmentary, a little obtuse, leaves lots of empty space on the page.) I would hate-read it obsessively. (Who likes this? Why would this ever be published?) And then one day, I read one of her poems and thought: "Wow . . . This is genius." You know, if you're going through hell, keep going!

What and where did you study?

I went to Johns Hopkins for poetry. It sounds more fun to me to study jazz than form poetry! Maybe we should give kids an option.

It seems to me there are maybe two (dominant) approaches to any type of art: one is, learning about it as a subject, like you would try to learn math, this sort of character-building process of becoming cultured. That would be when you go on the museum tour and someone points out aspects of the painting and you say, "oh right, cool." (This what I say at the museum all the time, hoping I will be excused from having to keep looking.) And that frame of engagement is very literal, like the art in question is a machine that can be understood or taken apart.

Then there's the second approach, when you respond to something already, even if you don't know why. You're drawn to it, you want to keep looking at it on your own, you want to talk about your reaction with other people. That's what I thought grad school was supposed to be, and college too—here are a bunch of like-minded people, talk amongst yourselves.

The second type is the only engagement that I want to participate in right now, but it would be tricky to give that freedom to kids. Or maybe that's what Montessori schools are supposed to do? I've never understood what Montessori schools do.

In the future deregulated education utopia of our design, children will decide which art they'd like to suffer through, be that jazz or poetry, stitching or home ec, football or interpretative dance, but they'll also decide whether they want to learn about it, or be reactive of it, and we'll all learn to love ourselves and those around us.

I want Black Mirror to do an episode about this!

Yeah, but then something would have to go atrociously wrong. What would it be?

No cliques anymore. The true aesthetes are devastated, their sense of identity unravels.

Keep going.

They want to split off to form their own society and they do but none of them have any practical skills.

Okay, this is coagulating now. Who will build our bridges, clean our shit?

Republicans. Sorry. Completely deteriorating answers from me.

Love it. We're nearly out of time, and I think this as good a time to call it as ever. Thanks for your time and words, Charlotte.

Thank you for asking! I am such a fan of the site, it was really an honor.