Love Letter to Lyric Poetry (!) and the Academic Adjacent

As a part of the promotional work for OO, I did a quick interview with Steven Beattie at Quill & Quire and one of the questions Beattie asked me was how my creative work relates to or reflects my academic work in Anarchists in the Academy. I don’t remember the exact words I said in response, but it went a little something like this: “In that book, I thought there could be radical work happening in the academy. I don’t think that anymore.” What exactly I said there, I’ll never know for sure, because that jaded little quip never made it into the resulting article, which, by the way, was wonderful, and finally gives credit to my manicures (homemade and purchased) which I never think get enough attention. It’s probably a good thing that my railing against the corporatized limitations of the academy didn’t make it into that trade publication: my position as an instructor is precarious, and probably all the more precarious as teaching shifts online and enrollment plummets. But, here I am writing it out online for more people to read, not because I want to self-sabotage (though there’s always a little thanatos in everything I do), but because I think it’s important to say. The real radical, critical, thoughtful work I’ve read has been related only at the most tenuous and supplemental level to the academy. When I look back at my long, long, long education and the time since when I’ve been teaching at the post-secondary level, I think that the experimentalism of my writing and publishing practice and the radicalism of my politics have arisen in spite of or against the academy. The only time my academic work has fostered good critical work has been when I engaged with other academics outside of these academic spaces, or in some kind of grey adjacent.

What did it for me, what really sealed the deal in closing my hopes for radical academic work (and sorry not sorry Paul Barrett, I know that’s like the tenth time I’ve said “radical” here) was my dissertation writing workshop. We were a motley crew of graduate students working in different genres and eras and trying desperately to finish our respective projects against timelines and committees, the time-sucks of teaching and writing, and then some of these brilliant people even had children to care for on top of all of that. We met at different times in different places with different levels of preparedness and different kinds of work to share. In fact, the only thing that remained constant was that we brought food and it was luxurious and delicious and we ate until we were gluttonously full.

The good thing about us all being at different points in our work, and that our work was so varied, was that we could, for lack of a more appropriate academic phrase, call each other on our bullshit. I was the only one writing on avant-garde poetics, and they’d say “I don’t see what the point of this is” and “you’re pretty utopian about this but I think it’s elitist” and “fuck this guy, he sounds like his head is up his ass.” Most often, they called me on my unfair, knee-jerk dislike of “lyric poetry,” a sweeping generalization I used to describe any poetry that didn’t look like the experimental work I wanted to read. I decided fairly early on in my undergrad that I didn’t like that kind of sense making square work, and it took a long time to undo the shitty elitism of that. I don’t know if I would have gotten there if it weren’t for the writing workshop pushing back against my self-aggrandizing claims.

What do you do when you’re a melancholic elitist studying the avant-garde and you become so close with scholars working in different fields? You say to each their own and whatever, and you move on. But what do you do when one of those scholars reveal themselves to be a beautiful poet of that very same lyric variety you’ve decided doesn’t do anything interesting or thoughtful or critical? And, what’s worse, she’s interesting and thoughtful and critical, too? Well, my friends, you’ve gotta change your mind. Enter the beautiful and brilliant Sam Bernstein.

A week or so ago (I don’t know exactly … what has happened to time these days of isolation? What is a day anymore anyway?) my partner and I drove by Sam’s house to drop off some seeds and a copy of OO and watch her beautiful children play on the sidewalk. Later, she wrote me the most beautiful email thanking me for the gifts and praising the book—all of which was lovely—and saying something I’ve heard her say a hundred times: that she tries to work, to write, but that the daily life of keeping that family fed and clothed and inspired and vibrant always gets in the way. Sam says this often, and part of it is (of course) that writer’s blessing and curse that they want every day to be a writing day if they choose to write. But there is also this thought, I know, in Sam’s head as it is in my head as it is in all the heads of all academics past and present that we should be writing and that the other stuff we do is not work and, worse, that that other stuff gets in the way of work. I sent Sam a link to my earlier post on Kate and exclaimed with feminist zeal about kitchen tables as poetic spaces. But, I wonder now if that’s an easier thing for me to say when my kitchen table almost always has a book or two on it and is never cluttered by snacks for children or mess from our crafts. Hell, I don’t even feed my cat; we have a robot that does that for us. It is. It must be.

And if it was me in Sam’s kitchen, cleaning and then cooking and then cleaning again for everyone and trying to write some poetry in between, I’d have written back to my avant-garde ass saying “Hmmmm sounds nice for you.” But, that’s not what Sam did. She wrote me back with more poetry! And she said:

               Now if ever I'm tempted
               to think my kitchen island
               is not a proper desk, that to interrupt
               thought to put dinner on or wash a dish
               is to undermine it, I'll think again
               on you and Kate at the kitchen table,
               happy crafty witchy scholars
               of the now and ever, sewing worlds together,
               and regain my thread.

That is the thing about what the workshop did for me and what Sam continually does for me. She makes me think about readers, about poetry as a thing that gets read. The avant-garde is so often a genre for writers more than readers. I’m that kind of poet often, I think. And as much as I truly believe, as Beattie quotes me in that Quill & Quire interview, that visual poetry “just lets everyone in,” there is something about that invitation that seems to appeal, largely, to other poets (and especially other visual poets). There is something so insular about this work. But, writing these posts and having to think about what other people might be interested in reading is forcing me to open up, to recognize what the workshop and what Sam especially had been telling me for years: access isn’t always a question of whether a reader can “understand” a work, it’s a question of whether or not a reader is invited in. And if you’ve ever read Sam’s poetry, particularly in Spit on the Devil (Mansfield, 2017), you know that Sam is a master of the opening of the poem. I love the openings most in her poems about her children. From “The First Month”:

               There was no fear.
               Only the recurrent
               worry of dropping her
               over the banister
               when walking from room to room.

“Tooth” starts “The first hurt / I can’t soothe.” And even I, childless zany Zia Dani, am in and empathetic and it’s because I was invited.

               So, what is this? A warning against elitism and hasty judgments against poetry? No. Well, maybe. But, mostly, it’s to say that all of these conversations about the power of poetry to move things and do things and comfort us and touch us, those conversations can’t be conversations without inviting a person to respond. Conversation needs listening and it needs changing. Writing needs to think about a reader, even if it’s never planning on being read. If I am not willing to hear or to read or two change how I’m thinking, I’m not having conversations at all. And if I’m not doing that, this is all soliloquy and I’m not here for it.