So I just read an essay about disassociation in poetry, specifically the urge some poets have to reject narrative, to embrace a disjointed structure that pivots and flails all the way down the page. It was Tony Hoagland's "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment." And my poetry world just fell to pieces.
As artists, we embrace many methods of conveying meaning (or un-meaning or feeling or whatever it is we do with our art), and dissociation is a valid route towards successful art. In both a prior essay ("Fragment, Juxtaposition, and Completeness," also included in his essay collection Real Sofistikashun, Graywolf Press, 2006) and this one, Hoagland provides demonstrations of where this technique succeeds and where it fails. As successes we have Guillarme Apollinaire's collages, Louis Aragon's own acrobatic-associative poems, and work from contemporary poets like Mattea Harvey and G. C. Waldrep. He shows how the disassociative, as opposed to the narrative, brings with it certain assumptions and privileges about how meaning works, its ultimate graspability, how modern life may in fact be reflected in the fragmented realities presented by the poetry of discontinuity.
I like it when art is moving. Any and all sorts. I appreciate orchestration, complex melodies that interplay, polyrhythms and improvisation. Accidental off-notes that don't make musical sense but convey a lot of soul do it for me too. I like long academic trade-journal essays that juggle myriad abstractions and recolor the world afterwards, yet something about the simplicity and common-sensibility of a Buddhist koan can floor me just the same. I'm not picky, but I think I have and eye for when art succeeds and when it doesn't.
As Hoagland's essay starts to wrap up, I'm wondering, as is Hoagland, if discontinuity (a technique that originally set out to (somewhat) represent the alienation, instability, hustle-and-bustle, insecurity, incomprehensible complexities, and sensory-synaptic overload embodied in our contemporary post-industrial culture) actually achieves its goals, here being both representing chaos and creating something moving. I tend to resist narrative and privileged discontinuity in my own poetry for the representative capacity stated above. Life is complex and confusing and not everything is made clear all the time. American culture asks us to ignore a lot about the way things work, while I always want to know more, being the curious mind and concerned citizen that I am. I am a multifaceted being full of contradictions, so why shouldn't my poetry reflect that too? What's wrong with portraying things as they really are, even if the results are unpleasant?
And then Hoagland asks if discontinuity works against the very medium of poetry itself. And I threw the book across the room.
I get that narrative continues to be used in all sorts of writing because it has proven itself successful at being able to do things like drama, arc, tension and release, dynamic juxtaposition, holding emotions hostage, and there's a universal understand-ability about stories. If you don;t know what you're doing in poetry, an easy, nonthreatening, stable place to start is to tell a story. Granted, a poem is more than a story, but stories work. They are one of the main ways humans convey and have conveyed meaning to each other for centuries, and there's tons of room within the form to play around and do more than simply "tell a story."
Now, post-Hoagland, I am tempted to agree with his argument about discontinuity undermining the major purpose of poetry. I think the main reason discontinuity in poetry can work to and has worked to undermine itself is not so much because it "leaves the reader confused" as it DENIES THEM ORIENTATION, a technique which does nothing to engage the reader in the art itself. Sure, there are curious minds who want to figure things out (myself included), but poetry isn't math--it shouldn't need to be "figured out." Like most slam-bangin' art, poetry has the potential to work on multiple levels. My favorite poems tend to succeed via BOTH surface-level readings and that more intense, active read where you read for technique more than content, where what's not there matters as much as what is. And disassociation / discontinuity denies the reader the surface, asks them to only read with intensity, something many readers find more cumbersome than pleasant. So to write from a position that provides a confusing surface, where meaning resides only in the obscured depths, begs the question: What are you expecting from your reader? Sure, if we do the work you're asking of us, we'll be able to take something from your art. Be we should WANT to do that work--something in the art itself should hook us from the start. If the start pushes the reader away, then what do you expect the reader to do?
Then there's somebody like Dean Young who can seemingly balance these two tensions (the inclusive Dionysian urge towards chaos and the exclusive Apollonian urge towards order) without an adverse boost in reader alienation. He flails everywhere, yet the reader remains grounded. Or maybe the poem flails while the author remains grounded? Perhaps the images can flail because the tone conveys them in a familiar manner? How how how. Certainly worth investigating.
This highlights my own struggle with audience-relations. I have been known to say to poets who bring up the idea of writing for an audience, "Screw the audience. Create. If you are making art for your audience, you might as well be making commercials, or paintings of soup cans," but that sentiment betrays not just my privilege of the creative act as opposed to the product (which I'll blog about later), but an attitude, which is where Hoagland's essay uppercut my poetry jaw wide open.
continued in part 2
J
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