Still More Notes from the Dodge Poetry Festival

In one of Billy Collins’ poems – the title is escaping me now and the book is at school – he reflects on the influence, or the image, of the bicycling poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the same gentleman who wrote a meandering, acrobatic poem called “Constantly Risking Absurdity.” In his session from the Main Stage on Friday, Collins discussed the absurdity so many English teachers risk when they ask the question, “So what is the poet trying to say?” or when they themselves take on the clarifier role: “So, in this poem, Dickinson (substitute Shakespeare, Wordsworth or whomever you wish) is trying to say…”

The implication, of course, is that the poet tried but couldn’t say. And that our special group of fifteen year-olds in this formerly obscure little classroom is going to say what Emily Dickinson did her best but failed to say.

The laughter that followed the riff I summarize above was divided into three types: genuine laughter that follows the saying of something funny; knowing laughter of teachers who recognize such absurdity from the mouths of their students; uncomfortable laughter of teachers who know themselves guilty of such a deed but would rather that others believe they’re laughing at someone else. I’m not sure which of those laughters was my laughter.

I can’t believe I’ve never said “so-and-so is trying to say…” You see such a scene on TV or in the movies and the sentence just seems such a natural part of the journey into figurative meaning. At the same time, I’ve tried to be very explicit with students that poems don’t mean anything. Poems simply say something, and readers make meaning of what’s been said. In any discussion about poetry, the poem simply provides the facts of the discussion.

And why do people have to give shit to Billy Collins?

Here’s a man who writes poetry that finds a moment, a real moment, writes his way through that moment up to a moment of truth, and then gives you a moment to think about it in that silence that I mentioned a few posts back. Clearly his poetry is momentous. But if your sensibility is a different kind of sensibility, then you can move on.

So this shaggy college student stands up and suggests, in a rambling discourse about the “dire estate of contemporary poetry,” that Collins is somehow harmful to the cause, whatever the cause is. And I’ll let it go that this moron has no frame of reference to compare this “estate” of poetry to any other state of contemporary poetry. But the idea behind his barely coherent effort at intellectualism was that humor or open-ness somehow devalues a poem, that a poem can’t have weight if it has lightness.

Well you can’t really tell me that “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July” doesn’t have power. Sure, you’re laughing, and then you finish and turn the page. But then you realize the number of experiences you’re not going to have, the fact that your observing life is so much fuller than your experiencing life, and you’ve been given a chance to reflect on the space between carpe diem and status quo. And you want to tell me that “The History Teacher” doesn’t have some quality rage in it? I could go on and on, but the point is humor only undermines content when it is misplaced. As Collins said, humor is epistemological, a way of looking at the world. I might twist it a little and say that humor is a way of dealing with the world. In either case, I put a lot more stock into the ideas of a person who has a sense of humor, a sense of perspective, than I do into the person carrying oh-so-publicly the weight of his seriousness.

There’s a part of me that hopes Shaggy never clears the fog enveloping him just so we have more people to mock. My mother would scold me for that – heck, I’d scold my kids for that – but I guess I’m just not nice. Sorry.

Still to come in the final sequel to Notes from the Dodge Poetry Festival: Tony Hoagland.