by Rose Kelleher
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There’s nothing poets love better than sneering at other poets. Those whose taste is markedly different from ours aren’t just bad poets; they’re not poets at all. Not true poets, anyway. They have no integrity, no real love of words. Every choice they make is driven by ego and ambition. Ask any poet what the biggest problem is with contemporary poetry, and the answer is always the same: Other Poets. If only those formalists would stop being so stuffy and hidebound; if those verse librists weren’t so undisciplined and self-indulgent; if those academic careerists weren’t so cryptic; if those Sunday poetasters weren’t so literal-minded; then maybe poetry wouldn’t be going to Hell in a handbasket. Of all the ongoing poetry wars, the one that most interests me these days is Edgy vs. Nice. I guess it’s because the arguments are all ad hominem, and that’s more fun than the intellectual stuff. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "edgy" as "daring, provocative, or trend-setting." What’s daring and what’s trend-setting, however, are often very different things. I’m using "edgy" here in the "daring, provocative" sense because that’s how I’ve heard it bandied about lately. In that sense, poets who write on edgy themes are considered edgy even if their writing style isn’t. (Three paragraphs in, and already someone, somewhere, is cursing me under his breath. Yes, I’m talking about poems that are about things. By some people’s definition, such poems cannot be edgy. Well, I happen to feel like talking about subject matter. One war at a time, please.) Here’s how poets see each other across the Edgy/Nice divide: Edgy poets care about nothing but shock value. They don’t write about edgy things because they feel moved to write about those particular things, but because being edgy gives them a certain cachet. Terrified of being accused of triteness, they rummage around in garbage cans for poem ideas, hoping to find something suitably dark and gritty. Edgy poets have no appreciation for the insights to be found in moments of quiet contemplation; they’re all about blood and gore, dead prostitutes, crucifixes immersed in urine, and orgies. Though they appear daring, they’re really playing it safe, hiding behind their fashionable edginess. At heart, they’re cowardly conformists. So who really are the cowardly conformists? That’s easy: Other Poets. Who’s really edgy? The definition suggests edgy poets are a distinct minority, but it’s a verifiable fact that every male poet thinks he’s edgy. It matters not a whit what kind of poetry he writes. Search the world over for the stodgiest of stodgy male writers, and I guarantee he fancies himself a rebel, even if his rebellion consists in using archaic diction to pontificate on the virtues of temperance. I’ve heard The Shit Creek Review described as edgy. At the time, I objected. There was something pretentious and dorky-sounding about it: I kept imagining Conan O’Brien doing one of his ironical cool-cat moves and saying, "Watch out, baby. I’m edgy! Rowr!" But TSCR’s submission guidelines mention the use of form as potentially edgy. Formalists, edgy? I thought we were all a bunch of prudish, whalebone-corset-wearing anal retentives. That’s what they tell me, anyway. But free verse is still predominant, and bucking trends, arguably, is edgy. By that logic, Candelabrum, with its formal poems about flowers and sunsets, is twice as edgy as TSCR. After all, poems about flowers and sunsets have been out of favor for ages. They’re not edgy; therefore they’re edgy. If "formal therefore edgy" doesn’t hold water, neither does "formal therefore not edgy." Mike Alexander, one of the administrators at Sonnet Central, once went to a poetry reading by Sapphire, and was listening appreciatively until the end, when she sneered, "Can you believe some people are still sitting in the closet writing sonnets?" The audience laughed, which is not surprising, since most people think of sonnets as flowery, archaic love poems. But Sapphire is a well-known poet with an MFA degree; she’s speaking from a position of authority when she tells people sonnets are for wimps. I’d fight her on this, but I’m too wimpy. Instead, I’ll just say that in my opinion, a sonnet is as good or bad, as tame or shocking, as shallow or insightful, as what you put into it. Consider Tony Barnstone’s "White Pig, Dark Pig," a sonnet about Japanese cannibalism during WWII which appears in the December 2006 issue of The Cortland Review1:
Is this what people write when they’re sitting in closets hiding from reality? Would sitting somewhere else have made the poem come out with different line breaks? Something bothers me about this defense, though: it implies that Barnstone’s sonnet is exempt from the charge of hiding from reality only because it’s about something ugly. In the same issue, Myrna Goodman’s "November Morning, 1972" is a softer poem, a poem no one would consider edgy. It’s about a suburban woman giving a neighbor boy a ride to school. I’m sure some critics would consider it worthless pap. There’s no sex, no urban grit, no gobbets of gore; therefore it’s not rooted in the real world. It doesn’t matter if, as I suspect, Goodman’s poem describes something she actually experienced and Barnstone’s was concocted from third-hand accounts while he sat at his desk; his poem will be seen as more realistic. Edgy poetry isn’t necessarily more realistic than other poetry, but poetry as a whole would be unrealistic without it. Obviously you wouldn’t want poetry to be all edgy, or all nice; the difference is that there’s more danger of the latter actually happening. Given that most readers don’t like to be made uncomfortable; given that the poetry scene, in print at least, is dominated by book-loving college graduates who have never, say, been homeless, or killed a man; given that our writing always reflects our experience, directly or indirectly; the Edgy:Nice ratio is always low. In "The Poetry of Nicey-Nice," Joseph Salemi criticized Rhina Espaillat’s poetry for being too nice. Well, I like it, but it certainly isn’t edgy. One part of his review that bugged me, though, was his suggestion that she’d purposely adopted a fashionably doubtful stance toward religion. It’s true that devotional poems are not fashionable. How often do you come across an unabashed expression of religious faith—a specific faith, mind you, not the nebulous, universal kind—in a poetry magazine? But it doesn’t follow that Espaillat was only pretending to be doubtful in a cynical attempt to curry favor. I’ve written a few poems about religious doubt. I didn’t do it to score points with some editor, but because I doubt. Nor did I decide to doubt after consulting a focus group; I’ve never had any choice in the matter. Are poems about doubt "nicer" than poems about faith? It depends on the venue, and the kind of faith. Are we talking about Poetry or First Things? And what’s the message: that the beauty of spring should remind us of Christ’s resurrection, or that fornicators roast in Hell forever? Whether your poetry is nice or edgy, someone’s going to question your motives. I learned this when a poem of mine was called edgy in an online workshop. (Yeah, that’s right. I’m edgy, baby. Rowr!) Soon afterwards, another reader mentioned my poem as one of several that had gotten her thinking about the nature of pandering. The implication was that we’d consciously tried, like ad execs, to come up with topics that were sexy and attention-grabbing. In truth, my poem described a scene (involving a man, marijuana, and an eleven-year-old girl) I’d felt moved to write about because it was thought-provoking. I had hoped the poem would get readers thinking about things like complicity and responsibility. Which brings me to my next two points: (1) edginess is relative, and (2) it can be distracting. Where the poet may have intended to explore some idea, readers may see only selfconscious, gratuitous edginess. Good edginess is never gratuitous. Take "After Experience Taught Me..." by W. D. Snodgrass2. Talk about edgy: a poem that tells you how to rip a man’s face off. The first time I read it my reaction was "Wahhh! I didn’t want to know how to do that!" It’s a horrifying image, but it has to be horrifying. The poem ends with this question:
If you weren’t shuddering at the thought of ripping someone’s face off, the question wouldn’t have so much weight. In asking yourself, "Would I do that to save my own life?" you end up taking stock of your life, your character, your most basic values. How many nice poems make you do that? James Kirkup’s "The Love that Dares to Speak its Name"3 was so edgy in 1976 that its publisher, Denis Lemon, was convicted of "blasphemous libel." The poem describes homosexual acts committed with Christ’s dead body. To some that may sound like an attack on Christianity, but the poem is anything but. How to explain this to a Christian who finds it offensive? Well, first you have to know that the title is a play on "the love that dare not speak its name," a phrase from a poem quoted by Oscar Wilde during his trial for "gross indecency," i.e. being gay. Next you have to imagine what it’s like to be treated by Christians as if Christ had died on the cross for everyone but you. And finally, you have to read the poem and see for yourself how much the narrator loves Christ. He expresses his love symbolically through sex:
Kirkup is saying that he’s human too, and as such, worthy of Christ’s love: "He loved all men, body, soul and spirit - even me." He’s saying it in an in-your-face way because others have been aggressive about excluding him, and he’s got to barge his way through to Christ’s table. For an edgy poem, it’s really quite sentimental and life-affirming. Edgy poetry is often nice under the surface. Few would deny that Nigel Holt’s "Perversion Sonnets"—a series of love poems written in the voices of coprophiliacs, urolagnists and other fetishists—are edgy. Much of the imagery is gory or scatological. Whatever your initial reaction, odds are you’re not going to say, "Aw, isn’t that nice." But the series is about love, something that takes many shapes and can be found in surprising places. Specifics aside, that’s nice. Still, Holt’s sonnets probably won’t be read on the air by Garrison Keillor. In his review of Good Poems, August Kleinzahler famously attacked Keillor for (you could say) not being edgy4. Really, I think his problem with Keillor was that he felt Keillor was trying to impose some kind of edgy-free vision on the poetry world, as opposed to just publishing one nice book. Poetry wars are like that. Any sensible person knows that good poems can be edgy or not, formal or not, etc., but every poet is convinced the Other Poets are bent on wiping out his tribe. Traditionally, Edgy poets have been more justified in this belief than Nice poets; after all, when was a poet ever censored or jailed for niceness? On the other hand, nowadays, what is there to be afraid of? Daring implies risk. Baudelaire took risks, but in the United States, in 2007, nobody’s going to clap you in irons or even ban your poems for obscenity. The worst that can happen is your officemate Googles you and decides you’re a weirdo; and let’s face it, you were never going to be friends with her anyway. Same with political poems. We speak of poets "courageously taking a stand," and that’s certainly true in some countries, such as China5 and Morocco6, but American poets have little to fear. I suppose it would be risky to write a perfectly unambiguous poem urging readers to blow up the White House, but even then I doubt you’d be in real trouble unless you actually included bomb-making instructions in the poem. Let’s test that theory:
I’ll let you know what happens (assuming they give me Internet access from Guantanamo). For most English-language poets, "risk" means the risk of not being published, which means the risk of not getting a nice ego stroke and a complimentary copy of some magazine that will be read by the other poets published in that issue. I suppose if you’re on a publish-or-perish career track, that’s a real risk. But the Snodgrass poem was published. Sapphire’s poems on child sexual abuse and other edgy themes have been widely published. Bukowski was wildly successful in his day and is still popular now. Profanity is no longer taboo; everybody and his brother knows Larkin’s "This Be The Verse" by heart. I hate to say it, but the only thing that’s still edgy, really, is racism. It’s the only thing people will admit to being shocked and offended by, the only thing that still gets censored. Thankfully it’s also old-fashioned, otherwise we’d be drowning in Neo-Nazi verse by poets anxious to appear daring. So what am I saying? I suppose I should try to wrap all this up with some kind of point. Okay, here goes:
Notes: 1 The issue is online here: http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/06/december/index.html?ref=home 2 For the full text, see: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171513 3 For the full text, see: http://torturebyroses.gydja.com/tbrkirkup.html 4 All three of our names begin with K, end with R, and have two L's. Isn't that, like, really weird? 5 A Chinese poet named Qin Zhongfei went to jail last year for writing a satirical poem. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/07/AR2007010701120.html 6 Moroccan poet Ali Lmrabet was imprisoned in 2003 for writing satire. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/25/AR2005042501591.html
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