As eager as I was to participate in the Sealey Challenge this year, yet again I found myself falling short of its goal of reading one poetry collection per day in August. But this year maybe for a different reason: I’m not sure what books mean to me anymore.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how scarcity models and hierarchies of prestige impact contemporary publishing practices—for everything from individual pieces in small internet journals to the collection of poems that will win the Pulitzer this year. It’s an insidious practice, one directly tied to capitalism. It’s incredibly pervasive and also sometimes hard to put into words exactly what it is. But I think we all participate in it. No matter how much we fancy ourselves anti-establishment or how much we attempt to overturn the prevailing paradigm. As it stands it is the law of the land.
This blog article does a decent job of introducing what I think I’m getting at. The part that struck me most as ringing true was this excerpt:
Traditional publishing, like network television, is built on scarcity. In traditional publishing, “airtime” was shelf space. Only so many brick-and-mortar stores that carried books (of any type) existed. Those stores only had room for a certain amount of shelf space. Only a handful of books could fit face-out on those shelves. Several more could fit spine-out, but it’s harder to sell a book based on its spine than it is to sell a book based on the cover.
Because the shelf space is limited, traditional publishers only kept books with a fantastic sales record in print. The other books had a short shelf life before they were taken out of the stores and eventually out of print.
I called this the produce model, because I couldn’t think of any other way to express what was going on. Traditional publishers treated books like produce that would spoil because, in effect, sales do decline if a book has been out for a long time. (Sales don’t evaporate and in some cases, sales increase. But they will eventually plateau.)
And a little further on in the post I saw a version of myself I didn’t like. I saw the way I have often viewed and thought about publishing and writing summed up to be something petty and reductive:
In the scarcity model, having a publishing contract equals security. Traditional publishing contracts were (are) rare, and were (are) hard to come by, so a writer who had one had achieved something major. Writers who had more than one contract over the years had managed to prove themselves valuable. In a world of limited resources, when a major company spent those resources on a writer, that writer knew she had value.
That’s why writers saw publishing contracts as validation. And, as traditional publishers tossed books out into the produce heap, the writer had to prove her value over and over again. Because every traditional publisher relied on gut instinct as much as numbers (if not more than numbers, since numbers are so unreliable throughout all of traditional publishing), intangibles like a good review in a respected publication (like The New York Times Book Review) added value. Again, a good review in a respected publication was rare, scarce, something that didn’t happen often.
When I say that I saw the way I thought I’ll expound a bit: I wanted a book with Graywolf. I wanted poems in Poetry, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. I thought any poem published in ~tiddlywinks review~ (a generic whatever stand-in for twitter-based poetry journal) must be “worse” than a poem published in The New Yorker. Or that a book from ~tiddlywinks press~ was less valuable than one put out by Copper Canyon.
This paradigm controlled my thoughts, and I think even if it doesn’t control yours, that it still plays a part in your practice. Even on the most minute levels—like the bios you include with submissions. Consider how clinical they often are and how much they sound like a literary resume. (And as much as I abhor a lot of things Juliana Spahr has done or stood for, I think her article on literary prizes does a good job of illustrating the way nepotism and prestige play into who gets to pretend to escape the scarcity model through funding and recognition).
Very much related to these considerations was how for a while I considered being a poetry professor. To do that I knew I needed at the very least a book with a “reputable” press and some pretty swanky pub credits to my name. And probably an MFA from a prestigious school—again, all because of the scarcity model entirely dictates higher educational opportunities in this country. And also because of the systematic defunding of the arts.
About 2/3 of the way through my MFA however, and in all honesty probably propelled by the absolute horror SPD had been peddling in their practices and the inexcusable treatment of their staff, I began believing that participating in a practice of writing and publishing was not just a career question but was becoming (and increasingly so) an ethical question. I decided to take a pause from a lot of my participation in the poetry landscape/community/ecosystem because I didn’t know what ethical participation looked like anymore. I wish I had been able to track it down, but alas I couldn’t find it—a post/article/essay/SOMETHING by Chiwan Choi where I remember him laying out the reasons that submitting poems in the current paradigm was no longer ethical (if you find it, let me know, please).
I’m lucky, because in taking a pause from participating in the poetry ecosystem, I had the opportunity to fall back on a career in science and chose to do so. In my day-to-day I work as a geneticist in a lab that studies diabetes and rare pediatric endocrine disorders.
It makes sense then, with my constant engagement in science and the distance I’ve begun putting between myself and the poetic ecosystem, that poetry (something I practiced every day for years on end) would begin to feel estranged from me.
What drew me to poetry was its potential: to make us feel less alone, to amaze us with what it unearths, to inspire us and hone our thinking in certain ways. This was before I started writing. But as I got more and more involved in writing and publishing my work, poetry began to lose its appeal. It became a product, something commodified and evaluated. I fell into the trap capitalism lays for us. I still fall into it daily.
So, in a long way, I think what I’m saying is poetry has lost much of its magic by being made into something I’ve begun viewing as a product to be evaluated. And maybe a lot of that comes from my personal practices, even when I feel I’m being most generous (which is when I’m reviewing books).
And maybe this is a tangential rabbit hole, but I think the scarcity paradigm has a stranglehold on contemporary book reviewing as well. Much of the criticism levied (and often by the “old guard”) at contemporary poetic criticism has something to do with too much generosity. The repeated qualm is that reviews have become more and more of extended blurbs of praise rather than things actively engaging and evaluating the work done in a project. There is too much generosity and celebration for the old guard’s liking.
I think however that maybe folks who take up that qualm are missing the mark. It goes without saying that criticism and generosity are not mutually exclusive, but I think maybe folks forget that and have constructed a reductive binary: either “good” or “bad.” This manifests in reviews that are entirely “blurb-y” or ones that are intensely harsh and have become known as “take-downs.”
If you’re asking how to remedy or “fix” poetry criticism at this point, you’re not alone. I, too, am trying to constantly balance generosity and critique. But maybe we’re missing the point. I keep returning to this review by Fargo Tbakhi as a template for what a book review CAN be. In it he reaches for the personal and public simultaneously, not seeking to disentangle their webs, but rather to become subsumed in their patterns. I find this exposition helpful also in considering the mechanics of a book:
What this emphasis on “listening” elides is the importance of speaking, of the speech act and its performative effects on the world, its fundamental capacity to affect and enact. It’s not only important who is listening, and to whom, and with what generosity and ethics of an ear—it is equally important who speaks, of whom they speak, and how they do so. The interplay and relationships of this web of performative relationality—performer, subject, and audience—are what create meaning, what engender some feeling or set of feelings, what allows the world to change or shift.
Each time I read this excerpt I am reminded of the failures of poetic criticism. Not that we’re ~doing~ what we’re ~doing~ wrong, but that maybe we’re ~doing~ the wrong thing. I think our barometers for evaluating and considering poetry are wrong.
This is what I’ve been trying to get at all along: I stopped consuming poetry for the Sealey Challenge because I was sure I was missing the point of each book I was reading. And I think (and hopefully so) I’m not alone. I’ll parrot and distill the general idea behind how I and some folks I remember speaking to about this have been approaching books as of late:
We’re looking for books filled with “good” poems, ones that are stand-alone fantastic that would get thousands of retweets when published in the New Yorker. At face-value we’re asking for “bangers” and lots of them. We’re asking for a type of product that has valuable characteristics to us. That’s the problem.
In how we seek to evaluate the merit/skill/craft/lyricism/striking-ness of a poem we reduce it to a potential for two categories (maybe three): good, bad, and “I’m ambivalent about this poem.”
But the thing is that books have more purposes than being a compendium for potentially widely-sharable poems. The purpose of a book has a lot to do with who is speaking and to whom, and whether or not I should I participate, and if so, how.
When reviewing books I like to use this Steph Burt quote as my template:
My ideal practice of book reviewing, of which I always fall short, is all about balance: I want to capture the book’s intended and executed work; describe my experience as a reader, with a projective eye toward those of potential readers; attempt to locate the poetry’s relationship to literary traditions (plural emphasized here, as there is no on literary tradition) and its relevance among contemporary movements; and recognize and work against the ways in which my experience of the book may be influenced by power- and privilege-based biases.
This is a good start, and a really helpful template for engaging with a book under the purposes of reviewing, but I think it should also be said (and mostly to preserve the reviewer’s enjoyment of poetry) that you must be open to being led by the book. Not every book is meant for you to review, and for a number of reasons—all very different and personal. They differ for everyone.
What happened was that I started approaching every book as if I were going to review it and I stopped being led by the books into bewilderment. But, with this realization, I attempted to suspend my criticism and lean into the generosity I had been giving poems before I thought I knew better. The first book I tackled was I Burned at the Feast, a selected translation of Arseny Tarkovsky by Dmitri Psurtsev and Philip Metres.
When I treated the book generously I found the generosity returned. And maybe that is because Tarkovsky is a generous poet. That label applies to him for many reasons, chiefly among them being his contrarianism. I find much of his poems’ generosity being rooted in a spirit that pushes back against paradigms on many different fronts.
In their introduction to I Burned at the Feast, Metres and Psurtsev point to a recognizable pattern in the poems:
Critic Sergei Chuprinin has written that Tarkovsky’s gift was seeing “heaven in a wildflower,” alluding to Blake’s poem. Tarkovsky’s interest in mysticism, rare among Russian poets during the enforced atheism of the Soviet age, explored both a transcendental Judeo-Christian vision of humanity and an immanent pantheism.
Beyond how mysticism rooted itself in his poems, he also found himself projecting unheroic visions of the second World War flying in opposition to the propaganda and victory narratives being peddled by the Soviet state. He found himself harkening back to the musicality of Pushkin and earlier Russian writers. Tarkovsky was making music and prayer where the cupboards had been laid bare by the state.
Takovsky writes in one poem “we lived, once upon a time, as if in a grave, drank no tea.” Being born ten years before the Russian Revolution, Tarkovsky lived through two World Wars and the Communist regime, dying six months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a docu-journalist during WWII he served on the front-lines and had his leg amputated. Despite this, he found levity and grace on the page. And I want to make plain my deepest gratitude for what he’s done in his work—finding ways to express that his survival is not something beautiful, it is never beautiful to suffer, but that it was necessary to survive in order to find beauty. There is a subtle nuance there that gives so much more agency to the individual and robs the paradigm of toxicity employed by capitalist mindsets. Which is a lens that we as westerners are employing and must rid ourselves of if we wish to more fully engage with that era of Russian work.
I think I’ll end with this—Tarkovsky’s distillation of the idea that there is a chance that a survivable life can also be rife with joy. His poem My sight, which was my power... ends with this stanza:
I am a candle. I burned at the feast.
Gather my wax when morning arrives
So that this page will prompt you
How to be proud, and how to weep,
How to give away the last third
Of happiness, and to die with ease—
And beneath a temporary roof
To burn posthumously, like a word.
It is a kind of protocol, yes, but it is also a mantra. It is also a prayer. The spiritualism is evident and in service to our continuance. We were part of the whole and the whole continues. Whether or not our contribution is recognized or lauded in perpetuity was never the important thing. The important thing is that we lived and someone else will live after in what we have made. The important thing then becomes our making (from “Dreams”):
We all emerged out of the common cave
And are guided by the same carved cuneiform.
Rilke writes “God speaks to each of us as he makes us, / then walks with us silently out of the night.” After that it is the silence that stretches, for it is a long walk out of the night. This is the silence we must live in our whole lives. Tarkovsky’s gift was sitting in that silence and learning to hear the music of it.
I bid farewell to everything I was . . .
I bid farewell to everything I was,
everything I despised, disliked, and loved.And now, a new life begins,
I bid farewell to yesterday’s skin.About me, I no longer need any news.
I bid goodbye—right to the marrow.At last, I look down on what I was,
see my separate soul, no longer loved,and gaze with calm at myself, at him,
and leave them alone in the abyss.Hello, hello, my armor of ice.
Hello, bread and not me. Hello, wine.Dreams of night and butterflies of day,
hello, everything and everyone without me.I read the pages of unwritten novels,
I hear the round language of a round apple,I hear the white speech of a white cloud,
but cannot save for you even a wordbecause I was the weaker vessel.
I don’t know why I broke myself.I won’t hold in my hand the turning sphere,
won’t say to you a word without a word.Yet long ago, the fish and rocks and leaves
and people and grass found their words in me.
“I bid farewell to everything I was…” from I Burned at the Feast, by Arseny Tarkovsky, translated by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev copyright © 2015 by Marina Tarkovskaya.