james stotts : part three

has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

it never stands still.  the more it expands, the later i feel i’ve come to the party.  maybe too late.  i can’t admit to the confidence in the current state of poetry that is advertised by poetry critics every time they get a chance to survey what we’re doing nowadays.  i don’t feel like we’re on any right track.  i asked mark strand once, not long before he passed, about what it means to be a poet in america today.  he wasn’t afraid—he was confident—that he didn’t have real readers in real numbers anymore, that they barely exist.  i don’t know if it’s a case of anymore, but it was nevertheless discouraging.

i think of russia as a time capsule, where it’s possible to see an analogy to the slow decline in concern here—accelerated.  the collapse of the soviet union also ended most of the literary censorship, or at least pushed the boundaries enough that a lot of underground poets were allowed to come up for air, and that a whole century of verboten verse came to light without consequence, so that russians could openly recover their modern heritage.  of course, pussy riot is still pushing the envelope, and they have a literary vocabulary, but they aren’t poets.  anyway, this ‘democracy’ came with a huge dystrophy of esteem generally for poetry.  sergei gandlevsky, when asked if it was better or worse, after the fall of the soviet union now that he can publish his work in his own country, shrugged and said it was ‘по-другому.’ just that things were ‘different’ now.  the persecution was gone, but nobody cares.  you can see this delineated clearly between generations in russia.  but the older generation was never comfortable reading tsvetaeva and mandelstam.  they love mayakovsky and esenin, though.  that would be like us being allowed to learn frost, but being told that t.s. eliott and langston hughes and allen ginsberg were subpar and anti-institutional.  and ¾ of our poetry would be in an underground.

what i see now here wherever i look is a compartmentalized identity poetry.  every poet in his camp, using the poetry to check off the newest box.  a lot of energy being wasted.  american poets get a lot of nosebleeds because they don’t have enough iron in their diet, i think.

just one more comparison, though, because i think american poetry deserves pride of place.  russian speakers will swear that pasternak’s translations of shakespeare are superior, just due to the natural poetic capability of the russian language.  i don’t consider it arrogant to state that the original is the wellspring, and proof of english’s weedy bastard capacity, and that it has outbastardized, in a good way, the field.