I’ve been reading poetry manuscripts to judge a contest. I’ve been sent four finalists. I ask myself what makes each group of poems a book. Out of the individual poems, is there a gathering that feels like a formed thing? Of course there’s always the voice, coming from one person, that makes the poems sound as if, yes, I know this person. But has the voice given me a whole—not like a story, necessarily at all—but something held stickily together like a ball of dough, maybe?
Like a country. All these disparate voices, disparate hopes, ideas, races. How can we call ourselves a country? We barely have a common myth any more. George Washington and the cherry tree? Honest Abe? Christopher Columbus? Nah. If you call each of us citizens a poem, how can we make a book of these? What will be the thread we can pull that gathers at the top so that it could hold things in?
What is the best balance of individual and collective? Russia and China, for example, have traditionally supported the whole, the state, rather than the individual. Republicans say they support the individual, a person’s individual rights, say, to carry a gun. Democrats say they support the collective ideal of safety over that individual’s right.
Ah me, the seductive rathole of politics! Returning, with some relief, to poems, I’ve noticed that many recent books of poetry are tightly woven together by a continuous narrative. A little like a novel in poems. They’re very enjoyable to read in that way. The other route is a book of poems that you know has been written poem by poem with no thought at the time of forming anything larger. Poems that hug you down into themselves, one by one.
Jerry is going to have a pacemaker put in tomorrow. This is one in a long thread of his health events, back and hip surgeries, on and on. You could make a narrative of these, a quite true one. You could write a poignant description of his labored walking, with a cane. You could make a narrative of my cancer (I already did), my other less serious surgeries, my recent back pain. The narrative could take the flavor of woe-is-me, or woe-is-him. Or of bravery, or smiling endurance, in the face of difficulties—that would make a good one! I could mention our long awaited vacation in Arizona that had to be cancelled---drama, sorrow! Humans love a story, the more troubles, the better.
I’m sorry, though, when the story almost completely takes over, because—at least from my own experience—when I launch into a story, I subtly distort to make the plot move the way I want. I exaggerate and minimize. And the teller herself becomes awfully important. Gather round, listen to me. Please applaud, or gasp, or sob, when I finish.
For good or ill, plot has overridden the individual moments. The moment, say, when a single poem could pull you down inside itself. The moment when you have the opportunity to experience fully, without straining toward the moral of the story, or whatever. Does any of this make any sense? I don’t want to jump back into politics here. Or even books of poems.
But.
The book of poems I’m choosing—I have made up my mind now—feels like a good balance. These poems feel written one by one, but there is a loose arc, one that floats to the surface the way memory informs our moments, simply floating up now and then as reminders, informers. Each poem is dense with the moment, with loving attention to detail.
That quality alone does not a good book make, nor a good poem make, or a good country make. But still. It’s something to notice.