I aim for the ecstatic

SHANNAN

In your Introduction to Best American Poetry 2019, you write:  

I became disenchanted with what amounted to beautiful architecture, glass fortresses of language whose walls and ceilings were lined with parallel facing mirrors in which the poet’s ego or aggressive wit or moral superiority or mannered experimentation gradually faded into an abyss of itself, ad infinitum, and the age lost its witness, and the reader, yearning for human connection, was crowded out by a narcissism that was hard not to see. And these works were written by some of the best minds! If they failed, it was not for lack of talent. The poems worked for their intended audiences. They won prizes, adulation. Yet their lack of engagement with the world beyond art limits their appeal.

I was excited to read this. It is something many of us young poets can be afraid to say out loud. I’m curious to know how, for you, poetry (an art so often self-centered even when not confessional) might become the opposite of narcissistic?

MAJOR

To some extent, this is a question of vision and how one understands their work operating within the larger sphere of culture and society. In the latter half of the last century, for example, witnessing became a term bandied about as a visible function of poetry whose purpose went beyond a mere framing of the self and its tribulations. I find poetry, however, that attempts to light a matchstick in the cave of our hearts somehow more compelling, for it is working to open us when so much is built to shut down the connections between each other and the earth we so necessarily need to emotionally survive. Many poems exhibit a great many qualities that I admire; witty, historically informed, intelligent, aesthetically adventurous, bewilderingly performative, aware of lineage, humorous.  But, when poetry acts to remind us that we are flesh and blood, bone and sinew, with a complex neural and emotional system, then, I feel such poems go beyond the pall of self-involvement that, as you rightly identify, blankets our efforts.

SHANNAN

The last lines of “Almost”, thrilling and evocative as they are, keep coming back to me:

We went to sip from our blue cups but the bombs

caught us merely blowing at the lips.

We were almost quenched.

Do you think poets — like, say, filmmakers or novelists — have social responsibility to respond to politics? Is poetry  inherently political or ought it to be beyond politics?

MAJOR

We’ve not necessarily a responsibility but we grow as artists and human beings when we align our talents with the universal struggle for dignity. I’ve noticed this is one of those areas in which we evolve; our political and social consciousness expand in direct relation to our growth as poets. We enter deeply into our material and seek to claim all aspects of our lives. Yet, the folly of existence has to always be in sight; we must laugh at ourselves as we cry for freedom, justice, and peace, and not only look at the world with a permanent grimace. Is it inherently political to be an artist? Yes, but we mustn’t lean only on such an essentialist fact.

SHANNAN

A lot of your own poems often place simple, domestic objects (for example, unwashed laundry at the very opening of “Love like Goths”) alongside grand abstractions (like love!). I sense that this snaps the poem’s elasticity to two apparently extreme ends — the utterly mundane and the brilliantly transcendent — thus creating a pleasing symphony. You also liberally use “you” and “we” throughout, however the “I” inevitably roars back into focus. Is this a conscious decision? I’m thinking, in particular, about this line from “Marching Guard”:

I loved you as much as I loved my oak-colored nose.

The image is so delightful and yet feels ironic (perhaps even sardonic) in the speaker’s mouth. It still retains a childlikeness which effuses through the piece:

I’ve journeyed more seas than ancient pirates

and only have low-interest bank statements to show for it

This “question” is, really, more an observation. I’m thinking about how David Lehman notes:

…the prejudice against humor in poetry is matched only by the bias in favor of the sincere autobiographical utterance. (American Poetry Review, 1995).

Your poems, for me, combine both rather masterfully. I invite you to address any aspect of what I’ve inquired into here.

MAJOR

For a long time, I’ve approached writing poems, keen for and desirous of, juxtaposition and the forceful utterance that drops as a ferocity of seeing. Mostly, I aim for the ecstatic, and yes, the effusive gesture that says I delight in the world and its inhabitants. I’m grateful for your reading and kind remarks here. For better or worse, I am inclined to make the autobiographical utterance, for I lack a strong sense of humor. On one end of that polarity, critics wonder if the poet sees the tragedy and horror of existence (climate crises, wars, ideological violence) and on the other, critics want poets to look on the world through rose-tinted glasses, to avoid solipsism, to not embody and claim the calamity that reaches into our homes. I say, sing your flesh and body and mind until it is received as an example of grace and love.