Poe t r y Is N o t a Pro j e c t
People read poems like newspapers, look at paintings as though they were excavations in the City Center, listen to music as if it were rush hour condensed. They don’t even know who’s invaded whom, what’s going to be built there (when, if ever). They get home. That’s all that matters to them. They get home. They get home alive.
-James Tate
Poe t r y Is N o t a Pro j e c t by Dor othea Lasky illustr ations by Sa r ah Glidden
UDP :: DOSSIER
Habi t u s
I once heard a scholar use the term “project” as he introduced another poet at a reading. He went on and on: “Her project echoes Dickinson’s project [blah blah blah].” The comparison seemed fine, but I wasn’t really sure the poet in question had a “project” per se. Nowadays, poetry critics and scholars often refer to an entire body of work by one poet as a “project,” but I don’t think poems work that way. I think poems come from the earth and work through the mind from the ground up. I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain, rather than things that are planted within the earth by the brain. I think a poet intuits a poem and a scientist conducts a “project.” I don’t know. That seems wrong, too. Poets and scientists are very similar in a lot of ways. I shouldn’t make them seem so different. But I do think there is a distinction. And the distinction, I think, is very important to how we come to think of poetry in the 21st century. Because I want this new century to be full of people who write poems, not full of poets who conduct projects and do nothing more.
There are sure to be a few people who will get upset about some superficial slant to the mere bringing up of this idea. “But, I have a project!” some people will undoubtedly say. And others will attest: “Oh, and the origin of the term project in the context of poetry happened around the time that DADA...” [snooze]. The truth is, I’m not trying to insult what any poet does to make poems. I am trying to say that, more likely than not, what most poets do is not a project but is an act of intuition. Maybe I should leave it all alone. Perhaps nowadays a poet who wants to make a living as a poet needs to have a project to survive and I need to realize this for what it is. But whatever the case (and not that this case is not important), I don’t think Emily Dickinson gave a damn about a project. The word constricts the immense body of work that she has left us. I get it. The term project comes from the visual art world. And other worlds too, like science, business,
and education. But especially from the visual art world. And if there is one thing that poets would like to be today, it’s visual artists. Why? Because visual artists have all the money. Still, having a project (and naming it) is a powerful tool. A poet with a project has everything set out before he even gets started. A poet with a nameable project seems wise, and better than other poets with unnameable ones. But this kind of thinking strikes me as a load of BS that nobody wants to acknowledge as such. I think that if you really are a poet, you don’t think this is how poetry works. When I mentioned “intuit” above—that poets intuit poems—I really meant that to create something, like a poem, means that the outside world of an artist and the internal drives within her blend and blur. But there is something so human, so instinctual about the drive, that it might be hard to be conscious of it enough to name it. Naming your intentions is great for some things,
but not for poetry. Projects are bad for poetry. I might argue that a poet with a “project” that he can lucidly discuss is a pretty boring poet, at best. Or that a poet with a “project” might not be a poet at all. Or only a baby poet, not a great one. A poet who says he has a project probably has no sense of the idea of habitus and its intersection with the act of creation. Which is to say that when a poet interacts with the field or domain of poetry, she is aware of the immense history she represents in her words enough to let herself be crushed by it. Yeah. I think the term project has nothing to do with poetry. Moreover, I think the notion of a poetic project may actually be very toxic to poetry. And toxic to poetry not only in the way that it is bad for the poets who are living and working in the context of poetry today, but toxic to the new, burgeoning poets among us. And the future ones, who are yet to be. The term “project” seems to suggest that a poet can set about his life path knowing what he is doing at all times. And to
tell a young poet that is to make him feel like he has to know how to create both a project and a poem. It’s hard enough to create a poem. If he is destined to be a great poet, he will never know what his project really was, no matter what he says it is, was, or what he might imagine it could be. Which is to say that a poem, as a thing, resists being talked about linearly in its very nonlinearity. In its very nonlinear life. In the poem’s actual life, goddamn them.
An Exam p l e
Reading this, you are probably looking for an example right about now of what the difference is between a person who is conducting a project and a person who is writing a poem. That’s fair—to want an example. Truly, the difference is mainly in what gets written. It is the idea made into action or object, and what life is in there. I gave you an example earlier of someone who wrote poems—Emily Dickinson. But sure, someone might argue she might have created her poems in a manner much like a project. That’s not really the point. It doesn’t really matter if the way she wrote her poems is the way we might think of someone conducting a poetic project today. What matters is how we talk about her work. And what value we give the discussion of her ideas versus the output. And the fact that being able to talk about the process of your work as a poet can sometimes breed its mediocrity—to be that detached. Because sometimes when I hear a poet talking about his so-called projects, I see him flying high above his poems. And to write a poem is to be a
maker. And to be a maker is to be down in the muck of making and not always to fly so high above the muck. But perhaps a real example would be good. One day, many years ago, I was walking along the street, minding my own business, thinking of my future, and all that. As I turned the corner, I ran into an acquaintance of mine. He happened to be a poet. This acquaintance asked me what I was doing and I think I said “nothing much.� I asked him the same and he told me that he was working on a project where his goal was to go to the local art museum every day for a month and write a poem about a different piece of art each day. I told him I thought that was nice, because I thought it was. I like when people write poems about art. I like the idea of poetry being alive in museums. Months after our meeting, I went to see my acquaintance give a poetry reading. He was reading from his museum project and I was interested in hearing his poems, especially because I knew the
museum he had written them in and liked a lot of the art there. Before he started his reading, he read an essay he wrote about his project. His logic was interesting. Then he read his poems. I did not like them. After the reading, people talked to him about his project and in general, most people liked the idea behind it, as did I. No one talked to him about his poems. His poems were not important to his project. His project was important to his project. Everything that mattered was in the idea. Well, I have given you this example and even I cringe a little using it. My acquaintance is a good person, with a worthy endeavor. It’s a little mean to pick on such a plight. In a world where poetry itself is maligned, it was nice to think that he was bothering to write poetry at all. My example bothers me, too, because I can’t help thinking that so many of my idols in poetry might conduct a project like his. For example, I am indebted to and in love with Bernadette Mayer’s writing experiments, with the experiments
and exercises of the Language writers and the French Surrealists, and with beautiful forms of Flarf. The problem I am pointing out, I guess, when I tell you that poetry is not a project, is the problem that a good deal of my own poetry idols used projects as generative forces in their poems. But the poems were the most important parts of the whole thing. If a project does not get to a real poem, then it is not that important to your work because it generates nothing. The problem I am pointing out in this pamphlet is that just because you have constructed a project does not mean you have written a poem. You can plan a party, but you have to make the people show up for it to really be a party. Any other way, all you have created is just a decorated empty room. You can blast the music as loud as you want to, but if there is no one there to dance to it, there will be no dancing.
What Is Rea l ly Not Intenti o n , but L i fe
Real poetry is a party, a wild party, a party where anything might happen. A party from which you may never return home. Poetry has everything to do with existing in a realm of uncertainty. In a great poem, there is no certain beginning, middle, or end to the real human drama which incited it, propels it, and will finish it. What differentiates a great poet from a not-great one is the capacity to exist in that uncertain space, where the grand external world (which means anything and everything) folds into the intense internal world of the individual. In this moment, the issues of the self become one with the universal1. In a poem, the poet makes beautiful this great love affair between the self and the universal. And like all kinds of love, linear intention (a plan) has nothing to do with it. It is a human instinct to create both out of the self and out of the world. And our human instincts (thankfully) are never linear. 1) What I mean here is that the self of a poet totally is subsumed (note: more like eaten) by the universal when he or she makes a poem. It is very similar to my use of habitus earlier, and this does very intimately concern fundamental issues of language. See Vygotsky’s Mind in Society (1978) for more.
A logical question that might come out of this: If poems aren’t projects, then what are they really? The truth is, I don’t really know exactly how to tell you in a way that makes sense to you in a paragraph. I really can only tell you in a poem. Poems have a metaphorical logic. When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exists. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet if none are there at all.
In such a brutal process, in a walk through such strange lands, it makes sense that people want to find an easy answer to what poems are. Of course, there is no easy answer. To find out what poems are, I look to poets to tell me what poems really are. And I read poems to explain to me what poems really are—they themselves poems and so not linear. Poetry is not the project of a poet—it is the very life of the poet. It is the poem and the poet together who create what we might talk about as intention within a poem. When what it is really is not intention, but life.
How We Wr i t e and What We Wr ite F o r
I’d like to say now that I love poets. I think poets are special, and more so I think all artists are special. Or more so even, I think the thinking of artists is special for its nonlinearity. I truly believe that if the kind of kaleidoscopic (versus linear) thinking that artists naturally engage in was promoted more in all people we would have a new and better world. We might even create a century full of aesthetic renaissance. Don’t you want that? Because if we supported artists more to take more time to think in our world (instead of doing our best to make their job so hard), we would have a world more like what we desire it to be: One of peace, prosperity, and love. Because poets make language and make language beautiful. Because beautiful language makes a new and beautiful world. Because poets live and make a new world, which beautiful language itself creates. There’s a lot we have to do in this new century to make our world better and to make our world better for poets. Let’s start first by valuing poems over projects.
When we do, we might begin to realize what about our cultivated world is still new, unique, and wild. Because poems, the way they are created and the way they exist, can, in a small way, remind the world of what’s still possible. Conceding to a faulty model of these rare chances of creation is a small concession. A seemingly small concession on a long road towards a complete dampening of what is still possible in this world. I refuse to do it. Instead of conceding, let’s make a party, poets. And let’s have everyone join us there.
Poetr y Is Not a Project © Dorothea Lasky 2010 Illustrations © Sarah Glidden 2010 This Dossier Series title was guest edited by Ben Fama First Edition 2010 Ugly Duckling Presse The Old American Can Factor y 232 Third Street #E- 002 Brooklyn, NY 11215 www.uglyducklingpresse.org The Dossier Series was created to expand the formal scope of the Presse. Dossier publications don’t share a single genre or form—long poem, lyric essay, criticism, ar tist book, polemical text—but rather an investigative impulse. For an updated list of new and for thcoming Dossier titles, point your browser to:: www.uglyducklingpresse.org/dossier