2021 – Page 4 – Ken Craft

Filling in another hole in the poetry sock, I add Ferlinghetti to the list. Cheating, maybe, by reaching for his “Greatest Poems,” but who’s to say this editor’s (Nancy J. Peters’) choices for “greatest” are actually the greatest? On the savanna of literature, Subjectivity is King of the Beasts (and I ain’t lion).

If you cringed at that pun, you might cringe at a few of Ferlinghetti’s, too, because he wasn’t above dropping them into his poems. Not that he loses points with me for using them. I am a fan. Every time the groaners start acting superior about them, I point to the Bard, who was a master of puns himself, only in his case, said puns were labeled “great literature.”

I would say it’s a funny world, but let’s just say it’s a funny savanna.

If this collection of “greatest hits” was a hamburger, I would be a carb guy. Meaning, the early poems and late poems (buns, if you’re still with me) seemed more entertaining than all the middle protein (burger, medium rare). I would even lean toward the earliest as the better.

Some enjoyable turns of phrases I wrote down in my journal from the early stuff (as is my habit) are the following:

loud dark winter
burnt places of that almond world
poet’s plangent dream
algebra of lyricism
leaf in a pool…lay like an eye winking circles
silence hung like a lost idea
groaning with babies and bayonets under cement skies

No, not show stoppers, but still, enough to snag the eye before the stream of lyricism pulls them loose and continues them on their way.

As for the middle of the sandwich, I was a bit underwhelmed at times. Not much special in the way of metaphor or imagery. Ferlinghetti’s go-to’s seem to be alliteration and assonance, but he was happy to ignore those, too, once he becomes popular (popularity being the Get Out of Jail Free card in Poetry World, that most strange and wonderful and insulated world).

Here, for example, is LF riffing casually (it certainly seems) on underwear, a subject every poet should write about:

Underwear
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I didn’t get much sleep last night
thinking about underwear
Have you ever stopped to consider
underwear in the abstract
When you really dig into it
some shocking problems are raised
Underwear is something
we all have to deal with
Everyone wears
some kind of underwear
The Pope wears underwear I hope
The Governor of Louisiana
wears underwear
I saw him on TV
He must have had tight underwear
He squirmed a lot
Underwear can really get you in a bind
You have seen the underwear ads
for men and women
so alike but so different
Women’s underwear holds things up
Men’s underwear holds things down
Underwear is one thing
men and women have in common
Underwear is all we have between us
You have seen the three-color pictures
with crotches encircled
to show the areas of extra strength
and three-way stretch
promising full freedom of action
Don’t be deceived
It’s all based on the two-party system
which doesn’t allow much freedom of choice
the way things are set up
America in its Underwear
struggles thru the night
Underwear controls everything in the end
Take foundation garments for instance
They are really fascist forms
of underground government
making people believe
something but the truth
telling you what you can or can’t do
Did you ever try to get around a girdle
Perhaps Non-Violent Action
is the only answer
Did Gandhi wear a girdle?
Did Lady Macbeth wear a girdle?
Was that why Macbeth murdered sleep?
And that spot she was always rubbing—
Was it really in her underwear?
Modern anglosaxon ladies
must have huge guilt complexes
always washing and washing and washing
Out damned spot
Underwear with spots very suspicious
Underwear with bulges very shocking
Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom
Someone has escaped his Underwear
May be naked somewhere
Help!
But don’t worry
Everybody’s still hung up in it
There won’t be no real revolution
And poetry still the underwear of the soul
And underwear still covering
a multitude of faults
in the geological sense—
strange sedimentary stones, inscrutable cracks!
If I were you I’d keep aside
an oversize pair of winter underwear
Do not go naked into that good night
And in the meantime
keep calm and warm and dry
No use stirring ourselves up prematurely
‘over Nothing’
Move forward with dignity
hand in vest
Don’t get emotional
And death shall have no dominion
There’s plenty of time my darling
Are we not still young and easy
Don’t shout

As you can see, Ferlinghetti forgoes periods and commas, though he does employ capitalization, which is more than some modern poets do, and other punctuation marks make cameos, too. Getting edgy, in other words, but not going over the edge.

Overall, a fun poet but, like Frank O’Hara, probably not one to imitate (unless you truly understand the meaning of that sign at the edge of a dark wood, “Imitate at Your Own Risk”).

For most, the year 2020 couldn’t end soon enough. It finished on more than one sour note, two of them being Covid’s sprawling gains and Donald Trump’s all-consuming narcissism, which rendered itself both in his pouting refusal to accept defeat and in his willingness to burn down the country as retribution for that defeat.

Less seen but equally disturbing is a trend that popped up in the literary scene: critics who have decided what writers should and should not be writing about under circumstances such as these. Two good examples appeared in The New York Times just as the year 2020 fizzled out.

Let’s start with the lesser of the two: Times critic Dwight Garner’s review of Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic, edited by Alice Quinn. Garner panned the book in a big way, which is his right. It’s what critics do, after all.

What struck me as odd, though, was Garner’s reasoning. He lifted a Salman Rushdie quote on what a poet’s work is: “to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep,” and used it as both beginning and end — as propped-up Gospel and reason to rip the majority of the book’s poems:

“Much of the tepid free verse is about flowers. Or birds. Or trees. Harold Ross, when he edited The New Yorker, was wise to rage against tree poems.

“Three poems talk about senior hours at the supermarket. Others consider Netflix, pesto, almond tarts, tidying up the pantry, going for a drive, owning six boxes of penne that is gluten-free. ‘Free the Glutens’ was Tom Waits’s memorable chant. ‘They’ve never had a country of their own.’

“A few of these poems evoke the realities of blue-collar life, but mostly they’ve been written as if by comfortable indoor cats.”

It’s snarky fun and makes for splashy press, but it all sounds rather imperious, as if definitions of poetry are the province of Salman Rushdie (and his pawns) or, for that matter, Salman Rushdie alone. Yes, that’d be a Salman Rushdie who does not write poetry — or, if he does, certainly doesn’t specialize in it.

Bigger transgressions occurred on The Times front page, where novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen penned an op-ed piece called “The Post-Trump Future of Literature: What Will Writers Do When the Outrage Is Over? Will They Go Back to Writing About Flowers and Moons?”

It’s a rhetorical question, obviously. Yes, they will, Nguyen complains, but no, they should not. His argument is that writers should be dealing in politics by writing against colonialism, war, white privilege, and similar riders of the apocalypse.

In Nguyen’s opinion, at present, only marginalized writers are holding up their end of the deal:

“Mr. Trump destroyed the ability of white writers to dwell in the apolitical. Everyone had to make a choice, especially in the face of a pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, both of which brought the life-or-death costs of systemic racism and economic inequality into painful focus.

“But in 2021, will writers, especially white writers, take a deep breath of relief and retreat back to the politics of the apolitical, which is to say a retreat back to white privilege?

“Explicit politics in American poetry and fiction has mostly been left to the marginalized: writers of color, queer and trans writers, feminist writers, anticolonial writers.”

It is a call to arms against arms, and a noble one in spirit, but there’s one small problem with its packaging. As was true with Garner’s criticisms, Nguyen is not so much suggesting as demanding that writers dive into blue collar slash political slash social justice issues. Ironically, his op-ed piece is a type of colonialism unto itself — occupying and suppressing, as it does, writers’ choice and free will. Instead of the ignominious “Build a wall, because I said so!” we get an equally ignominious “Write political outrage, because I said so!”

It all reminds me of high school, where writing topics were dictated by the indisputable arbiter and iron rule of the teacher. If a student was moved by, say, nature, his or her topic was forbidden or frowned upon. Robert Frost, you can take this note to the office while the rest of us write about the assigned topic, and all that.

The poet Jericho Brown, in an interview, says that all love poems are about politics and all political poems are about love. His is a wider, more generous scope, allowing writers to write what they know best and / or what moves them, allowing readers to not only choose their own subject matter but to interpret their readings in more metaphorical ways.

If we as readers are not happy about moon or flower or tree poems, we are free to use our ultimate power and not read books about such frivolous topics. And if we are more invested in crows circling over a pond on a windy fall day than the whims of Mitch McConnell’s power plays in Washington, so be it.

Both of these come from the same basic rights that make us free — at least in a democratic society — to define poetry or any other genre for others, and to say what should or should not be written and judge writers not by how they write, but by what they write. That is, I disagree with Rushdie, Garner, and Nguyen, but in the spirit of Voltaire. I defend their right to rant about it, even while I question their logic.

After all, these words themselves are political. They are my choice — a word I happen to like more than Garner or Nguyen do, I think.

Yearly Archives: 2021

Unfurling Ferlinghetti’s Finest

“Attica! Attica!” (Or, “Please Don’t Tell Me What to Write”)