Notes on Style
A good new poem in any style
will appear to a poet who writes in another style
as propaganda
for the Demiurge he has hated all his life.
Who deprives him of respect
(however respected he is), who excluded
or beat him in elementary or high school,
who kept him from being beautiful or loved
(however loved he is), sober or rich.
He may study the other poem, feel
the hair on the back of his head
rising, as Housman said, or the top of his head
coming off (Dickinson),
run upstairs to show it to his wife
and email it to friends and students, but
beneath all that maturity and culture
he hates it –
not only because he didn’t write it,
but because it’s in another style.
This rule applies to women poets also,
don’t kid yourself. Eventually he (or she)
goes for a walk. And what he thinks he’s doing
is seeking new perspectives
on trees, cars, childhood, the decay
of Being, the depredations of capital, but what
he’s really doing
is trying to get past that poem – to rewrite it
in his style or, if that’s impossible,
to make it not to have been.
He may decide that canonical sophistication
counts less than being accessible
to dreaming, warm-hearted, ordinary people.
Or that “style” is obsolete, even oppressive;
that it can be transcended
by, say, aleatoric techniques. These insights are futile:
whatever he writes next will be a style.
For poets only think they go outside.
Actually they sit, each in his room
in a grimy old apartment building;
the street, other poems, capital are in the room.
A painted-over door in each back wall
leads to a shared hallway, but few pry it open;
a mugger lurks there,
swift and merciless,
familiar with all the words, believing none.
|