A Poetics Brain Dump

Seriously though. Here’s something I told Oscar, and Rupert Estanislao this past weekend, regarding my current reading of Juan Felipe Herrera’s 187 Reasons, in which I am wrapping my head around some of his litanies being really out there, like cosmic out there. Some of his other work in this collection is sprawl, really moving in multiple directions all at once. Thing is, there’s containment to his sprawl, and this could be the moment, the event, the political project, the historical or geographical context, the poetic form.

But what I was telling Oscar and Rupert was that these things about Herrera’s poetry are setting me askew. I am realizing I’ve gotten so tightly wound about words, about line, about structure and “sense” (though I don’t equate disrupted syntax with nonsense). As though there’s “too much” consideration for discipline and technical proficiency in my process.

I went back to Adrian Castro’s Cantos to Blood and Honey, and started thinking about what these two poets, Herrera and Castro, have in common. They basically have incisive and urgent stories to tell and songs to sing, about where they’ve come from, details of their spiritual, political, and historical contexts, details of the violences of collision and contact. From all of the above, they have emerged, and they constantly (as individuals and as community) engage in piecing and repiecing themselves into wholeness. They do not fix themselves in time. They enact or demonstrate rather than dully explicate in their tellings. It’s in their use of languages, the forms, the other-than-Western meter and music. Think about the difference between (1) an oldtime storyteller’s intonation, gesture, facial expression, use of breath, that s/he apparently draws from the most deep-seated cultural and personal memories of these stories previously told to him/her, and (2) the flattest reading by someone uninvested, from the driest book of someone else’s facts.

[Addendum: I suppose option (3) would be the pushy demagogue who refuses to give you the space to work it out yourself, who doesn't believe you are capable of arriving at your own conclusion or formulating your own questions, who doesn't believe in the validity of your questions, who never turns down his/her volume, who doesn't believe in nuance and subtlety.]

This all must be rather obvious. Indeed, I know Castro and Herrera resonate as I consider my own writing projects. I just wonder then, why it is I feel like such a poetry world misfit. Or maybe I ought be more specific: I wonder why I feel like such an American poetry industry misfit.