Since I just started Bestiary Magazine a few months ago, a project into which I pour a considerable amount of my time, it might seem strange that I’m asking this question, but I think it’s an interesting one. Writers try to get into these journals for a multitude of reasons; some believe its a necessary part of creating or maintaining a writing career for themselves, some do it because they’ve been told by someone else (a teacher, a writer they admire, friends) that it’s a necessary part of being a writer, and some do it because they see that other writers do.
Very few, I imagine, do it for fun, which seems backward to me. Literary journals in general, and poetry journals in specific have incredibly small circulations. Poetry Magazine, for example, which is one of the most popular and well-funded poetry journals, has a circulation of 30,000. That’s about one tenth of one percent of the population of the United States. By comparison, The New Yorker’s circulation is almost 1.1 million — that’s 36 times the circulation of Poetry.
This is where the whole “art for art’s sake” argument will usually get brought to the table, and my response to that philosophy is to counter with one of my own: art for fun’s sake. I have a lot of complex overlapping reasons for reading and writing poetry, but the best summary of them all is that I read and write poetry because I enjoy doing so. It’s fun.
That, incidentally, is also why I participate in the social activities surrounding poetry reading and writing – activities like poetry readings, workshops, poetry slams, and trying to get published – because I enjoy all of those things. I enjoy meeting new poets, encountering new poems, and seeing where my poems fit in to all of that. The one thing I am not trying to do is make a career, or make money out of the venture, which, I know sounds like I’m advocating “art for art’s sake,” but I’m insistent that I’m not: I don’t have anything close to the high-minded ideals of people who do things because they’re artists. I imagine that if I liked golf or fishing or scrapbooking or the stock market I’d do those things with just as much passion and interest as I do reading and writing.
If the game of getting poems published in literary journals were not fun for me, I wouldn’t do it. And there’s no real compelling reason other than fun that I can think of to do it. One rarely, if ever, reaches new readers via such a medium; most of the people who buy and read literary magazines are other practicioners. If my own experience working for the several literary publications I’ve been a part of holds true across all literary journals, the number one demographic of buyers for a given issue is the people who were published in that issue and their loved ones. The second-highest demographic is people hoping to get published or who already have been published.
The best method for getting published frequently is to do what my friend James called “carpet-bombing” — to literally constantly send out poems to any and all journals until someone picks your poem up. That’s a full-time job with a pretty low rate of return.
That is why a great many of the poets I know who started in the poetry slams are uninterested in getting published: why do all that work for pretty much no reward other than being able to add another title to one’s bio?
Fun is the only satisfactory answer I can come up with. So here’s my unanswered question: why don’t more literary journals try to make the whole process more fun for the poets?

Ask All The Right Questions

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The Moon Goes Through The Motions Too

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Wheel Within A Wheel

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All My Friends Are Trees

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My poem “The Zombie, Rejected By His Human Lover, Responds,” written in response to a poem I saw Megan Thoma and J.W. Baz perform at the Cantab, has been published in the Cordite Poetry Review.

Look at me! Getting published! I have four poems in Apparatus Magazine. Go read them!

This fabulous blog posting over at the Ploughshares site is a must-read. Although Alicia Jo Rabins, the author, doesn’t mention performed poetry or the slam at all, I think the article applies perfectly to performed poetry and highlights two aspect of performance that I think are part of what makes it essential for to my writing process:

enacting writing community as a team sport–another performative act which is by nature imperfect, lived out in time and through bodies, more analogous to writing a poem than to having written one. Some poets retain a vivid sense of live performance even on the page; Allen Ginsberg is among them. Perhaps partly because he structured his line-lengths in “Howl” according to the length of his breaths, you can feel the physicality in the poem; you can feel the poem breathing on the page. It doesn’t feel like an artifact.

This is something I’ve been stressing to a lot of the “page” poets I know — that imperfection is what marks really interesting and powerful writing. I read an interview with Thom Yorke of Radiohead in The Believer recently in which Yorke describes Jonny Greenwood’s role in the band, which includes encouraging the band to “add some wrong notes” to the music. One of the analogies I like to use is of a cubic zirconia — being synthetic, a cubic zirconia is flawless, and it’s this lack of flaw that makes one distinguishable from a diamond to the naked eye.

Then there’s this:

Witnessing the real risk of process is one reason why artistic community (the workshop, the residency, the collaboration) is so important. We celebrate each other’s successes, but we also observe the fruitful disasters, the failures that inherently attend real risk-taking. Through thoughtful critique, we help each other to consider those failures without attachment–simply to compost them and harvest the richness they contain, to deepen the process, and refine the work.

The “risk of process” is something I think slams especially bring to poetry. Of course it doesn’t always work, and of course, people who are there to win instead of the have fun and learn will miss out on this and end up making poems that game the system more than they do any of the things I find most interesting and useful about poems, but for myself, I find that putting a poem in front of an audience to be judged by non-experts often highlights that risk. There are other kinds of risk. I’d never substitute a slam for an actual critique from a trusted critic or for a good workshop. But it becomes another, very gritty arena in which to take risks with my poems, and it becomes a location for the community. There are other arenas, of course. Shows like The Encyclopedia Show emphasize the communal aspect of creation. The show’s curators prescribe topics and give writers a month to compose their poems. This simple restriction requires the writer to step outside her usual subject matter, often resulting in really powerful, interesting writing.

The whole thing is really quite insightful, and there’s a great video interview with Allen Ginsberg posted in the article. Go check it out.

One might be tempted, in writing a poem about a difficult topic like the violence that underlies sexism (and makes it both possible and pervasive), to become didactic. One might also be tempted to be heavy-handed in the storytelling, or to draw conclusions for one’s reader or listener. What one doesn’t see often in such poetry is humor and a complicated speaker.
This poem by New Yorker Eboni Hogan is, among other things, a list poem. It’s not a typical list poem, however, because the speaker is repeating someone else’s list, effectively creating two speakers, the story’s narrator and the author of the beer poster. Hogan switches back and forth between telling the story and quoting the poster, sometimes cueing us with numbers, and sometimes simply weaving the statement into the poem so that there are moments when it’s difficult to tell whether we are hearing the narrator’s perspective or that of the poster’s author.
This structural device is quite effective, and accomplishes a lot in this poem. One of the most difficult things to pull off in a three-minute poem is to address a complex, nuanced topic without becoming academic or didactic. This particular topic has been addressed often and poorly, and here Hogan’s unique structure allows her to treat the topic with the sensitivity and complexity it deserves and yet still tell a powerful story.
How, for example, to explain, in three minutes, the complex relationship between a particular person and the larger social and political context that informs, enables and partly causes their behavior without stereotyping or resorting the very sort of academic language I’m using in this very sentence? How do we bring an audience to that kind of complexity without preaching at them and while entertaining them?
The concepts that sexism requires at least the threat of violence to remain powerful, and that to some degree a larger cultural set of normal or accepted ideas creates an environment whose existence surrounds woman making otherwise benign interactions deadly, that marketing continues to rely on sexist ideas about women to sell things like beer, and that participating in seemingly-harmless joking like that in the poster is really a connection to those deeper and darker tools of oppression are not the sorts of topics most except a small handful of people want to think about ever, but especially at a bar or while doing reading for pleasure.
So Hogan co-opts the rhetoric of sexism, weaving the statements on the poster into her narrative. Instead of going down the list in exact order, she’s taken some of the statements out of sequence and ordered them in the poem to align with what’s happening in the narrative.
What this does is help characterize the male character in the poem — as he takes actions, the poster “speaks” to us, so that we are led to make an implicit connection between what the poster is saying and what the man is doing. This opens up the topic of how advertising might create or undergird or enable the violent choices of the male character without actually saying as much. To put it another way, instead of delimiting inquiry on the part of the readers and listeners by making a declarative statement, Hogan encourages us to infer connections, which opens up inquiry into the larger world outside the poem.
Hogan uses this technique often in the poem. Imagine, for a moment, that in this poem, the speaker had been raped by the man or shot by him. The sympathy we as her audience would feel for the speaker would outweigh the thinking she wants us to do, necessary thinking about how sexism actually works, thinking we can’t do if we are feeling too much. So instead, Hogan has the male character head-butt the speaker (here I just want to point out that whether or not this happened in this way to Hogan in real life is beside the point in terms of how the writing is done). Here’s the speaker’s description of the head-butt:

He bowed like a gentleman,
body curled like so many question marks before him
and blessed me with a running start
a grand, glorified, dick-encrusted
American-as-apple-pie Rambo-style head butt

Note that the head-butt is compared with several overlapping modes of manhood: gentlemanliness, wholesomeness (American-as-apple-pie), militaristic (Rambo) and sexual (dick-encrusted). The head-butt itself can easily act a symbol for penetration, implying rape, or as the motion of a bullet, implying murder or (as the poem’s final image suggests) execution.

Sticking with one overpowering image would not allow Hogan to weave together so many manifestations of sexism, so she’s made the choice to back off what emotional power she could squeeze from the poem and instead offer us the chance to notice these overlapping concepts. Instead of being a woe-is-me poem about a single, sad moment, it becomes a poem addressing a larger, complicated topic — how sexism itself functions.
Part of that function includes how deeply-ingrained its ideas are in our culture so that women who are aware of and critical about sexism often report realizing that they have internalized sexist ideas and messages without being aware of it. Remember how at the beginning I mentioned that Hogan sometimes switches from the narrator’s account to a list item from the poster without cueing us, so that there are moments when the line between characters is blurred? What a masterful way to illustrate that internalization!

She gives the poster the final line of the poem. The effect of this is to both tie up the list and also make it clear that we’re meant to go back over the list and examine not only what is underlying the statements themselves, but also, how they connect to the choices the characters makes. The poem doesn’t tell us what to do about sexism or sexual assault. It doesn’t condemn anyone in specific. It never makes any proclamations. What it does very well is invite us to continue thinking about its subject matter long after the poem is done, the entire range of images and ideas echoing in our minds like the gunshot in the poem’s concluding image.

I came across this video of William Stafford reading one of my favorite poems of his, “The Star In The Hills,” while looking for examples of his work for a friend. The poem is one to which I have returned over and over for years. I love the combination of quirkiness and spooky mysticism and the political commentary implied by the speaker’s attitude, but, in all honesty, until I watched this video, I never thought of the poem as funny.
As I’ve moved back into participating in poetry slams again after ten years away, I’ve had to relearn how to perform poems. When I began practicing and preparing my work for the stage, I found that, overwhelmingly, I scored better with slam judges, and connected more reliably with my audiences when I read from paper than when I memorized and “performed” the poems. I began paying attention to the poets around me whose writing and performances I admire and find powerful, and re-realized that reading is a performance, and that the reason my readings off paper were more powerful and effective than when I had poems memorized is that, with the memorized poems, I was trying too hard to perform, whereas when I read off paper, I feel less inclined to do so, and I sound more like myself.
That’s the irritating thing about the false dichotomy, supported by both sides of the divide, between so-called “page” poetry and “stage” poetry. Poetry is poetry. I expect that it’s because many “page” poets don’t want to take the time to become good at performance that they like to distinguish the two, and I think the same might be true of performance poets, who find it easy to win over audiences, but more difficult to do the difficult work of editing.
Those of us who have chosen both work to become better writers, participate in a largely arbitrary, fickle, nepotistic process of getting published; and also work to become better performers of our own writing, participate in a largely arbitrary, fickle, random game of chance that is the poetry slam. I cannot, of course, speak for all practitioners of performed poetry. For myself, I find that each informs the other and becomes part of the writing process, for the better, I think. It is most often the case that what a poem needs to work well on the page is also what it needs to succeed well on stage.
Reading is a performance. There are some incredible writers who are just awful at it, and I don’t believe that makes what those writers can do as writers less effective or interesting, just like when I don’t enjoy reading on the page the poems of an excellent performer whose writing is not as polished doesn’t make that performer’s work any less interesting. For myself, I hope to do well at both, because I believe that an audience deserves the respect of my bothering to pay attention to both of those modes of delivery.
Which brings me back to William Stafford, who has long been one of my favorite poets, but who, for obvious reasons, I have never seen perform his work — until I stumbled on this video. Stafford’s performance of this poem, which works so well on the page that I have read it if not a hundred than at least dozens of times, reveals something by which I was taken aback — how funny the poem is.
The humor becomes a part of the poem’s meaning, and underscores the political dimension of the poem at the same time. Stafford’s delivery, charming and somewhat folksy, makes the speaker out to be a certain kind of character — a likable fellow, which is important for the poem, since the subtext of the poem could make the character seem self-serving rather than eager. Stafford also feels the music in his poem and convey it well. All told, this was a pleasant surprise — giving a long-beloved poem a new, interesting dimension. Which is what performances of poems should be doing.