Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the seventeenth one. You may notice that it’s a little different this month; I had to switch from tinyletter to Substack because tinyletter banned me. Don’t know why.
Boredom. We learned about Marxism in a single class period of an introductory literary theory class in grad school taught by an absolutely brilliant professor and pedagogue, Dr. Joanna Davis-McElligatt. That day, the world of “Creative Writing (Poetry category)” that I had spent the last decade of my intellectual, social, and creative lives in went from feeling like an exciting, multi-dimensional, cool place to a flat group of exchange values. What had made it arresting to be of and in that place was the way we—poets—assigned values to the variety of different “markets” associated with being a poet. Presses, literary journals, “programs” (as in, MFA programs), contests, residencies, and worst of all, poets themselves—every entity had its own specialized market value, which was, of course, not economic but cultural. And these values differed microscopically; you couldn’t distinguish among them with the naked eye; you needed an MFA in creative writing to do it. After I saw it in this light, I couldn’t go back to the way I was before. It wasn’t interesting to me anymore. I stopped caring about where or what types of journals my poetry was published in. I stopped reading much poetry; it had all been about the presses and the names of the poets and the titles of the books, not the content of the books. But at the same time, and after so many years of trying, I finally started my poetry getting published in the fancy places, the ones with the high exchange values.
Horror. I was thinking about this as I, for some reason, read through the entire list, thousands-long, of names/affiliations of people who have signed the “Letter to the Poetry Foundation from Fellows + Programmatic Partners,” which was published on June 6, 2020, and has been widely distributed, but which I only just found out about because I’m not a cool poet anymore. This list is full of poetry-world boldface names (many who signed it multiple times, for reasons obscure to me). On the list, I saw many well-published poets I know, and even more well-published poets who well-published poets I know know. The letter criticizes the Poetry Foundation for the brief statement it made in support of the Black Lives Matter protests: “Given the stakes, which equate to no less than genocide against Black people, the watery vagaries of this statement are, ultimately, a violence.” The letter calls on the Poetry Foundation and its famous publication, Poetry, to “do better,” and delineates some of what that would look like: the president and chair of the board should resign, the president should be replaced with someone who has a mission of equity and equality, the board should release a new statement with actionable steps it is taking to end racism, and the Poetry Foundation’s $100 million should be redistributed to anti-racism and social justice efforts. The letter is forceful, specific in its requests, eloquent, and angry. I don’t know what led to the letter, and the Black Lives Matter statement didn’t seem like a violence to me—but when the [Association] [of] [Writers] [and] [Writing] [Programs] all but collapsed, I saw how the genuine horror of a place can be sanitized when it hits the public creative writing world. A lot of people said that AWP didn’t seem so bad and that they loved and supported the two guys who got fired, but they didn’t know the real story. I had worked there, and I knew. So I think maybe the letter to the Poetry Foundation is the same kind of thing.
But as I read through the long, long list of names and affiliations of the signers, I got a feeling like everyone was chiming in not to lend the support of their names to this call to action, but to showcase their value in front of the entire community. People put their affiliations as editor in chief of such-and-such small press or fellowship recipient from such-and-such organization, as if they were writing contributor bios for a literary magazine. And if tone can be read in a five-word signature, name/affiliation (which of course I think it can—or else I’d be even less of a poet than I am now), I read many of the signatures as people kind of bragging about their association with the Poetry Foundation, even in this letter excoriating it. A lot of people wrote as their affiliation that they had been finalists for the Foundation’s prestigious Ruth Lily Prize—not winners but finalists. Is that really connection enough to the Poetry Foundation to be meaningful in this context? Someone wrote, “just a student and reader of poetry” and someone else wrote, “contributor/subscriber (no poems were accepted, I have only submitted)”—sounding almost sheepish, like who were they to sign this letter. Someone wrote, “(published poet, but not by PF)”—could you get any more sheepish than putting your “affiliation” in parentheses?
It was like signing this letter replaced or supplemented the prestige that the Poetry Foundation endows on poets. And there was a hierarchy to the signers. The really cool people were the ones who had written it, they were the ones who had won the Ruth Lilly Prize; the secondary signers were in a lower category. Among those, there were the sort of cool people had been finalists for the prize or contributors to Poetry; then there was a lower rung of people who were published poets but whose work hadn’t appeared in Poetry; then the people who were mere subscribers to Poetry. (And then, I thought as I read, me, who didn’t even know about the letter…)
Glory. The writers of the letter call themselves “invested stewards in the future of poetry, and so the onus is on us to push those with institutional capital to use it for good.” The authors of the letter have institutional capital, too—not necessarily financial, but cultural. And they're “invested” it in “the future of poetry” as if it were a stock.
I agree with the letter-writers and signers that the Poetry Foundation should give away all its money. But I believe it should do this not because I, like them, “dream of a world in which the massive health hoarding that underlies the Foundation’s work would be replaced by the redistribution of every cent to those whose labor amassed those funds.” I mean, I do dream of that, too, but I really think it should give away all its money because institutional capital doesn’t have anything to do with poetry. I don’t mean that institutional capital shouldn’t have anything to do with poetry; I mean that it already doesn’t. That money and the way it’s spent and the things it’s spent on is not poetry. It’s something else. It’s the addicting world of exchange values and posting online and carving your own, cool, gratifying niche for yourself. Most of our great American poets, past and present, love that shit. But that doesn’t make it poetry. I dream of a poetry that exists beyond that. Off market.
Sincerely,
Lucy
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