9th
READ POEMS, EAT TOAST!
All I have to say to anybody worrying about how art will fare in our crummy new future is: READ POEMS.
Back a few years ago I cherished a small hope that I could figure out a way to get important poets paid like important visual artists, but I take that back. Now we are all going to be paid like poets if we get paid at all. If poets can make work under a no-money, nobody cares about you system, then so can artists. These shining little objects have been constructed without assistants, without dealers, and without much glory waiting at the end of the line, except maybe the prospect of getting laid after the book party.
I have admired Joe Wenderoth’s intro to Graham Foust’s book, Leave the Room to Itself for a long time and now it’s sounding even better. Incidentally, artists, Wenderoth got to write this essay because he was the judge of the 2003 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, which sponsored the publication of the book. That’s how you get a book published as a young poet, you have to win a PRIZE. There are like, 4 of these. Wenderoth was probably awarded the honor of judging this prize, and writing this essay because everybody likes his book, Letters to Wendy’s, or maybe it was something else noteworthy he did. Poets get jobs, rather than, say, cold hard Brooklyn real estate when they attain amazing professional success.
Joe Wenderoth quotes Paul Celan, who says that poets can get on with their work under rotten conditions, “…with manmade stars flying overhead, unsheltered even by the traditional tent of the sky, exposed in an unsuspected, terrifying way, carry their existence into language, racked by reality and in search of it.” Wenderoth goes on expand on Celan’s thought, which I am just going to go ahead and quote here because I’ve had this paragraph almost constantly in mind for about a month:
“Many of the younger American poets I have encountered in the last ten years seem at home — and grateful to be home in the shelterlessness of American “life”.
He says that younger American poets manage this by making friends, and recognizing each other’s accomplishments, and since no cash is changing hands you know that when someone likes your work they aren’t bullshitting you because there is incentive for them to lie. What we have after living like this for a while is art that we get to keep and pass around - it can sustain us and encourage us to keep trying to wring what we can out of ourselves for other people.
JW rather loftily puts it: “The struggle is, in my view, dignified — never self congratulatory, never self pitying — and it has produced sounds for us to come back to — sounds to set out from.”
If you still think we are without hope, please read Graham Foust’s essay on Jack Spicer (in Jacket Magazine.) Spicer thought the poetry world was corrupt (how would he have gotten through an opening at Dietch Projects, I wonder??) and wrote a hard to ignore poem, “This Ocean”, which kicks up salt and air and the bread we live on in our faces and ends, “No/One listens to poetry.”
Some friends of Article, Cecily Iddings and Chris Hosea, have started a project that proves the power of reading and writing together in shitty times, it’s called The Blue Letter. It’s a letter, really, it comes in the actual mail, on different colored paper every time. Chris and Cecily use it to house groups of poems from a few poets per letter (so far, Dara Weir, Lisa Robertson) and also to excerpt correspondence from Blue Letter readers. It is not a high walled, pearly floored venue but it’s a big space where things can happen, and do. Send a postcard to:
The Blue Letter
93 1st Place
Apt. 2R
Brooklyn, NY 11231
or email theblueletter@gmail.com…
to get on the list. Art is going to be okay. Toast is cheap and poems are free.
—Kim Bennett
