What if I say I have no idea why I'm doing what I'm doing?

 

Sartre presented it perfectly when he said that the problem of writers shouldn't be whether 300 people will be able to read their work, but what is going to happen if 300 people will be able to read their work.  So the question for me now becomes "What do I want my poems to do to my readers?"

 

A recent conversation about the poetry of Elizabeth Willis and Gertrude Stein brought up one direction poetry could take.  The seeming "meaninglessness" of their work opens itself up to become an experience of questions.  Willis creates beautiful poetry that doesn't offer explanations about its beauty, Stein attempts to defamiliarize language.  Some might even say Willis is like Stein sounding better.  For some poets, having "an experience of questions" brings people back to their humanity.  Poems that reveal only questions after questions are a gift to man's eternal quest for knowledge. 

 

I have to admit that I can appreciate such space intended for that kind of mental masturbation.  A final draft of a poem does, after all, offer a relatively significant amount of cranial orgasms.  However, I have to deal with the nagging suspicion that the likes of Willis, Stein, and to some extent Ann Lauterbach, will only be read by those who are poets themselves, just as Louis Zukofsky was called "a poet's poet's poet." 

 

On the opposite end of the spectrum lies the likes of Pablo Neruda, Billy Collins, and Sharon Olds--the "beginner-friendly" poets.  The casual language of Collins, the romance of pop Neruda, and the unparalleled eroticism of Olds make "beginners" feel comfortable about poetry.  Because of them, outsiders are lured into the seemingly happy and easy world of verse.  The challenge can then be found in encouraging the newbies to read more, learn more, and ask more.  And one of the directions this usually takes is that when the newbies mature in their sense of poetry, they seem to outgrow the "beginner-friendly" poets and move on to more "difficult" and less "accessible" poetry.

 

The two pseudo-groups may be polar opposites when it comes to accessibility, but what I find at the center of their work is the accomplishment of making their readers see--perhaps even unsee--boundaries, regardless of whether the reader is aware of it or not.  What can we consider as parenthetical qualities of something that can be classified under "poem?"  When does something begin to be a poem, and how far can it be taken?  When a piece can nudge the boundaries in a (good) way that catches attention and raises questions to foster discussion or even argument, it makes me want my poems to do something like that.

 

Something like that, but not exactly like that.  I don't want to write poems solely for poetry. Maybe it's a given, aside from romantic, so maybe I shouldn't say it.  I know that if I were looking for a way to spark some kind of social change, writing poems may not be the best agent for it.  We already know that poetry doesn't have a lot of readership, especially locally.  (Although we hear of a lot of people who you know, just wrote this poem five minutes ago because they were like, really sad then.)  And even if I am somehow able to write one thing with a bit of social significance, because I can fall under a certain label, my work will probably be dismissed by most activist groups.  Add to that the fact that I'm not a big fan of poetry awards nor am I in a rush to get published, then it will not be a bad assumption to say that my poems will never bring about world peace.

 

So if I don't think that my poems will ever be able to do what I want them to do, why do I write?  I think it's because I believe that if you want someone to realize that pigs can't fly, saying it to them outright is not the best thing to do.  Instead, you throw a wild boar at him and make sure the beast lands on his head.  The reason poetry has so much strength is that it makes you come to your own conclusions, while making you think that it's your own conclusion. 

 

And so, if I will never produce anything of significance, I wouldn't have much regret if I wasted my whole life trying to accomplish something worthwhile.  After all, my attempts at poetry might prove to be my best failures.