Leaves of Gross

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When I was 9 years old, I memorized a poem. It was called “Cafeteria,” written by my classmates Egil Dennerline and Shola and Doyin Richards, and I can still recall its first lines:

I loved it. Our fourth-grade class loved it. “Cafeteria” was a hit! Soon, we were all writing poems that represented our own brief experience of the worlds of school and parents. Poetry!

In the 42 years since, however, my relationship to an entire branch of human literature has degraded significantly. High school English classes rehashed the basics of meter, rhyme, and other techniques without instilling in us any actual appreciation, let alone love, for poetry itself, whether we were assigned T.S. Eliot or Langston Hughes. And I gained two degrees in creative writing, at a premier institution of higher learning, without ever needing to study a poem, let alone write one. In fact, I used to delight in telling my grad-school colleagues, many of them poets themselves, that I loathed poetry. Not their poetry, of course, but, you know, poetry. I mean, come on: Ugh.

When I made these claims, however, I was both completely honest and also fully ironic. Honesty: I did not and do not and mostly cannot read poetry for my own enjoyment. Irony: The techniques of poetry—the approaches to language, cadence, structure—suffuse my prose (or at least I like to think they do) to a degree I can’t and won’t deny.

And so now, because one Trying! reader, C.M., cursed by the muse to become a poet himself, prompted me to write an essay simply about “poetry”—but also because a novel I read recently included several lines from Walt Whitman—I’m here to make full and complete sense of poetry, prose, and my own messy feelings about them both.

More after the ad…

All writing is performance. Although the words have been set down, rearranged, sharpened, excised, stetted, winnowed, expanded, proofread (or not), and finally sent off to the printer—or (ahem) the email server—they are the fixed (for the moment) equivalent of an anxious actor standing before you, in your living room, craving your attention, your forbearance, your unbalking love, while they demonstrate, with varying degrees of skill, their mastery of words. Writers are by definition egotists: Rightly or wrongly, we all believe we have something important to communicate, and we want you, our readers, to believe likewise, whether for a few hundred words or several hundred pages. Truly humble writers do not exist.

Still, we know not to expect your attention. We have to earn it, often from the get-go. Journalists are trained to nail their ledes, screenwriters give themselves 10 minutes (at most!) to suck audiences in, and while novelists have more space to work their magic, it’s rare, especially in recent decades, to find fiction writers who do not begin with lines of intrigue or scenes of wonder. For some of us, it’s calculated; for others, it’s natural. For me, I’ve been calculating it so long it’s become natural. My ledes for Trying! aim to pique your attention, often with understatement, since I’m writing about my humdrum life, which may not be all that different from your humdrum life, and also trying to transform it into more than what it is. Some recent examples:

Nothing explosive there, nothing overly dramatic. Still, I hope, each one has just enough quirk to get you to start reading, and maybe keep reading. But these ledes are understated for another reason, too: And that’s that I know I’m up here performing for you, and while I want you to watch, or read, all the way till the end, I don’t want that to be nakedly visible from the first line. In other words, I crave your attention, but I’d be embarrassed to appear to be asking for it. It’s a silly position to be in, I know, and I should really just get over myself, but the feeling is real and inescapable, and the potential for humiliation is high. I have said and written some dumb things before¹!

And so this is my issue with so much poetry: that cringe factor. Reading a poem, I am embarrassed for the poet, who has (often but not always, of course) concentrated and crystallized so much imagery and language into such constrained space that the poem’s jewellike existence on the page calls attention to itself without the layers of irony and self-effacement that would otherwise, in other genres, broker my relationship to the work. Throw in some wonky punctuation and seemingly arbitrary line breaks, and you’ve lost me, you damn dirty hippie. When I begin anything, I ask myself: Why am I reading this? And I find most poems have no answer but an implied Because.

This is frequently a structural issue. So many poems are about a particular moment—a feeling, an image, a crux when something happened or something was communicated or not communicated. They are self-contained. They are allusions to a bigger story.

But what I like most in my reading is the bigger story. I read fiction (and watch movies) for the long, dramatic arc—the build-up, the B plots, the suspense, the explosive moments that arrive only after they’ve been painstakingly earned over scores or hundreds of pages. I want to be carried emotionally through a fantastic number of moments, not to linger on or in a single one. Few poems, apart from sagas such as The Odyssey or Dante’s Inferno, have a narrative strategy equivalent to that of a novel. This is not a criticism of poetry as it is; just a way of saying that what it often is is often not for me.

And so I say, half jokingly and half seriously, “To hell with poetry!” I don’t read it, I don’t need it. But which half of me is joking, and which is serious?

Not long after Jean Liu and I started dating, back in the late 20th century, we had a discussion—as new couples typically do—about Tang Dynasty poetry. As a child in Taiwan, she’d been required to memorize many of the most famous verses, including “Quiet Night Thought,” by Li Bai, which she translated on the fly thus:

In the decades since, I’ve read many other translations. Some of them force elaborate rhymes, others substitute “frost” for “snow,” but none have the elegant simplicity, the clarity of language and feeling, that Jean assembled in an instant. I suppose this was the second poem I ever memorized.

Frequent readers of Trying! will recognize this as the point in the essay where I declare that everything that has led up to it — everything above that Eakins photo of Walt Whitman — is bullshit. Because it is. There’s no rhyme or reason behind my lifelong rejection of poetry. Not all of it is precious, not all of it is non-narrative. And the fact is, I like moments, I like wordplay for the sake of wordplay, language that exists simply because it can. The other week, I included a link to “Proverbs From Purgatory,” by Lloyd Schwartz, which I claimed was my favorite poem. Here are its opening lines, which should pretty well convey why I love it:

This is silly, but it’s transcendently silly — it’s playful at a level few of us will ever attempt, let alone reach. And in fact, it inspired my own rare attempts at poetry.

Yes, I have written poetry! My poetry, such as it is, is found poetry: I sift the detritus of American media in search of overused tropes, then assemble their multifarious expressions into stanzas that, I hope, transform and elevate the hackneyed, if often overly precise verbiage into something new. Here’s an excerpt from one I wrote, published in 2015 in New York, called “On the Condition of Anonymity,” based on explanations given to New York Times reporters for why sources spoke anonymously:

That was fun! Over the years, I’ve written others, none of them quite as good, but for me at least, they provided a sense of satisfaction — of following a linguistic game as far as it would go. Which is also what these essays are as well: attempts to string words together for as long as I’m able, to have them cohere pleasurably at least on a sentence level, and to get you, [insert first_name], to join me for the entire ridiculous ride, even if we’re going in circles. There may certainly be substance there — ideas, arguments, god forbid even reporting! — but it’s words first of all and most of all.

And this is what I’ve been finding in Walt Whitman, who I’ve been rereading lately: an earnest, unrestrained love for what can be accomplished with words. At his best, he’s unself-conscious, agog with observations of the New York that surrounds him, and fervently trying to render it all into language.

And the way at times the words take him over, so that he can’t help but roll them out, sidestepping redundancy with a deftness I envy:

I too have known that feeling, when the words give up their frivolity and simply flow, faithful both to the reality we all perceive and to the throbbing dictates of my baffled and curious brain. This is the kind of poetry I like — maybe even love — and want to channel in my prose: these unique and inimitable collisions of letters and cadences, etymologies and abstractions, foreignness and familiarity. I don’t know if you see it there in my writing, but I’m putting it there, in every sentence I can, or at least I’m trying. After all, what is Trying! if not my song of myself? 🪨🪨🪨

This essay was written based on a one-word prompt—”Poetry”—from a reader. If you want me to compose 2,000 words based on your random (or well-considered?) suggestion, you know where to find me.