A Community of Poets: Fact and Myth
Dateline: 7/28/98Your guide Bob Holman is out traveling the world for the next three weeks & will return just in time to get to Texas for the 1998 National Poetry Slam, one of the biggest & liveliest gatherings of poets on the planet. The Slam has been a powerful generator of community among poets & as this year's gathering approaches critical mass, Bob offers his thoughts of some years ago (pre-Slam) on the matter of community. --Margery Snyder
From 1977-1980 I worked for the CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) Artists Project in New York City. This was the largest federally-funded artists’ project since the WPA: 350 artists of all disciplines, poets, dancers, musicians, painters; a moment of amazing synergy and dynamism and posssibility; a hotbed of collaborative impulse; a visionary socialist utopian paycheck. At the time, I was embarrassed to admit I worked for the Feds; but dreams were born there, and they die hard, and I still believe in this evanescent ideal of community, even as Internet advertisers pull the earth out from under us to reveal the rug that the earth shrugs off as “toupee.”
Now, I look back and see the CETA job as what turned me into a poet who makes money being a poet. I will go to war to bring back funding for art. But first -- the following is drawn from a piece I wrote for the CETA Artists Project Journal.
It was published in December, 1979.
A Community of Poets: Fact and Myth
A clatter of poets. A scatter of poets. A crow of poets. Not a crow. There is no one poets’ bird. Penguin of poets. Flamingo.
A community of poets sticks in one’s craw.
What remains with us is the individualist and careerist atmosphere of the old literary world, the petty interests of malevolent coteries, mutual backscratching; and the word ‘poetical’ has come to mean ‘lax,’ ‘a bit drunk,’ ‘debauched,’ and so on. Even the way a poet dresses and speaks with friends must be different and entirely dictated by the kind of poetry one writes.
Future poems needed, just like the unexpected rhymes in poetry.
The fine poetical work would be written to the social command and sent to the publisher by plane. I insist ‘by plane,’ since the engagement of poetry with contemporary life is one of the most important factors in its production. You will need a telephone so your publishers and agents can reach you.
When I was writing I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement that will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.
By being conscious of a poetry community, we’re taking charge of thinking about ourselves rather than allowing the thinking to go to public opinion polls, grants panels, or “whatever seems to happen.”
You sometimes get caught on thinking that art is such a spontaneous process, how can you attempt to dictate the bounds of it by defining a community. Well, all I can say is that things will happen more creatively and spontaneously in a community designed for that to happen.
The creative process is delicate -- so when people are withdrawing support when you need it, that’s when corners are turned. And if people are letting each other down it makes a real difference.
Also to work: the relationship to the community just outside us: other artists/people who wish to push the poem but are not poets/just people in general.
Ultimately, it’s you sitting in front of a typewriter. A supportive community can be a help there. As individualistic as writing is, in practice writers have always helped each other. To a point.
It’s time to push the point.
--Bob Holman
- Vladimir Mayakovsky, How Are Verses Made?* (Out of print, but Amazon will search used bookstores for a copy if you order it.)
- Frank O'Hara, Personism: A Manifesto (His Collected Poems* are essential.)
- Ed Friedman, Interview (See his recent collection, Mao & Matisse.*)
*As a result of a commercial relationship between About.com, its Guides and Amazon.com online booksellers, these titles can be purchased directly from Amazon.com by following the links above. (Note: Amazon.com is solely responsible for fulfillment of book or CD orders placed through these links.)
