Yeah, you! I’m talking to you!
I received an email the other day from the Vermont Arts Council inviting me to nominate a candidate for Vermont Poet Laureate, and I thought, who better than me? For all of you who agree, follow this link to help me throw my hat in the ring. You can find everything you need to know to fill out the nomination form right here on this web site.
Poetry doesn’t need to be boring or mystifying or trivial. It can be about more than some feeling or experience or passing fancy or perception the author had. It doesn’t have to be a word game. It can do more than advertise how sensitive or perceptive or humane or smart or verbally adept the author is. It doesn’t have to come in little bite size pieces that you can read while folding toilet paper.
Poetry can engage the world on all the levels that you do. It can make statements, tell stories about characters doing things, express points of view and arguments and ideas, contain adventure and excitement and jokes that are actually funny. It can be so big that it takes hours and days and weeks to read. It can be so vivid that you don’t want to watch a movie instead.
I want to wrest poetry away from the clammy fingers of the Standard MFA Workshop American Lyric that are clenching it by the throat, squeezing the life out of it. I am sick of reading award winning poems that tell me in twenty lines or so about some tranche de vie. Why are you telling me this? Who cares? Why should I care? Why should anybody care? I am sick of being dazzled by verbal brilliance – it hurts and it’s bad for the eyes. I am sick of poems that dare me to understand them, like an adolescent with something to prove to himself.
Where are the poems that back an eighteen wheeler up to your head, unload, and leave you with completely rearranged furniture and a new set of tenants? Who is writing them? I’ll leave it to you to decide if I’m such a poet, but if you agree with me that this is something poetry needs to do and that too few poets are trying to do it, then VOTE FOR ME!
The deadline for nominations is March 25.
Tags: poetry, Seth Steinzor, To Join the Lost, Vermont Arts Council, Vermont author, Vermont Poet Laureate
Posted in art, Poetry | 9 Comments »
I recently participated in a Facebook discussion about the new Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial. The press clipping that sparked the discussion said that critics of the memorial are upset because it depicts King in a sombre, confrontational stance, and because it was done by a sculptor from China. The reported criticism seems absurd to me. It is a curious mythology that would recall King as a nonconfrontational figure. On the other hand, I think MLK might have had some trouble wrapping his mind around the idea of a 30 foot tall statue of himself on a 4 acre plaza. I don’t think he would have much cared what country the perpetrator was from.
