Soul food

When I sat down to read the poet James Wood's essay "Taxonomy and Grace" in Open Letters Monthly (read it here), I had just finished leading my American Lit Survey class through Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," with its vivid evocation of poets lost in the "total animal soup of time" who strive "to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought ....with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years." I always get a little excited about the image of the poet violently tearing a pound of flesh from his body and offering the bloody mess to readers and saying, "Eat! It's good for what ails you!"

Wood's essay expresses a yearning for poetry that feeds readers. "I still believe," he writes, "that poems can speak to other human beings and can make collective society consider our own convictions, experiences, and beliefs," but he finds this belief fading among the academics who teach poetry and attend academic conferences. For instance, he describes his experience at a recent annual conference of the AWP (the Association for Writers and Writing Programs):

When I mingle with other writers there, rarely do I speak of how individual poems transformed my life. Honestly, I rarely hear any writers talk about this. Instead, we talk about our bona fides and aesthetic theories because we want to participate in the academic world—one whose tenure-line opportunities are dwindling as our numbers grow exponentially.

Woods joins a chorus of voices complaining that something is wrong with poetry these days, but he's not sure how to fix the problem or whom to blame. He criticizes creative writing programs not because they produce formulaic work but because they privilege taxonomy, dividing poems and poets into discrete groups and demanding loyalty to particular theoretical approaches until poet are stuck wriggling to the wall like Prufrock pinned by a formulaic phrase. Taxonomy is attractive, explains Wood, because it produces a sense of certainty, but poetry lives in the realm of the tenuous. "Literature matters to most people," he says, "not because it reinforces a dominant ideology or singular politic, but because it reflects tension and uncertainty."

Taxonomy flattens tension and uncertainty, but both characteristics easily coexist with the characteristics Wood would like to see more often in poetry--passion, connection, grace. "I take what I need from theory, history, or politics, and dispense with the rest," he claims, adding, "I believe that my work can reach other people--that it can matter not solely for its theme and message but for its crafting and attention to detail....I write with the belief that I will reach someone but once the poem is out of my hands and in the world, I also know I have no control over how people interpret or react to it."

So the poet stands humbly offering his bloody pound of flesh, but he can't make readers eat. He can only hope that it will be "good to eat a thousand years."