Defensive about contemporary poetry, or about the trope that it’s written only for other poets, which sometimes it is, I frequently retreat to the laziest of arguments: You have to have studied physics to understand contemporary physics, don’t you? So if physics is sometimes fully understood only by other physicists, is that a bad thing?
I don’t know. If we let the poets speak only to themselves, it’s not as if they can cook up a hydrogen bomb behind our backs.
Can they?
Of course they can. A nuclear winter of words, put together, as they say, in the best possible order, trumping our turgid, bloviated prose every time, getting at the heart of the matter. Those poems they distill from the babel of too much thought, too much language — for that is the craft, and then the art; it’s a paring away — can blow us up as well as the product of any Manhattan Project.
If we listen.
A bunch of us, almost 200, got together downtown at the Los Angeles Library Thursday night to celebrate 25 years of Claremont Graduate University’s Kingsley and Kate Tufts Awards by listening to the poems of this year’s winners, Vievee Francis and Phillip B. Williams. Then there was a dinner next door at the California Club at which we got to listen some more, and I’m not sure that the old dark-paneled dining room’s walls have heard such words. For both of these winners of two of the hottest, largest prizes in all of poetry are African American, and both bring a radical personal politics born of oppression to their writing, turned in the classic American manner into a kind of biblical despair.
The rooms were packed with some of the greats of the poetry world, and Alice Quinn, longtime poetry editor of The New Yorker and now executive director of the Poetry Society of America, got us going with a line from Gerald Manley Hopkins: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Then she reminded us that the late Kingsley Tufts, the Los Angeles businessman whose estate, with his wife Kate’s, endowed these awards, wrote what we would now call light verse that was published long ago in her magazine. Then she quoted the editor who followed her, Paul Muldoon: “I’m often prompted to think: well, what is the alternative to light verse? Is it heavy verse?”
Vievee Francis stood to read her “A Flight of Swiftlets Made Their Way In”: “and settled along my cage — / so expectantly beautiful, / their swerve, I wanted to touch / them, to take their tiny frames / and snap their necks.”
These wonderfully Dickensonian lines are just what Kate Tufts had hoped for when, 22 years ago, as the awards were getting going, she told writer Jack Miles, “Sometimes I just wish they would give the prize to somebody completely outrageous.”
It’s not that the elegant Francis, born of the South and of Detroit and an English professor at Dartmouth, is in her person “outrageous.” It’s that, like every good and great poet writing today, she believes in, and writes, a verse that, post-singsong, post-Beat, post-modern, has had the stuffing torn out of it, and is leaner and cooler for that.
Young Phillip Williams, whose first book “Thief in the Interior” won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, writes out of the Chicago he grew up in: “Children speak to their murdered brothers with a cereal box / and construction paper cut into a Ouija’s tongue that licks / yes when asked if liquor could polish a skull in a way / pleasing to the dead, licks no when asked for a name.”
This is poetry we can’t live without. Your way of looking at the world would change if you read Francis’s “Forest Primeval” and Williams’s “Thief.” It’s a change I recommend making.
