By
Brian Doyle
from
The Oregonian
I
have a friend who calls himself a poet because he published a poem in a
magazine once, but then for fun he published the exact same poem in another
magazine, just to see if he could, and ever since it's been the deluge. By his
count he has published the exact same poem in 11 little magazines and journals
and reviews and webzines so far. He has published no other poem in his poetic
career than that poem, which I have to say is a pretty good poem, although
reading it 11 times, as I have, dilutes the salt and song of it a little -- I
know where the surprises are, the twists of phrase, the way he cracks his lines
so they have a little extra pop and swerve in them. Still, though, as he likes
to say, it's a pretty good poem, serviceable, sturdy, not too self-absorbed and
self-obsessed and self-indulgent like so many poems are, and as there are no
sudden phrases in French or Greek, which happens sometimes in arty poems, and
when that linguistic crime occurs, as he says, you want to get a serious
baseball bat and have at the ankles of the arty poet for being such a
pretentious doofus, although cracking poets on the ankles for being such
narcissistic dolts is frowned upon, even by editors, some of whom actually do
have baseball bats in their offices, in case of emergencies.
[So
unpack this with me. Or maybe not. Maybe we should just make jokes. Jokes are probably the best course of action
at this point. But, be careful, this next bit gets
pretty existential.]
I
have asked my friend why he is so intent on publishing this one poem over and
over again and he pretty much has a different answer every time I ask the
question. Sometimes he says he thinks it is a fine poem and the more times it
appears the better, on principle. Sometimes he says it's an indictment of our
culture that so few people read poems that no one yet has noticed that he
publishes the same poem over and over again. Sometimes, on dark days, he says I
guess I am not much of a poet, because it looks like all I have is the one poem
in me and I am wedded to it until death do us part. Sometimes he says he is
playing a shell game with poetry magazine editors, and he does not feel bad
about that because it's not like he is getting paid anyway. Sometimes he says
his calculus is that poetry magazines are read by so few people that each time
the poem is published it is read by a maximum of seven people and therefore the
poem has been read by 77 people to date, excluding him and me, and he will quit
when he gets more than 100 readers total, including him and me. Sometimes he
says that the poem is actually different each time it appears because it is
printed in a different typeface or on a different weight of paper or different
electric screen, and context is everything in poetry, and therefore the poem is
by definition a new poem, given its new context. Sometimes he says that the
poem is actually different every time because we are wrong to think that we
know anything certain about something we have read before; for one thing we
immediately forget most of what we read, and for another the whole point of a
poem is to have layers and hints and intimations and subtexts and shimmers and
suggestions of other meanings and depths, so each time you read the same poem
it is not the same poem because you are reading it a different way, on a
different day, and of course you are not the same person you were when you read
it before either, so how could the poem be the same if you are different when
you read it?
Which
is a pretty good point, actually.
[Or not. As
the joke goes, why not cut to the chase and just publish the same poem over and
over because isn’t that what most poets do anyway. And then, yes, of course, it is an indictment
of the poetry-reading world that one could publish the same poem in 11
different journals and no one would notice.
But really, it’s mostly just kind of a sad morning.]
My
friend also says look, the whole point of a poem is to jazz your perceptions,
to send you sideways mentally and emotionally for a moment, to stimulate you to
see things in a slightly different and ideally refreshing way, so really he is
doing readers and editors a subtle service in presenting a poem that you can
read in lots of different ways depending on what sort of paper or screen it is
appearing on, and the typeface, and the time of day, and who you are when you read
it. If you think about this carefully for a moment, he says, I am turning the
whole dynamic around, so that the poem is the same but everything else is
different; in a sense the poem is no longer the lines on the page or screen,
but the whole panoply of things that are different each time the poem appears
in a new magazine or journal or review or webzine. The poem is everything else
except the lines on the page, get it?
This
is a pretty interesting point, actually, but every time he explains this slowly
and carefully to me with that glint in his eye I am not sure if he is making a
brilliant and subtle point about poetry and art and perception and metaphysical
existence or if he has gone over the edge altogether and I am being sold a pile
of nuts. So, in classic editorial fashion, I will leave this question to you,
the reader, and tiptoe gently out of the end of this essay, leaving only my
byline below as evidence that I was here.
[I
don’t find it all that interesting a point, but good taste and interesting
points aside, there still are issues about our culture on display here, none of
which please me. And, even as I point, I’m
passing over in silence.]
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