What no serious poet does

Paisley Rekdahl served as poet guest editor for the 2020 number of The Best American Poetry. In her introduction she makes this amazing statement:

“I have never treated poetry as a therapeutic activity; I doubt any serious poet does.”

What? Please! The statement and the tutting corollary are condescending and ridiculous. Maybe even Infuriating?  

Rekdahl’s categorical is followed by the muddled: “And yet if I resist the impulse to turn to poetry for solace, I also risk missing the intimacy that poetry offers us, an intimacy that suggests the author knows my private thoughts and feelings and that, even if she cannot speak to me individually, she speaks about us all as a world.”

Again, what? 

For Paisley Rekdahl “therapeutic activity” and “solace” seem to be the same thing. I guess she’s talking specifically about writing poetry, but she probably also means reading poetry. Why turning to poetry for solace is a bad thing goes unexplained. It must be so obvious to her that she takes it as a given. Uncontroversial. All her friends think so! Why? 

If we turn to a dictionary to help us figure out what Rekdahl means by “therapeutic” we get this at Merriam-Webster: “having a beneficial effect on the body or mind”

Surely even to the deadly serious Paisley Rekdahl it wouldn’t be verboten for a poet to think of poetry as “having a beneficial effect on the … mind”. So she must mean something less broad, a definition with bad connotations. Similarly, another definition at M-W goes, “producing a useful or favorable result or effect”. That doesn’t seem to be so horrific as to be something a poet ought never to do. I imagine Rekdahl arguing that true poetry is not created purely in order to produce a useful or favorable result or effect. True poetry/art is full and deep — full of contradictions, ambiguities, suggestions. That which looks like poetry but is crafted solely to produce a favorable effect is propaganda. “Propaganda” is a word with few positive connotations. Propaganda typically leaves out a lot of truth in order to pare down to the only message it wants to get across. That sounds bad. 

Earlier in the essay Rekdahl talks about how at the beginning of the Covid epidemic her “inbox was daily stuffed with requests from poetry chain mails and journalists and school administrators and arts programs to supply them with poems, preferably ones that could offer people inspiration. … [But] I didn’t feel poetry should be hopeful … [W]hy should I trust a poem that insisted everything, and everyone, would be all right?”

Well, that does sounds like a cheery kind of propaganda, doesn’t it? She’s exasperated by all this grasping after hope, that she, as a poet, is supposed to provide. I’m not a therapist, she seems to say. That’s not my job. Soothing you is not poetry’s job. 

Maybe not. But it’s quite a leap from pique over being prodded to produce poems that soothe to declaring that no serious poet ever turns to poetry for solace. 

Art therapy — and by extension, poetry therapy, I suppose — gets a bad rap. Since Paisley Rekdahl turns her nose up at the word “therapeutic” I immediately thought of the attitude I’ve encountered over the use of art and poetry as ways to heal. Art isn’t meant to heal! It’s meant to — something else — something serious. Make you think, feel, make you analyze, parse — but not heal, dammit. That’s for mommies — and medicines. Could there be some misogyny in the disdain for art therapy? “Serious” is such a masculine word.

Every Best American Poetry includes several pages at the back that not only give brief bios of the poets but also feature the poets talking about their poems. So do any of the poets talk about poetry as a therapeutic activity? 

Victoria Chang: “[M]y mother passed after a long illness and I was/am a bit lost without her. I read … many poems that helped me … I can see, in retrospect, that I wrote these poems to help myself, to see if I could get to the center of grief. Could I distill it? Describe it?” 

Gee, that sounds almost like the definition of “therapeutic.”

Max Ritvo: “I want my writing to heal people. And not like chemotherapy, but like a good veggie soup. Poetry must entertain if it is to heal.”

Arthur Sze: “In traditional Japanese culture, when a ceramic pot is broken, the shards are reassembled and bound together with gold-dusted lacquer. This ‘golden repair’ does not disguise but highlights the breakage, and in writing this section [of the poem that appears in the anthology], I conceived of silence as my gold lacquer.”

James Tate: “[Poets] may end up with an audience and a following of some sort, but in truth they write their poems with various degrees of obsessiveness mostly for themselves, for the pleasure and satisfaction it gives them. And for the hunger and need nothing else can abate.”

So many unserious poets!

source:

The Best American Poetry 2020

edited by Paisley Rekdahl

series editor, David Lehman

Scribner Poetry / Simon & Schuster, NY