Poetry police

Originally posted: January 25, 2021

During the Inauguration, National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman stole the show with her poem “The Hill We Climb”. I watched the ceremony the same way I read my reviews - breath held, jaw clenched, and squinting - because remember the confetti canon and the armed terrorists who stormed the capitol? Luckily, it was fine. No one got assassinated and I had the privilege of witnessing Gorman’s performance in real time. It was a tour de force and 99% of the millions who saw her agreed. But you know…there’s always the one per cent.

The next day, a fellow author posed a question on Facebook (I know, I know): I'm not a poet, they said, and asked the experts to weigh in. Was Amanda Gorman's "poem" any good?

This is a writer whose work I have long admired. Their latest book is currently sitting on my coffee table. I wasn’t expecting the professional hit to come from inside the house, you know? Critique is one thing but imagine someone solicited opinions on your book by derisively calling it a “novel”? I waded into the comments to find out what the poets were saying.

Those Himalayas of the Mind

“people need heroines… it just gets trying to see sentimentality elevated to art”
“Well, the problem is, people will now think, oh that's what good poetry is. When it isn't.”
“it is what a lot of people would LIKE poetry to be. Feel-goodish stuff.”
“can we expect anything different from officially sanctioned and mandated poetry?”
“It is a speech, not a poem.”
“will soon be forgotten”
“the whole thing was a lie… and stank of currying favour…Makes sense that she has presidential aspirations.”
“If she sticks with it, maybe, MAYBE, depending on more factors than I can name, she will write a poem….I want to be generous to her, so I can sincerely say, you had a lot of feeling there, Amanda, if you like, if it gives you something you can't get anywhere else, just keep going.”

Oh, you thought that one was comically bad? I saved this gem for last (formatting: mine):

“I did not like the poem.
She was using words that should not be in poems.
It's more a rockstar performance than art.”

The House of Poetry

At last check there were 300+ comments and most of them were not of this ilk. Savvier poets pointed out that what Gorman wrote and performed was indeed a poem, of a type classified as occasional poetry, that it comes from traditions of spoken word, slam, and hip-hop, all of which are meant to be experienced live and in the moment, not read off the page like narrative and lyric poetry. My favourite was the commenter who prosaically declared: “The house of poetry has many rooms.”

The poets who move between rooms are a generous lot. They were offering up a hell of a lot of free educational labour and I’d like to believe some of the grumps took note and learned something. But, as one persistent commenter made clear, over and over: hope is for dupes and liars. So more likely they stayed stubbornly put in the draughty old wing, sucking on their sour grapes.

Just so we’re clear: Amanda Gorman is a Harvard graduate. Her unpublished poetry collection is a bestseller. None of this derision matters a whit to her success. But some of these writers, I imagine, are teaching and mentoring less fortunate emerging poets. Is this the level of arrogance and ignorance they bring to those encounters? Easy to see why so many young writers, especially writers of colour, feel disillusioned with traditional creative writing programs. Because often this kind of critique - which has more to do with who you are than the quality of your work - is a hell of a lot more subtle and insidious. The burn is baked into the subtext and you can’t quite articulate why you feel the criticism is destructive rather than constructive.

So it’s instructive to consider what the critics found triggering. Gorman’s ambition, for one. How dare she? (Once at a party, while I was out of town, a cranky old poet snarked about my ambition to my husband, and then asked him not to tell me what she’d said. lol)

The laziest critique in the world is to ridicule what you don’t understand. Gorman’s spoken word influences are foreign to her detractors so they dismiss her art as a speech. A stump speech. She’s just gunning for the Oval Office, after all.

Powerful people have elevated her to Capitol Hill and put a microphone into her hand. It must be because she’s young and they can bend her to their will, use her as a mouthpiece of the state. The trigger here is agency. Who gave her that? Let’s pretend we can take it away.

The hope in Gorman’s poem is belittled by people who, conveniently, have no idea what it’s like to be a Black woman in America facing down a climate catastrophe that’s going to plague her long after the rest of us are dust. Gorman’s hope is an act of resistance, not a folly of youth. It’s also the burden of resilience that’s foisted on Black people, and women, in particular. The poetry police are shockingly unimaginative.

And then of course there are art’s perennial twin questions: is this any good and who gets to decide? For too long a homogeneous cabal have been the arbiters of taste. But now the times, they are a changing. The house of poetry has built new wings. And some of the old guard are….well old and scared, it seems like.

The Myth of Zero Sum

Gorman is a triple threat - young, Black, and a woman. I’m sure every bitter poet on that Facebook thread would balk at the insinuation that their dislike stems from racism. Fine, that’s their truth. Here’s the incontrovertible truth: Black women are rare in poetry workshops. They’re almost never students or teachers or included in the canon. Because the whole damn institution is racist. And when you are part of the institution, some of that stink sticks to you. You must be vigilant about hosing it down (yes, me too. All of us). But if you don’t pay attention, you won’t even notice. It’s 2021. I can’t believe I’m still having to spell this out.

It’s hard out there for a poet. There’s no fame, no fortune, entirely too little respect. When you are part of a marginalized group and the podium and shelf space is limited and the publisher says: “we love this book but we’ve already got an immigrant novel coming out this year” (lol. true story) it can be complicated to witness someone else’s success. It’s easy to mistake the game for zero sum. It’s easy to denigrate the perceived competition, especially when you think the competition should be more marginal than you. It’s the same ugly psychology that drives the anti-immigration sentiment in immigrant communities. I paid my dues; why should this new guy have it easy?

Here’s what many writers of colour have figured out: we’re better off working together than against each other. Constructive critique is necessary. Envy is not. So we indulge our sour grapes in private. Then we get the fuck over ourselves and cheer for the home team.