Short Essay On Poetry #2

I’m playing the monster truck phone game again. It’s been a while & they’ve added a new game mode, a variation on the floor is lava. It’s another reason to open the app, I guess, & I probably will open it more over the next few days, but then it’ll fade back away again. The new gimmicks can’t last forever. Time’s fickle like that, old favorites can never be true favorites again.

It’s like the new Death Cab. It was good. It was, really, but every time one of the songs comes up on shuffle, I skip it. I only want to listen to pop music and Samia right now. That, too, will change one day. Soon, probably.

Reinvention is only reinvention if something feels fundamentally changed.

When I started out writing again, it was because I discovered grit lit. That, I thought, was the shit. I wrote fiction influenced by guys who published with middle names. It was good, & a lot of it will be in my fiction debut, but I always need change. I wrote about sports. Now I write about me.

Bring this back to the poem, Justin.

The best poems are ones that reinvent themselves, or maybe the best poets are the one where every poem is a new creation. For a long time, I didn’t get that, but now? Yeah, man. Every blank page can take you anywhere, & it’s best to ride that. (I sound like a words are magic person now. They are, but I don’t want to be the type of person who says that.)

Adding a fancy new part to the app isn’t enough to change it radically. It was to be a real change. You have to rediscover the words every time.

Short Essay On Poetry #4

Tina Lemon Johnson. That’s the alter ego of a drag queen from Iowa City. I’ve never seen her perform but my wife & I started watching Sasha Belle’s Drag Race—it’s the best art in America—on YouTube & she was on the season, this tall clown, this vision of overblown ridiculousness. It was weird—a drag queen who was, in a sense, portraying another drag queen, an extra layer of unreality.

I wrote my dissertation—well, the critical intro, I’m not that smart, most of it was just the poems that make up my first book—on the line between the prose poem & the lyric essay, but ask me now about that, ask me to describe my argument, & I’ll say I don’t fucking know.

But that liminal space there that divides these things—genre division is all liminal btw—feels very Tina Lemon Johnson-esque, if you know what I’m saying. It’s hard to define where one drag persona ends & the other begins, & it’s hard to find the line between genres. There really isn’t a line—line implies this linear quality, that there is a clear distinction of things, but it’s all cloudy, murky, etc.

It’s been like six years since we watched this, but tonight we found a new season. Tina Lemon Johnson is competing, but as her other drag persona, the real one, whatever real means. (Isn’t everything real?) But at the end of the episode, where they show the picture of her next to how many points she has in the season, she’s in the Tina makeup. The lines so blurred together that you can’t even pretend to find them.

I’ve stopped thinking about genre when I write. The thing becomes what the thing is meant to become. I don’t even know if I should use the word meant. It all evolves organically. I told Andrew in an interview that I decide what genre to write about by how much of my own life I want in the piece & that might have been true two months ago, but I’m always willing to reconsider my process.

❊

Short Essay On Poetry #7

I spent last summer thinking my poetics needed to take something from the sensibility of Tony Hoagland. He was my first real teacher & for all his faults, he knew how to turn a critical eye toward America while making light of it, & there’s little I love more in my life than trying to make light of something.

But I don’t want a poetics of cultural criticism. I don’t want to be political, or at least too political. There are people who do that & there are people who do that well but for me, I want a poetics that helps me understand myself.

I’m reading Tony’s essay, the one I mentioned a couple of essays ago. (Am I committing, now, to thinking of these essays as a project?) There’s a Mark Halliday poem in there & it’s the most accessible thing ever, which, for me, makes it the most inaccessible thing ever. That’s beside the point, though—I like what Tony says about the poem, that it—along with a Matthea Harvey poem he quotes as well—contains “a warning about how generic, how over-familiar, our storytelling is.” I’ve been thinking about that with my work, how my first two books are so narrative. The third—if it ever exists—probably will be too, simply because I spent last fall still working in that mode, though doing so in a voice that felt a little freer. At some point, this spring, something changed, & I didn’t want to tell a story anymore. I wanted to tell a moment, which is like a story in that it contains the fledgling seed of narrative but differs because that seed stays just a seed.

IDK if I’ve succeeded at that.

But then he talks about the “inadvertent sentimentality and narcissism” of confessionalism, & I get a bit annoyed (is it okay to be annoyed at the dead?), & I start to kind of see why, as I move deeper into fatherhood, I’ve started to turn more inward as a writer—I want to write about the self, I want to be sentimental. It’s human to want those things.

I’m not going to finish his essay right now. I didn’t sleep much last night & I have some work to get done, so I’ll put a pin in it. Maybe I’ll come back, or maybe I got enough out of that first section. But I do want to think about sentimentality for a moment. That was the biggest lesson in undergrad, that sentimentality kills the poem, but there’s a difference between a college sophomore whose biggest influences are Plath & a Hallmark card & someone who understands how to thread that sentimentality in. (Don’t take that as an attack on Plath—if I ever wrote a poem as good as “Daddy” then I’d never write another poem again.) Emotion gets a bad rap. You just have to learn to harness it, or, at least, to pretend you know how to harness it. •  





Justin Carter is the author of Brazos and Laterals, and the editor of Some Words.

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