poetry and the baroque
Sometime in late 2003/early 2004 I am in the first semester of my MFA program, sitting in a private conference with the instructor of the first workshop I enrolled in. This instructor had a novel, but probably unwise way overall, of teaching the class. Each week for the first several weeks,, he has us vote on our favorite poem from the class's handouts from the previous week. Each week, with one or two exceptions, I am somehow declared the winner (even while occasionally disagreeing that a couple of people were writing much better work than mine--though sadly neither are still writing today.) Part of it is just that the poems I was writing were very sound and seemed like I had it together (and I did, just in a different and much less interesting to me, anyway, than I do now). I always think of these, most of which later were included in my first book, THE FEVER ALMANAC, as crowd pleasers. They were tidy and nice and had all their Ps and Qs in place. They were maybe a little weird and haunting, but I would lean into that more later. Structurally, they looked like poems should, with line breaks and stanzas and nothing more than a page and all self-contained.. It would be a year before I delved into prose poems hardcore and stayed there quite awhile. A short time before I started working with found poems and appropriated texts, with fragmentation and a more collage-like style.
I started grad school in a brand new spanking MFA program at Columbia after having already been publishing widely for a couple years. I already had an MA degree, albeit in lit, not writing, but had gotten firm background in poetry ranging from medieval epics to the modernists. Having all this in hand, I was not only slightly older than most of my peers in workshop, but also more experienced in publishing and with a more defined voice than I had just a couple years prior. I had feet in a couple of communities then, those of online poets publishing in journals and keeping blogs in their heyday. The other in local open mic poets. The conversations in each were vastly different. In class, the judging, in the end was abandoned, largely because I think he got tired of me winning and also, people started gunning for me and being uneccesarily cruel in their critiques. Not just critical of the poems, but me for even writing the things I wrote about at all. In the conference that end of the semester, the same instructor says "I think people were impressed in the beginning with your work, but the shine wore off." I think I just shrugged, not sure how to respond, having divested myself from that semester, and probably the following one, of paying too much mind to what was said about my work. Politely of course, I'd write down notes on my draft and then throw them out as soon as I got home. Late in the semester, when I went out for some beers randomly one night when class was canceled, two writers in the class who were nice to me that I did not know that well, said they appreciated that I seemed to gave no fucks. And of course, they were wrong, I gave all the fucks. Otherwise I wouldn't have been in the program....
Nevertheless, all that aside, the other takeaway from that conference was the instructor's suggestion that my work had a "baroque" quality to it. Basically that is was just a little too much. A little too gilded and shellaqued. I though of this recently while reading Lisa Marie Basile's post talking about maximalism and gilded poems--about a desire to be twisty and baroque as a writer. To be dark and layered and intricately wrought, and how much I gravitate to those books that are. I'm guessing the implication in that discussion was whether or not a reader could find a way inside it (the cynic in my says to pick it apart, but maybe just even to live inside it.) My work did change over the years (though actually I would say my best work harbors somewhere between these two rocks--the baroque and everyday. The lavishness of language and its spareness.
When I was writing all those online lessons on art and architecture a couple years back, the Baroque was my favorite era, though that may also be held by the similar, but slightly varying, Rococo style. The work I am writing now is definitely more Rococo than not. I don't tie up my ends so precise and the Ps and Qs are out of place, but I am still writing the same kinds of poems that seemed to make my peers angry in those workshops. Back then, things got worse before they got better, though thankfully I had enough going on that I cared less and less and then very little at all. Now I revel in my baroquenes...luxuriate in it occasionally depending on the project. The new series of sci-fi poems are a fun trip for this. They feel like very ornate and sexy poems about space and robots and genetic engineering and I am totally not hating it...
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