Hidden
neatly in the hyperbole of Thomas Sayers Ellis’ “All Their Stanzas Look Alike”
(The Maverick Room. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2005. 114-115.) is a truth of
sorts. There is a boring “sameness” in a substantial amount of contemporary
“canonized” American poetry. Perhaps the
alleged excellence of how MFA programs teach the making of poetry is partially
to blame. MFA is an acronym for an unprintable phrase. In my scandalizing opinion, MFA programs
promote craft as technical excellence and ego-interiority, minimizing the
option of craft to speak with engaged boldness of the painful messiness of life
and world affairs. To be sure,
aesthetics can evoke bright moments of pleasure or eargasms, even a bit of
knowledge. But the best poetry uses
aesthetic properties to intensify the pragmatic, the always present need to deal
with how people manufacture horrors for themselves and others. Jazz counts as
some of our best poetry, and certainly John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Cecil Taylor
and other jazz people direct our minds to the “sound” science and physics of
existing. Metaphysics for real. How refreshing it is to read John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for
Freedom: Spirituality and the Music (New York: Oxford University Press,
2010) edited by Leonard L. Brown. Abstain
for a time from the sameness of poetry and look for practical and critical
stimulation in the differentness of fictional and non-fictional narrative. Find
alternative spaces where furious flowers bloom. We do not need to construct and
deconstruct a bogus war between poetry and non-poetry, because in certain
remarkable instances it is poetry and poetic equations that cut a pathway to
narrative. Consider the importance of how poets Brenda Marie Osbey and Honoreé
Fanonne Jeffers excavate histories, of how Rudolph Lewis employs the poetics of
orality to craft fiction.
