... and Response

There's a story I like to tell when I run into another native New Yorker away from the Big Apple. Shortly after college, being still active in campus theater and known to have a car, I was giving some undergrad members of the Stevens Dramatic Society (who knew me casually as "that older guy" who did Drood") a ride to a play. When my intended path along Route 46 was, shall we say, interrupted by an aggressive driver, I responded by stating my disapproval clearly and completely using the vocabulary I'd acquired during my months of driver education in the outer boroughs. With hand gestures.

And one of my young friends in the back seat immediately said "I didn't know you were from New York!"

Aside from confirming for the specific regional flair of dialectal Brooklynese, this tells me two things: that a specific mode of communication can provide an immediate, leveling, and intimate link, and that emotion - especially negative emotion - is a great font of energy from which to fuel said communication. What it doesn't tell me is that swearing at a guy in a beat-up Cherokee is great communication.

Or, in a more artful context, consider that while a visceral response may provoke a strong sense of identification, and that may be a powerfully felt and meaningful experience, that cannot be confused with great art. This idea pokes its head out a lot at open mikes, where people will present freshly-minted poems of protest and observation and receive timely attaboys and amens. Can be valuable, community-building, reinforcing. But it's usually not art. Not any more than a good standup comedy routine, anyway.

Consider the standups. Who are the great standup comedians today? There are a few that I'll stop and watch if I catch them flipping channels - Ron White, Kathleen Madigan, and Jeff Dunham among others*. I think they're terrific at their craft. And funny. And while I'll always stop and watch them, I'm not archiving their stuff to share it with my kids when they're old enough. Now, George Carlin, on the other hand... Carlin was political, vitriolic, and at times (almost) as dirty as some of the current crop. But his craft was honed at another level, one which made it timeless. The Seven Words You Can't Say On Television have all been said on television this year (four of them on "free" TV), but the routine still rings out with humor and purpose, and doesn't rely only on the shock value of the words - which is good because they don't have much of that commodity left.

I expect out poets to give the same effort when creating works of protest or witness. Not that the act of witness is not in itself important, but recognize that shock (disgust, disappointment...) is not enough; that there is crafting and distance required to apply Wordsworth's classic definition and make the witnessing into a poem. In Fooling with Words, Mark Doty admitted that many of his poems start when they "come tumbling of him", but that this isn't the poem; it's "a cry" which is refined through the physical crafting of language. Consider that when people turned to poetry in September 2001, they turned largely to a poem written in 1939; that suggests something about the works created in the years in between.

My own work crosses into witness infrequently, but when I head that way, it's usually later, when I've decided what I want to say, and whether it's something that I can say well. That last piece is important to me.

It's the value that the poet brings.



* - I'm also partial to an old Bob Newhart Button-Down Mind bit on Sirius!