Quarantines, Morgues and Where Poets Are Born

This month’s issue of Poetry was a surprise for me. First of all, I read a lot of literary magazines – mainly to find out what a particular mag is looking for in terms of style and content so that I can submit some material. I don’t read literary magazines to find new talent. That’s why I browse through bookstore shelves and eavesdrop on other poets talking about a new writer they’ve found. I’ve discovered three American poets by browsing – Jeffrey McDaniel, Sarah Lindsay and Stephen Dobyns. These finds are what can keep me going for months. But in literary magazines the odds are much slimmer. In them you find poets who have been lucky enough to be published in their first journal and may never be seen again. Many others are the type of writer who consistently publishes over the decades and you even come to recognize their names, even if they don’t ever seem to achieve any acclaim. Then there are the established poets. Once in a great while, you find a new poet that you think is going to go the distance.

That’s what happened to me this month when I read Katherine Larson’s five poems in the March Poetry. I won’t ruin the experience for you and will let you decide for yourself if you like her work, but all I know is it was a pleasure for me to read poems that actually have thematic integrity and a muted power that is all the more powerful for it being muted. And these poems finish well, unlike so many poems I read. (Remember people, sometimes open-endedness and the claim that you want readers to find their own meanings in a poem is just an excuse for having nothing to say.)

The real choker for me is that these are Ms. Larson’s first published poems. She did win a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship in 2003, but still… It amazes me where poets come from and how some can get so good so fast. If she were a stock, I would be in on the ground floor right now and I would buy, buy, buy.

At the other end of things, and in fact in the same issue of Poetry, are those other writers. A number of writers take some time to look at poets who, though they had variable reputations while they were alive, have already faded into the dust that covers their books. The look at these poets is loving, focusing on their strengths and their best lines – a courtesy probably less frequently given them while they were alive. It is a poignant thing to look at any poet’s work, seeing as how even the best known poets are hardly recognized in our culture (unless they are as savvy as Leonard Cohen and can play a guitar). But to look at those who seem to be on their way out of human memory, that hits a little to close to where I live.

It seems I’m still reading poets and commentaries on poets just to take stock of my own poetic fortune. I go to local readings and open stages both to be surprised by a poem or even just a line that will stay with me for a while, and to see where I fit in the local poetry scheme. I like to think it isn’t just about ego, though. I’m drawn to crowds of poems and poets because of some larger force. We poets are merely the vehicles by which poems meet other poems, much like some scientists hypothesize human bodies are merely methods of conveyance for viruses and bacteria who are the true architects of the world. The main snag in that analogy, of course, is that poems can only dream of being as sophisticated as viruses and bacteria. Poems are the much slower disease we are all dying for (not from) as they commingle and create new possibilities. They are the disease I hope might someday change us.

Still, it would be nice to be the author of the mutant poem that set everything in motion – the poem that got out of the literary quarantine of magazines and coffee houses and got the sirens wailing.