On Anonymity, the Open Road, a Couple of Poets, and Trees Without Toilet Paper

In which poet-troubadour Paul Allen and I agree we care far more about particular poems than we care about the State of Poetry.
It started simply enough. This past Thursday evening on Facebook, Ron Cooper, novelist and Philosophy prof, posted a link to a Washington Post piece that begins this way: “Friday morning, America’s great poets will wake up to find that someone has TP-ed their trees and scrawled ‘COWARD’ on their doors.” To be clear, the Washington Post blogger is talking about an essay written by someone else and scheduled to appear the next morning, Friday, in Harper’s July issue. In his Facebook post, Professor Cooper cleverly tags a couple of poets whose relative anonymity renders them and their trees, if they have any, safe.
One of those poets is me, a guy with a couple of books and a very short list of awards, someone who writes more prose these days than he does poetry. The better known of the two poets Ron tagged is Paul Allen, Ron’s Creative Writing teacher back in the day at College of Charleston, a poet and songwriter/performer who recently retired, sold or gave away almost all of his belongings, and bought a camper that he pulls about the country behind his truck, stopping where he wants for as long as he wants.
Anonymity is a relative thing, of course. Paul Allen has performed and read in any number of places. Performances are hard things to track, but there’s plenty of evidence on-line that Paul Allen is a master songwriter and performer. His first book, American Crawl, won the Vassar Miller Award, and his second, Ground Forces, was published in Ireland eleven years later in 2008. One thing’s for sure. Paul Allen gets around. He also returns, as he does in this clip of a reading he did at College of Charleston after retiring. Watch it, listen to the audience, feel the energy, and tell me Paul Allen suffers from anonymity. Tell me this isn’t the return of their local hero. Not a professional poet. Not a poet whose national eminence will get his trees TP-ed in Harper’s. But their poet and a serious and seriously good one.
Thing is I can’t take one of his books to the Whiskey Tub because I’ve never read one, though I will soon enough and not because of a chance Facebook comment by a mutual friend. I’ll read one or both Paul Allen books because I’ve just watched and listened to that recent video of Paul reading his American long poem at College of Charleston, which I watched because I’d just listened to a few of his songs, which I listened to because of the comments he made in the Facebook thread Ron Cooper started.
Here are a couple of Paul Allen highlights, the reason we’re here in this blog entry. Responding to the Washington Post warning about the mean things that were about to explode from the pages of Harper’s, Paul quoted or paraphrased something his mentor John Fredrick Nims said in response to a student’s comment that he liked poetry: “I don’t like poetry. There are just certain poems that I like.” I agree with Paul, who agrees with Professor Nims. The Harper’s jeremiad might fill up a few comment threads, maybe even sell a couple copies, but, as Paul puts it, “For me, articles like [the Harper’s essay] aren’t interesting; I have no real interest in the state of poetry.” Come to think of it, neither do I and I haven’t for quite a few years. That phrase, “the State of Poetry,” calls to mind the famous line from that great John Berryman Dream Song (#14): “literature bores me, especially great literature.” I don’t like literature or poetry any more or less than I like any other broad category. I like individual instances. And that State of Poetry, whatever the hell it is, will survive any number of bad instances and proclamations of doom. And funny thing about those bad instances. Folks rarely agree on what’s bad and what’s good.
Discussing the pressure on some to publish, Paul describes the proliferation of small or “small-minded” poems. They are, he writes, “like anecdotes or like notes for poems that don’t get written because the notes get published too easily, too quickly. Part of that is just my own interest. I enjoy sitting on a poem for a month, two, three working every day on it–triggering a question that vaguely makes me remember something from Spinoza so I go read him during the writing. I like researching not just the details that pop up but the ideas, the historical world. But that’s just me and it has been to my (and my work’s) detriment that I enjoy such things. Now, fortunately, I have no career and seek no future as a poet, gave that up long ago in preference for teaching. Thus I don’t ‘keep up’ or think much about where poetry is going.” I don’t think about it either. I trust that poetry, like liquor or pants or music, will continue to go where it goes, in part because of the differences in individual taste and assessments of quality (to my mind, impossible to untangle). The multiplicity of approaches and preparations, not to mention uses and appropriations (though I just did), trumps the efforts of superiors who would guide us (and here I confess I once wore a park ranger hat and got evangelical about right behavior in Poetryville). I’m too busy co-raising four young daughters to get romantic about taking to the open road like Paul, but I find his wandering, the purposeful aimlessness of it, to be a beautiful thing. My favorite part of that passage, though, and the one that won me over, is the admission that his assessment is marked by self-interest. “Part of it,” he says, “is just my own interest.” Yes to that.
And yes to this: “That’s why I don’t plan to read the article. I’m not interested in the subject of it. I just write my poems, trying to get a collection of ‘travel poems’ done while I live only in a camper and just drive around the country. In some ways, I guess my retired life is like my poetry. I ramble, stop at a place that looks interesting, explore it. But I have no set agenda and don’t even have ‘things in this country I want to see.’ I have no home state, region, or (I suspect) country. I’m interested in the two brothers in Eunice, LA, who lived in the campground I was staying in for three weeks; 10 and 11 whom I taught to fish. And they caught some nice ones, and I taught them how to clean them. I’m interested in the crawfish farm where the campground was located. But I’m not interested in the South (or the country) as an idea or state of mind. Just scenes and moments here and there. That’s pretty close to my work. Not interested in my poetry as it fits in (or defies) any current scene because I have no interest in the current scene (or taste or quality). I guess that comes with retirement. Those things mattered to me a bit more when I was teaching because I felt I had a responsibility to my subject matter and to my students to ‘keep up.’ I’d rather read ‘Gerontion’ for the hundredth time than be given a new book by Louise Glück, for example. (Just an example.)” Amen, friend. Here’s to retirement, to self-knowledge, and to the long ramble that takes you forward (Eunice, LA) even as it brings you back (“Gerontion”).
Until Ron Cooper paired us, a couple of two-book poets in no danger of being indicted in a major-magazine jeremiad about everything that’s wrong with poetry (or the State of It), Paul Allen and I had never heard of each other. Not surprising given distances, the number of poets poeting these days, and our ages, both 52 or so, when our first books were published. Within half an hour, though, and ankle-deep in the comment stream, I knew I’d met a comrade whose view is long as a river and clear as a lost mountain creek. In other words, I’d met someone whose way is one I aspire to. Long live and travel, Paul Allen. I’ll wait for your poems.