Canada Dry Wednesday, January 13, 2010

1
It's the layering of gimmicks--rhyme schemes and repetition and metric jingles--that lend poetry its natural opacity. In fact, the whole history of free verse has been an attempt to replicate that opacity without the appearance of gimmicks at all. The Oulipo had a word for a text wherein the constraint is to produce a text which reads as if written under a restriction, without any restriction being imposed at all--"Canada Dry" (derived from a series of advertisements in the 60's that promoted ginger ale as a "kicky" alternative to real alcohol). In other words, the supposed difficulty of poetry is not a poem-to-poem problem, but a universal one. Assuming that, it's also not worth arguing. It's fortunate for the crossword puzzle industry that what they produced was never mistaken for soulcraft--they are neither expected to fill in the puzzles nor make them unsolvable.

There are poets who, in an effort to bypass the difficulty of poetry, write little synopses of the novels they would have written if they weren't so lazy. They aren't difficult, it's true, but they're also boring, too boring even to understand things like games and puzzles, boring even in translation, and are not worth talking about. It's the people engaged in the 30-year cult of difficulty (70 years, if you count The New Criticism) you have to try to talk down from this stuff. They're the ones getting too old to continue the pretense, who created our very difficult world in a situation of unparalleled ease, who are still squatting on a big chunk of poetic real estate, and we younger writers should know better than to allow them to fuck with our dignity, and especially with our fun. No other generation has folded so readily before their elders as we have before ours. They will die soon, and what will we have? Nothing of our own. Not an art, nor a legitimate politics: nothing. Just this meaningless word called difficulty.

2
After hosting a reading of self-identified "literary" science fiction writers this Thursday--a very talented group, and one of the more exciting and fun readings we've had--I was chatting with one of the founders of The Interstitial Arts Foundation. She was singing the praises of an annual science fiction convention outside of Boston called Readercon. She hit upon all the things that make it exciting to me: "it's science fiction writing, but it's the rare convention without the distractions. It's by and for writers." At first, I was excited by the focus of it. But something deeper hit me about it. I'm tired of the "focus" of poets. Because it's all focus, all the time. What luxury, I was thinking, to be in actual danger of being distracted by one's peers. I dream of being so distracted by another poet, instead of watching him or her pretend, in drudgery and recitation, to have honed their specific ideology of language to a killing point.

As we discussed the merits of Readercon, I was thinking the analog to poetry would be if we were in a situation in which there were regularly these fantastic Rhythm and Rhyme conferences featuring birdwatchers, video game developers, graphic designers, musicians and hopscotch athletes --conventions available from month to month in states all over the country, held together by the specifically unserious love of its participants-- and that at least one of them had the rare benefit of featuring only poets. This does not exist of course, because poetry shares with factories and offices and government bureaus everywhere an obsession with perfecting singular processes and the neat-freak abhorrence of the non-ideological.

Where else can you find such clarifying unprofessionalism as in science fiction?