Dear HBM—


I have been having such a hard time writing this for reasons that now seem terribly obvious, but that have been obscured to me for the past few months. Protectively, I imagine. In many ways I’m at the threshold of this very issue—the “question” of the poet who meditates on poetry, who uses the university as a site for doing that meditating, who studies both in and about poetry. I believe it’s good and yet am ready, at the same time, to run in the opposite direction, a decision still (as I attempt to say here) mediated by the university’s tether…There’s some stuff to ignore here, who knows what it’s worth. Is it new? Old? Both seem at once good and bad.




20 BCE, 2024 CE

It’s about twenty years before a new and supposedly common era is supposed to start. A poet sits down to write something about poetry, something to possibly dissuade a friend’s son from going into the business of being a poet in the first place. Writing poems is unglamorous, the poet writes. It makes the poet an object of potential ridicule since poems depend on other people and other people are notoriously hard to trust. It won’t make you money!  It’s very difficult to do this thing well or right. The poet ends his poem—maybe he smiles to himself—with a bitter reciter, a murdering bear-leech who preys upon readers. It’s an inverse image of the beautiful creature (a woman tapering off into a fish) that the poem began with. There are dangers in poetry, the poet seems to say in his poem and about his poem, to poets themselves.

Then a while later another poet sits down to understand why they started writing so long ago and kept at it and what has been the result, what has it all amounted to in the end. Most days they worry it has all amounted to very little. Writing poems is unglamorous; they have felt increasingly a kind of ridicule for it, a ridicule that comes from inside themselves. It hasn’t made them money, but it also hasn’t solved or contributed to the solution of several very bad problems plaguing the world.

These poets are poets and write poems in which they explain or explore these conundrums; whatever the poet says, they say it “as” poetry, they say it in the medium of poetry which undermines the whole enterprise in a certain sense—the enterprise of warning against poetry, and poet-hood—because the son is intrigued by the risks and the possible pain, it sounds very exciting and romantic, and the poet can’t help herself, she’s remembering what poem-language can do, it heals something and helps her go on, if only for a bit. They go on writing and others go on reading and the complaint turns into a defense, of sorts. The way to do this is the reason to.

Of our imperfect knowledge of the world,

Our conditional modes of grasping/words,

Words can only approximate,

Early

Or late, late you learnt

(     Knowing is nothing

      Nothing but a noise

Cicadas have my envy

Cicadas the most felicitous

2009-2013-2021 CE

It's about ten years after a new century has supposedly started. Gertrude Stein said it takes a long time for a century to die, so maybe it’s right at the beginning of this new one or still at the end of the old—has anything new started yet? Sure, plenty. Everything’s new and changing and devolving and dying or collapsing and being discovered. There are new ways to talk and the old places where people gathered to do this kind of specialized talking and thinking are also somewhat new as they become part of everything else just like they always were. There’s lots to recommend this and lots to not.




School was always a product. And school always contained within it something unproductive, even where it was meant to be otherwise. A daydream in the classroom, an hour spent with an ancient idea. The university is no utopia. But what arises in its setting might attempt such an appearance. That the arts increasingly find themselves both within the university and at a “marginal” point within that same university appears now as an inevitability of this unending age, that which has redescribed the writer and their desired life through the logic of the market, and what it might from this kind of person effectively extract. In this same swoop of history comes the age of different sorts of collapse. The decay of institutions (some gladly, some through a process of underfunding, gutting, neglecting), though also, the flattening and homogenization of the university course offering, the increasing supplanting of things onto other things. Juliana Spahr writes about this so excellently in “The Scotch Taped,” recounting the fate of Mills College in Oakland, a small school “merged” into a larger school and quickly redefined by and in relation to this action, all things suddenly “merged” into all other things, the era of non-distinction, the University’s Great Hybridity, interdisciplinarity without earnest cross-pollination. The best poets I know are historians. They care about good and evil science. They know that poetry holds within it splotches of knowledge essential to both endeavors. This is not that: the thinker who is thorough and responsive, who behaves nurturingly toward the un-disciplined world with, if they’re “lucky,” an occasional marketability. This Great Hybridity is, instead, what Andrews calls the “radical shapelessness and contingency” required of capital, seeking to rapidly “innovate,” or, put plainly, to mine new markets. Fewer classes that do more things. Writing for engineers to further engineering—though, of course, shouldn’t they try it?




Increasingly the young, on the cusp of poetry which has something to do with the cusp of life, their lives as they imagine life might be assembled—out of a line that comes to them from the world and that they return to the world, a line to follow, to toe, to cross—they want this right now, to fulfill their poetry desires immediately after the other school stuff they had to do. Whereas before poetry school might never have happened at all, it was some meetings with a slightly cantankerous friend of your dad’s, then maybe it was something only other poets—those you liked or didn’t—attended, because they could or couldn’t, or they went after taking some “time off,” that was their privilege, to take time and do what they wanted with it, what they could, there was discussion about this for a bit.




The world narrows as it flattens, fanning outward. The options for how to build a life seem fewer because there are more options than ever before, and because each of these new options proves more or less the same. Be a poet now, and the promises contained within that declaration, call for a responsive abstention. To structure one’s life around poetry before life declares that one cannot. To invent in this life a way to do poems everywhere. If poetry school is to “work,” this provocation is what it teaches—the ubiquity of poems-as-poems for the sake of poetry. And will offer for this, hopefully, a little money. Money tied to teaching too many classes and at other times too few; being routinely assessed by those older and occasionally those younger; relating to others as a student or as an instructor “of record,” two positions that serve to codify that other position, being a writer. A writer—of little record? The work of poetry feels serious and important in this kind of school, and also at times like a fortunate accident. Not the school we have but the dream of it, one glintingly accessible through this present arrangement. Abstention from and into something. Not forgetting what we circumvent, but seeing “it” relentlessly, living it anew, negotiating it in the verse.




So then yes to poetry school immediately. Poets are needed to teach in these schools so that’s good, though also unfair, there’s a pool that’s a pit where many of the teachers are now, longer and longer, other bad things are happening too. All around swirls the bad, but poetry is good, it’s good at bad or bad at good. And then after poetry school a certain number of poets want more school—or the students in this further school realize they’re poets too as they’re figuring out how their minds work.




To live a life with poetry’s governing and disorienting questions at its middle had seemed a prior impossibility to me, constituting a version of reality I could only have stumbled upon through error. Walking to and from workshop, to and from seminar, to and from a few jobs, I think of poets who have said “no” to school before this “era”—every “era” being built upon preserving what came before it in the continuous and changing present, refiguring, remembering, critiquing, relating to history. The many poets who found “schools” elsewhere, not in a university but in the dream hidden at its periphery, who are read and kept alive now, often, in the versions of school we do have.

I saw another ladybug

Chicago could win

if  I eat the leftover fish & chips

in every line so I don’t forget

We went to the river called fish & chips

We stayed at the fish & chips tower

They donated a million dollars to the fish & chips foundation

so we could go to school for free

It’s called fish & chips college for women

The poem creates its own memory, the poem supplements its own failing memory, the poem laughs at its own world. The poem defends its world, a laughably impossible addendum to the world we have, no millions of dollars for it, and yet, I share the dream and perform it. Fish & chips college for women for all.





Their minds have something to do with poetry, all these students think and their professors along with them. The mind does, it’s very exciting. The poem-mind with its lines and lives, its thinking-feelings that name or associate that which has been elided from or repressed by ordinary discourse, the poem-mind, becomes vast, coursing in its new-old medium, fascial. There is a kind of “lyricized critical thinking” that can happen in a poem, they think, an “intellection via poetry” but it’s more than that, there’s something more going on.



Being in a workshop cannot make nor define a Poet. That much is obvious. But that the increasing centrality of the activities of “school” for poets—of learning, of reading, of dropping out, of zooming in, of moving where the funding is—have changed poetry… that is without question. At once, the intermingling of soft disciplines with their hard counterparts, the thinning thread between worker, learner, teacher, teacher, and artist, are both certain features of the past twenty-something years of academy collapse, and, have necessitated much careful thinking. We have to defend ourselves.




Though now they’re coming out of school, having ignored the millennia’s warnings, having not noticed their teachers getting bluesy, stressed by all the admin they’re taking on and the collapse of their homes, the nets around them getting holey, the line flickering or going out, sometimes there is literal collapse, there are actual holes, or their friends, they’ve witnessed their friends having ups and downs, serious downs sometimes, sometimes because of poetry and being a poet, and the news, they’re reading the news, more and more, inevitable and inescapable, now it’s in their lives or it is their lives.




Poetry continues to appear in these zones. Where poetry school allowed respite from many of the concerns of my “prior” life and entrance into poetry life—which is still, relentlessly, life, though laced with more of what Spahr calls feeling lucky—it also placed me back inside of that old life once more, poised with an ever-intensifying question: what type of person is a poet? Or better, to borrow more directly from you, Hannah: what behaviors define the kind of person a poet is?




Maybe there’s a narrowing of how poems are written in these decades, a paucity of subject matter (Wong May hates it too), or maybe there’s an expansion of how poems—and their poets—think and write and are and it’s all going on as the poems come into contact with other knowledge-traditions and discourses, computers, various mediations technical and personal, like the poet sitting in a seminar or a workshop or making a workshop of their own because of what they read in seminar. The new kinds of braiding that twist and turn poets and readers around, spinning them to think seriously about poetry, that braid poets and readers into the pattern that's been woven and unwoven for a very long time, a kind of being-weaving that is the poet learning to be, developing habits constitutive of a type of person a poet is.




A poet who does not only reflect, but who replies. The poet who braids. Like Horace, knowing what we do not know, “incapable of and ignorant at preserving the described turns and colors of works” and yet still “greeted” as a poet. Arsy poets come to this problem to stay.

Some say that poets should not attempt it. Some. Some and

they. I absorb all the anxieties. But you don’t resolve them.

You are no relief from them. You merely elaborate them.

You make me more anxious. How many times have you

said, it is not my job. I can do nothing about anything, the

clerk repeats. I can only collect.

Stay on matters of nature, on matters of love, on the

domestic, on language, sound. Furrow the same row. The

esoteric, not history, or politics. This is the conservative line

of poetry; to stay away from politics, stay away from

intervening in the everyday except soothe, sage, bring good

tidings, observe beauty…

The type of poet a person is: an instability let’s say at least since Horace or at least JS Mill, who observed that one can “pass into the poet,” that is, the poet’s not a stable figure on either side of the Wordsworth/Shelley divide but circulating as costume or habit, shadow, mood. (Valèry also thinks this; maybe so does Dionne Brand) Perhaps the flowering of ars poeticas over the last dozen years stems from poets’ increasing institutionalization but it’s also true that the ars tradition offers its own ways to negotiate the complicated claims we make for and about poetry: utopia, disappointment, profession, waste. These also being somewhat the claims of life. An ars typically counsels modesty, sketches peril, contains the bad seed of itself. In the identity-matrix, claiming “poet” might give you tools otherwise not available to sort, sift, rage, cycle, sink, start again.




Poetry that “contains the bad seed of itself,” able to respond to its conditions and its failures, arising from its own murky concerns. Dionne Brand and the anxious clerk. “Lyricized critical thinking:” a mode in which poetry does not just do its form, but observes it, cautions against it, sees its own fate. Poetry wants to tell us how it was made, and to negotiate its own worth. To believe in poetry is to believe in the worthiness of this eternal negotiation. Rukeyser: “The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.” To be unafraid of poetry is to see reality. Both what’s here and what’s not.





Perhaps we gravitate toward it because ours is a criminal era and a “good” ars is forensic, itemizing the poem’s crimes. We are given its report. What did poetry do?




In response to this landscape of flattening merger, of new and old fears, poetry is asked to define its reality. To speak of its own shape. Even where poetry shows itself to be, as you say, criminal. With all the baggage of that term. Andrews acknowledges this; the actual qualities of the poetry emergent from our present messy nexus, at once at odds with the “university” and too its weird symptom, poetry that maintains a “reflexive concern with how poetry works.” I might name “concern,” instead, anxiety.Saddled with bad energy, doom, and invention. The poet spy. We’re left in the world of the weird job, the many jobs, the writer’s variable gigs, the ever-expanding classroom with an old question of identity; again returned, with vigor. We have observed, in your words, a “flowering of ars poeticas over the last dozen years.” Yes. A rise in the metameditation of the writer. Not the first of their kind, but quickening their pace. What has been thought of as the Autofiction Era might equally prove the ars era. Poetry searches for and is its own shield. Spahr:

Later I joked, now I know what I
will be doing when the world burns; I will be

shutting the windows and catching up on my
email finally. I didn’t joke about writing

a poem. Probably a sign they matter
still. The fire was much, and I knew I was small

before it, and there was more to come. The year
whose fires would not stop […]

Dear SKT—


The Ars Era. I like to think of it creeping, yes why not in a flowering way, alongside what Anna Kornbluh calls “immediacy writing”—the “personalist blurring of genre and anti-representational immediacy” she tracks along institutional conditions that Andrews and Spahr and McGurl, among others, have named. That you’ve drawn out here too. A pretty, invasive, choking, ground cover. (Plenty of us have joked about writing a poem, but maybe not when that poem wandered out from a real death to meet us.) In the ars tradition we see the poet doing a lot of the bad stuff of now, talking about themselves, hogging the focus, dematerializing the line… but I do think ars poetica is about transmission in an important, hard to categorize way. Not distribution. Writing an ars, discovering a poem you’ve written is an ars, there’s shame but a bit of pride too. A contribution to something ongoing, something anciently human. Easy to critique, hard to completely dismiss. The pedagogy of the Horatian ars—do this, don’t do that, become this, be careful of becoming that—might carry you across the threshold or turn you off and away and what you may discover in an elsewhere could be less or more than poetry in its current shape. The poet, Laura (Riding) Jackson lets us know, is one of the “wisdom-professions” particularly bedazzled by their own congress with words, presupposing the “silent laity” that keeps the roles in motion and carves out authority here, not there. The move to ars since 2000-whenever might then be seen as an attempt to shore up the “professionalism of the voicing” of poetry, another tactic by which importance, even of minor varieties, which even in their minor key could mean subsistence (a job with health insurance; a living wage), is won. Yet participation in the ars might be even more insidious, and inside us. Transmission but also digestion, in which poets are metabolized by our own traditions as much as the other way around. As Dionne Brand puts it, “Who is this fucking Horace? Someone you once studied. Was forced to study you mean! Whatever, forced, made to, obliged, irrelevant. It’s all part of you now like so many gut microbes.”

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Quoted language is from “Zhi Lao” from Picasso’s Tears by Wong May (Octopus Books, 2014), “Fish & Chips” by Bernadette Mayer (Poetry, 2018), Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’s The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University (John Hopkins University Press, 2023), The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos by Dionne Brand (Duke University Press, 2018), The Life of Poetry by Muriel Rukeyser (Current Books, 1949), Ars Poeticas by Juliana Spahr (Wesleyan University Press, 2025), Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh (Verso, 2023), and The Telling by Laura (Riding) Jackson (Harper and Row, 1972).