Dear Editor, 

     My reaction to Tony Hoagland's essay was: why must poetry be at all concerned with narrative?  Why must a poet tell stories when poetry is the only genre of writing in which we can be wholly concerned with the nature of language itself? The shorter, more concentrated form of poetry allows each word to garner the attention given to a sentence in prose and should say just as much. We are blessed to be readers and writers of a genre that encourages us to enjoy the minutia and delicacy of language. I adore reading a single word in a poem that rings with four different yet viable meanings. I adore coming across a string of words on a line with new visual texture and sound. 

     As poets, we should not be concerned with the sentence, as so many are wont to be, but with the word. Poetry is our only outlet for this type of lexical adventuring. Shouldn't we revel in this freedom instead of condemning it as obsure or difficult? 

     I actually loved the lines from Kevin McFadden's poem, which Hoagland quotes disparagingly: "Oily fellows, earthmen. Spell/ freeway, spell monolith, sell/ me a fossil. Wholly repellent." I'm immediately rapt with this close attention to the word--even the letter--rather than the sentence. (We learn in the footnote that each line is made up of identical letters shuffled and reshuffled.) The fact that Hoagland dismisses the sense-making of the poem and then mentions this very important key to it in the form of a footnote, an afterthought, is disturbing. 

     Isn't there merit in the nature of this poem's construction?  This doesn't seem a case of "eluding structures" to me but an interesting way to address and modify structure and language itself through a microscope. Where else, but in poems such as these, could we witness language like this? 

 

 

 

Published under the name Jeanette Karhi in Poetry, June 2006.

The original essay, "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment" by Tony Hoagland, appeared in the March 2006 issue of Poetry