Poetry at the Palmer House

by Tim W. Brown

Poets Discussed in this Piece: Pat Mora, Li-Young Lee, X.J. Kennedy, Michael Anania, Paul Hoover, Angela Jackson.

English teachers from all over the United States flocked to the Palmer House from March

22 to 24, 1990, in order to attend the annual Conference on College Composition and

Communication (or "Four Cs" for short). Four Cs mainly draws individuals who teach freshman

English at either two-year or four-year schools. The emphasis on teaching writing separates Four

Cs from other organizations in the loosely defined discipline of college English, most notably the

Modern Language Association (or "MLA" for short), which emphasizes the study of literature

and literary criticism. More high-toned organizations like the MLA consider Four Cs a maverick

group; one person with whom I spoke compared Four Cs with the Los Angeles Raiders football

team – a collection of outsiders who are grudgingly respected by the rest of the league.

Perhaps it is this maverick attitude which enabled a number of poetry events to be held at

a convention that otherwise conducted seminars discussing the teaching of freshman English. At

every hour of the day, and also in the evening, you could see poetry readings scheduled

concurrently with more scholarly sounding presentations like "The Chicago School and Neo-

Aristotelian Rhetoric: Plurality or Dogma?" and "Contemporary Composition Theory: Brilliant

and/or Counterproductive?"

The first reading I attended started Thursday morning at 10:15; the reading was held in

one of the many anonymous conference rooms in the hotel. After a few introductory remarks by

some scholarly type who acted as M.C. came Pat Mora, a Mexican American poet originally

from the Southwest, who now lives in Cincinnati. Nearly all of the poems she read were set in

the Southwest and were concerned with the clash between Mexican and American cultures.

Most appealing in Mora's poetry was the humanitarian strain that permeated the work she

presented. "Spanish is not enough," concludes the speaker of the poem "Elena," when she

reflects on her solitary life, trying as a first generation immigrant to communicate with her

children who speak English. Worse, her proud husband will not allow her to learn English so that

she can share in her children's experiences, because he doesn't want her to be smarter than him.

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Although such despair is a big component of the immigrant experience, Mora matched this

despair with an equal amount of dignity, also a strong immigrant characteristic, in her poem

"Senior Citizen Trio," which recollects life in the old country. The last line of the poem, "It's

good to save the stories," expressed Mora's belief that we should conserve our ethnic traditions;

since we can't live forever, it is necessary to transmit these experiences through stories told to

young people, and by implication, through a vehicle like poetry.

Paired up with Pat Mora was Chicagoan Li-Young Lee, who, like Mora, believes stories

from his immigrant experience need sharing. Through his poetry Li-Young Lee recounts some

harrowing experiences, including persecution and flight from Indonesia. In his poem "The

Interrogation" he tells in rather hallucinatory fashion the story of his father's incarceration in a

leper colony and his family's subsequent escape. Horrific dead body images crowd the poem, as

do moments of terror as he and his family are chased from house to house by government

authorities. These experiences are so horrible that he concludes the poem by saying, ironically,

given his earlier claim of wanting to share his stories with others, that "I grow leaden from

stories" and "I'm through with memory."

In another poem, "Rain Diary," Li-Young Lee exhibits an admirable urge toward the

transcendental as he reflects on earth, love, death, filial piety, God, heaven and salvation.

However, a danger involved with writing about such metaphysical subjects is that they too easily

become abstractions creeping further and further away from objective reality, which was the case

with most of the poems Li-Young Lee read: too few concrete images, too little metaphor, too

many adjectives. The poems he read simply were not as engaging, not as particularized, as his

between-poem commentary, which I found much more interesting. Maybe it was his misfortune

to share the podium with Pat Mora, whose sweeping command of imagery and metaphor

revealed what his poetry lacked.

Next on the agenda, at noon, was a seminar entitled "The Many Uses of Poetry in the

Freshman English Classroom." Despite the prosaic title, this seminar was very well attended –s

standing room only. Two out of the five speakers were themselves prosaic, but three, Richard

Jones of DePaul, Alice Brand of SUNY-Brockport, and Diane Kendig of the University of

Findlay, attacked the forces opposed to creative writing as part of the English curriculum. For,

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despite the maverick reputation attached to Four Cs, there still are factions wondering what

place, if any, poets have in the organization.

Jones responded to this question with a resounding "All poets are rhetoricians," and

Brand, echoing this sentiment, declared that in all writing, expository or expressive, there is "no

room for sweeping generalizations," a pithy bit of philosophy. All the presenters at this seminar

said in one way or another that for students to become better writers, they need to participate in

close reading and writing of poetry to demonstrate the value of showing, not telling, the latter of

which students are wont to do.

Kendig, in an effort to take the discussion of poetry out of the classroom and into the

"real world," said that poets should organize on-campus reading series. After the session, when,

playing devil's advocate, I argued that poetry "on-campus" is still pretty removed from the real

world, she agreed, but explained that many of the conference participants came from small

college towns whose cultural life revolves around the university. She justified the on-campus

idea by explaining that a college serves the community; her goal is to reach out to the community

and draw an audience of people who aren't all college professors.

By far the most entertaining poetry event at the convention occurred at 1:45 on Thursday

in the Monroe Room, a gigantic banquet hall. On the bill was X.J. Kennedy, a self-proclaimed

"old-fangled, curmudgeonly poet," in from Amherst, Massachusetts. At the outset he said he was

glad to see "fellow fugitives from the more serious sessions"; then, to smooth over the potential

insult to more academic sensibilities, he proceeded to show parallels between the process of

writing poetry and current composition theory. He observed that in both types of writing

surprises happen along the way; he advised poets to "write a big bunch of garbage, stir, then look

for sense."

It is difficult to imagine Kennedy following this advice, because his poems always take

traditional forms, although he subverts these forms with humorous or bawdy subject matter. For

example, he read a poem entitled "Ode," which has the speaker addressing his ass. Some of the

images contained in this poem included "Vesuvius upside-down," "Cyclops," "two rump roasts,"

and "Cave of the Winds." Remarkably, all of it was written in perfectly patterned meter and

rhyme. Kennedy concluded his reading by singing his poem "Somebody Stole My Myths" (in

which he rhymed "personal crisis" with "Dionysius") to the tune of "Somebody Stole My Gal,"

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complete with a jazzy trumpet solo achieved through buzzing into his fist. Kennedy, the

consummate crowd pleaser, certainly gave the lie to Robert Bly's quip that "the sonnet is where

old professors go to die."

Late Thursday afternoon I attended a reading featuring Michael Anania, who presides

over the creative writing program at University of Illinois at Chicago. Because he publishes so

widely, I'm familiar with Anania's work, and previous to the convention I admired his poetic

skill, how he appeared to think in images much like poets of old thought in blank verse.

However, after seeing him live, I've revised my estimate: Anania packs way too many images in

his poetry, to the point where thought and feeling are smothered.

On the one hand, you have to admire lines like "bitter taste of snow/caught in your

throat/that you can't cough out." And you have to admire his titles: "Variations for a Summer

Evening," "April Snow and Improvisation" and "Constructions," all of which imply a conceptual

approach in writing poetry, probably no better exemplified than in "Factum, Chansons, Etc.," a

poem describing a visit to Prague, that took as its starting point Anania's running across an old

reference book discussing witchcraft and herbal remedies. But on the other hand, despite your

admiration, you want to yell from the back of the room, "WHERE'S THE GUTS?"

Clearly, Anania is a wordsmith of the first order; however, like the composer Johann

Sebastian Bach, his reflections on the geometry of life result in an impressive Baroque display

without much gut involved. During the discussion afterwards, Anania admitted that he distrusts

feeling, claiming that "I'm not interested in feeling at all." He acknowledged that poetry elicits

feeling, but rejected it as an important part of the composition process, recommending that "if

feelings get too directed" while writing a poem, "go make coffee."

I ended up skipping Thursday evening's festivities, which featured Mike Royko, Studs

Terkel and Gwendolyn Brooks, all of whom I had seen before, and who were at the convention, I

had a feeling, to play to the out-of-town crowd. Instead, I met up with some old graduate school

friends, who took me along to a textbook party held in a hotel suite complete with wet bar, pool

table and fireplace. Given the number of potential customers for composition textbooks at the

convention, publishers try to capture a little good will by throwing textbook parties, where they

give you all the booze and food you want, even if you show no interest in their lines of books.

The party was a much needed respite.

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"An Exultation of Larks," the most publicized poetry event of the conference, happened

on Friday night. Along with the two featured poets, Paul Hoover of Columbia College and

Angela Jackson, there were sixteen readers at an "open reading" for which participants had to

sign up in advance. For the most part none of these readers presented anything notable, although

several let their hair down by taking swipes at the academic mentality or making sex jokes; one

woman referred to "masculinist pinheads" dominating the proceedings, whereas another read a

poem exploring "the commonality between the etymology of 'pencil' and 'penis'" that included

the following line: "You can't cap a pen in mid-thought." While waiting seemingly hours for the

featured readers, I found myself wishing that the pitchers of ice water in the back of the room

were pitchers of beer.

But soon enough Paul Hoover got up and read. It was interesting to see Hoover and

Anania read within a day of each other because of their commonalities: both are in midcareer,

and both are the reigning heavyweights of their respective creative writing programs. The

similarities end there, however. If Anania is like Bach, then Hoover, with his lighter touch, is

like Eric Satie, a composer whose work I like tons more than Bach's.

Hoover, unlike Anania, poked fun at his subject matter and t himself; his poetic voice is

amiable and, thankfully, lacks any Ozymandian pretensions. The speaker of his poem "Baseball"

observes that "some players look like gods," while others look" upwardly mobile." Like any

urban dweller boxed in by cement and brick, he relishes the pastoral setting of the ball park,

confessing that "I like to watch the grass." In "Baseball," as well as in two other poems he read,

"At the Music Box," where the speaker waxes nostalgic over old movies, and "Tribal Item," an

encounter with the unfamiliar terrain of a video store, Hoover let loose a spillway of images

which defied analysis.

Sitting there seeking some avenue of entry into what I was hearing, it struck me that

Hoover's poetry followed the same principles as hypertext, a computer application wherein

seemingly unrelated bits of information are linked to others; separately, the data mean very little,

but examined together the data come to resemble intuition. Though his work no doubt goes

through a painstaking process of revision, Hoover intimated that simply documenting ordinary

life is more important than worshiping Art. This anti-art impulse was well expressed in a pair of

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lines from a recent book-length poem, "The Novel," which caused a number of gasps: "I sat on

the face of T.S. Eliot/and squirmed my butt around."

A number of seminars at the conference concerned how minorities fit into the English

curriculum; an example was "Black Students, Standard English and Basic Writing." I didn't

attend this particular seminar, and I hope it didn't devolve into participants breaking chairs over

each other's heads, a definite possibility, given the bitter debate over the issue of black English in

the composition classroom. At the far right there are those who want to stamp it out altogether; at

the far left are those who encourage it. Those opposed to Black English need only have seen

Angela Jackson to witness the power of this means of expression.

As if to test the audience on this sensitive topic, one representative of the role of race in

American culture and its impact on individual identity, Jackson opened up with two poems

written in African American dialect. The first, "Doctor Watts," started with Jackson humming a

gospel tune, one she interpreted in the rest of the poem as "the song every soul knows." Although

this poem grew specifically out of the African American experience, it referred to a phenomenon

recognized by every soul in the audience, race aside.

Jackson proceeded to wow the crowd with her second dialect poem, "The Man with the

White Liver," whose subject was a love/hate relationship with the local lady killer. Alternately

ranting and raving about this abusive man, who nonetheless is great in bed, the speaker

punctuates her commentary with the refrain "He the killin' love giver." Jackson's delivery of this

poem was one of the most energetic performances I've ever seen a poet give”•. The remaining

poems in Jackson's set were a bit anticlimactic by comparison, though all, written in standard

English, pointedly described the complications of race in America. To the disappointment of

everyone, Jackson's was a short reading consisting of only five poems; we all craved more.

In addition to the poets discussed above, an attendee of the conference could have seen,

among others, Lisel Mueller and David Hernandez, both of whom I missed at the daytime

sessions on Friday and Saturday. Hernandez, especially, would have been a treat, considering his

anti-academic reputation. Perhaps Hernandez found, like me, that some academic poetry isn't as

stodgy as it's all cracked up to be. As one conference participant said, "I've checked the poetry

listings. Really, the best stuff is here."

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