Collectionism

Abstract

Collectionism J.D. Smith (bio) Deniability. George Witte. Orchises Press. http://mason.gmu.edu/~lathbury. 91 pages; paper, $14.95. Unexpected Guests. Steven P. Schneider. Blue Light Press. 1862 - 45th Ave. San Francisco, CA 94122. 92 pages; paper, $15.95. "Of the making of books there is no end" wrote the world-weary author of the Book of Ecclesiastes circa the second century BC, two millennia before the invention of moveable type and 2,200 years prior to the advent of American po-biz, which like other American industries is increasingly globalized. MFA programs have proliferated throughout the Anglosphere, and workshops have just happened to become available in some of Europe's foremost tourist destinations and on at least one cruise ship. In step with this development, the largely industrial incentive structures of academic tenure and grant support have led to a situation in which an estimated 1,000 poetry collections are published annually in the US. Any number of motivations may attend the writing of an individual poem, or group of poems, but once it is time to send a collection out into the world to fend for itself, publishing is packaging. In an age of marketing and market research, even in the nearly nonexistent market for poetry, the pleasures of sampling a slender volume at random to see the dappled workings of a poet's sensibility are not guaranteed, as the packaging tail wags the poetical dog. It is not enough to follow Robert Frost's advice that, if a book contains twenty-five poems, the book as a whole should be the twenty-sixth. Editors and even teaching poets who may have once known better advise their vulnerable charges to compile manuscripts and even write individual poems with an eye toward an arc, or a logline, or whatever it is that desperate "creatives" offer potential buyers of their work and souls during an elevator pitch. Somehow forgotten is that such an effort represents an attempt to recover creative and commercial territory long since ceded to the novel, as well as an abandonment of the interiority that poetry has claimed for itself after largely casting off the mnemonic and narrative burden of ages past. For lack of a better term, this emphasis on the book as product may be called "collectionism," as ultimately unsuccessful as—if less disastrous than—the other "isms" that made up the last century. The typical book produced under collectionism is likely to contain several good or even outstanding poems, but they are likely to be surrounded by others that feel as if they were written as homework rather than as a response to necessity—and that is precisely what such poems are, methodical attempts to bridge themes and tones. The reader is thus compelled to pore over or at least identify those dull tracings that connect the important dots rather than pleasurably light upon the bright and isolated points from which one might infer the constellation of a sensibility. Until such time as poetry publishing ceases to imitate the marketing of widgets and returns to being its own best self—a time more eschatological than imminent—there seem to exist only a few ways for poets to sidestep the pitfalls of collectionism. One is to ignore the spirit of the age altogether and write a poem at a time, or longer sequences only when one sees fit. The only poets who can reliably succeed in this approach are celebrities in other fields, especially those who go by only one name, or the thinning ranks of established poets who made their careers in an earlier era—themselves small-scale celebrities. A second approach, hybrid of the fox that knows many things and the hedgehog that knows one great thing, entails making a book of several sections. Each functions as a sort of chapbook, and those chapbooks are pressed together into something that is—or can pretend to be—a larger whole. Collating poems in this way can leave many fine poems uncollected, especially at the earlier stages of a career, but it can similarly prevent poets from wasting their time and talents on unfelt and consequently uninteresting poems. A third strategy—and blessed are...