The Problem of Self: Poetry in the Little Magazine

Abstract

THE PROBLEM OF SELF: POETRY IN THE LITTLE MAGAZINE / Marc Manganaro As an editor I have noticed that there is a lot of "good" poetry about these days, perhaps more than ever before. I think that much of the poetry published in magazines today remains in that dubious category simply because it follows, or I should say, falls into modes established by someone else long ago who is now residing, as one popular film has it, in a galaxy far, far away. This essay attempts to outline one of the basic tendencies which contributes to making the all-too-familiar, the only "good," in today's poetry. I decided to go to the little magazines themselves for examples, choosing twelve of the most notable "littles" as a basis, though I cite only six in the essay itself. I have no wish to "rate" or evaluate the magazines themselves, and my choosing them certainly does not mean I think them mediocre. Nor am I attempting to judge the poets whose works I happen to choose. To insure that, I have decided to keep the names of the poets anonymous, with the exception of one whose work I find especially praiseworthy. The individual poems merely serve as examples of what is too often seen, or not seen enough, by editors. Louise Gluck, in a recent issue of Antaeus, delineates two kinds of modern poems, those in which a reader is sought, which "postulate a listener" (Eliot is given as an example), and those which are "not addressed outward" but only "allowed to be overheard" (Wallace Stevens serves as an example). According to Gluck, the reader in this second type is alienated, for "to overhear is to experience exclusion." This is an interesting and useful distinction. My feeling is that since the great Modernists we have moved in great numbers toward the first type, termed by Gluck the poem of "invitation." Indeed, I think we often unwittingly go far beyond it, straining the limits of the reader's tolerance as we do not invite so much as hound the guests into our homes. Many poems sent to magazines today are of unwarranted invitation, not bothering to take into consideration the question of whether the reader would wish to enter into the particular world of the poet or persona. This tendency is especially seen in poems containing a great deal of personal or highly circumstantial detail, enough to make it necessary for the reader to work out the tangle of the persona or poet's autobiographical complex, a task which may very well not be worth the effort. The key of course is that the poem succeed in transcending the personal detail upon which it is based. Yet even when the overly particular detail is balanced by other qualities at work in the poem, the reader, out of an The Missouri Review · 249 often understandable lack of interest, may drop the poem before it has run its course. Are we always to lay the blame on the reader for this? Does not the poet today, as in times past, owe some consideration to audience? One might respond that such a protest is nothing new—the same kinds of questions were raised, out of frustration, over the obscurity or complexity of Modernists such as Eliot and Pound. Yet with both Eliot and Pound the difficulties were warranted by the scope and magnitude of the efforts. We tried harder with them because we recognized them as comprehensive responses to and revisions of modern culture. The contemporary poem of circumstantial detail does not usually offer a vision broadening beyond the immediate world of the poem. Let's look at an example, from a poem entitled "Catching Eels," published in the Spring 1983 issue of Prairie Schooner: Out there, on the channel sea that barely ripples, water fit to be a mirror, he hears the first whimper of his dead brother, then the second, the third, until he is lost in the counting and so stops counting and listens and stares. He remembers the story of his brother treating typhus-ridden Partisans on the coast, how he slept with the sick, gave them his water to drink, his...