A Poetry Essay by Brooke Clark

In honour of Poetry Month, the Walrus has published an essay on poetry. Entitled "The Narcissism of Contemporary Poetry", it is followed by the cut-lines: "The poetry world is broad, but remains shallow. Do writers need to do more than simply write about themselves?"

There is so much to object to in this connoisseurial essay. But rather than pick its low-hanging fruit, let's consider those lines.

"The poetry world is broad..." Thankfully! But you wouldn't know it from Clark's essay, which zeroes in on lyric poetry, which the author calls "the selfie of the poetry world." While I agree that the lyric has its excesses (in the mid-1990s I referred to the poetry of Anne Michaels as "too candied," and have paid for it ever since), it is not the lyric that carries the auto-portrait but the narrative (recall George Bowering's example of the egoceptive poems of Irving Layton: "I placed/ my hand/ upon/ her thigh").

Rather than follow that first (dependent) clause with "...but remains shallow" (especially for a general interest magazine like the Walrus) imagine how refreshing it would be to read, "...so let's take a moment to talk about its tendencies," and from there read about the increase in confessional poems (as a result of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram?), repetitive list poems (as a result of an almost forty year old slam culture?), but also the ongoing experiment in the genre, as manifest in New Media, science and technology, or even the word's increased appearance not as genre marker but as an adjective used to describe how we might chose to live our lives -- poetically.

"Do writers need to do more than simply write about themselves?" I would say no, only because the argument for "no" is more generative. Writers write about themselves because writing about another has never been more difficult. Rather than challenge those difficulties and, as Jesse Wente points out, accept the critique from those whose bodies, lives, lands and languages you will invariably trample over, writers have taken refuge in themselves, their own bodies. In that sense, writers need to write more difficultly about themselves, not through oops-I-did-it-again confessions or love/hate litanies but, well, how about proprioceptively?