On Friday I finished making hand written notes for my essay and started typing them into the paper, editing as I went. With four days to go before the deadline I was certainly ahead of the game compared to the last two essays I’ve worked on for Canadian Poetry, but this one was going to be more difficult because I would be critiquing a poet that my professor likes a lot. On Wednesday evening I had sent him a first draft of the first half of my argument and on Friday he responded. Here is some of what he said:
“You write well and forcefully, but I feel that your best point is the last, at the bottom of page 4: (Perhaps Jones’s writing is not intended to be poetry or the poetic aspect of her writing is secondary for her. She wants her compositions to convey politically important information. It can be argued that Jones simplifies her message to reach a disenfranchised audience that has been denied education, but there is nothing in Compton’s tribute to Poitier that grade school students could not understand. “To Poitier” is a relatively uncomplicated poem and yet it also has depth that is fortified by metaphor. It not only sheds light on the significance of an African American icon, but it also shows that poetry works better when it is used as more than a blunt object but as a tool that the audience can use as well. Creativity is at least as liberating as being inspired by a hero and Compton offers both in this poem. The impressive collection of facts that Jones presents about Paul Robeson can be gained from other sources than her poem while Compton’s insights into Poitier are unique.) The rest of your argument falls into an age-old division between poetry of purpose and poetry of aestheticism (art-for-art’s-sake), an argument that is often wielded to ‘shut down’ politically motivated poets as being propagandists as opposed to being artists. In the end, this devolves into a matter of opinion. I ask you to consider how your viewpoint aligns with the classic, Canadian bias in favour of ‘elitism’, ‘aestheticism’ and an Ivory Tower – orientation as opposed to making space for poetry that is directed to the masses, that is populist in register. I love Wayde’s work – and I love the fact that my own work has inspired his (as he has acknowledged) but I also love Jones’s work -- for the power of those rhymes (often) and images – especially when they are recited aloud. You quote Jones’s (weak – maybe) rhymes without taking into account the investment of her poetic in song – which often employs ‘fake’ or ‘weak’ rhymes. In a sense, you are arguing the difference between Bob Dylan and T. S. Eliot, when maybe the real difference is between the ‘public address’ of song and the interiority of (print oriented) poetry.
“Your argument is forceful, opinionated but – for me – not convincing, for it does not ponder deeply enough deeply enough the potential power of Jones’s ‘public address’, which I have had the benefit of witnessing. I also would hope that you would consider demonstrably stronger work by her before casting her aside too easily. If you want to check out an academic argument in favour of ‘public poetry’, ‘populist poetry’, see N. C. Press’s ‘The Poetry of the Canadian People’, which is a 1970s, Marxist-inspired, collection of union songs, work songs, ballads, etc. The US academic Cary Nelson published a volume on this question back in 1992.
“Your opinion is very clear, but it does not, for the most part, advance beyond ‘opinion’. I’d still give you a good mark, for you write and reason well, but I’m not sure that your opinion advances much beyond an anti-populist, anti utilitarian bias.”
Yikes! I knew that putting my argument across to George Elliot Clarke was going to be a hard sell, but he really drove that point home a lot harder. I don’t think that he understands what I’m getting at, but I’m glad he pointed out where he thinks the holes are so that I can try to make my meaning clearer to him. He seems to think that my argument is against simplicity. I’m fine with simple, but simple needs to be deep and unique. It may be nearly impossible to convince him, but I’m gonna give it the old college try.
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