Small Press Review, Volume 35, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2003

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"Ptry, you say?"
Sonny Williams
from the Sunday, April 13, 2003 edition
of the New Orleans Times-Picayune
710 Apple Street, Norco LA 70079

A few columns ago, I reported on Another South, a recent anthology of otherstream poetry I had some poems in. It was actually reviewed in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in April. Unfortunately, the review was the pits. And my letter-to-the-editors correcting its errors and complaining of its unfairness was ignored.

According to the Times-Picayune website, the review was by a local New Orleans college English teacher named Sonny Williams. It appeared in their Sunday, April 13, edition. I should have been happy about it, because it stars me. Even its title, "Ptry, you say?" is a reference to a poem of mine, and its subheading, "That's POETRY, 'encrypted for metaphorical purpose,' as it would be at home in 'Another South,'" is a slam against something in the contributor's note I wrote for the anthology.

Williams's review begins with a neutral overview that speaks of "Interesting questions" and compliments the anthology editor, Bill Lavender, for "Judiciously present(ing)" the anthology's contents. Thereupon, it slides into one of the two standard Philistine dismissals of unconventional poetry: that it isn't really new. Even though Lavender says almost immediately in his introduction, "(This anthology) is not intended to represent a new 'Southern Lit.' It has not been my goal to define a new genre, style, or movement, and I make no claim for any sort of dominance by any of the styles and genres included. I only want to claim that the work represented here is happening. a simple fact that would be hard to deduce from reading the standard southern publications." On the other hand, the mathematical and cryptographic poems of mine that were in the anthology, and similarly pluraesthetic poems (i.e., poems using more than one expressive modality) by a few others, such as Jake Berry, are certainly as new as poetry can be.

Williams takes the word of Hank Lazer, who wrote an introduction to the anthology, that the anthology's poetry has evolved out of theory, particularly French post-structuralism. To demonstrate his with-it-ness, he quotes Marjorie Perloff to support his position. Such poetry as he takes Another South mainly to contain, is at its best, according to Perloff, when it "engages in a 'textual activism' that challenges language and actively pursues social and political ideas, questioning how we come to know our world and our place in it." This is malarky: while Perloff knows a little about language poetry, she is ignorant about most other forms of poetry that have been taken up since the eighties, and are represented in this wide-ranging collection, and have a multitude of concerns not mentioned by Perloff.

Not surprisingly, it is here that William brings to the fore the second main Philistine argument against adventurous writing: it don't make no sense. For him, the "attempts (of the anthology's poets) to 'derange the language,' as Bernadette Mayer puts it (make) much of (its) poetry . . . literally unreadable. . . ."

At this juncture, I (a believer in new criticism and opponent of the French slush all my life) re-enter the essay. Williams's example of "theory-based poetry" at its worst is one of my poems, "Cryptographiku for Wallace Stevens":

spsjpi 

vxqqhu 

cwuvmn 

winter 

Not content with having misspelled the poem's title (a very minor error), Williams gets its third word wrong, as well, spelling it "cwuvmm." This severely damages it since it is clearly a code-containing poem with a need to have every letter right. Williams goes on to badly misspell a passage he quotes from my contributor's note--and misrepresent what I said, to boot. He claims I represent this poem as "one of (my) 'more sophisticated 'cryptographers' (i.e., texts encrypted for some metaphorical purpose) and that I'll leave to the reader to puzzle out.'" What I actually said (with italics added) was that it and another poem "contain more sophisticated 'cryptophors' (i.e., texts encrypted for some metaphorical purpose) that I'll leave it to the reader to puzzle out."

A bit of sloppiness bothersome only to a super-sensitive author, you say? Perhaps. But Williams does worse in not referring to what I said just before his quotation. I was speaking of my first cryptographiku in the anthology, "Cryptographiku No. 1": "at his desk, the boy,/ writing his way b/ wywye tfdsfu xpsme." This, I said, "simply depicts a boy writing a message in code. My hope is that a reader, in solving the poem's (very simple) code, will experience the joy of working with codes; but the coded material is intended also to speak metaphorically of the boy's writing his way into a secret world, of making/finding a world that is to the conventional one what an encrypted message is to a normal one."

Is the "metaphorical purpose" Williams mocks really so obscure? Can what I said about the boy at his desk not be applied to "Cryptographiku for Wallace Stevens" to figure out "what 'metaphorical purpose' that poem has? Am I really so indifferent to and implicitly contemptuous of anyone who would read my poems as Williams seems trying to make me out as? I'll leave it to the readers of this column to decide--as I wish Williams had given his readers the chance to.

Before signing off, I have one more philistinism of Williams's to discuss. It is the too wide-spread notion that a poem that has to be explained to be appreciated is no good, a variation on the anti-obscurity plank of the Philistines' platform. Such a notion neglects the fact that that all poetry composed a hundred or more years ago is vigorously taught in school, first through frequent exposure to it, and then through lessons on things like rhyme, etc. It neglects, too, the fact that all later established poetry is equally vigorously shown and taught to students in later grades, and in colleges. Poems like mine in Another South, on the other hand, are hardly so much as noticed much less read or studied in any school. Is it any wonder that their authors might think instruction in how to read them like that given for all other poetry might be helpful (if not necessarily to everyone)? That said, I would agree with the claim that a poem that has to be explained to be appreciated is defective--except that I would amend it to read, "A poem that needs to be explained to be appreciated by a knowledgeable reader who has given it a reasonable amount of concentrated, sympathetic attention is (probably) defective.