Excerpt from Feeling as a Foreign Language

"A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge"

In order to write and read mindfully, we must become cultural outsiders. By hovering on the perimeter of the circle, we can see its full circumference. Imagination is the transfiguring force. But it is imagination as a thorny rather than lazy maelstrom. Imagination as an active rather than passive metabolism, pressing against cultural assumptions in order to reinvent them.

Reading much contemporary poetry, you could conclude that while most poets think poetry should have imagination and emotion, they don't think it should have ideas. Yet even purely autobiographical poems rest upon assumptions suffused with ideology. Poetry has ideas whether it wants them or not. Usually they remain in the background, a quiet chorus behind the starring subject. When ideas do take center stage, the thinking in poetry favors the canon of Western culture: the Great Ideas of Great Men. This dialogue with eminence often constitutes a bid for authority and a borrowing of intellectual weight. Poets might deny such an agenda, but the effect is there whether intended or not. It would be hypocritical to dismiss the self-serving aspect of the company we keep on the page. When I bolster my words with those of Canetti or Heaney, I effectively say, "These aren't just my own trivial concerns; Nobel prize winners have written on the subject." There is no risk in citing those who are invested with legitimacy, and there can be gain: Such inclusions can dismantle resistance to unpopular ideas.

Poetry (and essays) is more valuable, however, when it calls attention to those whose remarkable histories and thinking would go unremarked otherwise. It also is refreshing to include thinkers who are not favored among poets. Poetics certainly could benefit from an infusion of contemporary thought from other fields. Rather than considering current theories, however, contemporary poetry tends to rehearse the past. In its prizing of the prized and honoring of the honored, poetry supports a winner-takes-all ideology. Whose poetry do I have in mind?

To resist a winner-takes-all framework, one must read across the field rather than limit one's reading to the successful few. It follows that my impressions are not gleaned from "stars" but from an engagement with a much broader spectrum of endeavor. In some cases, I don't know the nature of the poets who inform my observations. For instance, I currently am judging an award that requires me to read forty-five anonymous manuscripts, and those submissions will tint my perceptions concerning praxis.

Winner-takes-all is a trickle-down aesthetic in which a largely invisible majority is influenced by a visibly large minority. Rather than conflate the two spheres, I mean to suggest their reciprocity. My approach is comparable, perhaps, to that of "history from the bottom up," a method of inquiry that focuses upon the nonelite. Historian Thomas C. Holt writes, "Major activities are born of germs contained in everyday practice." He notes that power can be realized only at the quotidian level, and that "it is dependent…on the reproduction of the relations, idioms, and the worldview that are its means of action. In short, the everyday is where…politics, economics, ideologies…are lived." ("Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History") I would like to add that the everyday is where poetry is "lived," where it acquires the force of majority. The zeitgeist is expressed more clearly by the obscure many than by the acclaimed few. It is within the ordinary gossip and buzz, within the thousands of unacclaimed poems, that poetry takes shape.

Copyright 1999 by Alice Fulton. All rights reserved.