Eliot Khalil Wilson: Poetry Sings Like That
You often write about war, hunting, and violence with a finely tuned sense of outrage at injustice. What kindled your interest in these subjects and how do you approach them in poetry?
How can anyone not be outraged by war crimes? The political poem is famously hard to write and keep from becoming overt and sententious. The difficulty of it is something I’m confronted with over and over, but the necessity of it outweighs everything else.
What is the biggest block to your creativity and what do you do to counter it?
Reading always generates writing. The two are reciprocal acts. Reading always helps me get unblocked. If I really feel uncreative or uninspired, I’ll pick up a copy of Poetry magazine. I’ve never published anything in Poetry magazine and I probably never will owing to their perverse refusal to publish me. If I were to discover a lost chapter from the Psalm of Psalms, autographed by Jesus, and sent it in, they would reject it, but I sort of thrive on that rejection. It motivates me.
Why does poetry matter?
Because it has a humanizing effect. Poetry is metaphor and metaphors are connections—bridges in this time of increasing economic and spiritual alienation. I think of Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge—how it lends a myth of God—or Wordsworth’s great poem “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”—to say nothing of the image in the visual arts.
Your question also throws me back to Dana Gioia’s 1992 inflammatory essay “Can Poetry Matter?,” which was one of many essays that decried poetry’s loss of cultural importance and then went on, essentially, to blame the academy for homogenizing and neutering the entire aesthetic. I think that parts of the essay are vastly less true today. For one thing, Gioia claimed that “never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet.” I know this to be absolutely untrue and the latest statistics from MLA bear me out. In fact, the opposite is true.
So you think Gioia’s on the wrong track about why poetry seems to be increasingly marginalized?
He is right about poetry’s loss of cultural importance, but I do not know of a time when poetry was ever all that culturally important. We are a prose country if we are literate at all, tabloidish and simultaneously Puritanical. I also think that we are increasingly visually oriented. Personally, I’m glad about the proliferation of MFA programs, since I think that the quality of poetry in this country has been improved by them. If there are poets everywhere scribbling in their image notebooks, then so be it. Believe me, you could have worse neighbors than poets. Yes, the competition is murder, but this competition is good. These programs may also prove to be poetry’s only market base.
Why does poetry matter to you?
Of course, it matters to me personally beyond all this. Perhaps you remember that Warner Brother’s cartoon “One Froggy Evening,” in which this poor construction worker finds a strong box in the cornerstone of a building he is demolishing. The box contains a frog, which suddenly slaps on a top hat and cane and starts singing this old Emerson and Howard tune. The frog belts out:
Hello, my baby
Hello, my honey
Hello, my ragtime gal
Send me a kiss by wire
Baby, my heart’s on fire
If you refuse me
Honey, you’ll lose me
Then you’ll be left alone
Oh baby, telephone
And tell me I’m your own
So this construction worker takes the frog to this talent agent, but the frog won’t sing. He rents a recital hall with what little money he has saved in his mattress, but the frog just won’t sing for the public. The construction worker goes broke and is finally admitted to some insane asylum with the frog, who can really croon and can dance like Gene Kelly, singing to him and him alone the entire time.
The guy’s downfall was trying to market the frog. If that were me, I’d be happy just to be sung to by the frog. Poetry sings like that to me, and there is no money in it. The point is the song, an essentially private singing. If others read my poems, then great, but that is not the only reason to sing.
