Shooting My Poetry Mouth Off (January 2011)

Shooting My Poetry Mouth Off
by Richard Krawiec

January 2011

In one of the intelligent, passionate Facebook rants Franz Wright has become known for, the Pulitzer-prize winning poet excoriated the proliferation of MFA programs which began in the 1970s, when colleges realized they could make a lot of money “giving someone an advanced degree for writing a manuscript of truly lousy poems.”  Wright asks, “How many poets can there be in one generation?”

There are no MFAs in haiku – yet – but Wright’s comments have application for the haiku world. In a time when Open Mics draw 30 people and bookstore readings 6, when small presses require poets to ‘pre-sell’ 100 copies of their books in order to ensure publication, when people who have never read a haiku magazine win haiku-tweet contests, when many haiku books are self-published, and don’t break even, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves, “What are we publishing?  And why?”

At a recent meeting of the NC Haiku Society, Richard Straw, who is one of my favorite haiku writers publishing today, shared one poem that was a small masterpiece, but the next poem he shared with the group, while decent, did not come close in quality to the first poem.

“Why do you want to publish this?” I asked.

For the next hour, six of us argued about whether a poet has a right to publish every burp they put on paper.  The fact that so many poets exercise this ‘right’ is directly responsible, I believe, for the single most common complaint I hear from writers these days – that the literary magazines are publishing mediocre poetry.

Writers blame editors, but I think editors are so inundated with writing that may be technically proficient, but offers nothing more; thus, it is difficult for them to find the time to make quality decisions on every poem.  If an editor has to read 500 poems a month, there is no way to give thoughtful attention to each one.  So they tend to gravitate, unconsciously, towards poems that have a recognizable surface, poems that are easy to judge.  Most editors simply don’t have the time to reread and ponder over everything submitted.

But if an editor only had to look at 75-100 poems a month, they could spend time to reflect and reread in order to make their choices.  When writers inundate editors with so much mediocrity, the editors have little time to re-evaluate and/or change their minds.  I’ve edited multiple anthologies, and I’ve spoken with other editors, and to a person we all have recognized, after the fact, we selected some poems we should not have, and rejected others that we may have selected if we’d had time to sit with them longer.

The argument I hear from poets is that they have a right to publish everything they write.  And anyways, they can’t always tell whether something is their best work.

Rights only exist within the context of corresponding responsibilities.  I think writers have an obligation to the universe, to posterity, to other writers, to their genre, and to their own legacy to submit only their best work for publication.

Yes, it is sometimes difficult to tell how to rank your top poems.  But every writer certainly can split their work into at least 2 piles – the strongest, the top 25%, and those that are less strong, the other 75%.  The poems in this second group should not be sent out.  If you can’t tell, at least generally, which are your best poems and which ones are weaker – then you shouldn’t send anything out.  If you don’t have enough critical perspective to recognize when you’re not writing your best, then you are not ready for publication.

The fine Croatian poet Tomislav Maretić says “Haiku without ‘sufficient substance’ and ‘so what haiku’ are contraindicated for publishing, and they are ‘contra-propaganda’ for this nice genre of poetry.”

Tomislav has no difficulty recognizing that poems like these, while they may be publishable, are clearly not up to the same standard as the following examples of his best work:

I am just as guilty as anyone of sending out work I know to be inferior.  I have felt the desire to publish everything, to count up how many magazines my work appears in.  I understand that impulse because I am part of that problem; I’ve had poems published that I wish I could retract.  I’ve had a couple I cringe at, haiku as well as free verse.  I also have had some of my strongest work unable to find a home.  That happens sometimes. But I am learning to be more selective, to send out fewer poems, less often.

We owe it to the integrity of our craft, to our overworked editors, and to our own development as writers, to self-edit, self-select.  We owe it to every haiku master who preceded us to let our work sit in a drawer for a year and then go back to it with a fresh eye, see if it stands up over time.

Maretić send along this quote from, he believes, Basho, “If you write three good haiku you are a haiku poet, if you write five good haiku, you are a great haiku poet, and if you have ten good haiku, you are a master!”

We should keep those numbers in mind as we go about submitting our poems.  As the late Ray Carver once said, “If the writing can’t be as good as it is within us to make it, why do it?  That’s all we have to take to the grave.”

Shooting My Poetry Mouth Off • Richard Krawiec
January 2011
haijinx