At last, the problem with American poetry is an American poet performing the part of his own poet-ness, and another poet he’s been plagiarizing from all this time, and another poet who likes grocery shopping more than poetry, and people who like reading poetry are like, “Is that a contradiction?” Then they go to a play, and the play tells them the answer to that question. But they better catch the play when it’s performed. What would it mean if you could only see a play every 104 years, the poems asks very directly to the reader’s face. And then indirectly the poem asks, what if the country performed plays and poems only when they could afford to perform them? How many times would the country perform “austerity measures” as administrative acts of procrastinating.
Like in the days of Netflix DVDs, and you’d finally send the DVD for that one documentary back without having watched it. Part of your own austerity measures.
I’m writing about the poem written by Daniel Borzutzky in a recent issue of FENCE. And it feels like a return to the heady Borzutzky days of The Performance of Becoming Human and The Book of Interfering Bodies. Poems about contradiction, and quit telling them they’re contradictions, and the paradox around a person contradicting the possibility of saying anything if they’re just going to contradict themselves. In those books the poet was mouthing the words of oppression or putting words in the mouths of people doing the oppressing, whether they’re the ones writing the rules that are oppressive or they’re the people acting in oppressive ways at people who don’t deserve to be oppressed. That’s the contradiction.
It’s a poetry that pretends there’s not an answer to contradicting yourself. Or wait a second, is this one of those “bad” poems this poem refers to—someone wrote it using Borzutzky’s name so he could be part of the poetry conversations. After all, this particular poem was written to address the question, “What’s the problem in American Poetry right now?” And it might surprise people that many poetry conversations in America revolve around bad poems. Or, no. Poetry conversations in America always seem to refer to the existence of some bad poems doing the most annoying thing, but no one’s going to tell you which poems they’re actually referring to.
Dear Daniel Borzutzky, for the record, this poem isn’t a bad poem. You’ll have to try harder. Please try harder. I am not capable of writing a Borzutzky-sounding devotional to his work, because even his darkest poems feel like an animatronic enthusiasm inside me. Like I can feel the downward pressure of his poetic lines, the stanzas that run me, sprint me, into a contradiction. I am always feeling the truths that lie beneath each lie. And the poem’s intentions to keep piling the lies on that truth to suppress it. How I enjoy the 104-year-old actors in the play. How I enjoy the woman holding the poet responsible for how her husband read the poem. And maybe I shouldn’t be so desperate to read poems that will make me feel bad. This Daniel Borzutzky poem makes me feel so bad and also hilarious. Like a pop song that’s been running through my mind for so long. I’m sorry I can’t say anything legitimately clever about a Daniel Borzutzky poem when he’s taken all the most clever things for himself!