I would like to make clear what exactly is going on here. Friends and colleagues are asking everyday what the mêlée is all about. In the first sentence of an article entitled “American Poetry in the New Century,” John Barr, President of the Poetry Foundation, writes, “Poetry in this country is ready for something new.” Conversely, in the first sentence of “Who Keeps Killing Poetry?” by D. W. Fenza, Executive Director of AWP, we get the following response to Barr’s Declaration of Impotence: “Every few years, the experts decide that she is moribund, comatose, wounded, infected, deranged, or dead.” I find both of these statements to be true, but it’s a pity to say so on such a grand scale.
Sometimes clarification is best achieved through negative terms. The abovementioned debate is not, in my mind, what the mêlée is all about. As the poet Bob Haslam phrased it to me, “the inclination to passionately evince an aesthetic position often leads to petty arguments and the digging of imaginary trenches.” I was defending a different position then. However, when I see two of the most powerful people in the American poetry business squabbling about whether “the next Walt Whitman [will] be an MFA graduate,” I am reminded, with a shiver, of my freshman year philosophy debates over the necessity of a god’s existence. I would like to thank John Barr and D. W. Fenza for helping me to gain some perspective here. I wish we could take this defensiveness and this emotion to where something is actually at stake. Walt Whitman found a place in the real battlefield of his day. But the battlefields of our day seem to be camouflaged by the ambivalence of too many writers who consider themselves members of the poetry community. After all, isn’t poetry more like AA than a country club? You’re a member when you say you are. And I say, here and now, I’m a member (of the poetry community that is). I would like to seize this opportunity to deny the right of corporations like the Poetry Foundation, or AWP—or any university, for that matter—to dictate what the state of poetry in America ought to be.
People often talk vaguely about “freedom of the press” without giving a clear description of what that looks like. However, I heard the poet Amiri Baraka give a compelling definition in a lecture once, and I now agree with him. In essence, he said that we are all free to become the press. Isn’t that what we do when we write a poem and let someone read it, or when we publish a magazine and ask people to buy it? Baraka is one of a few enduring poets who shy away from nothing. When a poet is willing to put his security and reputation on the line day after day, year after year, decade after decade, then that conflict seems worthy of my attention. Doesn’t a poem serve as a proxy for the poet in the reader’s hands? I consider every poem to be a resume and a purpose statement, each one being an artifact of who I was and a decree of who I claim to be. I am not saying that all poetry should be political, but I am saying that all of it is. So we, as poets, can choose to keep playing hide and seek with our political selves, but it is a choice.
In this magazine the poems will speak for themselves. They will not be enhanced by commentary from the editors or propped up by the poet’s credentials through contributor’s notes. The poem is the only credential you need to publish here. Guru Jack told me once that true freedom comes from the willingness to take responsibility for one’s actions, as well as one’s product. But I had learned this lesson years ago when my older brother and I fought at my aunt’s house about whether professional wrestling was fake. Instead of getting upset, my aunt moved the furniture and said we should finish the brawl to discover who was right. I have never been more terrified. There is nothing scarier than permission to fight for your beliefs. And so here I guess it is time to say that we have finished moving the furniture: Welcome to the Mêlée.
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