Working in a Sidelined Genre
/By Cameron Scott '93
As a writer of creative nonfiction, my process tends to bottleneck at the point where I need a good reader/interlocutor. I should say that by creative nonfiction I mean poems, prose poems, and lyrical essays. If you groaned quietly to yourself when you saw the word “poems,” you have identified the problem. People don’t like poetry—or more accurately, they don’t think they like it, so they almost never read it. Even many poets are often thin in their reading in the genre.
With so few willing readers, even fewer skilled readers, and only a subset of those right for one’s specific goals and style, it’s pretty isolating making poetry and poetry-adjacent work.
“Can lyrical writing be kinder to the reader, giving more and/or demanding less?”
I’ll admit, I am envious of art forms, particularly the visual arts, for which there’s more opportunity to engage with others through the work. But I can’t draw—and language is so rich and important that I remain convinced that it is a compelling raw material.
Still, poetry is partly to blame for its lack of popularity. Poetry mainly speaks not to but near its audience. It expects readers to do a lot of work without offering them many treats along the way. The genre has also mostly settled, at least since World War II, for the narrow set of forms and “personal” subject matters allocated to it. That makes it a low-cost proposition for readers to dismiss it.
My work is focused on finding ways to sidestep those limitations in hopes of writing things that feel more alive. Here, I’m going to focus on one question I am asking to try to reframe poetry’s relationship to its audience: can lyrical writing be kinder to the reader, giving more and/or demanding less?
1
When I said I can’t draw, perhaps you thought to yourself, “Get a camera!” I am a competent photographer, but I’m no Minor White (a favorite since my Princeton days). For a long time, I looked at my photos and saw the glass half empty: they weren’t rich enough in form and meaning to hold up as art. One day recently, with newfound pandemic time on my hands, I started thinking about the glass half full: not enough in the image meant room for words!
Sliver SHiver, 2020
I began experimenting with putting words on photos I had taken. I also consciously lowered the bar for myself about how artful the photos needed to be. If the images were too heavily artful, it would defeat the purpose, anyway. Visually appealing photographs could potentially serve as the “treats” to make a viewer’s engagement with words more palatable. I liked the idea of allowing readers to experience poetic work through a social take-it-or-leave-it attitude similar to that expressed in galleries. Just as it’s often okay to respond with “hmm” or “that’s beautiful” in a museum, in some cases it’s okay to respond that way to a poem.
The visual poems I’ve started making reduce poetry to its most basic unit, because I know I can’t expect a viewer to stand and read anything for long: two words in relationship to one another and/or an image captured in a short phrase. To a greater or lesser degree, a photograph might also suggest an additional word. In my notebook, I had written down “silver, sliver, shiver,” but with a photo that included silvery reflection, I used just sliver and shiver.
2
In a prose poem I have been working on, I decided I wanted the literal meaning to be explicit, not hidden in obliqueness or symbolism. As I’ve worked on the poem, whenever I have felt like I was packing in more meaning at the cost of making the most literal reading more difficult, I’ve cut parts and tried again. (I have cut and tried again so many times that the exercise began to feel like a Sisyphusian form of torture.)
The poem is about the controversy surrounding eucalyptus trees in California (they are a fire-prone non-native species, but they can be lovely and smell good). It establishes a few facts of history and biology and offers a fair bit of description of the trees in California landscapes. It doesn’t take, explicitly or implicitly, a position on the controversy. I’ve asked less of the reader, but I wonder if I have given less as a result.
There are words I wanted to use in the poem out of an interest in their etymology. They are beautiful, but they’re not everyday words. To offer them up generously, with no strings attached, I couldn’t let them bog down the clarity of the writing. I ended up removing them from the flow of the prose paragraphs, setting them to sea between paragraphs:
Australians brought these box-budded (“well covered”) trees. Coastal brush looked barren without them – fog running like a river over it, caught here and there like cotton wool.
holm
holt
The Tasmanian blue gum is a slatternly tree – smelling of armpit, of human animal – with bark slashed to ribbons hanging from a spare vertical.
dross
When the poem features pairs of words, they work sort of like the pairs of words in the visual poems: the paragraph before plays the part of the image they bounce off.
3
Lately I’ve been re-examining the history of poetry, thinking about social contexts where poetry was the beating heart of the creative arts, not the vestigial organ it is here and now. I’m curious about how poems written—and widely read—in these circumstances might differ from poems written—and mostly ignored—now.
I stumbled upon recent translations of Horace—Horace: The Odes, edited by J. D. McClatchy, featuring several translations by the amazing Paul Muldoon, both of whom I took workshops with at Princeton. Horace hardly needed dusting off, so clear and personable were his odes. I got curious about the original metric forms, which, I learned, Horace had adapted from ancient Greek forms. I ended up finding some online audio recordings of the odes in the original Latin.
ut pictura poesis, 2021
I decided to create a “translation” of one ode (I.12) by using the words (I thought) I recognized and otherwise transcribing what the remaining words sounded like or evoked for me. (I didn’t study Latin, but I speak Spanish and some French.) I won’t swear that what I produced has value as a piece of writing, but I ended up with some words and images I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to: “You have a certain wise radiance, / like a haughty horse at pasture . . .”; “A twin, an Airbnb superhost, he was lost / in fond memories of the Centre Pompidou . . .”
Ironically, my “translation” asks a lot of a reader, since the best reading would include some consideration of the original Latin. But Horace is so good, maybe sending the reader back to his work, written as the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire, is a kind of generosity. It brings in the sociality of writers with writers, in any case.
I notice that these experiments—curating words and offering them for consideration and translating (such as it is)—also bring the poet down from the lofty place most readers imagine him/her to occupy. I think that might be a good first step toward making lyrical writing more sociable, more engaging. What do you think?