Answers? What answers?
"Maybe a poet could come along who could solve all our problems, but I haven't seen him yet."
Excellent interview with James Dickey in the Paris Review, which specialises in doing good interviews with writers. Dickey was at that point talking about writers being urged to make public pronouncements, and pointing out that if they were experts on politics, economics or anything else, they probably wouldn't be sitting around writing poems very much. But his words reminded me of something slightly different, a tendency in criticism best represented by some poet-critic years back, who frequently complained that the poetry he was reviewing raised questions and then refused to suggest answers - in his phrase, it "threw its hands up".
I've never understood this notion that (a) there must be an answer to every question, whether practical or existential, and (b) that if there is, it's any part of a poet's or fiction writer's job to find it. If there's one thing I loathe, it's the kind of writing that wants to tie things up with the pretty bow of an "answer". To practical questions of politics or economics there may be answers, and it's for politicians and economists to find them. If there are any such convenient answers to questions of life, the universe and everything, one would rather expect philosophers to have found them by now, and if they haven't, it seems mighty unlikely that a 40-line poem can do it. If it tries, as often as not it achieves the kind of superficial glibness you expect rather of a Facebook post.
What, for instance, is the "answer" to the agonising fact that has been the theme of so many poems: that we're all going to die and be forgotten? There isn't one, at least not unless you accept "we're all going to a better place" and it is notable that even Parson Herrick, who in his day job should have believed that implicitly, doesn't really seem to have been satisfied with it, at least if we judge by "To the Virgins, to make much of Time". That doesn't mean poets shouldn't write about it.
In fact, it seems to me that one purpose of poetry is precisely to raise questions, not in order to answer them but in order to make others think about them. Another reason I dislike the idea of poems trying to provide answers is that it reduces the reader to the status of a spectator, whereas I think writing should be a participant sport. The likelihood is, in fact, that when it comes to ways of dealing with the world, there are as many partial or possible "answers" as there are individuals. It is not the poet's business to point the reader toward one or another; it is enough to be aware, and make others aware, of the existence of questions.
Excellent interview with James Dickey in the Paris Review, which specialises in doing good interviews with writers. Dickey was at that point talking about writers being urged to make public pronouncements, and pointing out that if they were experts on politics, economics or anything else, they probably wouldn't be sitting around writing poems very much. But his words reminded me of something slightly different, a tendency in criticism best represented by some poet-critic years back, who frequently complained that the poetry he was reviewing raised questions and then refused to suggest answers - in his phrase, it "threw its hands up".
I've never understood this notion that (a) there must be an answer to every question, whether practical or existential, and (b) that if there is, it's any part of a poet's or fiction writer's job to find it. If there's one thing I loathe, it's the kind of writing that wants to tie things up with the pretty bow of an "answer". To practical questions of politics or economics there may be answers, and it's for politicians and economists to find them. If there are any such convenient answers to questions of life, the universe and everything, one would rather expect philosophers to have found them by now, and if they haven't, it seems mighty unlikely that a 40-line poem can do it. If it tries, as often as not it achieves the kind of superficial glibness you expect rather of a Facebook post.
What, for instance, is the "answer" to the agonising fact that has been the theme of so many poems: that we're all going to die and be forgotten? There isn't one, at least not unless you accept "we're all going to a better place" and it is notable that even Parson Herrick, who in his day job should have believed that implicitly, doesn't really seem to have been satisfied with it, at least if we judge by "To the Virgins, to make much of Time". That doesn't mean poets shouldn't write about it.
In fact, it seems to me that one purpose of poetry is precisely to raise questions, not in order to answer them but in order to make others think about them. Another reason I dislike the idea of poems trying to provide answers is that it reduces the reader to the status of a spectator, whereas I think writing should be a participant sport. The likelihood is, in fact, that when it comes to ways of dealing with the world, there are as many partial or possible "answers" as there are individuals. It is not the poet's business to point the reader toward one or another; it is enough to be aware, and make others aware, of the existence of questions.
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