In Defense of Poetry
"On Style" by
Beth Ann Fennelly,
Campbell Corner Poetry Judge
The
biggest revolution in cooking in the last
several decades has been the creation of fusion
cuisine, that is, the marriage of flavors
and techniques from different cuisines. One
of fusion's main innovators is Sottha Kuhn,
recently profiled in The New Yorker. Kuhn
was born and raised in Cambodia but received
all his formal training in Paris. As a young
chef he practiced French cuisine exclusively,
but over the years he started introducing
elements of Cambodian cooking to his French
dishes. The profile begins with a background
of the culinary arts: "It takes about
ten years to become a chef-" Molly O'Neill
writes, "to master the ways of a knife,
the inner life of ingredients, and the vicissitudes
of heat, and then to hone the knowledge until
it lives in the hands." The article then
traces the evolution of Kuhn's fusion cuisine;
O'Neill writes, "By the time I met Sottha,
in 1991, he was midway through his second
decade, the time when a chef's personal style
usually begins to emerge. In Sottha's case,
I could taste the East in his Western cooking,
but just barely; his effort to create a distinct
signature was still tentative."
As
a judge for the 2001 Campbell Corner Awards,
I've been invited to give some musings on
an aspect of poetry, and the above paragraph
might seem an unlikely way to begin. The truth
is, I've often thought that food and poetry
have a lot in common-but that's a topic for
another, longer essay. What I want to think
about here is a poet's style. How long does
it take to develop? Six months? A year? Six
years? What I believe is that the poet's path
to style is like the chef's path. First comes
the decade of learning the tools; then comes
the decade where the "distinct signature"
begins to emerge. Foolhardy are those who
expect shortcuts, who think it takes less
time to master similes than it does to master
spices.
Almost
every fall I teach a Beginning Poetry Workshop,
and I feel a little like the nurse who tells
the amnesiac all about his accident to have
him, the next day, ask again, "What happened?"
What I mean is, the students change but the
lessons, naturally, can not. Sooner or later
we end up discussing style, usually after
a student turns in her third or fourth poem
written solely in lower case. It's likely
I'll suggest the student might want to consider
other strategies, and it's likely she'll reply
that she can't, because lowercase is her "style."
What's
true, though unpleasant to say, is that the
student is too young to have a style. What's
also true, and equally unpleasant, is that
I, her thirty-year-old teacher, am also too
young. Dear Lord, let me be styleless. I can
have tendencies, sure; inclinations, why not;
but I've been writing seriously-daily, or
as close to daily as I can manage-for just
eight years, and to have a style now, I believe,
would mean I failed to apprentice myself enough
to the world. It would mean I mistook circumspection
for efficiency, mistook winning a game of
mumbly-peg for "mastering the ways of
the knife," mistook a facility with the
burners for understanding the "vicissitudes
of heat."
The
student who writes in lowercase because it
is her style is writing a poem and putting
her style on it. As if style is added to content,
the knifeful of mustard on the already-assembled
sandwich. But that is not style. Style is
not an accumulation of gestures. Style erupts.
Style starts where there's zero at the bone.
Style's a coring, and a letting go. Style
accounts for us, style is the sum of us, style
is as distinct as a fingerprint or a snowflake,
as easy to fake as an orgasm-as hard to achieve,
and as lonely, as a moral life. Or so I imagine.
Style,
once achieved, can still trip up accomplished
poets. If the student poet's failing is to
write a poem and put her style on it, the
accomplished poet's failing is to take her
style and fit her poems into it. Once a poet
has found her style, she can imitate herself,
forge her own "distinct signature."
The style becomes self conscious, static;
it holds still for the camera. John Berryman,
in his journals, notes with pleasure that
one day he wrote a poem "with no style
whatsoever!" It's a curious boast. There
is, I think, a profundity to it. Berryman
had a style, and his style bedazzled. Toward
the end of his life, however, his poetry faltered,
The Dream Songs fall off. What accounts for
it? I think he sometimes used his style to
mask an empty poem, the way, in the Civil
War, Southerners stretched their coffee by
mixing in chicory or burnt corn, adding more
and more as coffee grew more and more scarce.
Then, when coffee became available again,
they found it too strong; they'd begun to
prefer the substitutes.
Which
brings us back to food. The poems that won
the 2001 Joseph Campbell Awards have done
so because they were created by working chefs.
Like Sottha Kuhn in his second decade of cooking,
these poets strive to know the "inner
life of ingredients"; perhaps onions
would do for all but the most discriminating
of gourmands, but they dice the shallots or
scallions or leeks, because they are what's
called for. Like Kuhn, they understand that
style is not just how we've been trained,
but who we are, and who we were, and if, though
it seems strange, the Cambodian flavors ask
to be married to the French ones, these are
poets who will attempt it. They understand
the process to be mysterious, and dynamic,
and accept that they need to "hone the
knowledge until it lives in the hands."
Having done so, now they'll let it live in
yours. Take and eat, my friends. It is good.
It is good.
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