The Poetry Judge
by Garrison Keillor
(The Atlantic, Feb.96)
THERE are four hundred poems," the president of the poetry society said over the phone, "but judging won't take you that long, because most of them are pretty bad." The next day the poems arrived in an apple carton, three bundles bound with rubber bands, and I spread them out in the squares of sunshine on my dining-room table. "O dining-room table, dear old friend, home of my mournful mashed potatoes." Four hundred poems, enough to fill a bread box, by ninety-three poets who hoped to win one of four modest cash prizes-modest to you, but no prize is modest to a poet. Poets are starved for prizes--awards, with cash stipends, named after ladies with three names. And what poet truly feels, deep down in his or her heart, that he or she is unworthy of much, much more recognition, right away? Not me. I won the Anna von Helmholz Phelan Prize for poetry in 1962 and am starved for another, even though I am no longer a poet. When I took the rubber bands off the bundles of poems, I could hear a faint sucking, an inhalation of poem breath, poems whispering, Please, sir. Please.
The president had asked me to judge the society's annual contest because, she admitted, she was having a hard time finding people to do it, and, though I had no time to give her, none, I said yes because I was angry about some awful stuff I'd read recently. It was dreadful garbage, and because dreadful people have plenty of time to serve as judges, this garbage had won awards. It was a book of essays by a Minnesota guy who specializes in taking walks in the woods and looking at the reflections of sunlight on small bodies of water and feeling grievous and wounded in a vague way-a thoughtful guy in a harsh, unfeeling world with too much molded-plastic furniture, and he pouts for a few pages and then resolves to soldier on as a sensitive person in a crass world. This guy's stuff reads like a very long letter from someone you wish would write to someone else; it is mournful and piteous, as if he were about to ask if he could come and live in your home for a few months, but it won awards because it is pretentiously sad and is "about" something, maleness or the millennium, and that means his books will find their way into schools, his glum reflections will be disseminated among innocent schoolchildren, and they will learn that a great writer is one who can lead the reader away from the dangerous edge of strong feeling and into the barns of boredom. So the brighter ones--though they
love to write stories!--will decide not to be writers, and we'll have another writerless generation like the thirtysome-thing adolescents of today, and our beloved country will sink ever deeper into the great couch of despond and vanish in the Internet. That is why I agreed to judge the poetry contest: to save America. Otherwise, why bother?
A two-foot stack of poems on the dining-room table, the names of the poets blacked out, each poet a number, each poem assigned a letter: la, 1b, 1c. "O Poem la, yearning, naked, wet, would you mind getting dressed, please, la?"
la was an elegy to a dead cat, with classic elegiac touches-the gray sky weeping rain, dead flowers in a vase, bare boughs of trees, brown leaves skittering across the
vacant yard where once Kitty had chased them-but mainly the poem was a bitter complaint against Daddy.
I was your happy dancing little Daddy's girl
starving for your love
but no you were too busy Daddy
your stony face and angry eyes
made me the fearful self-accusing person I am
and I did your dirty work Daddy
and went ahead and ruined my life for
forty-seven years
and only Kitty could draw me out of the shadows
only Kitty made the world a safe place in which to
have feelings
and now she is gone too
A hundred lines of this, ending with a pledge to remember
the sacred cat forever ("Kitty, you will live in me as long as I
have breath/your purr will be in the wind").
1b was a continuation of la and began "The life in me frightens
you and you keep/running and running away/ but how can you
escape your own daughter?" And Ic: "You're dead, Daddy, so
why won't you go away?/Why do you still scare me?/And why
am I unable to hate you?" The second poet offered a poem that
began "If there's a bowling lane in heaven, then I know that
Grandma's there," and the third had written an ode to Denise
with whom the poet finds peace that can never cease, and the
fourth took us to Vietnam, a line of grunts snaking through the
steaming jungle, men who are scared, doped up on reefer,
pissed off at the lieutenant, remembering the buddies who got
blown away yesterday, and we come to a village and burn the
hooches and a Vietnamese woman comes running screaming
out of a burning hooch and your best friend lifts his rifle and
shoots her point-blank through the head, and how do you like
it now, blue-eyed boy? And then came poet No. 5, with a
poem in which life is a sweater we are knitting and we must
ever be ready to pull some stitches and redo the sleeve.
I read poems for four hours straight with hardly a break. I
tried to read each poem all the way to the end, but poems that
start out clunky never get good, I discovered, and a judge has to conserve his strength. Some
were so awkward that I stuck with them to the end out of politeness--like the poem about the difficulty of writing a poem.
I tried to keep my mind on work
And do the tasks assigned to me,
But somehow I could not shirk
The still small voice of poetry.
Through eight stanzas the poet resists the call of creativity.
I did not want to feel the pain,
The aching longing for the sea,
The lonely music of the rain,
That comes to me through poetry.
Finally, in the last stanzas, the poet surrenders to the demands of art.
And then at last I quit the fight
And gathering up my strength somehow,
I wrote the poem I had to write,
This poem that lies before you now.
And now my poem has reached an end,
I the poet at last am free,
And now the task is yours, my friend,
To grapple with my poetry.
Many poems competed to be the worst of the lot, but it
was hard to ignore a long poem titled "going to my brother's
wedding reception at the minikahda club after seeing a
documentary about rwanda," which began, "my cousins in
their gleaming white tuxedos stepped over the emaciated
bodies of black children and helped themselves to more
watercress sandwiches/the children wailed but their wailing
became a string quartet playing beatles tunes/i turned away
sick with revulsion, i was covered with flies, and everyone smiled
and said i had never looked better." The poet did variations
on this riff for a page and a half. I imagined he was twenty years
old, shy, not a good dancer, a college junior from the wealthy suburbs
who felt torn between becoming a lawyer and joining the
Minikahda Club and becoming a poet and hating people in
the Minikahda Club. But watching a PBS documentary on
starvation in Africa doesn't give you a license to feel more
sensitive than all the other guys in white tuxes, and why didn't
he go to Africa and get over it instead of writing a windy
poem about the middle class enjoying itself on the patio?
Nonetheless, I could easily--yes, easily--imagine some
judges who would snatch this poem out of the pile and give it
the Naomi Windham Nissensen Award for Sensitivity of
Greater Than Medium Length. I know people who could see
the self-aggrandizing agony of the young man in the white
tuxedo as quite insightful.
Teachers of creative writing who seduce their students
into writing journals-yards and yards of sensitive wall-
paper!
Administrators of literary programs who keep humor
alarms on their desks!
Artistic politicos and commissars who insist that Literature
must express the anger of oppressed people, thus forcing
oppressed people to watch TV for their entertainment!
Proponents of the Pain Theory of Literature and devotees of
pitiful writing--
If Flannery O'Connor were alive today, would we be
taught to think of her as a Physically Challenged. Writer, or
could we simply read her books?
A Hispanic poet offered "Recuerdos de la Duluth," about his experience as a little boy when he was taken out of the classroom, along with two other boys, and brought to the Anglo school nurse and sprayed for head lice. Evidently his life had been marked by this.
I have kept this secret for thirty
years.
Tried to look friendly. Wanted to be a regular guy.
But now the truth is out:
I am an alien.
I have head lice.
Never mind that spraying a boy's head may have been the best way to treat his head lice back then-to the poet, it was an act of exclusion and oppression. What will he think after an Anglo doctor gives him his first digital prostate examination? Will it, too, symbolize his estrangement from America?
The theme of Speaking Out After Long Silence was everywhere (I was unable to bring myself to say this until now), accompanied by the theme of You Had to Be There to Understand (How can you know how terrible it was/You who have never gone to the school nurse's office?). Hardly any poems were written for amusement, for the pleasure of language. Almost all were compelled, driven, winging up out of the poet's maimed past-grappling with painful truths, doing battle with a world that would deny the poet's existence.
I am me! I scream at the clouds
At the skulls under the earth
At the damnation
For too long have I kept the peace
Now I shout at everyone in the street:
I am me and without me I am nothing!
There are people in Manhattan who shout at everyone in the street and wave their arms and argue with streetlights, but would you buy a book by them?
AS I read through the pile, it was easy to spot the winning poems: they were the readable ones. Some were good enough that I might have read them out loud to someone sitting nearby--the simple test of a good poem.
There was a poem called "The Bravery of Irises," in which the poet, a woman, knelt in the flower beds and whacked away at dead stalks in the company of her husband, who seemed to be an okay guy, not a rapist or a murderer, but simply a fellow gardener kneeling there too, with whom she conversed quietly about flowers and about Paris, which she hoped to see someday, though the trip had been postponed many times because they didn't want to leave their garden. She seemed to be contented-a mood that can be hard to convey in writing without seeming smug or stupid. I thought it was a lovely poem. Like Whitman or Dickinson, this poet looked to nature as redeeming humankind from our sickness. Irises had a certain power to make her happy, and she looked back on years of iris happiness, beginning in girlhood.
Our flowers come from the rotten bones
of ancestors.
They had to die so this garden could grow.
Working in the garden is our homage to them.
The only reason to love gardening is that when you
were little,
Someone you loved loved to garden, and
You followed them around and did as they did.
And it rubbed off. My love,
We meet again in the irises, and my love,
We have been to Paris every day for forty-five years.
I put her poem in the Winner category, a thin stack next to the heap of Bad Daddy poems, in which I also put Bad Boyfriends and one Mean Mommy ("The Duchess of Revlon"). There was a small pile of poems of Homage to the Beloved, including two lesbian poems, but none by women who loved men--a shame, if you ask me: what sort of dullard can't get off at least one good one for her beloved? There was a stack of poems of Mute Wonder in the Woods--not fresh-squeezed wonder, unfortunately, but reconstituted ("I lie on a summer day and look at the clouds1 scudding across the sky/And wonder what it means/and what do the trees mean/and the birds flying south"). There was a large mound of poems about the Struggle to Be Me ("I am a myriad of sights/sounds/feelings/songs/smells all intertwined with thoughts/stories/impressions/memories and yes I am beautiful yes/and how shall I defend this/beauty/wonder/feeling/yes in this world of No") and a handful of poems of Mute Wonder in the Presence of Death ("I held the thin transparent hand/that had peeled so many potatoes/and thought of so much to say/to that thin body with big eyes that once had been/my cousin Harriet"). There were about fifteen poems on Vietnam, all of them bloody, with mosquitoes and sweat and fear and stink in them, all of them angry about innocence violated and lives brutalized and an uncaring nation anxious to forget.
It was hard to read those poems and imagine how possibly to judge them as writing, or how the writers wished to be judged. After you have read ten Vietnam poems by ten men so haunted by the war that twenty-five years later their poems are breathless with horror, do you say, "Thank you all very much for sharing your horrors with us, and I choose horror No. 5 because the imagery is more vivid and it is better structured and more original"? These are true-life experiences, not literary pieces, and if someone tells you how he almost died when he was eighteen, how can you deny him the prize?
Experience becomes literature when it no longer matters to the reader whether the story is true or not. Stephen Crane wasn't around for the Civil War, but you don't wonder about that as you read 'The Red Badge of Courage', it's all quite real on the page. Andrew Marvell could have been a Trappist monk in Kentucky and never had a mistress, but "Had we but World enough, and Time,/This coyness Lady were no crime" would still be a fine poem. On the other hand, if the poem "Quang Ngai, Bravo Company" ("And he raised his gun/and I thought hey cut it out/and then her head blew up/and the lieutenant turned away and puked") were written by a false veteran, born in 1962, who knew about Vietnam only from movies, you would feel cheated. The woman sorrowing for the cat who rescued her from Daddy's coldness has to be for real, or else the poem is a joke: you'd be angry at anyone inventing a Bad Daddy, just as if someone at your AA meeting stood up and described how alcohol had destroyed his life and you later found out that the confession was pure fiction, you would shake your head in disbelief.
There was no doubt in my mind that most of the poems I read were about the poets' real lives, offered up as performances in hopes of winning a prize for the quality of their suffering, like the candidates on the old Queen for a Day show, who told their troubles to the genial host; audience applause determined who would get the Amana Radarange and the weekend at Lake Tahoe.
I wanted to sit the poets down in a classroom and lecture them: Self-expression is not the point of it, people! We are not here on paper in order to retail our injuries. For one thing, it is unfair to bore someone who doesn't have the opportunity to bore you right back, and for another, we have better things to do-to defend the hopeless and the down-and-out, to find humor in dreadful circumstances, to satirize the pompous and pretentious, to make deer appear suddenly in the driveway.
WRITING is a blessed life, no matter how hard it may be at times, and a person is lucky to be a writer. So go be one, I thought, having spent almost six hours reading 400 poems. There were five poems in my Winners pile. I agonized for perhaps two or three minutes over the hundreds of rejects--
I am sorry, I mean no disrespect to Kitty.
I am glad your Grandma loved to bowl.
I am sorry for all of you poets who have been hurt by men.
I am sorry for rejecting poems that were about the moon,
which is beautiful, of course.
I am sorry for rejecting poems that were about someone
who, I am sure, is as admirable as you say.
I am sorry about your head lice, my friend.
War poets, you can have my car, my stereo, my books- please don't come and shoot me!
--and then I sent my nominations to the poetry-contest committee, and a few weeks later the president phoned with the results. Two of my recommendations had won prizes, but not the poem about irises.
"It was the best poem in the bunch," I said. She said that she had liked it too, but that the awards committee felt that other poems, though perhaps less advanced technically, deserved recognition. "I think we felt it was important to show that poetry isn't just about flowers," she said. The iris poem struck some people on the committee as a little boring. She mentioned that they had found "Quang Ngai, Bravo Company" particularly moving. They felt that it said things that needed to be said.
Okay, I said to her, that's fine,
As I reached for the pistol you gave me, Daddy.
She thanked me for my work, and I said that it was my
pleasure,
As I put the pistol to the back of her head
And blew her brains out,
Which didn't amount to all that much, frankly,
And ran her through a wood chipper.
She made a little bit less than a full load.
I mixed her with the dirt
At the end of the flower bed,
And this fall I'll plant bulbs in her
And next spring she'll look better than she ever did as a
president,
And men in tuxedos will say how terrific the irises look,
But do you know what I went through
For beauty,
America,
And you on the terrace drinking your gin and tonics,
How can you possibly understand any of this, you
dummies?
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