Yes?
Well, sort of following on that, in a way, since you made
both references to, I guess, what
you'd call the traditional canon to Babylon,
and so forth, and Shakespeare, and also
a more contemporary canon, which is to say Hollywood movies,
maybe speak a little bit about--
this is brought to mind, because I made a reference
in a class the other day to the original sin and, of course,
promptly realized that no one class knew
what I meant by original sin.
And so what are the advantages and disadvantages of--
are there advantages and disadvantages
to losing that shared canon?
Is there a new canon?
Oh, far better minds than mine have
been trying to address this question for some time.
And on the one hand, we live in a wonderful, richly larger
world than the one in which many of us
were trained, which took for granted that there were
a certain number of stamped with approval texts and so forth.
Although, I had to acquire those later as well.
They weren't books around my house.
So it was all magical to me.
But yeah, I mean, I think it's--
well, one sees in contemporary poetry in America vast amounts
of it, really saturated with reference
to other books, books that have played large roles
in human imagination over time.
The Bible is the most conspicuous.
I don't remember a time when more people were
using bits from the Bible, or structures
from the Book of Common Prayer, or the contemplative orders.
So I think you see a lot of longing for that commonality.
But frankly, a lot of longing for the formal advantage
that those invocations can provide
when one is looking to structure in query
or to structure a book.
It's fabulous to be able to deploy
the foundational patterns or skeletal patterns
of other known habits of mind, whether it's
the chart of chemical elements or the books of the Bible.
And so I think that's partly behind it.
And it is certainly an issue that readers
have to be generous as they read, more generous than was
called upon when everybody could take
for granted a certain kind of commonality.
And I think writers need to be generous with their readers
as well.
But I don't think it's--
on the one hand, you see, well, there
might have been an era when we could
take for granted people would know
the basic stories of the Bible or some
of the basic plots in Shakespeare, some of them.
But on the other hand, I certainly
don't know the basic tenets of Islam.
And when I was reading--
or I don't know much about jazz, the history of jazz.
So when I'm reading Yusef Komunyakaa or when
I'm reading Agha Shahid Ali, I am doing a lot of--
I'm reading other things simultaneously.
I'm looking stuff up.
And I'm grateful to them when they give me little clues,
whether it's in apparatus or internal
to the poems about where I should go first to just begin
to get an orientation for things I'm embarrassed not
to know better than I do.
And I think that's--
I mean, that probably is a change.
And, in fact, it's a change in what
I call somewhat stealthily--
I guess, it sounds academic, though, I am--
the rhetorical contract that is the social life of poems,
that social aspect, the part of poetry
that it makes no sense except as a feature of life
of among people.
And I think it is simply the case
that there are just many different orders of shared
imagination that exist in the world now and we, I think,
have to be aware that much of what we're interested in
will have to suffer us as apprentices
and flipped around that if, as I think
is often the case, if when we write,
our writing is partly haunted with the music,
and memory, and figures, and strictures of that
which we have read or heard and which
has made a deep impression that we best leave a trail of crumbs
for readers who might not have come to this moment
by the same paths we came, and who will need to,
at some level, trace a new path to it.
I think that's-- there probably are losses in not having
a single shared body of reference.
It's not just canonical text.
It's all kinds of other things.
On the other hand, again, if we are
like Blanche DuBois rely upon the kindness of strangers
and remember to be strangers who can offer some kindness,
I think it's a wonderful prospect
that we have before us as well where, at some level,
we can all come either new or as if new
to culture that is our own.
And it makes for a new kind of a sort
of mosaic of shared reference.
I don't know what it's going to look like in 50 years.
I don't know what it's going to mean to write poetry
in 50 years exactly, how one will touch the common chords
of recognition.
Because the other aspect of that question--
I'm going on far too long, but it's
a really, really interesting question--
is that when one allows, perhaps, one's own language
or a contemporary idiom to be, one
allows for a certain kind of bleed through
of other language, or it allows that surface
to be punctured by other things that come to mind, or enter
the audible field.
Part of what's at stake and part of the way a poem is musically
scored is that those enter as aspects of recognition.
And though they can be recuperated on purpose
by people who didn't go to Sunday school
and hear them for years, and years, and years,
the familiarity is, of course, not the same.
And the sense of the kind of give away,
the homeliness of certain light motifs or touchstones
is not the same.
And since that's part of what one
might want to be scoring into poetry,
I guess that has to be thought of in a whole new way.
How can we make something new function
as though it were familiar or how to code it
as nursery food in a way.
I mean, that's a whole other set of questions.
It's a great question.
It's a great set of problems to contemplate, and fascinating.
Some of the rest of you probably have better ideas
about that than I do.
Yeah?