It's Down to the Kitten

Thanks, Jack. My position as of this evening is that it's craft, tactics and workshop all the way down. I do not accept Kasey's "narrow" definition of craft as "a familiar set of mechanically 'workshoppable' skills such as meter, lineation, rhyme, etc.," mainly because I don't accept his constraints on the workshop.

(I think there is an ideal Platonic workshop that is just, well, ideal when compared to real, bounded, sited workshops, whether on or off line, and that that's the workshop we're talking about.)

Pirooz and Allyssa are discussing the idea that "voice" is the other of craft. One way to understand this is that just as poets might have strategic interests that go beyond their tactical problems with a particular poem, and just as their poetry may be subjected to criticism that goes beyond the sort of thing you deal with in a workshop, so too do poets work on their voice as something above and beyond their craft. I don't think this distinction is advisable.

Josh championed the strategic approach to poetry in his response to Jeffery Bahr's reading of Dan Chiasson's "To Helena Concerning Dan Chiasson", which, he says, "is entirely oriented toward what makes a poem an invulnerable object or monument." Such a reading is fixated on tactics, "ignoring or obscuring other possible attitudes and valences (poem as discourse, poem as social actor, poem as social tactic or meditation on same)."

This reminded me of T. S. Eliot's introduction to the Sacred Wood and his "repeated assertion that when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not another thing." It seems to me that as soon as we move our "critique" of a piece of work outside the workshop we debauch the art.

So I think those poets who have been workshopping (or pimping) Mary Oliver's poem have been showing her the greatest respect possible. Those who have been excusing "The Kitten"'s defects and trying to sell it on merits that do not belong to it, but, perhaps, to the sentiments of a likable poet or an amiable public, have been cheapening the art.

Yes, poems can be appreciated for features that cannot be improved in the shop. The inticement to do so, however, is not about poetry, but another thing. It is no doubt a strategic matter.

In The Rebel somewhere, Albert Camus said that true generosity to the future lies in giving all to the present, as a part of an argument for tactical cells, not strategic organizations. I think we can say something similar here. The art of poetry lies in giving everything to the poem.