A LETTER FROM MARK YAKICH
written to a concerned poet after judging the April 2003 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Dear Poets who entered this month’s contest and other readers,

This month was fun aside from all the catastrophes in the world. I say that in all honesty. To paraphrase from Janet Kaplan’s poem “The Examined Life” in the latest Denver Quarterly -- without the proper, and sometimes very expensive, tools life is difficult to figure out. As a corollary, Edmund Jabès once wrote: “You think you live, you think you write your life: you dig a hole.” All I have to add is that tools come in many forms; poems are tools or, perhaps better, little machines.

After last month’s contest, I received a letter from a concerned poet about my selections. I reprint the letter (name withheld) below and my brief responses, not in order to deflect any future letters, but rather to make poets think about issues of aesthetics in their work. An aesthetic is a good thing, I believe, and a poet who claims to be aesthetic-free is like a journalist who claims to be entirely objective in reporting the news. For the record, I like journalists, I like objectives, and I believe that tolerance for others is fine but appreciation for others is a world better.

Mark Yakich

Dear Mark Yakich,

Hi there. I’m writing in regards to the poems chosen for the March IBPC. What criteria was used to judge the submissions? I have been workshopping poetry on the net for a year now and have never seen poems of such low caliber selected as winners. In case you’re wondering, none of my poems were selected for the March competition and I do not write this letter as a “sore loser,” but as a writer who is deeply concerned for my fellow poets who dedicate months to revision and editing only to see poems riddled with familiar phrases and incomprehensible thematics win in this competition. I question if the criteria maybe slipped through the cracks... perhaps went down the pipes? I’m a little dissapointed. I’ve read some your poetry and enjoyed it, which was surprising, given the selected poems this month.

Sincerely,
Concerned Poet

Dear Concerned Poet,

Thanks for the note. I tried to pick the best of the lot, as I saw it. As far as criteria go, ultimately there are no criteria for selecting poems beyond personal aesthetics. I mean, what kind of criteria are you talking about -- rhythm, nice images? I’ve been an editor for a variety of well-established lit magazines and most of the stuff that comes in over the transom is riddled with clichés. If you’re looking for solid poems, free of cliché and well-wrought, look to the “older” poets -- Shakespeare, Hopkins, Keats, Moore, Rukeyser, Bishop. Or look to non-American poets -- Tsvetaeva, Noteboom, Ponge, Baudelaire, et al. Or, look at more recent poets -- early Forche, early CK Williams, Heather McHugh, Paul Muldoon, Ann Lauterbach, et al. My point is, you’re not going to find stunning work necessarily in net writing groups. That is to take nothing away from them or the people who write poems: I, after all, am one of them.

Sincerely,
Mark

Dear Concerned Poet,

Let me add just one more thing. I get frustrated by the work I see published in magazines, too, especially magazines like The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, and other big ones. I can’t emphasize enough the aesthetic dimension of my answer to your question -- meaning, some people are going to like poems about flowers or death and some people are not. Or some people are going to like comic poems about flowers or death and some are not. Some people are going to like formal poems, rhymed or unrhymed sonnets. Some people hate villanelles, especially because that penultimate stanza usually breaks down. Some people are only going to like fragmented poems, because that is how they see the world. A good many people see poems as “made things,” that is wrought-out pieces of word sculpture, that is things created from convention and tradition -- poems are the oddest, toughest form of art, in my small opinion, because they are made up out of the most intangible, completely artificial stuff we use every day: words.

To my point: one must develop one’s aesthetic and find the writers and poets and magazines one needs to find based on a lifetime of reading and writing and reading and writing from a wide variety of sources, from cookbooks to 14th century French troubadour songs, from the Bible to Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, from Don Quixote to Don DeLillo.

Sorry for the long, windy reply. Your note just set me to thinking aloud.

And now it’s time for a movie.

Best wishes,
Mark