End Notes: What I Didn't Know
A look back at six months of reviews and reading
When I started this series, I thought I was going to read books, and write about them while highlighting indie presses. I would pass along the good stuff to you, dear reader. I think more was happening than what I expected; I was learning.
Honestly, I wanted to read more. I wanted to get outside my comfort zone and trust those who made the recommendation. In the opening announcement post for the series, I was saying out loud what I needed to hear: you don’t have to read the great poets if they don’t grab you. You can hunt for your own pantheon. And I think that was my way of compensating for this weight that I wasn’t reading the right things, thinking the right way, making the poems I should be making. Tackling that idea of “should” became the soul of this series as each poet revealed something in me that I’d gotten pretty good at hiding.
Gion Davis made me a reader who was implicated, who couldn’t stand outside the poem and feel safe. Maybe I’d been reading and writing from a distance, narrating, performing, making sure I was the clever one in the room. Gion’s poems said: you can’t protect yourself that way.
Chen Chen handed me permission I didn’t know I needed. Pop culture, Sailor Moon, the internet, all the stuff I’d learned to think wasn’t serious enough for poems or was in some way indecorous for my poetry. I’d barred myself from whole territories of language because I thought maturity meant narrowing what you allowed yourself to love. Chen wrote about Mitski and fracking and his mother and love all in the same breath and I realized I’d been restraining what my poems could hold. I live in a tapestry of influences and references, maybe to a corny fault, but an honest one. Why did I think my poems shouldn’t?
Richard Siken made me jealous and terrified. I read Crush and I understood that the work matters, that revision isn’t betrayal, that getting out of your own way is harder than doing something clever. I sat with that and thought about how much of my work I’d dressed up or hidden behind sarcasm or syntax or how I’d learned to be too sure of myself as a defense against being seen.
Taylor Johnson came back to me from Oberlin and asked: what do you do with what you’re handed? Taylor’s poems chewed on inheritance and the concept of a flawed love or a flawed tool before accepting that language will fail but you have to pass it on anyway. I reflected on my own desire for control, my need to have it all figured out before the poem lands. Taylor taught me that precision and mess live in the same place. That the flaws are built in and that’s the whole point.
And then Andrea Gibson. By the time I got to Gibson, I was tired. Tired of distance. Tired of sarcasm. Tired of protecting myself with language when the whole reason I came to poetry was to be heard. Gibson doesn’t protect. Gibson says it. There’s urgency in that book that has everything to do with poems that don’t let us get away with not saying what we mean.
So of the goals I announced at the beginning: to relish in my community’s success. That happened, but it happened sideways; the reading of these collections, the poets my community had suggested, became a mirror. I admitted, through these reviews, that I was the problem. That my hesitation, my irony, my distance, my need to be in control of how I was perceived, that was what was keeping me from writing the poems I actually wanted to write.
What surprised me most is that I didn’t know how defensive I was. I thought, well I’m maybe not reading enough, but I’m still open and hungry. But I was also protecting some version of myself that couldn’t be wrong, couldn’t be earnest, couldn’t care too much without making a joke about it. I was good at that. Good at sarcasm. Good at distance.
But the smartest thing I learned through this series is that it’s not about the flourish. Or rather it’s not about the empty flourish. Because what I want to write and read are those poems that can have it both ways, both the move on the page and the desire behind it. I think they call that craft. I think the journey here has been about matching impulse with process, trust with tools.
The series became a conversation between these poets and my own work. Between what I thought I believed and what these books made me see I actually needed. I’m not done with reviews. I’m not done thinking about how poets teach me. I’m not done with my community or the hunt for what grabs me by the throat. But I want to be done with some of those internal shoulds or shouldn’ts. I’m learning to be honest in a way I didn’t expect to be. I want to play more.
There’s more to say. There’s always more to say. Thank you for reading.
-Sean
