Favoritism, shallowness, self-dealing, competition dressed up as virtue, flatterers dressed up as sages, coteries dressed up as the elect: none of that is new. But right now, it just seems so loud.

What faith teaches is that we're all exiles from that Zion that is eternity, to which we shall one day return. What Vaughan understands is that if we seek eternity, it is now.

I only revise poems on a clipboard. Masking tape is wrapped around the clip, the words “Cross Country” written in marker. My wife used it during her coaching days, and I leave the tape on. Poets are sentimental; it is one of our defining traits. Poems command a space. They are structural objects. I need to hold them, see their type on the page. Prose can live on the screen for me, but poetry needs to get out and breathe. A poem on a clipboard is a statement: it’s time to get to work. I learned this method from Erin Aults, a friend from college. We went to a small school on a river where people took writing seriously. I was inspired by how she would revise her poems: she had a clipboard at the library, or sitting around campus, and it seemed like there was a little bit of ceremony to the action. Her poems were wonderful, and she had a great eye as an editor for our school literary magazine, so I trusted her methods. The other defining trait of poets: we believe in ritual and superstition. Years after college—when memories of then had become a little fuzzy, yet still comforting—I was reading an article about an archive of 30,000 horticultural periodicals at the Royal Botanical Gardens. The project was methodical, and necessary. The catalogs ranged back to 1853. More than simply the story of seeds (although that would be enough, I think), they are the stories of cultures and lives. And halfway through the article, I saw someone familiar: Erin. She’s in charge of the archive. How does a poet become an archivist? I think I suspected the answer before I asked Erin: you approach objects with care. [millions_ad] I like to see the routes that lives take, and Erin’s has got me thinking about what draws us to poetry—and what we draw from it. She still feels “almost a euphoria about the language and directness of poetry, that it has both exactness and expansiveness.” After college, she worked at a used bookstore in Columbus, Ohio, which began her “love of the book as an object.” She remembers “especially during the heavy ‘buy season’ (usually spring and summer when the public was selling off their books to us), as this grand battle between me and making order of these objects. The backroom and processing area of the bookstore would be overflowing with books. There was a lot of learning how to ‘conquer’ the books as objects either through stacking or ordering or selling.” Soon after, she was working at the Ohio State University libraries, where she “dissected and mended books and paper, learning their science, understanding materials, form, and outside pressures that affected them.” Later, she handled books of Catholic history at the John M. Kelly Library at University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. Some texts were from the 1500s, and she was “aware that I am one of so many people who have touched this book, that the book is a perfect machine—moveable parts and all. I understood my purpose as a conservator, librarian, and archivist is to help it last another 500 years and to make sure that people have the chance to work with it and be close to it. This is a piece of history that will not tell you what it contains unless you touch it, move it, and work with it.” That sounds like the mechanics of poetry to me. And those 30,000 catalogs at the Royal Botanical Gardens? There’s poetry in them, too. “I can see them as a mix of chapbooks, book art, with a healthy dose of late-night local-channel half-hour-long product commercials,” she says. She finds stories and lives in those books, like ME Blacklock, a “nursery owner and plant breeder during a time when women didn't often get to do that work.” Isabella Preston, the Queen of Horticulture in the 1920s, who bred lilies, lilacs, and roses. I asked Erin if caring for, and curating, this collection might intersect with poetry. She sees “both poetry and archival work as potentially radical and political acts. Both of them are relying on words and language to create opportunities of recognition, change, and justice.” Poetry and archiving are “done often as solitary work but are really reliant on the person who is receiving and interpreting the work...Similarly, the internal logic in both poetry and archives is always present within the creator but the logic is not always evident at first glance. Both reader or researcher might need to dive deep to tease out the meaning the poem or archives holds.” Poems and archives, she says, are “both historical records. They both can be about providing access. Of course, they both require care and observation.” I like that. Let’s think about poems as objects that deserve care, observation, and preservation. An inspiring way to commemorate the work of others—and maybe the right spirit to help us create poems that can last. Image Credit: Flickr/Internet Archive Book Images.

After 17 drafts over two weeks, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” was completed on November 4, 1975. The poem began as notes, and evolved into a villanelle. She changed the title. She deleted words. She reached for possible rhymes. Brett Candlish Millier says the “effect of reading all these drafts together one often feels in reading the raw material of her poems and then the poems themselves: the tremendous selectivity of her method and her gift for forcing richness from minimal words.” Revision is art. Denise Levertov said it was dangerous to revise a poem unless “you are hot in it.” Some poets suffer through revision. Other poets find life in revision. All poets do it. Here are 15 poets on the worthy work of revision. “I revise incessantly. Usually when I’m starting to work on a poem, I don’t read it aloud—not until it gets to a certain point. You can lull yourself with your own voice; but I hear it in my head.” — Rita Dove “The energy of revision is the energy of creation and change, which is also the energy of destruction.” — Maggie Anderson “I revise constantly. I used to revise whole poems; now I revise as I go along, from line to line. Sometimes I erase so much I tear a hole in the paper.” — Charles Wright “You can get expert at teaching and be crude in practice. The revision, the consciousness that tinkers with the poem—that has something to do with teaching and criticism. But the impulse that starts a poem and makes it of any importance is distinct from teaching.” — Robert Lowell “Revision teaches me how to push beyond the choices that come easily. It restrains me, challenges me, forces me back and back and back again to my failures. Process saves me from the poverty of my intentions.” — Traci Brimhall “The poets who influenced me most were Yeats and Valéry. Both were poets who revised endlessly, and I believe in revision. But I think you can only do it when you're inspired. In other words, the poem goes dead if you don't revise it white heat. You can't revise it cold, as far as I'm concerned. It's like playing a very stiff three sets of tennis one after another.” — May Sarton “Sometimes going over something is a way of entering into a whole new process of writing, finding new layers in a piece of writing. I think of it that way. Again, one of the people I learned a great deal from was Robert Graves, who felt that going over a piece—the revisions—was almost more valuable than producing an original draft.” — W.S. Merwin “Revision is to occupy a poem as spectator instead of as creator. We clean a room so that it looks unoccupied; in revision we work to efface affect, idiosyncrasy and error so that the poem is a hotel room with the sheets turned down, a mint on its pillow.” — Carmen Giménez Smith [millions_ad] “I don't actually revise, or it's very seldom that I revise. What I do is write so leisurely that all the revisions occur in thought or in the margins of the page. It can make for a page which is as dense, graphically, as some men's-room walls. Which is not to say that a poem is like going to the men's room.”  — Richard Wilbur “I do sometimes use a reading as part of the revision process. I write wanting the poems to be heard, to be thought of, to be read out loud, as human speech.” — Thomas Lux “I revise endlessly. Even after publication.” — Clarence Major “A poem rarely comes whole and completely dressed. As a rule, it comes in bits and pieces. You get an impression of something—you feel something, you anticipate something, and you begin, feebly, to put these impressions and feelings and anticipation or rememberings into those things which seem so common and handleable—words.  And you flail and you falter and you shift and you shake, and finally, you come forth with the first draft. Then, if you're myself and if you're like many of the other poets I know, you revise, and you revise. And often the finished product is nothing like your first draft. Sometimes it is.” — Gwendolyn Brooks “I do read the poems aloud, yes—not while writing, as much, but in the revision stage. I want to test for where things are too rough, or aren’t rough enough, where they fall into patterns of sound and whether or not those are meaningful or distracting patterns.” — Carl Phillips “I revise purposefully and constantly and playfully, as often for sound as for meaning. I lean, too, on the weight of a lifetime of reading poetry. I think back, even, to weekly Mass growing up: its wildly varied poetry, its varying metrical cadences, the call and response, the repetition. I still call on these tools in my poems. — Kerrin McCadden “Sometimes I go through the first revision, the second revision, the third revision, the fourth revision, the fifth revision, the sixth revision and then go, 'Hold it!' You wanna throw the poem down, you want to say all kinds of things. It's sometimes at about the fourth revision that you tear it apart, but if you can just make yourself go past that, it will turn a corner later and it will say, 'Here I am, come get me.' At sometime, by the ninth or tenth revision, when you are practically despairing about it, it turns that corner and that is the most exquisite moment when it happens. And all this is worth the days, the weeks, the months you've spent, and then it flows and the rhythm is there, the imagery is there and it's so wonderful. All that process made it happen. Sometimes you put it down for the night and then you pick it up from the bed in the cold light of the morning. When you read it out loud, in the early morning hours when things are clear, the poem becomes clear also. I always maintain that it's revision that makes that poem turn a corner—and you really don't know how it happens.” — Sonia Sanchez Image Credit: Pxhere.

Any argument about poetry is one worth having. So it’s been equally thrilling and disappointing to see recent debates decrying the proliferation of "artless" poetry in a market irrevocably changed by social media. A particularly scathing review of Hollie McNish’s Plum has now further inflamed the debate. Rebecca Watts’s article in the PN Review’s latest issue has inspired some heated responses. There isn’t much in the original piece that hasn’t been written or insinuated before, especially concerning the poet Rupi Kaur’s meteoric rise. If I had a bitcoin for every time I heard social media is dumbing us down, I could buy shares in Amazon. What really caught my attention, however, was something else; the refashioning of a longstanding brand of exclusivity as a minority position. Repeating age-old prejudices while casting oneself as a beleaguered truth-teller is truly a feat to behold. As an admittedly "young female poet" hell-bent on destroying poetry, I felt it was only right to respond to the sentiment behind Watts’s piece. I write poems. Sometimes I get paid for them. Sometimes I read them and get paid for that too. Sometimes they are published months later in a journal or magazine or anthology and I get paid for this too. Yes, there isn’t much money in poetry but there is still money behind it. Poetry is as transactional as any other form of work. This means it is also dramatically stratified according to the gendered, raced, and classed social antagonisms that organize our world. Some poets clarify these antagonisms, in a variety of subtle and unsubtle ways. Some poets choose to maintain a critical distance. All remain a part of the game. Any poet who tells you they have transcended this political economy is lying. In its desire for imagined freedoms, some poetry aims only for what Theodor W. Adorno termed the "aesthetics of redemption." For some people, that means a solipsist Instagram sound-bite of a poem that appeals to both the specific alienation of young women of color and the common experiences of a wider audience. For some people, that’s enough. This is what they need to get through their day. For many, this is what they choose to enjoy in whatever little leisure time they have amidst the generally intolerable conditions that make up their daily lives. This generates a lot of attention/readership/money for Instagram poets, who become symbols of everything that is wrong with audiences and not everything that is wrong with the conditions of this world. As Watts argues, cults of personality are constructed around these young women. But we already have a wealth of personality cults within the Poetry (with a capital P) world. Except we call it a canon. Our personality cults are endorsed through policy and propaganda and have been as globally exported as any post with thousands of likes. What Watts disparages as the "dumbing effect" of social media is really the creation of new markets, and as a result, competitors. Honesty and accessibility are the currency of this new market and those who don’t trade in these affectations can expect to be shut out. That’s fine. They have their own market, propped up by centuries-old institutions, faculties, presses, awards, and networks. The reader is not "dead," as Watts declares. The reader just has more options. It was through the web that I discovered the poets who changed my life. I found rare archived poetry journals from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E to the Black Arts Movement’s Black Dialogue, tracked passages through forums, listened to Mutabaruka performances on SoundCloud and even accessed PDF collections to share among those of us who could not always afford the hard copies we wanted. Through social media, I and so many other poets I know have connected internationally and met people we would never have come across offline. Those who cannot attend readings or performance can now stream them. There are forms of sociality found on the web that extend beyond a few hyper-visible poets who generate as much backlash as they do praise. If these poets shift millions of copies, well then, the market has spoken. There’s something to be said for the poet-turned-brand whose aestheticized presence enables literary institutions to absolve themselves, maintain relevancy and, of course, push sales. Marginalization becomes a kind of raw material. Brand building and unbridled commodification can foster an unambitious and reactionary poetry culture. All of that can’t be denied. It can also do the same for criticism, as seen in the uninspired shoe-horning of Donald Trump into any critique of poets from "under-represented" backgrounds. Predictably, Watts falls into this trap. We are told to think of the "middle-aged, middle-class reviewing sector" which enables these young female poets by showering them with praise. Please think of them, for they are too terrorized to critique these women properly. No one is too terrorized to critique Rupi Kaur’s work, as they have shown across various platforms, from BuzzFeed to The Guardian. No one is too terrorized to imply that even poets like Claudia Rankine and Vahni Capildeo owe their success to consumer-driven moralism or favoritism by prize judges who share similar ethnic backgrounds. Think back to the furore surrounding Sarah Howe’s 2016 T.S. Eliot-Prize win, which incidentally gave us the #derangedpoetess hashtag. Still, Watts laments the denigration of "intellectual accomplishments" for the sole purpose of championing a "representative of a group identity that the establishment can fetishize." That’s an interesting choice of words. Fetish; as derived from the Portuguese feitiço, meaning charm or illusion, originating from the Latin facticius, or artificial.  This term emerged from the supposed attachment of Africans to material objects considered to be lower art forms. Unlike the Holy Cross or communion rite symbolism, the objects used in religious ceremonies by West Africans were seen as intensely alien, primitive, and ultimately worthless. These same objects would later fill the museums of Europe. I include this only to stress how established this chronology is. First, non-European expression is devalued, then rapidly commodified, and finally derided once again when its original practitioners choose to reclaim it. Karl Marx likened the accumulation of commodities to fetishism, in the original, mystical sense of the word. "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing.  But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties," he once famously wrote. Today’s personality poets lend a likable and honest veneer to the commodities they sell, like all public figures. Their meticulously honed image is what makes them so approachable. They’re just like you and me, with the same concerns and insecurities. Except they can distill it all into simplistic yet relatable bitesize verse. In that sense, they serve their function. [millions_ad] Watts, and many others, are not members of an embattled class. Their anxieties are echoed everywhere from The Times Literary Supplement to Private Eye. When they speak of terror, they mean the tyranny of bad taste. When we speak of terror, we mean something else entirely. Here is where the confusion lies; these young female poets are fashioned into representatives due to the relative novelty and scarcity of poetry stemming from their subject positions. There is often very little choice in the matter. Sure, some play up to it more than others. But that’s a problem Watts and others have to take up with the publishers, reviewers, and journalists who insist upon their predetermined angles (most of whom do not belong to the same backgrounds as these poets). Toni Morrison writes, "Black Literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form." The imaginatively bankrupt criticism and scholarship these poets are faced with is a result of many factors, one of which being their historical condition. My own work is often reduced to newsreel topicality when I am just writing about existing. For the next four years at least, it will be critiqued against Trump or Nigel Farage or Brexit or Marine Le Pen or something else I haven’t actually written about. I’ve made my peace with that. As Nikki Giovanni reminds me, "they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was happy." Exceptional individuals aside, most of these predominantly performance and spoken word poets are seldom published, reviewed, promoted, or awarded as often as the critics that fear their encroachment. There’s no use mourning the death of a critical culture when such poets are hardly reviewed in prestigious journals and magazines, least of all in the PN Review. Until they are, their critics could try learning to discern between the superficial optics of representation in the marketplace of liberal identity politics and the genuine structural changes which would actually threaten them. Better still, they could say what they really mean. These "debates" are often poorly disguised attacks against poets who are seen to have monopolized on a kind of literary affirmative action (this definition of affirmative action clearly doesn’t extend to the incestuously nepotistic "highbrow" circles that determine quality as we understand it). Critique made in bad faith (most of what has been written on InstaPoets) sounds as elementary and petty as adults belittling teenage girls for their love of boy bands. I’m against anti-intellectualism. I’m also against the delusional dream of a pure poetry, much less the banality of a "civilized" one. I struggle to take seriously anyone who defends the neutrality and objectivity of governmentally subsidized institutions and claustrophobically narrow-minded academic cliques. Tradition shouldn’t be used as an excuse for provinciality. Different traditions hold differing understandings of craft and its implementation. The same bastions of "critical culture" are the MFA poetry workshops molded by the Cold War and the CIA’s resulting cultural operations. We see another example of this supposed objectivity in the 1970s British neo-Movement’s purge of innovative poets from important magazines and publishing houses during the New Poetry Revival. Such a closely guarded consensus is not in any position to sneer at the populisms of the spoken poetry world. "Against Bourgeois Art!" Amiri Baraka once declared, railing against poets who were "as safe as old toilet paper." Hyperbolic as that may be, he was right about one thing. The world is heavier than they know. Kate Tempest, Hollie McNish, and Rupi Kaur have their respective audiences. Watts has hers. I dare to think I have mine. How we master the forms we choose to write in and speak back to our own traditions is a personal choice. We have the right to our own specificity. For some, Instagram and Pinterest will serve as a gateway drug into more complex and messy renderings of the human experience. This is especially true for younger, budding poets who are already hyper-aware of the feminized and racialized biases they will have to contend with. Young poets who want to experiment and grow don’t need to be patronized or lectured to about Real Poetry™. They don’t need to be handed a scroll of revered poets to go off and read as if all those names can’t be found on any reputable first year English Literature undergraduate syllabus. If anything, their online education may lead them to newer and less travelled roads. To "safeguard language" is to draw borders. I can’t speak for all young female poets, but I for one am not remotely interested in the defense of borders. To bring something into being is an act of poiesis. Poems are composed in classrooms, empty buses, busy squares, public parks, dressing rooms, and prisons cells. They are written at the crack of dawn, between shifts and at the end of long days. Poets are the older women I know who recite traditional epics at weddings. They are the young women who disseminate passages from out-of-print anthologies via Tumblr. They are the bloggers who workshop their poems with a global audience. Once, I took an Uber home after a poetry event. In conversation with the driver, I discovered he was a veteran of the decades-long Eritrean liberation struggle. Before that, he had studied in Russia, learnt the language, and fell in love with Russian poetry. He had even written his own. I still had some unsold copies from my earlier reading. He had lost his verse-filled notebooks long ago and had nothing to share with me. In that moment, it didn’t matter. We were both poets. Leonard Cohen once called the poem the "constitution of the inner country." We are all entitled to our own poetic homelands, wherever we may find them. It’s a big world out there. So let’s write some poems. Image Credit: Instagram/Rupi Kaur.