Poems that Chaff

Adrienne Rich:

"There's a lot of what I would call comfortable poetry around. But then there is all this other stuff going on -- which is wilder, which is bristling; it's juicier, it's everything that you would want. And it's not comfortable. That's the kind of poetry that interests me -- a field of energy. It's intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual -- all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture."

Michael Klein "A Rich Life: Adrienne Rich on Poetry,
Politics, and Personal Revelation"
Boston Phoenix (June 1999)

It seems to me that once upon a time I wrote poetry that wasn't always comfortable. It chaffed and itched. It asked questions. It forced me to walk on edges.

Not all of Rich's early poems speak from that place, but in time she realized that many people gave up the edge for the comfort of a middle place where the cracks and fissures weren't pronounced, where people didn't raise an eyebrow or wonder why you wrote poetry that made people vibrate or turn away.

I think that the place we stand right now requires the type of poetry that disturbs, that causes people to stop and think, to feel deeply.

I can still recall lines of war poetry I read, but once, years ago. Those poems provoked and prodded, caused discomfort. They weren't written to be comfortable.

I can never forget two lines from Randall Jarrell's poem "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner". In the poem a World War ll gunner in an American bomber plane writes about his death.

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

That last line is indelible.

So what happened? Did I become too conventional, too comfortable with conformity?

I must practice being outrageous.