Poets Are Made By Degrees
It is hard to picture them writing verse, as hard as dinosaurs having sex they ape the minimalism of modern art, spinning the straw of the bourgeois life into gold, inane minutiae, the homoiomereia of daily strife. The day exfiltrates and they go to ground what is glib must be profound, arpeggios on the keys, a magpie sound grates in the coffee shop or teachers lounge. baristas no longer notice the magpies’ castanet cries. Holographs on the lectern and a litre of Pierian Spring. Head in Plath’s oven, the Pythia’s cave of our times, the sibyl no longer prophesies in verse, and the worst poetasters have tenure, and by degrees, poetry is wiped off The Earth.
Describing Poetry At A Party
Petrified by the smoke and ash in contorted poses as they burned and choked like the victims of Pompeii I don’t know what has made me their Pliny to the rescue though I pass them every day and make them the butt of my jokes
Sack-of-shit slumped in his liminal doorway Spike still in his foot is the pole of his numinous Air BnB The paramedic’s Naloxone nasal spray has been Davey’s martyrdom At least in prison he could fix-up and dream the Coleridge dream
He may be the cultural attaché of Philistia but still waxes ekphrastic about the powder in his poke. Perhaps its sherbet filled communion wafers that the smack evokes. By the time I spoke at the party the room turned into Rhinocolura where dust excises noses from the inside out.
Once they snorted for joy and then in derision that someone so abstinent brought up Novalis.
the cowl of her hoodie swamped her face but I never broke step when she asked me for change petrified by Spice it is hard to eat with any grace Who knew that KFC had added mock Ortolan to their range
For GG
On my last bender I saw Apollonius of Tyana In my shaving mirror, And gasped until the glass Steamed over. Then, corpse candles In the meteora of a shucked pullover.
When the booze gives your brain a fracking: What Pythian nonsense From the deepest founts — Lost luggage of the unconscious In staggering amounts. You must regain the thrill of the inane, Like Bart Simpson’s joy At burlap sacks. Though sobriety is profane There is workaday divinity The Dionysian lacks.
What the readers said
Three readers, filed separately. Where they diverge, the divergence stands rather than being argued out. How the Archive reads →
Three poems at three different states of finish, and I think you already know which one is built. Poets Are Made By Degrees opens with a working engine — four long lines with real rhythm under them, and an opening comparison that earns its rudeness. Then the lineation stops. From what is glib must be profound onward the poem becomes a prose block, and while the sentences keep their momentum, the line has quit doing any work; the reader feels the engine drop out mid-sentence. If the collapse is deliberate — the form degrading as the subject degrades — it needs one signal that it was chosen. Describing Poetry At A Party leaks in a different way: the syntax dangles. Clauses arrive without the subject they belong to, and the reader spends the middle of the poem working out who is doing what. But look at what happens in that poem’s last four lines, where it stops improvising and commits: face / change / grace / range, a locked ABAB quatrain, and instantly the writing tightens. For GG is the one that holds throughout — the metre stabilises, the rhymes arrive on schedule (founts / amounts, inane / profane, sacks / lacks), and the turn from Apollonius in the shaving mirror to Bart Simpson’s joy at burlap sacks is a clean, funny, completely controlled landing. It is the best thing here, and it is the shortest and the plainest. That is worth sitting with.
Read as a set, the first two poems build two cages and set them side by side. There is the academic enclosure — tenure, the coffee shop, the teachers lounge, holographs on the lectern, a litre of Pierian Spring — and there is the street: the liminal doorway, the spike, the prison cell, the KFC counter, Rhinocolura, the ancient city where criminals were sent after their noses were cut off. The poems move between the two, and the speaker’s position is stated outright: I don’t know what has made me their Pliny. Pliny sailed toward the eruption to observe it and died of the observing. That is the system I see here — erudition used to hold a scene at a safe distance, and the classical reference arriving exactly where the feeling would otherwise have to. Where I part company with ML is on whether the poem knows this. I think it does: I pass them every day and make them the butt of my jokes is the speaker filing the charge against himself before any reader can, and the whole point of naming your poem Poets Are Made By Degrees is to include yourself in the indictment. I also have to record a stop. In For GG I went looking for a third cage and there is none. The poem abandons the institutions entirely and resolves into one person telling another to stay sober because there is workaday divinity / The Dionysian lacks. That is not a structure. It is advice, and it is good advice, and I had nothing further to say about it.
The body in For GG is real. The panic at the shaving mirror, gasping until the glass steams over; corpse candles in the static of a pulled-off jumper; the brain getting fracked by drink — that is written from inside the experience, not about it, and it is why the poem lands.
The middle poem is where I have to stop. A man is overdosing in a doorway and the poem turns him into a numinous Air BnB, and a woman asking for change becomes mock ortolan on a KFC menu — the songbird eaten whole under a napkin, so the diner is hidden from God. The jokes are good. That is precisely the difficulty: the poem reaches for an allusion at every point where feeling would cost it something, and each allusion arrives fast enough to close the moment before it opens. My colleague reads make them the butt of my jokes as self-indictment. I read it as an admission the poem makes once and then does not act on — and naming a habit is not the same as examining it. I am not asking the work to be kinder. I am asking what the erudition is protecting, because something in these poems is being kept at a distance very hard, and the third poem — where the speaker is the one on the floor — is the only place the distance closes.
Why it is here, and what it reaches for
The mock ortolan
These three poems arrive as one submission and should be read as one: a satire of the poetry economy, a walk past the people it does not employ, and a hangover. The voice is constant across all three — dense, allusive, funny, contemptuous — and the submission’s real subject is what that voice is for.
The myth it exposes is stated in its own title. Poetry refined by degrees — the belief that education, workshops and tenure preserve and purify the art they administer — is dismantled by the pun the poem never stops turning: the worst poetasters have tenure, and by degrees, poetry is wiped off The Earth. Qualification as the instrument of decay. The sibyl has stopped prophesying in verse; what is left is arpeggios in a coffee shop and magpie noise the baristas no longer hear.
Beneath it runs the myth the poems depend on to work at all: the erudite cynic’s immunity — the idea that a speaker who can name Rhinocolura, Novalis and Apollonius of Tyana is thereby standing outside the decay he catalogues rather than inside it. The submission is at its strongest where it suspects this of itself (their Pliny, the butt of my jokes) and at its most exposed where it forgets to. Our readers divide on which happens more often, and that division is filed rather than resolved.
Its symbols are all counterfeits or containers: the mock ortolan (the cruel delicacy reissued as fast food — luxury’s cruelty without luxury, consumed by someone who cannot afford either), the Pierian Spring (the source of inspiration, ordered by the litre), Plath’s oven (the poet’s death repurposed as an oracle for hire), the shaving mirror (the only place in the submission where the speaker looks directly at himself), and the burlap sacks (borrowed from a cartoon, and the one object here nobody is being clever about). Its target is the mock ortolan: the thing that imitates a rare cruelty at scale and sells it cheap.
It is retained at the first rung, Archive. The archive had a procedure ready for it — it was read, argued over, and filed without anything about the machine having to change. What it leaves behind is a diagnostic: a clear, useful specimen of the posture in which classical learning is deployed simultaneously as a weapon against the institution that granted it and as a shield against being moved by anything.
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