Daybook Entry - Allen Grossman

My common response to the readings I attend can be summarized in the question, Why do not these speakers, since they have taken upon themselves the privilege of poetry, speak in such a way as to disclose more of their humanity, not merely their pain and pleasure, though they speak with very little conviction of that, but also more of the antiquity, indeed, the profundity, of their minds and art?  I feel that in poetry today there has arisen a criterion, even among the reputed wild men of civilization, gentility; and I detest that gentility.

I feel it as a sense of internalized constraint. Gentility manifests itself as a set of rules defining what can and what cannot be said; and I believe these rules are internalized by the pets of our generation. They speak neither very loud nor very soft, nor very passionately nor with great sadness. This gentility has overtaken in particular the young. Though I do not entirely wish to account for it, I would like to tell you what I am listening for.

So far, I have proposed that it is among the obligations and privileges of the poetic speaker to speak words which avow his affiliation not merely with the mortal community but to the community of the dead, and beyond the dead, to the source of all persons. I hear nothing of that antiquity, which even you cannot deny pertains to every moment of both physical and cultural life.

At the same time, and this is another matter, I feel that the subjects of poetry have not changed with sufficient ingenuity and courage in accord with our changing sense of what constitutes truth about the social world.

Poets these days do not find poems the occasion for the amplification of consciousness with respect to language. They speak from a more restricted aspect of their being when they speak their poems that they do when they speak in social situations.

Allen Grossman