Nate Pritts on H_NGM_N

Mr. Nate Pritts sent a very thoughtful response via email, which I'm posting here, with his permission.

KLG:

Thanks for reading H_NGM_N so carefully, first & foremost, & for your words about it on your blog. To me, writing & publishing poetry is an imminently social act – almost one of promotion, where the implicit statement is “Read this.” To proclaim anything else would be disingenuous. So, yes, building a community is one of the most worthwhile things I can think to do. And coming across writings like yours is one of the real benefits to what I do.

And it’s funny how different communities overlap – I’ve met a lot of writers through our shared online gig, people who pulled me out of the listserv to say they’d seen H_NGM_N or my work somewhere, or who I’ve tagged because I’ve seen theirs. It’s great!

I’m writing this, really, to keep this dialogue going because even where you say you are being grumpy about Clay’s remark, you’re really just talking it out. I mean, you seem to take issue with his position (labeling it maybe redundant or maybe too conveniently sweeping?).

You know, I really think it’s impossible to judge fashion. Tony Hoagland has this great essay called something like “The Skittery Poem of the Moment” & my first read of that title made it sound as if he was proclaiming the jumpy poem as the current poem du jour. Now (I may be wrong) I read the “of the moment” part of that to indicate how the poem is grounded, an in process record.

So with that out there, I do think Clay’s statement has tremendous worth – both to him, to readers (of that particular review & those potential readers of Orlen’s work), &, yes, to Orlen himself.

Upon receiving my MFA from Warren Wilson College, I was given a diploma & a big carved walking stick. The idea behind this, related to me by the program’s director Pete Turchi, but possibly unverifiable in its accuracy, is that in the big dark forest of literary giants, the sticks help us to bang against the trunks as a way of finding our path.

I’ve always interpreted this a little violently. At times, I’ve taken my stick & tried to use it like an axe to hack down some trunks that stood in my way (I could name names). What I mean is that I think, in an individual’s aesthetic development, we need something to work against.
Sometimes, it even helps to think that “they’re all against us.” I think Clay is right to perceive that in certain communities (H_NGM_N may be one of them), “narrative poetry” (of the type Richard Hugo might recognize) is “out of fashion.” So (I’m projecting on behalf of my buddy Clay), his statement is grounded in his own deep appreciation for Orlen’s project which is similar to his own & which (despite Clay’s astounding publication record) might be seen as having few friends today.

But I would guess that your biggest objection comes from these kind of pronouncements – we all cut our hair, or narrative is or is not in fashion. I’m with you that these kinds of statements have the effect of dulling the vitality of what’s really going on around us. I still want to say that what Clay writes is worthwhile because it is his record of what is happening now.

He feels that there is not a lot of narrative poetry out there today; other people may feel oppressed by the weight of so much narrative poetry. OK. He said/She said. But finally and most importantly, his statement is one of acceptance, of realizing that everybody has something to learn from everyone. Meaning, every one of the factions existing in poetry these days would really be sorry if the ones they were working against disappeared. How boring would that be?

This stuff is all kind of nebulous & maybe it shows that I’m uncomfortable talking it out. But thanks again for unknowingly prodding me to work my brain this morning. You’re the best!

N8

(I would have posted this as a comment but I don't blog.)

http://www.h-ngm-n.com/nate-pritts/

In part because of some recent conversations on Mark's blog and

in part because of a few critical projects

and in part because I'm now adjusted enough to the fact that I live in San Diego county to start trying to make sense of some of the poetic projects of my peers

I have been reading the current issue of H_NGM_N. Nate Pritts (the editor) and I both work for the same online tutoring company, which is where I initially "met" him. Nate's interest in creating poetic community through the magazine seems evident, and he talks about this in "Some Notes about H_NGM_N," which acts as an introduction to Issue 6. Most magazines create communities, even if this isn't an explicit goal that they have, so I like the fact that Nate seems aware that this is part of what editors do.

Issue 6 seems well edited. There is an entire section on the poet Steve Orlen that includes memoirs from students, a review of his New and Selected, and a kind of poetics statement by Orlen. I had heard of Steve Orlen before I read this section, but I know know more about him. I'm not going to go out and buy his New and Selected, but I appreciate the cohesiveness of this section.

I'm about to get a bit grumpy. If you only want to read what I liked, go to the bottom of this post.

Something that Clay Matthew's says in his review of Steve Orlen helped solidify a few things for me: "If narrative poetry is out fashion these days, I’m thankful Orlen didn’t get the memo, or rather chose to ignore it, because both the new and old poems here carry on the tradition of the storyteller—of one poet sharing his tale with the rest of us."

Let me try to clarify what this clarifies.

Ann Landers once said something like this: In the 60s we all grew our hair long and protested against war and the government.

No we didn't, Ann Landers. You certainly didn't.

So, when did narrative poetry go out of fashion? Whose sense of fashion?

My sense is that we Youth of Today (YOT) who write poetry like to feel like we're rejecting and/or resurrecting narrative. Depending on who you talk to, narrative was never sufficiently rejected, so we need to resurrect oulipo and procedural work, or else narrative was too easily rejected, and we need to return to narrative.

So, the rejecting/non rejecting thing is probably a perennial conversation now, similar to a form/content argument that resurfaces every so often. But I'm not saying that just because these debates are perennial means that they aren't important or that they are all the same. Every generation, I suppose, needs to come to their conclusions on their own. I guess.

On to the poems that I thought were interesting or promising. My disclaimer: I liked reading these issues, and my notes on the poems I liked are just that. Notes:

Brent Pallas' poems were interesting. They were persona poems of a sort, but their diction was varied and often complex, playing around with Victorian scientific syntax.

I really wanted to like Jim Goar's work from 33 poems before sunrise. He's working to connect space on the page to actual material space. There were some good moments.

Christopher Rizzo's sonnets written with found language viewed (or heard) on a bus ride had some good moments, as well.

I was interested in Viola Lee's poems. There were moments I liked a lot: "You are unlike oatmeal in the morning." Looking back on the lines I really like, I like all the negative ones. Writing poems that seek to understand self relative to the objects in one's environment is interesting, and the idea that one would address inanimate objects is also interesting. I'm not sure how I felt about the repeated lyric "you" address.