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Confessions of an Ethnographic Poet

Anthropology and Humanism v. 20 no. 1 (1995)

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Poetry

DON MITCHELL

Department of Anthropology

Buffalo State College

1300 Elmivood Avenue

Buffalo, NY 14222-1095

Confessions of an Ethnographic Poet

My lunch with a Real Poet nearly sank me. For a long time I thought it was the worst mistake I'd ever made. I'd written a few poems, and since I'd submitted one for publication, thus verifying my status as a poet, I asked a Real English Professor I knew to introduce me to a Real Poet—someone who had actually had books of poems published, a man who taught poetry at the large university in my town. I was granted a "one-time consultation.” I sent four or five poems off to him, and a week or so later we met for lunch.

What happened was in retrospect quite predictable. The meeting, certainly for me (and probably for him), was unpleasant. Nothing I'd written was acceptable to him. It was all vague. The images were murky and didn't fit. The line breaks were awkward. What I thought I'd been saying wasn't at all what he was reading. "This poem's about..." he'd say, and it wouldn't be what I'd meant it to be about at all. The poems were clearly bad. Perhaps not as bad as the most wretched undergraduate poetry, but bad enough.

When he wasn't criticizing my poems—savagely—this poet couldn't stop asking about life in the field. He couldn't hear enough about being in an exotic culture. Learning a different language. Living in the rain forest. Participating in a different kinship system. My poetry was of no interest to him, but he seemed fascinated by the life I'd lived in the village. It was all he wanted to talk about.

When we parted outside the restaurant he said, "Follow your heart!" I took this to mean he thought my poetry represented nothing more than catharsis, perhaps even therapy, and this angered me. Severe depression followed anger. I recovered my equilibrium over the next few days and tried to make sense of what had happened. The best I could do was to suppose that he just hadn't taken

me seriously. If he had, he'd have seen that those were real poems I'd offered him, poems he hadn't liked, of course, but still, real poems. "He just didn't like them and couldn't get beyond that," I told myself, "he doesn't know how to deal with serious adults who aren't students." Still, my confidence in myself was shaken. How had I ever imagined I could write poetry!

It had begun about two and a half years before, when I'd decided to try writing some serious poetry. I did it in a perfectly ordinary manner—I turned on my computer, opened a file, and began to type. When I printed the result, it appeared to be a poem. The words were scattered around the page. Nothing rhymed. There were images that I supposed would seem unusual to the reader. There were

strange connections, and I'd deliberately flipped around in time and space. I left lines hanging. I indented with abandon. I omitted conjunctions. The last poem I'd written—rhyming couplets about a dead soldier—had been in eighth grade. This was more complex and adult. Surely it was a poem.

Six months after that, I got my nerve up and showed the first version of "Sightlines" to a friend I was visiting—an ex-English professor. Of course I waited until we were in the car heading for the airport, before I began,"... I've written something, perhaps you'd look at it...." To my relief, he didn't laugh. I gave him a typescript. In a few days he called to say that perhaps something could be made of this poem.

I was encouraged. More than encouraged, because a Real English Professor, and his friend, another Real English Professor who was also a Real Novelist, had put themselves on record that I had something to work with. My friend then went on to introduce me to a woman, a published writer, though not a poet. She came to see what I had, and made me read "Sightlines" to her, which I accom-

plished but not without much throat-clearing and hesitation. Two decades of lecturing to freshmen hadn't really prepared me to read a poem out loud, especially one I'd written myself. She sat with me and talked about the poem. She had me move some stanzas around—moving one from the middle right to the top, which grounded the poem, gave it a beginning. She helped me tighten things up, and suggested I pay more attention to line breaks. I realized I had no idea how one might pay attention to line breaks, but she told me the best thing to do was to read it aloud and see where my voice, my breath, broke the lines. (Only recently have I learned that this is approximately the Black Mountain line break style. I like this coincidence because most mornings when I take my son to school I pull up behind Robert Creeley's Saab.)

"I'm told I have a nineteenth-century voice," she said, "so I write fiction instead of poetry." I wasn't certain what kind of voice I had, but since the lines still sprawled over the page I decided it was a twentieth-century voice. I said this to myself.

I realized that I'd been thinking of my poem more visually than aurally. I wanted it to look a certain way on the page. I had given no thought at all to how it sounded. Thus my training began.

I retyped the poem and sent it to Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly. The step of sending it off seemed important, even crucial, to me. I'd actually submitted a poem. A short time after that my new friend put me in touch with two women who ran a small writing group. They were fiction writers, but enjoyed poetry and were willing to have a would-be poet join them. "Sightlines" was the

first poem I read to them. They, too, were encouraging. Over the next month, in different living rooms, "Sightlines" tightened up. It got shorter and more focused. The lines lined up at the left now.

I realized it was a much better poem, so I wrote AHQ, and since I hadn't heard anything about the first version, I asked to have it withdrawn, and the second one substituted for it. Doing this was embarrassing to me, but since I didn't know any of the AHQ people personally, it wasn't so bad. In due time I got a letter saying that this would be done.

I might well have put the writing aside if it hadn't been for my writing group, which continued to meet once a week. I can't say they "taught" me anything in the classic sense, but in their presence I learned a great deal. Week after week they listened to my poems and helped me shape them. They made me read parts over and over, as they listened. "That doesn't sound right," they'd say, or "that

line doesn't serve any function." There's nothing like reading what you've written to people who will listen carefully to it, and tell you what they hear. You don't get ripped up and down, but they do let you know when you're not getting through. And so you try it another way.

They helped me learn how to become a more disciplined writer, both in the sense of keeping at it and the sense of tightening, reshaping, rethinking. I was also benefiting from another form of discipline, too, though I didn't recognize the connection at first.

I've spent the last 12 or 13 years developing large-scale computer applications, most written in Fortran, a programming language not known for freedom of form. Programmers in any language learn multiple ways to achieve a result. First you have to clarify what the routine's intent is, and then choose from among the possible ways of achieving it. Sometimes you're under pressure to be efficient and concise, sometimes not. There's the quick-and-dirty routine, and there's the refined, fully realized routine. You have to be willing to abandon an entire approach, a structure, even though you may like it, in favor of another that may not be so appealing but does the job better. I had learned programming from a remarkably concise programmer, and I was always trying to make my code as refined and efficient as his. Eventually I realized that some of the technical skills required to write poetry were not very different from those required to write good code.

In the meantime, I heard nothing from AHQ. I sent some poems out to ordinary literary journals, and they were rejected without comment. I entered the AHQ poetry competition, and didn't win, but I did got a very encouraging letter from Toni Flores. That helped keep me going.

While all this was going on, my wife was helping an advocacy group with a cause but no computer. I read, and sometimes helped type, many of the poems that were submitted to their newsletter. The group's focus was sexual abuse and so the writers expressed strong emotions in their submissions. The themes were startling, even horrifying. I found many of the poems compelling, but not

because they were what my professional poet would have called poems. It was because their subject material was so striking.

At first I saw these poems as no different from my own. The writers had seen and experienced things and wanted to share them with others. They had something to say. All the emotions were there—rage, sorrow, pain, occasionally joy. But there wasn't much technique.

Over the months that I looked at these poems I became increasingly unwilling to call them poems. "They're something," I'd say to my wife, "but they aren't poems." I was saying this because at the same time I was beginning to realize what had been wrong with my own poems. They belonged to exactly the same species: something, but not a poem.

I'm not competent to discuss poetics, and I don't intend to. So I can't really put a critical name to what I'm describing. But what I saw in the poems those abused women wrote alerted me to the same problems in my own work. We all focused on exotic topics, unusual connections, genuine strangeness, and of course the Other, defined in my case culturally and geographically, and in their case

sexually and emotionally. We wrote as if this were all that was required to make a poem.

By this route we return to my encounter with the professional poet. He saw that my poems were not yet poems, and probably because he is an excellent poet he was able to separate his understanding of poetry from his fascination with the exotic. Of course I didn't see that at the time.

As anthropologists, we've been trained to understand another logic, perhaps many others. It comes easily for us, as it should. We know and can use different speech rhythms, different grammars. We can easily connect ideas, objects, visions that urban North Americans cannot. If we just tell what we've seen and what we did and how we felt about seeing and doing it we can easily produce

that something-but-not-a poem. The trick, I think, is to realize that this is only the beginning, and to go on from there.

It took me more than two years to shape "Sightlines" into a poem, and when the third major revision was done I resubmitted it and it won a prize. It had the subject material to be a good poem all along, but I didn't know how to make the poem emerge, and for a long time I didn't even understand that I was failing to get it out. I think if s a good poem now. I turned it into one by wrestling with

language over and over, by trying different structures, and perhaps more than anything else by testing what I'd written with critics who were not easily dazzled by the arcane and mysterious. After all this I've learned something about writing poetry, though "something" is the operant word here. I've learned about as much of this difficult art as I did about the Nagovisi after, say, a year in the rain forest

with them. By then I could use their language, though not fluently. I knew the landscape, but not all the secret paths. I knew where the dangers were and how to avoid them, but I hadn't yet learned how to confront and master dangers I couldn't avoid. It’s been said that poetry's a dangerous trade. So's ethnography, and so much more so the two combined. Who can resist it?