I have been called an "academic poet" from time to time since that workshop led by Diane Wakoski thirty years ago. I had walked into class late, not realizing we were having a guest teacher, and there was this person railing on against short poems, poems that fit conveniently onto an 8 ½ by 11 page and which could be discussed easily in a workshop. After she’d finished, I raised a question about Ginsberg and Whitman, who had long, long poems in which some of the images didn’t live up to the same standard of intensity as the best parts. She stood up, pointed at me, still a grad student, and called me an "academic." I was not feeling particularly embraced by my own academic program at that point, so I felt obscurely humiliated as well as puzzled. Obviously I had a reaction of shock, because Wakoski said, "That’s what the academics said about Ginsberg and Whitman!"
Recently, I was solicited to serve on a review board for a small press. The editor said that, to make up the balance of perspectives that he thought the board needed, he wanted two "academic poets," of which I suppose I would be one. The others on the panel, I surmised, would be innovative, independent, experimental, non-academic poets. That got me to thinking, what exactly is an "academic poet?" Is it a poet who works in academia? or a poet who writes in an "academic style," which I suppose would be the style most highly valued in the academy?
It is true that for the past quarter century and more I have earned most of my living from teaching at various colleges, and universities. As a consequence, I am more of an academic than most people, and I also write poetry. Therefore, I am a poet who is also an academic. However, I think that, even more than this, my poems proceed from other poems, written anywhere from eight months to 800 years previously, and this is probably what causes the moniker "academic poet" to stick.
One poet, John Berryman, also considered an "academic poet" by many, has influenced my work in a very conscious way. William Matthews, a poet whose work has been of interest to me lately, has become a more recent model. The two collide in the following, fairly recent, poem of mine:
Written just after Reading Berryman
Did Matthews obsess about Berryman
as I do, striving to write his sonnets
while always to myself staying honest,
as honest as to the dark ferryman?
For Her young, supple, lithe body's pinioned
to those tortured iambic, rhyming lines
like sexy chicken paprika on tines
of fork he raised, savoring the onions.
The rhymes take me directions I don't know:
is there, here in the dark, another step
after the step I've relaxed into now?
Or is each pace potentially Last Stop?
Can I ask someone about where to go?
or maybe where is dictated by how?
Both Matthews and Berryman wrote rhyming sonnets, although Matthews communicates more directly through his sound structure, and Berryman’s sonnets, written for a woman with whom he was at the time having an affair, are more tortured, complicated affairs. Whenever I’ve just been reading Berryman, my rhyme schemes take over the wheel of the car and drive me to places I never would have imagined.
I’ve just read the preceding paragraph over, and then the poem that it comments on, and I think I have a working definition of "academic poet:" someone who writes in relation to previous poets, in relation to inherited poetic forms, and who is conscious of doing this. Or maybe this would just constitute a self-consciously academic poet...
Just this morning I was reading in the Poetry anthology, which contains poems selected from that little mag’s near-century of publication. I regularly dip into this or another book of poems to jumpstart my own writing process; I suppose this is partially what makes me an academic poet, although what reading—or, in this case, choosing not to read—other people’s poems evokes for me is very often quite personal:
Semicolons
Because Richard Hugo had once said that
semicolons were for assholes, I skipped
his poem about Skykomish something –
only the first half of the title – read
Denise Levertov's poem "To a Snake"
and felt the cool dry skin with its pulse slide
across my hot skin, sweaty with summer,
twenty-nine years ago when Chris handed
me a looping hose of blacksnake he'd found
in the mountains with the Pentecostals
gathering snakes for the Sunday service;
they'd given him the nonpoisonous one
as a souvenir rather than toss it
back into the sea of twisted laurels.
The critic Harold Bloom once wrote about the Anxiety of Influence; I suppose my being an "academic poet" means that I can accept the influence without the anxiety.
"So then why did I just write this column?" he asks, defensively.
Don Riggs studied myth as an undergraduate, the Middle Ages as a grad student (MA, PhD, UNC-Chapel Hill), taught French on the college level, worked as a massage therapist in a holistic health center, and has been teaching English in various places for the last decade and a half.