I am always interested in the poem that doesn't know, that is obviously trying to know, that spends so much of itself looking into what it might know, I would think it got tired of not knowing. To me, this is the poem that is helpless to its subject, and, when it's being done right, when I can sense that the poet isn't just using it as a device, or a trick (as many poets do), then I am helpless to what this poet might tell me.
What's at stake here goes back to that maxim by Frost: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." Some poems claim that they don't know, because the poet wants to be seen as someone who is helpless to his poem. More often, he's just being lazy. He doesn't want to know what lies at the heart of his poem, because, really, he just wants to go on and write the next poem. Whatever validity Tony Hoagland has in his "skittery poem of the moment" argument, this, to me, is at its heart. Many poets are fascinated by the fact that they have an imagination, and they delight in all the craziness it can produce, and then they further delight in the quick associations it can make. But many, many of them don't take time to try and dig a little further into the source of all those imagination snacks. I don't care if they think they're impersonating Dean Young, because, ultimately, they aren't. If they were, they would take their poems as seriously as I think Dean Young takes his.
A long wind-up to James Hoch's poem "Disgrace and Oblivion in Ancient Rome," found in the September/October 2009 issue of American Poetry Review. Here is a poem with an investment that continually redeems itself over the course of the poem. What is history? What is history, according to a father who was a history teacher? What is history, when you don't know what you think of that father? What is a father? These are the kinds of questions I hear in this poem. And, then, what I hear more, is how these play out amid a backdrop of the ruins in Rome, or the sculpture of Stalin in Vilnius, both of which could be read as a figurative take on the speaker's history. They could also be read as a larger awareness of how these generational issues take place as a part of history. Generations make up history, though it doesn't always seem so immediately evident.
Hoch has made a poem here that is both sentimentally aware, and intellectually ambitious. Even if it hasn't come close to answering those questions it proposes.
Related Links:
American Poetry Review
Miscreants