The New Scorsese

Verse essay on the state of poetry.

You asked me who my favorite poets were.
I told you Keats and you.
You said stop joking and answer the question.
I said nothing and just stared up at the clouds.
You asked me if I liked a particular poet.
I said nothing and just stared up at the clouds.
You said if I didn’t like them, it probably meant
I wasn’t much of a poet myself, or a kind person.
I said I hadn’t answered and asked what that meant.
You said my silence implied I didn’t like them.
It felt like a scene from a movie I wouldn’t have enjoyed
but was happy to be in. I said [name of poet]’s poems
feel too random. I get what’s going on with them
but then there’s all this other stuff added in
that I don’t have a context for.
It’s like the terror of being too simplistic
overwhelms [name of poet], and they overcorrect
by conjuring hollow complications.
You said nothing and just stared up at the clouds.
Nothing in the new Scorsese is random, I said.
Have you seen it?
No.
Everything in art should be like the new Scorsese,
I added dreamily. You sat up and said,
You want every poem to be like some dumb movie?
Nothing in the new Scorsese feels like a code
I’m supposed to be able to decode but can’t.
But you’re not supposed to be trying to decode
[name of poet]’s poems, or anyone else’s, you said.
And life isn’t anything like a movie anyway.
Shouldn’t poetry show us life as it is
at least to the poet who wrote the poem? you said.
Some people just want to be happy, I said.
What if your life sucks, and all you want
is poetry that makes you feel like you want to feel?
How come all the poets that do that are never cool
for very long?
Why is all the enduring poetry your way?
You scooted away from me on the grass. My way?
That’s ridiculous. Nothing is my way.
Not your way personally, I said, but the way
of [name of poet] and all those [name of movement
said poet had come to be associated with] poets.
They’re famous, I added, just like you want them to be,
but no one’s ever even heard of my favorite poets.
Not even me.
The ones who write things that are fun
and that you can immerse yourself in
like a Scorsese movie, that don’t reward you
culturally for liking them, but do reward you
for reading them, poems with a grim thread of truth
flowing through them
but that at the same time exist to entertain you.
I’ve never seen a single poem do that.
You said nothing and just stared up at the clouds.
I stared at them too, and eventually you said
that I was lucky that I could see anything at all
through such a thick miasma of cynicism.
I said I was only candidly assessing my aesthetics.
I used to see everything through a different miasma,
I added, an even thicker one of faith in God.
A faith I borrowed to convince myself I was a poet
and since then I feel like I’ve lost more belief in poetry
than I’ve gained, since it’s words
that have become more important to me
than actual people I love and know
and how can that be the case if I’m doing it right?
It’s like all literature made for me was a ladder
that allowed me to climb higher and deeper into myself.
You faced me. That’s because you want poetry
to change you, but you chicken out
when you don’t get to orchestrate the change.
You’re like someone who quits the journey halfway through
because who you were before is being stripped away
and that makes you uncomfortable with everything stripping it,
but if you’d keep going you’d get to find out
who the you you were becoming is,
which is the person you’re meant to become,
and the person the world most needs you to be.
Poetry can catalyze such a change
but only if you keep going. Once it begins
you can’t go back or undo it without suffering even more,
and probably making others suffer.
You want to change it, not be changed by it.
You want it to be given to you,
not become a piece of the it that is given
because you love self-control more than anything,
which is pathetic, and impossible, you said,
adding, and completely unmeaningful.
I was quiet for a while and tried to let it sink in.
I was also trying to make sense of it,
and decide which parts of it I agreed with.
I worried you were misinterpreting my silence
as more of the same of whatever it was
you disliked about me, then decided
that the least cynical thing I could do
would be to persist in my silence
regardless of how you assessed it
until I had something more authentic than nothing to say.
How come you never write poetry like that?
I eventually asked you. Like what?
Your précis of my preoccupation with self-possession.
That was my favorite thing you’ve ever said.
It would’ve been nice to read that in a poem.
This is a conversation, you said, not one of your poems.
Poetry isn’t supposed to replicate everything
you find gratifying in movies or life, you added.
It’s only itself.
Besides, you said, everything I said
has already been said so many times
by better poets than me, it isn’t worth me
wasting one of my own poems on saying it,
which I’m only going to get so many of in my life.
I wanted to disagree, but I let you finish.
Your poetry was completely your own, you said.
Something no one else could’ve thought or read
and you didn’t care if I or anyone else got anything out of it,
good or bad. That’s not true, I thought but kept quiet.
Then, after too long, I said I thought it was good.
What’s good, you said. Your poetry, I said.
Spare me, you said. No, I said, I mean it.
I mean, I was joking before, but I also meant it.
Well, thanks. No, really.
It moves me in ways I didn’t think myself capable of being moved.
Movies make me happy, but they don’t change me.
They make me feel immense and forgiven
for who I am, but the kind of poems you write
make me feel like I don’t even know myself
and so they can only forgive me for not knowing who I am.
They can’t forgive me for being anything in particular.
They make me wonder if I’m deficient
because I don’t have context for the things in them,
or if they are, and then they sort of forgive me
for wondering that.
As soon as I said it, I regretted saying it
because it sounded like something I would say
because I liked how it sounded
rather than because it was something I actually believed
and had thought very deeply about,
and I had sort of said it to cover up a silence
and I had that little hiccup where I wished I could’ve listened
to what you would have said or not said in its place.
But that’s how I feel when I read your poems,
I added, trying to recover.
I’m sitting there thinking, what is this doing?
And that’s the same as thinking, who am I
in relation to whatever it is?
And that’s the same as changing, slightly.
To wonder if you are who you think you are even briefly
is to change permanently.
I’m not sure what you thought about that.
You just said nothing and stared up at the clouds.
The clouds continued to roll in from over the tops of the trees,
low and fast and wispy, only to vanish above us.
Quietly acquiescing to implacable blue.