So as a poet - I question thee. I understand your point. I grok your point. And I think maybe I understand it. I once coined a phrase that I'm proud of when people kept calling me an artist and I kept insisting that I was just a photographer, and photography is a skill, not an art. To make them happy and make me happy, I honed this phrase: Photography is the craft of turning perspective into art. That makes me a craftsman, not an artist. I'm much more comfortable being a craftsman. After all, what I photographed was already there. I'm just showing you. Yeah, I'm showing you the way I see it, but in the end it's just pointing a box with a hole in it covered in glass at something. The "art", if you will, is in the perspective. I don't know that there's anything less tangible than "perspective." Photography, then, is perspective made real. I crafted another phrase I'm proud of that I'm sure belongs to a million philosophers whose names I recognize: You can have focus or perspective, but not both. As you can tell, I'm a visual thinker. As a visual thinker, I think I see your objection. I share it. You can't have perspective about a current event. Someone who spends months on a poem is, subconsciously or not, evaluating it in the stream of time. Someone who spends months on a poem is regarding it from all sides, in all light, at sunrise and sunset, to truly present the perspective of the idea. It is that perspective - how you describe the idea - that is the art. And it is very difficult to give that level of meditative regard to a current event by definition. It is being shaped wholesale as we observe. If poetry is how we adapt to trauma, though, we can't exactly wait. There's something valuable about the raw and unregarded as well. It may not jive with your aesthetic, though. Piketty had an interesting observation in Capital in the 21st Century. He pointed out that prior to the 20th century, novelists listed monetary amounts in their works. They were safe in doing this because the value of things really didn't change. Something worth 40 florins in 1680 was worth 40 florins in 1880 (or whatever). So all the numbers in Jane Austen were there to give the audience a real sense of wealth, now and forever. But starting in the 1900s, all that shit went out the window because capital controls went haywire. now, whenever you see a price on something it's just ridiculous (I'm reading The Da Vinci Code: 20 million Euros! BWUAHHAHAHA!!!!). "In the loop" was an interesting poem in which the phrase "virginia Tech" lands like a thud. it's an anachronism spoiling an otherwise interesting composition - in putting in the anchor for street cred, it invalidates the poem for all other expression. It freezes the perspective forever in time. Humor me. Find a poem about Eugene Hasenfus (who?). If somebody used his name in a poem we'd laugh... but the sentiment wrapped up in that name describes the point where the United States went from "Morning in America" to "Iran Contra Scandal" and it's far too poignant a shift to abuse with pointless proper nouns. By the way? Alliteratively beautiful.Does a dark poet somewhere prepare poems predicting the next serial killer?
That makes me a craftsman, not an artist. I'm much more comfortable being a craftsman. After all, what I photographed was already there. I'm just showing you. Yeah, I'm showing you the way I see it, but in the end it's just pointing a box with a hole in it covered in glass at something. I'm so gonna steal that - cartography is a very similar craft. Making a map is a method of showing information in a certain light (a craft) as opposed to the creation of new information (an art).Photography is the craft of turning perspective into art.
Words are already there; we use them to show 1000s of perspectives and all it takes is selection and order. Wondrous, although perhaps not to your point. Time implies polish, natch? It represents living with an idea and getting to know an idea in every corner and hopefully, picking out the best aspects of that idea to present in a work. That's not always how great work goes of course, but time ALMOST never hurts. Time hurts when what you're writing only matters because it just happened. I'll cede this point because really I just wanted to see if I could find any such poetry. Not with a quick search or two. I bet if a still-popular-enough-to-be-easily-searchable poet has written at least an Iran-Contra poem if not one w/a Hasenfus nod it's this dude. And I see the poem in Hasenfus' story. I'm sure someone has written it. I wrote a poem about Burt and Linda Pugach because I read their story and saw the poem in it. I like poems-to-process. I frequently, frequently, write them. Poems-to-get-over, poems-to-be-mad, poems-that-show-me-I-cared-more-than-I-thought. I can immediately write process-poems about general, standard, life-knocks-ya-about 'trauma." I find that I can't always immediately write about the big and the bad. I need some space before I can stare it in the face. If you replace "Virginia Tech" with "the university," (more syllables but same meter so it works), does that soften it back into success for you? Do you think naming V-T was a "name dropping" moment - the narrator dropped the name of the university so that we would realize and connect to that specific school shooting? Or was it just confessional. "It wouldn't be there if he didn't want us to know it," right? Perhaps Hicok was aiming simply for blatant honesty. Thanks for reading :) - you & all the rest of you.
It's like greeting cards: "birthday" is likely to have a more universal sentiment than "birthday for your stepdaughter turning 16." "University" is better than "Virginia Tech" but you're still writing a poem about senseless violence. Why rob it of universality? Points for looking for a Eugene Hasenfus poem. I meant it as a joke.