Poetry is not a Project
Dorothea Lasky
The main point of Lasky’s “PinaP” is that projects hurt, and are hurting, poetry. For those of you that do not know, a poetic ‘project’ as Lasky might define it (though she is reluctant to define anything thoroughly in”PinaP”) is basically a group (series/book) of poems that are governed by a premeditated concept. Lasky makes it clear that some projects are ok (Mayer, French Surrealists, Flarf…etc), but because “the poems were the most important part of the whole thing”, which she argues is not the case with most contemporary “projects”. Lasky is implying that contemporary poetic projects are wasteful and ultimately distract both reader and audience from getting to any poems that have (any/the most?) value.
Ultimately Lasky is right, but she doesn’t solidify herself enough. In conjunction with Lasky’s assertions, I would argue that poetic “projects” are arbitrary in every way and are in place for two very important reasons:
1) Talking about a project is very scientific sounding, it allows people to sound as though they know what they are talking about. Though Lasky says “Poets and Scientists are similar…there is a distinction”. I think that distinction is, scientists collect empirical data, rationalize it, analyze it, and then make a statement about it. Lasky (and I agree) explains that a poet takes the external world, internalizes it, then gets subsumed by the universal. Their final products are different; a scientific theory articulates something about how the world functions, while a poem has no real boundary on what it can/cannot do, in fact, you could say that a poem is one of the only objects in our culture that hasn’t been totally devoured by capitalistic intentions. That said the “project” is very academic way to show that poems have a purpose/intention and are valuable to some degree. After all, a department of creative writing would be a hard thing to get funding for if everybody went around rallying for the arbitrariness of poems.
2) The unknown scares people, if a poem does not have a limit/definition, people get scared. It is because they do not understand it. How many people have you talked to that have said “oh poetry, I just don’t get it”? And you try to explain to them that there is nothing “to get”, but that only confuses them more. Projects help a person (especially one not familiar with poetry) to rationalize better what is going on. I’m not trying to say that poets are smarter and wiser than everybody else, I’m just saying that genesis is important (and if you don’t believe me, why do you think so many people actually believe Creationism?). Some people need an origin, which is fine.
But this is what Lasky is talking about, that poems do not need a project, they need life. Where they originated from is not nearly as important as what they say. When she says “Poetry…is the very life of the poet…It is the poem and the poet together who create what we might talk about as intention within a poem. When what it is really is not intention, but life”. This is the very heart of what Lasky is discussing. Poems should not be bound by logic, because logic kills poems. Imagine if Jackson Pollock measured out and planned every stroke and color in an action painting, it wouldn’t work. He’d be too constrained to get to the real action of action painting. The same is true for poems. By limiting what you can put into the poem (or how to put it in) you are also limiting what your reader can get out of the poem. The poem loses its dimension and definition, which ultimately leads to bad poems.
That said I really enjoyed Lasky’s Poetry is not a Project because as true as it is, it also tries not to offend (though I could see a certain style poets getting offended by it). Lasky isn’t trying to make enemies, after all:
“Because poems, the way they are created and the way they exist, can, in a small way, remind the world of what’s still possible. Conceding to a faulty model of these rare chances of creation is a small concession…Instead of conceding, let’s make a party poets. And let’s have everyone join us there”.
(This is more of a fleshing out of my own ideas through Lasky’s PinaP. I enjoyed the book a lot, but I found it made me throw a lot of ideas, so this is less a review and more of a fleshing out. But check it out, it’s good. It makes you think. Also I’m glad somebody young within the academy realized how flawed the “project” and conversation about projects is).
