Jesse Scott Owen

I don't know where I got turned on to the work of Osip Mandelstam—best guesses are Hugh Kenner or Guy Davenport—all I can trace back is I knew he was a contemporary of Mayakovsky. Who knows, but I had some inkling from somewhere that I should read him.

So when my bookstore started bringing in remainder copies of Mandelstam's Critical Prose and Letters, a brick of a book, I grabbed one, in keeping with my awful habit of buying more books than I can possibly read. Luckily though, because my shelfs and desk and bedside tables are all covered in piles of books, the Mandelstam did not get shelved (is in fact, still not) and soon enough I picked it up and read a few short essays.

"Yes, nothing is easier than to talk about requirements, about what is obligatory in art: in the first place, such talk is always arbitrary and not incumbent upon anything; in the second place, it is an inexhaustible theme for philosophizing; in the third place, it avoids a very unpleasant matter that hardly anyone is capable of, namely, gratitude for what is, the most ordinary gratitude for what poetry is at a given time."

The above is from Mandelstam's essay, The Slump. On the one hand, I want to agree with Mandelstam, because he is Mandelstam, and in agreement I can pretend to the same lofty height from which he speaks. On the other, I am mortally incapable of gratitude, except with great reluctance, and great assistance from God Almighty.

Take, for instance, Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey, which, anyone—except bad poets, tweens, white girls, black girls, white boys, black boys, various other people—will tell you, is bad poetry, or better, not poetry at all. It is good and right to hate Kaur's work. It is likely plagiarized. It does not seem to represent any actual inner or outer reality. It is facile.

How am I to be grateful for it?

Louis Zukofsky, of the late modernists, in Prepositions+, his collection of critical essays, wrote about, "the graceless error of writing down to those who consciously want a something else from poetry—not poetry—as some stay for their own vanity."

While I don't believe she is writing down, I do believe Kaur makes a graceless error, and perhaps is scratching some eternal itch for those who do not actually like or want poetry.

It is not right, however, to imagine Kaur's is the First Bad Poetry. Mandelstam comments in On Contemporary Poetry, "Nowadays people write bad poetry in a new way — that is the only difference!" Bad poetry is a fact of life, and I am no better off for my ridiculous taken-aback-ness at just some new bad poetry.

I don't have a conclusion, barely a thesis, this is just something I'm struggling with, how does someone trying to do serious work (and generally failing, and so compensatorily overreacting toward easily-spotted not-poetry) deal with Kaur in the zeitgeist? I don't know.

So here's a gratitude list for Rupi Kaur:

1. New people are reading poetry, or at least, identify as the sort of person who enjoys poetry.
2. Though perhaps Kaur is plagiarizing her, people may then be turned on to Nayyirah Waheed's  work, which is good. (Related: She has proven that Waheed's work is worth plagiarizing.)
3. Women of color are being recognized in poetry.
4. Perhaps while a not-poetry, the work might be a something-else that is of value.
5. She gave me something to write about.


Of questionable relevance or application:

Here's an old professor of mine writing about the worth of bad movies.

Here's Plutarch on the worth of one's enemies.

And here are some contemporary poets writing great poetry today:

Mina Pam Dick
Marie Howe
C.T. McGaha
D.A. Powell
Craig Morgan Teicher
Marcus Wicker
Rachel Zucker