Note: this little essay was originally published in ARCADE 31.1 in something like 2009. They have since reformatted their website and it is no longer available therethrough. I re-produce it here as an archive, though some ideas about the poetry of this city never seem to change.
No ideas but in things
- William Carlos Williams
It is as though the bar for aesthetic acceptability has been raised unilaterally. Whether this is a function of a generation’s having come of age under different architecture and album design, or of Apple’s having taught the masses what a curve means, good design is so ubiquitous now, and the collective eye so trained, that the vagaries of generations past smack of serious deprivation; we use the term “aesthetic crime” and mostly we use it to reference a particular decade in American production. All this good sense can be blinding, complacency bred, etc; especially here in the Northwest, where even government buildings--libraries, fire stations, city halls-- once the bastion of the bland, are so dedicated to graceful, progressive monumentality, it is hard to keep in mind that there is nothing “natural” about these choices, that it wasn’t always this way, that, as the poet Jane Kenyon writes, “it might have been/ otherwise.” Indeed, trying to tell my students what the world was like in the 1980’s is an exercise is exotica.
You couldn’t get coffee anywhere. There was literally no place where you could go and sit to study, chat with friends, do a bit of journalling. There was your house, and there was the bar. And bars weren’t quiet and cool like (some) are now. You couldn’t go and write in one like Hemingway in the Parisian 30’s. They were loud, smoky, and dominated by the jukebox and the pool table. And beer? Forget trying to get a beer. People drank Miller by the gallon. Budweiser was the “King of Beers.” You drank the soda pop that the TV told you to, wore the jeans and sneakers that were ordered by your caste, ate non-organic factory-farmed food, etc. It wasn’t that nothing mattered, it was just that things didn’t matter.
“It might have been otherwise.”
Enter: recycling, the internet, craft-brews, thrift stores, grunge rock, and cappuccinii, and suddenly, when I want to send a birthday card, I go to a boutique shop where I rifle through stacks of letter-pressed stock on hand-made paper, beautifully-designed limited edition prints, usually run on a vintage machine, and usually out of someone’s garage. Suddenly, when I get a birthday card, it’s not a semi-fancy holder for the cash I hope is inside, but a gesture; often, one so lovely it precludes the necessity of a gift.
The plums on the table matter again, because the table is solid wood, hand-planed by a friend of mine, and the because I bought the plums from the farmer at an outdoor market; they’re organic, local, and in-season. So delicious. So cold.
I mention this because Seattle is taking her place again in the annals of the made. Our poets have been producing verse-for-the-long-term, rather than the hip, or of-the-moment sort Stephen(ie) Burt poo-poos in their recent article “The New Thing” (Boston Review 2008). Our poets connected with the universities, like Kenney, Bierds, McHugh, Wagoner, or our younger writers: Savich, Nienow, Wing, Mountford.
There are our fluctuating cast of literary periodicals: the Seattle Review, which has just altered its format to include only long poems and essays, Poetry Northwest, under the strong editorship of Kevin Craft, the perfect-bound and full-color Image, and new kid on the block, The Monarch Review.
Nor are these the only publishing front: we have Copper Canyon Press, located in Port Townsend, which produces some of the most important poets ever, in addition to exciting new voices like Ben Lerner, and both Michael and Matthew Dickman. And we also have Wave Books (recently), which focuses on edgier writers whose work they produce in beautiful objects: books of minimalist design that focuses on quality materials. Sometimes the Wave Books project converges, and we get both a gorgeous object and internationally-important, era-defining poetry, as in Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation (2011) which was probably the most aesthetically significant book of the decade, and is available in a handsome-to-the-hand Wave edition.
I didn’t set out here to provide a survey of the Northwestern literary culture as I’ve come to know it since moving to Seattle six or so years ago, but these things leap immediately to mind when I start thinking about things. When Jean Baudrilliard asked, in his final philosophical mediation before his death in 2007: Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared, his question was as much about the notion of disappearance as it was about the notion of the (every)things doing the disappearing. It’s a semi-real question posed by critics, curators, and certain dwarf planets, and it is left for our designers--poets, consumptives, craftsmen--to call back across the distance (of time? of the country?) to answer.