Jeffrey Thomson
October 2008
Jeffrey Thomson is the author of
four books of poems, including the forthcoming Birdwatching
in Wartime (CMU 2009) and Renovation (CMU
2005). Also forthcoming is a collection of
poems translated from the Spanish of Juan Carlos Flores, Many Way to Dig a Tunnel (Green Integer 2009) and
an anthology of emerging poets: From the
Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just
Plain Sound Great co-edited with Camille Dungy and Matt O’Donnell (Persea Books,
2009). He has won fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Arts Commission, and, most recently, was
named the 2008 Individual Arts Fellow in the Literary Arts by the Maine Arts Commission. He is an associate professor of creative
writing at the University of Maine Farmington. His
website is www.jeffreythomson.com.
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Statement of Poetics
In
a world that consistently conspires to deny us any kind of inner life (why exactly do we
need a television in the elevator or at the grocery checkout line?), in a world where
late-model capitalism demands that we turn everything (including ourselves) into brands that can be properly marketed, poetry exists as a manifestation of
something beyond the meager limits of a world defined by profit and loss, by revenue and
the return on investment.
Poetry demands your attention and your time. It
speaks to you of the poet’s inner life and, thus, about your own. Poetry also demands empathy; it demands that we
recognize the humanity of people other than ourselves.
It demands that we live in a world that is interconnected and
interdependent. Metaphor, so fundamental to
the way poems work, sets up a chain of meaning that says, not X is like Y, but X is Y—a radical statement of equality. This is also why poets and writers are always among
the first to be arrested in any political system sliding toward totalitarianism.
Conventional wisdom is about making us feel comfortable with ourselves and our place in
the world. I believe poetry is about the
opposite – thinking in ways radical and complex about the world – thinking that
makes us uncomfortable with the world. And then, it is making that discomfort beautiful. Because
this is art we are talking about. I don’t
mean beautiful in the sense of the pretty or the picturesque alone, but beautiful in the
sense of the well-crafted. Beauty comes from
the intention of the creator on the material of creation.
Not the beautiful thing described, but the thing described beautifully.
I believe neither one of these qualities – complexity or beauty – will carry a
poem alone. I believe complexity for its own
sake is masturbation and that beauty alone is narcissism.
I believe in poems with all the hooks and wires left in them. I believe in surprise and song. I believe in antagonism and opposition. I believe that alienation is good for you and that
starting over every time is the only way to move forward.
I believe in accident and the accumulation of detail. I believe in the sentence. The metaphor. The
word.
I believe in the small and the daily and the quotidian.
I believe that the poem must be at once “true” (to the self, to
the moment of its inspiration, to the honest assessment of the speaker who brings it into
being) and “false” (the poem is not the self or an honest assessment of
experience; it is, as Wallace Stevens says, abstract).
I believe in the quality of song, the sound of words, the architecture of
meaning they make in the ear and the mind of the reader. I believe poems have multiple
meanings and that the best poems never, ultimately, give up their mystery.
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