Paul Monette: Outside Poetry

Following up on the writing of Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog, Paul Monette published in 1994, not long before his own death from AIDS, a final volume of poetry: West of Yesterday, East of Summer: new and Selected Poems (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994). I want to reprint here his story of the writing of Love Alone, which has come to be considered one of the great moments in literature regarding the AIDS epidemic, because it has insight into the poetry establishment and being a poetry outsider. I relate to this story on the level of sympathy for suffering, but also a poet who feels himself to be more of an outsider than establishment poet; experience certainly gives that view credence.

The story begins when Paul's life-partner, Roger Horwtiz, was dying from AIDS. Paul had been feeling unable to write, so bound up was he with the emotions and suffering around caring for Rog. He had long ago turned from writing poems to writing novels and non-fiction, which is still his best-known work. As Rog was dying, Paul read him the new poem. This is from the Introduction to Monette's New and Selected Poems:

I ripped through my recitation with unpunctuated force and when I got to the end there was silence. I thought maybe he'd fallen asleep.

Then he spoke with a soft astonishment. "Sweetheart, that's terrific. How can you say you'll never write again?"

But that's exactly what I'd say, lying in his arms late at night, sobbing as if my heart would break. "I can't do it without you," I'd say. "Yes, you can," came the soothing reply. "And besides, I'm still here."

But then five weeks later he wasn't anymore, and I figured I'd died too. His doctor's admonition the night he died—"You have to write about him, Paul"—was just so much empty advice. Then, it must have been two weeks later, I was standing watch at the grave in Forest Lawn, as I did every day while dusk fell. Next morning I had to leave for Boston to visit my parents, who hadn't seen me in a year and a half, dreading every minute of the further separation from Roger.

And I suddenly realized that if the plane went down tomorrow, there would be no record anywhere of what we'd suffered and how love got us through. So I sat in the grass in the failing light and opened my journal and scribbled about twenty-five lines—the poem called "Here"—and that night I propped it on my desk, labeled "To Whom It May Concern."

The next day on the plane to Boston I pulled out the journal again, and wrote the whole of "No Goodbyes," in a torrent of unfiltered feeling. And that is how they were all written from then on, at least the first ten, entirely WITHOUT THINKING. An endless catalogue of the lost, nothing too minor to heave onto the pyre of my dead days. I don't doubt that some shaping imagination was at work, even so, but it stayed resolutely unconscious, completely on its own. I had no sense that anyone else would want them, but I hadn't counted on the luck of its crossing the desk of [editor] Michael Denneny, who was ready to go to contract with half the poems in place.

So Love Alone is at least half journal poems. This breaks every one of the usual rules: usually there's no way that good poems can come out of raw journal-writing. We see thousands of new poems every year that are jsut journal-entries, from teenage angst poets who have just discovered Artur Rimbaud (usually boys) or Sylvia Plath (usually girls) to poets just finishing their MFAs in creative writing who haven't enough life-experience as yet to write about anything other than how their cat just died and their girlfriend dumped them. Usually journal-poems suck, because the people who proffer them haven't enough life-experience yet to be able to have anything to say.

But Monette's journal-poems are sublime. Why do they work? Why don't they suck? One truthful answer is that Monette is by this time in life an experienced writer, with published books of poetry and award-winning novels under this belt. He is both an experienced writer and he has something to say. He dumps his raw feelings onto the page, but being a writer, he dumps his feelings through his art, coherently, clearly, and with all his writer's craft online. There was indeed a "shaping imagination" somewhere at work in the mix, even as Monette was writing the elegies at white heat. I feel connected to that experience: in some ways, Monette is describing exactly how I have been feeling when writing the Letters series poems.

Monette continues:

the volume [Love Alone] appear in March of 1988, and when the first copy appeared by overnight express, I sat at my desk sobbing and saying over and over, "Rog, we did it." Whatever intrinsic merit the elegies had, I'd accomplished what I set out to do, leaving a record of our love and times. It was in the nature of an unexpected bonus that os many people responded enthusiastically to the work—not put off or bewildered as we feared by the run-on frenzy of the style, the banishing of punctuation. Moreover, I even got my wish as I had stated in the Preface: That the readership proved to be drawn from the ranks of the AIDS-afflicted and the grief-haunted, and not from that plucky little band of the general poetry reader.

But that wasn't nearly as odd as the reaction of the general poetry WRITER. For old times' sake, I sent out eight or ten copies to my [poet] colleagues from a decade ago, most of whose work I'd loyally kept up with—despite its being the opposite of mine. So perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised by the responses. Two poets wrote back nearly identical letters, in which they dismissed "Love Alone" as "not being poetry at all, really. Too raw and too unfiltered, and of course riddled with clichés." But clearly an important "document," all the same.

"It's clearly more like performance art, isn't it? Have you thought of showing it to Eric Bogosian?"

And my favorite: "Thank you for the book, with that wonderful picture of you and Roger on the cover. I'll cherish it. The text, I'm afraid, is not my thing."

This is the point at which I want to talk about insider and outsider poetry. What we have here is an example of something raw and rather original being rejected by the poetry mandarins. Who's to say what's poetry and what's not? Who's got the right to define and own what poetry is or is not?

I've run into this myself on occasion; I have had a poetry mandarin actually say to my face that something I wrote was not a poem. It was nothing he recognized as a poem. I challenged him on his pronouncement, though, and got him to finally admit that he could make no objection to the content or style of the poem, his objections were purely moral ones based on his rejection of the experimental form i was using.

If something cannot be poetry because it's too raw and unfiltered—even though Monette's shaping imagination was at work on some level in the poems, not neglecting or ignoring the craft of an experience writer—then nothing I've ever written can be called poetry. No experiments can be called poems. By this (conservative, formalist, stick in the mud) standard of definition, Tennyson is poetry but Ginsberg is not, Eliot is poetry but Corso is not. And that's patently absurd.

As Monette adds in his Introduction to the New and Selected Poems:

I can only imagine what the silver-tongued response will be to the body of "New Poems." Too political by a mile, unbearably strident, nothing reflected on, no FORM. Well, at least they've got all that right. Raw being just how AIDS has left me, flayed of layers of skin I didn't know I had—flayed to the bone—I was screaming as much as composing when I sat to write. Pain was pain, not wisdom, and the idea of waxing metaphorical and philosophical about such horrors seemed at best presumptuous, at worst insulting. So if I have succeeded in convincing the mainstream run of poets—with their Guggenheims and their tenure tracks, with their surefooted march to "Selected" [Poems], "Collected," "Complete"—that I mean to stay an outsider, lobbing my poems like pipe bombs, so be it.

I relate so well to all of this. I relate to the rawness, as I go through my own chronic illness. I relate to the aspects of rejection and affirmation alike. This paragraph amounts to an outsider's manifesto. Monette's rejection of philosophical abstraction in his poetry is one I largely agree with; I have been saying for years that poems written solely from the head ultimately fail, because they only mimic the complete range of human experience, which must embrace suffering as well as ecstasy.

I write poems that have no FORM all the time, that record pain as pain, rather than the idea of pain one step removed. I write things that I'm sure the tenure-track poets would not recognize as poetry, but when shared non-professional poets get plaudits. I write poem-like substances, rather than poems, perhaps. And if so, I am content with that.

Although he is gone, Paul Monette feels to me like a brother. As far as the poetry world goes, I'm content to be an outsider, just as he was.

18 Elegies

I was organizing my bookshelves, house, bedroom, basement, and closets over the weekend. I am moving things around, and finding more logical places to put things. In the next or so I am going to get rid of the twin bed in my bedroom, which I find it hard to sleep on, and replace it with a queen size futon on one of those folding frames you can configure either as a bed or a couch. I need to do this before the summer, before surgery. I am cleaning out my life and house beforehand, as much as possible. (Also making a Will, etc.) When I lived in California, I slept on a couch-futon in my room, and slept well. So I'm going to try that again. I need room to sprawl, and I sleep better on a hard surface than on a soft bed. In fact, I sleep better on an air mattress on the floor than I do in the current bed.

So I was moving some books around during part of this reorganization process, and I was reminded that there is another precursor and inspiration for the ongoing Letters-form poem series. I had first read and absorbed this book of poems some years ago, and it was not in the forefront of my mind when I began the current poem series last year. But I can see the similarities, now, the possibility of a subconscious influence. And I welcome that, I don't reject it, because it seems both natural and fitting. The parallels seem powerfully resonant to me, at this moment.


Paul Monette: Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988) First edition hardcover.

Paul Monette's Elegies for his lover, Roger Horwitz, lost to AIDS, are searing. They burn with white heat, bright fire. They are overwhelmed with grief, longing, anger, pain, intensity, beauty. They are one of the best poem-cycles depicting the grief of an entire generation of men lost to AIDS. Grief for the lost, survivor's guilt and pain for those who go on living.

Pulling this book off my shelf, I sat down and re-read the entire book as though it were a single work. It reads very well that way; as does Jim Harrison's Letters to Yesenin, another book of elegies in a similar form and style. Although each poet has a unique voice. Monette's style is a similar sort of moderate-length line broken regularly as though is were a prose-poem broken into lines. What propels Monette's line is where the lines end on words that almost compel you to read on; this adds up to the breathless rush.

In the book's Preface, Monette has this to say about the form of these poems:

When I began to write about AiDS during Roger's illness, I wanted a form that would move with breathless speed, so I could scream if I wanted and rattle on and empty my Uzi into the sky.

He settled on a form with no punctuation, which also adds to the propulsion. There are no stanza breaks or commas, each poem is a block of flowing text that rushes on until it ends. "Here," the first poem in the series, demonstrates this form:

•

Here

everything extraneous has burned away
this is how burning fells in the fall
of the final year not like leaves in a blue
October but as if the skin were a paper lantern
full of trapped moths beating their fixed wings
and yet I can lie on this hill just above you
a foot beside where I will lie myself
soon soon and for all the wrack and blubber
feel still how we were warriors when the
merest morning sun in the garden was a
kingdom after Room 1010 war is not all
death it turns out war is what little
thing you hold in to refugeed and far from home
oh sweetie will you please forgive me this
that every time I opened a box of anything
Glad Bags One-A-Days KINGSIZE was
the worst I'd think will you still be here
when the box is empty Rog Rog who will
play boy with me now that I bucket with tears
through it all when I'd cling beside you sobbing
you'd shrug it off with the quietest I'm still
here I have your watch in the top drawer
which I don't dare wear yet help me please
the boxes grocery home day after day
the junk that keeps men spotless but it doesn't
matter now how long they last or I
the day has taken you with it and all
there is now is burning dark the only green
is up by the grass and this little thing
of telling the hill I'm here on I'm here

•

I love where he breaks the line in places that almost forces you to go to the next line. This is not where most poets would break, as it is not always a natural pause for breath. Lots of boring poetry has predictable line-breaks, where you'd expect a thought to be broken, or a pause for breath to be inserted. These Elegies break all those "rules."

I've used this technique in some of my own poems. It's a thrilling technique. I feel this breathless rushing, this forward momentum, this propulsion in my own Letters poems, although more like Harrison's form I use sentences and punctuation. There are sentence fragments, but they're punctuated. My own form is more like a prose-poem with line-breaks, but I can still break the line in non-standard ways, that generates momentum.

Another poem from Love Alone can be read here: No Goodbyes.



The photo on the cover of the book has a special meaning. It is a photo of Paul and Rog together in Italy, and is the centerpiece of the last Elegy in the book, "Brother of the Mount of Olives." This is my favorite poem of the series, because it ends the book on a note of loving memory rather than rage. It heals, or starts to heal, all the turbulence that has come before. The poem begins with the discovery of the photo:

•

Brother of the Mount of Olives

combing the attic for anything extra
missed or missing evidence of us I sift
your oldest letters on onionskin soft-
cover Gallimard novels from graduate school
brown at the edges like pound cake and turn up
an undeveloped film race it to SUNSET
PLAZA ONE-HOUR wait out the hour wacko
as a spy smuggling a chip that might decode
World War III then sit on the curb pouring over
prints of Christmas '83 till I hit paydirt
three shots of the hermit abbey on the moors
southeast of Siena our final crisscross
of the Tuscan hills before the sack of Rome
unplanned it was just that we couldn't bear
to leave the region quite the Green Guide barely
gave it a nod minor Renaissance pile
but the real thing monks in Benedictine white
pressing olives and gliding about in hooded
silence Benedict having commanded shh
along with gaunt motto ora et labora
pray work but our particular brother John
couldn't stop chattering not fromm the moment
he met us grinning at the cloister door
seventy years olive-cheeked bald and guileless . . .

•

It's a sublime moment, ending when the brother from the monastery takes the portraits of the two lovers with Paul's camera. And then Paul rediscovers the photos after Rog has died, and this poem emerges. This is the genuine spirit of elegy.

Re-reading this book of Elegies reminds how powerful it is, how moving, and how much I loved it when I first encountered it. It was such a scream that it knocked me over. It's a book about life, really, not about death. Dying, pain, fury, regret, grief, all of which I can relate to—but these emotions are of the living. The dead are tranquil, mostly.