The Violence
Ethan Paquin
An author's statement
I don’t like to discuss my own work because I think to do so is presumptuous, but I can shed a little light on what I’m doing. All my poetry owes to bigger and better things than poetry: the natural world, painting and sculpture and architecture, spirituality. All my poetry is informed by things deeper than poetry: love, loss of love, ruinous relationships, redeemed relationships, the bond between a landscape and a man, between a man and his children, between a man and art.
Thanks to my family, every member of which is a soulful, sensitive, artistic person, the visual arts have long been my love. My first books were art books—the Impressionists, all the usual stuff. Then my parents went to Spain and came back with a Prado guidebook. Then on to Spanish and Flemish painters. Then onto Homer and the American pastoral. At my little hometown library, Leach Library in Londonderry, New Hampshire, I used to check out the same Winslow Homer book every week—the anthology by Albert Ten Eyck Gardner. I went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Gardner Museum, the Currier Gallery with my aunt, and the Metropolitan Museum with my dad when I was like nine. I began painting when I was young, was trained in watercolors by a painter named Jean Wyman, and almost went to art school. Anyway, this is a pretty deep relationship I’ve had with art, so when I began writing seriously—sometime when I was an undergrad, though I began thinking about “real” poetry after reading Ferlinghetti in junior high school—I like to think it shows. I like to use the page as a canvas—the whole white blank thing is there beckoning, and so few poets ever use it. If a poem is grave and quiet, use the heft of the white—keep the text in a small, condensed block in the middle of the page. If the poem is about a mountain range, arrange the names of the peaks on the page in their proper geographic location. Use tabbing, spacing, everything—it’s not just about words.
And, while we’re discussing words, let me share my favorite quote ever. Brian Henry—at the time my young poetry teacher at Plymouth, now one of my closest friends—taught my workshop class to “love language.” To “never abuse language.” I’ve always carried that with me. What it means is that dead language is for lawyers, doctors, politicians. Poets have the OED and a lot of time to sift through that thing, reminding the world how beautiful it is via our language. “Persimmon”—does life get any prettier than that word? I teach all my students the same thing—what are you going to do to reinvigorate the world? To work against the deadening of life that occurs solely by the deadening of our language? So I’ve liked to use difficult and beautiful, uncommon language in my books, though in this third book, more sparingly. I look back at much of my first book with loathing—it’s so dense and obtuse. With the second book, and especially with the third one, I pared it down, got a little quieter. I think I also got more sincere. Meeting Franz Wright and talking about his life and his art helped me a lot. Sincerity is key—it’s something so many younger poets, who fancy themselves hip flaneurs, viciously react against. It’s not hip to be direct, to hurt. I look at a lot of my peers and think, do they feel anything? Do they ever hurt? I hate a lot of poetry done these days by my fellow MFA holders—to be fair, I hate what I was doing in my own poetry. Sure, you can flex awareness of language and be pyrotechnical and be ironic and super-duper twenty-first-century aware, but in the long run, poetry is done a disservice. Too much fanciful language is as abusive to language as is abstracted language. (Here’s where some of the British critics were maybe right about The Makeshift). It’s narcissistic. There’s too much hyper-irony everywhere, and also a lot of writing that doesn’t really go anywhere. So you’re gonna tell me, using a few crazy words, about a crazy experience you had in Brooklyn, or whatever hip place you live in? Fine, but what are you going to teach the world by the end of the poem? How will you have striven to advance the art of poetry by the end of the poem? Usually, nothing more than “I live in Brooklyn and you don’t” and “By continuing to uphold the virtues of stream-of-consciousness and free verse” will be the respective answers. I see a lot of this and it’s dismaying.
In the past few years of reading, I’ve rarely had a shared experience with a poet, so I think a lot of poetry today fails. I want that moment in which I innately know what the poet’s touching on, where the sensation is, where I feel their seeing. I feel I’m on a track that matters. When you’re an inch from being divorced, torn in tens of directions each hour, why are you going to ignore it and write about Wittgenstein? When you find yourself standing atop what used to be the tallest dam in the country with a good poet friend (Joshua Beckman), blown away by the total painful beauty of a desolate, hollow, airy, but warm and red and godlike place (eastern Oregon), why simply chalk it up to just another experience on your blog when you can let that moment dictate the rest of your life? When I wrote the second and the third books, the time felt right to address these things, and the manner in which I addressed them felt right. I didn’t set out to do anything in any particular way—the beauty of poetry. Pain and joy just are, they can’t be predicted and they can’t be ascribed to formula. I’m very pleased with The Violence because I think it’s authentic: it had me going in a different direction, and it forced me to confront things about myself. I’m also pleased because it may be highly personal, but it doesn’t strike me as narcissistic or self-fetishizing. I think many people can read it and have that same connection I discussed earlier; maybe, for some readers, I was able to put in words those sensations they’ve had in darker times of their lives, or to put in words the realization that things might work out . . . maybe. We’ll see.
