Poetry, U.S.A.

Damon McLaughlin is a poet and musician from Tucson, AZ. His chapbook Olduvai Theory won the 2011 Toad Hall Press Chapbook Contest; Exchanging Lives (Backwaters Press, 2008) is his first full-length collection. He blogs at Present Everywhere, Visible Nowhere. 

Someone actually had the nerve to say to me once “Poetry comes from a place: if you want to write poetry, go there.” This “Poet” was well-written, respected, and (more significantly) responsible for my grade, so I drove halfway across the States and back looking for “Poetry,” searching for it in the deep canyons of Utah, sacrificing my Celica for it with a deer in the Sierras, reading the deer hair stuck in my Celica’s grill for signs of a new direction. I drank forties of Mickey’s malt liquor on Mission Beach, hoping for a vision. Considering the advice of the “Poet” was metaphorical, I searched inward via Buddhist mysticism, solitude, veganism—each method as fruitless as the last. But all the while I was searching, I was writing and reading poems like my life depended on it, just as it depends on sex and breathing.

“Poetry comes from a place” sounds nice, but it’s the worst writing advice I’ve ever been given. Once past its alliterative tricks, its meretricious depth, I find it nothing less than an indictment of poetry for exclusivity, for Eldorado-like impossibility. And I mean—besides—isn’t it the journey not the destination? I’m fairly certain my prof—the “Poet”—didn’t want me to find poetry in the first place.


Less poetic but more useful was the advice given me by the poet Vince Gotera who said, parroting Richard Hugo, don’t listen to anything I say. Gotera is a guy in a Hawaiian shirt and cut-off jean shorts and can hardly be taken seriously. As his student, I learned to listen closely, a lesson I learned well from him. He also said something to the effect of line, image, sound—not necessarily in that order. This was some of the best advice I was ever given, and to this day it continues to serve me well—something like the front post and rear sight aperture I use to line up the work of others as well as my own.

It’s true such staples can seem passé in these days of distractive, intentionally subversive poems in which disregard can be the new regard and discontinuity can be the new continuity, but if we strip away the bullshit, then line, image, and sound is what we’re left with. Strip that out and what’s left is content. That’s a problem because content is ubiquitous, and poetry is not. To my mind, content is the essential focus neither of a poet nor of a poem. It plays a role for both, yes—but it’s not the bottom line (ugh, bad pun). I mean—the question what does it mean? hasn’t helped the masses write or appreciate poetry ever—not once. That content-based question is a poetry killer in schools the nation over. No wonder we prefer the Kardashians.

Thing is—whether or not you write intentionally intelligible or intentionally unintelligible poems, you’re still pushing and pulling language with those basic tools/constituents of written poetry. You’re either writing with them or against them, breaking them into pieces and putting them back together. Think of line, image, sound as scaffold to something larger in gestalt, structures that tidy up the mind, that make the process of one’s thinking or of one’s thought—a paraphrase of Jane Miller’s definition of poetry—presentable. Without the structures of the brain, its properly aligned, quasi-infinite neural networks, the mind remains an obscure puddle. Without its implements, a poem remains the same, at best a puddle of mis-constructed prose. All poems are fastened by their tools, no matter what highfalutin pontificating we may hear and condone.

But that’s me. I find the joy of poetry in craft. If you find the joy of poetry in philosophizing about it or whatever, that’s cool. If you think Poetry is a place, then I confess—there is an old, shot-gunned sign for Poetry near River Road on route 77 just north of Mammoth. Turn left at the saguaro with two broken arms. For the rest of us? Break out your hammer and awl, your mortar and pestle, your mango-juice and peppered-fat poems. In the words of Mark Strand, “there is no happiness like mine” when I eat your delicious, peppered-fat poems.

When my first book came out, I took Steve Orlen down to the Red Garter Saloon to give him a copy (he’d blurbed the book) and to just hang out awhile. Among many useful things, we discussed the current states of poetry and how young, emerging poets like myself would find our way through this ever heterogeneous poetry landscape—not to mention through the world at large, which continues to cut our funding and marginalize us. I was much more concerned about this fluff than Orlen was. I think he thought my concerns were rooted in youth and foolishness, but, always good with his words, he didn’t say so. He puffed a menthol off to the side since I didn’t smoke and asked with his soft sincerity, “Do you like what you’re writing, what you’re doing? Is it pleasurable?” I thought about it a moment, then nodded that it was—of course it was. “Then what’s the big deal?” he wanted to know, and we got to talking about his son the comedian, my daughter the genius. He filled the air with minty smoke, and I drank another Guinness, knowing he’d given me something worth holding onto.

Read more of Damon's guest blog posts for Cheek Teeth here and here.