Poetry de profundis: a few notes

In her recent interview with Open Letters Monthly, the Russian / American poet Katia Kapovich observes a tonal and thematic difference between American and Russian poetry. She sees American verse as being balanced between the sparkling moment and the mundane, of making magic in the everyday; Russian verse, on the other hand, is "de profundis," concerned with extremes, life and death, the big questions and capital-letter ideas.

These are just her impressions, and she would readily admit that they are limited. Still, they stick with me. As a poet and a reader, I am naturally more drawn to the profound idea over the minute but mundane detail. Not as a necessity — there are plenty of excellent poems that revel in the humble everyday, and I enjoy many of them. Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind as a master of minutae who I admire (although my favorite of her poems is either “Crusoe in England” or “Casabianca,” neither of which really fit that description).

Because of their recently published correspondence, thinking about Bishop has me thinking about Robert Lowell, another of my favorite poets. Jonathan Raban recently wrote that Lowell, "brilliantly fused the most intimate details of his own life with the public turmoil of his century." Indeed, in his best work the balance between the personal and de profundis is monumental: I find in the success of this monumentalization of his own life, a life that mirrored so many in lots of surprising ways, and his ability to connect and analyze the profound through language and metaphor; and in his failures, often, there is only a much baser attempt at grappling with either these big ideas or his biography.

But it is also impossible to argue that contemporary American poetry is unconcerned with profound concepts. Many if not most poets are engaged with deconstruction and hegemony, whether they are aware of the influence or not. (These postmodern critiques seem to have become the mere techniques of poetic observation.) They do reflect on some of our deepest ethical issues, often focused on socio-economics and language politics. So much of human experience is given short service by these techniques, though. It seems as if the direct confrontation of the "orphic" in contemporary poetry is considered declasse, dismissed. Not all and every, but many and most — the plurality of American poets shy away from these Russian Novel Concepts.

Or maybe not. Even as I write this post, counter-examples do come to mind. A.E. Stallings, for one, attends to them from time to time. And there are more, certainly. But why this nagging impression of fleeting mundanity then?