Banango Lit

by Justin Carter

I just got out of a craft talk/ lecture by Mark Halliday and J Allyn Rosser (which also featured Tony Hoagland and Kevin Prufer and Ange Mlinko asking questions (who needs AWP, this was probably better) ~10 minutes ago. The craft talk was about “everything” poems, by which they meant poems that attempt to discuss everything and the inability to be able to discuss everything and the exhaustion that can be found in these poems that attempt to do this. Also discussed were poems that were “anti-everything” and, as Rosser said, acted like “black holes” to the idea of the everything poem.

Poems we read/looked at include: “Great Topics of the World” by Albert Goldbarth, “Minor Figure” by Mary Ruefle, “Dog Toy” by Dean Young, and “The Living” by Robert Pinsky. The example of an “anti-everything” poem was Yehuda Amichai’s “The Diameter of the Bomb.”

The everything poem was looked at as a poem that wants to tell the reader about everything it can. It uses lots of images and lots of fragmentation and it usually does not have much of a narrative branch, although there is usually enough to “ground” the poem.

Dean Young writes these poems a lot. Ange Mlinko brought up the idea of the everything poem not being “memorable.” I love Dean Young, but if I was asked right now to write down some Dean Young lines, I could not do it. I can give you poem titles I like, but not lines. I felt like Mlinko’s concern was valid. Halliday countered by saying that the mood that these poems evoked could be memorable. I agreed with this.

I don’t write everything poems. When I have tried to write an everything poem I have ended up with a mass of images floating around on a page. Nothing was “grounding” my images. I think this is something that I learned at this lecture. If I want to write about everything, it needs to be grounded in something.

It also needs to show an awareness of the exhaustion that writing about everything must have. The Mary Ruefle poem is a good example of that.

I love Mary Ruefle.

Meanwhile, the “anti” everything poem, the Amichai piece, began by expanding in a way that suggested it would be an everything poem, but then ended with a type of meaninglessness and nothingness. Kevin Prufer mentioned this poem by Archibald MacLeish that does the same type of thing.

I don’t know what else to say about this topic. I hope it is interesting. I hope someone will want to discuss the “everything” poem with me.

To tie this to the “alt lit” world, and to encourage feedback, can you think of any poems in that scene that would be considered an everything poem?