Written by: Liam Smith
As I begin the process of drafting my debut chapbook, the tangibility of a project has heightened my sense of purpose. Working towards a collection makes me feel closer to the label of “poet,” this substantial written output seems like “proof of life” for my writerly identity. I was excited to share this budding project with a professor of mine and drafted a brief process statement about representing a more language-driven register in my poems. Upon sharing this vision with my professor, she tasked me with reading Dorothea Lasky’s chapbook-length essay Poetry Is Not a Project. I’ll admit to having some reservations about the validity of this essay. From my view, this chapbook was undeniably a project: the result of deliberate efforts to divert my poetry into new and exciting directions. After all, doesn’t every collection begin with a project in mind; don’t the specific approaches to new poems help differentiate them from our earlier works? Despite my initial reluctance, Lasky’s essay helped me perceive the not-yet-started poetry collection in new light, suggesting that the concreteness of projects is too tidy for what she calls the “muck” of creating poetry (Lasky).
Lasky’s central argument is that the project of making poems is too divorced from the poems it may inspire. She follows the logic that “what most poets do is not a project but is an act of intuition,” and that a poem “resists being talked about linearly in its very nonlinearity” (Lasky). For Lasky, a poem is an infinite thing; it sprawls and expands the mental limits of its creator. She views the poem as uninterested with the “project” of its creation, and thus poets who think of a collection as a project are “flying high above (their) poems,” when artists ought to exist “in the muck” of their art (Lasky). This argument emphasizes the need for immersion in one’s work to properly explore the intangible qualities of poetry. For Lasky, poems provide a space for tinkering language (the finite) towards concepts that are otherwise inexpressible (the infinite/the sublime).
The essay grounds its argument through Lasky’s recollection of her acquaintance’s own poetry “project,” and the distance between his project and its resulting poems. She writes about attending his reading, where he read an essay about his project and then read his poems. After the reading, audience members came to discuss his project, and “most people liked the idea behind it,” but nobody asked about the poems (Lasky). Lasky writes that the “poems were not important to his project. His project was important to his project. Everything that mattered was in the idea” (Lasky). Despite the intrigue of his process statement, the poems seemed unsuccessful, and the project is left as an irrelevant success to the poetry.
It is so natural for writers to create an identity for their work, as Lasky’s acquaintance had done; to draft a concrete statement that separates it from the work of others. Lasky’s essay has asked me to question the identity of my own work: if my chapbook is not a project, then what is it? While this seems like a fruitful question at first, it completely misses the author’s point. Lasky argues that molding an identity for your poetry is distancing yourself from the actual work of creating; she believes the elusive and infinite nature of poetry is far removed from the stability of external projects. As I begin to create my chapbook, the words of Dorothea Lasky steer me away from the “project” of my poetry, as I plunge into the muck of writing poems.
Featured Image Caption: The Cover of Dorothea Lasky’s Poetry Is Not a Project.
