So now we’ve come, dear readers, to the end of the road—and still I can’t let go. It’s unnatural. You belong to me. I belong to you. I mean, I’ve been writing this series for YOU, my loves, my poets, my unnameables.
I’ve received a few interesting responses from people during the process of posting “Total Fail.” My consensus from the responses is that the most compelling thing about the series has been in reading the description of my writing and revision process—it being (like shame) something a lot of poets don’t talk about. It’s odd—when I started the series it didn’t occur to me at all that that would be the interesting part. I thought it would be more in service to the idea of failure, and what makes a poem fail.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been keeping a list of possible reasons why “As I Write This” failed. I started the list the day I asked Sink Review to take the poem down, and I’ve continued it throughout the process of writing “Total Fail.” As a sort of preface, I should say that a lot of these reasons for my failure were passing thoughts—what’s most amusing about them (to me) is that I thought them at all. Which is another way of saying: I still do not know why “As I Write This” failed, though I’m sure it did.
So maybe the poem failed from the beginning because I changed the original title, “Welcome,” to “As I Write This.” Like I took away the welcome mat and offered a document of some dislocated present—and who likes dislocated presents?
Or maybe “As I Write This” failed because the simple act of naming is not enough—tagging is not enough—and other than naming the poem had no purpose. It was a mess—and it can be hard to know when MESS and RAWNESS are actually generative for poetry. My feeling is that they were not for this poem—or rather that I couldn’t handle the poetic mess. That messiness is such a poetic ideal, isn’t it? How many poets have you heard who say they want their poems to be
messy, or that they don’t want to present the stuff of poetry with a neat little bow? It’s symptomatic of a poetry culture whose audience is made up mostly of other poets. Messiness, rawness, “the unfinished”—these are qualities that are not only desired but almost obligatory in many poetic circles these days.
Or maybe the poem failed because it created (as far as I could perceive) more negative than positive feeling in the world. In the poem’s moment I was trying to unify all the people populating my imagination, in some form of address. So when what I heard most directly were negative responses I felt like the poem failed.
Though this is a problematic way of thinking. Of course people will focus on the negative, if any sort of negativity is present. But it doesn’t cancel out the positives.
Or maybe the poem failed because:
it hurt people I care about,
it was careless in some of its inclusions,
it attracted unwanted attention from people I no longer want in my life,
it was not thorough enough,
I didn’t think through its social effects,
it caused the end of a relationship,
I chose not to defend it to those who criticized it.
Or maybe it failed because I let others’ criticism wear away at me—I took to heart what people said even if they did not say it to me directly, and even if I felt that what they had to say was disingenuous and/or harboring an agenda.
Or maybe I only THINK the poem failed because the response process made me paranoid.
Or maybe the poem failed because I over-edited the thing.
Or maybe it failed because it was not a poem at all, just crazy man writing in a notebook.
Or maybe it failed because I published what, like
Thek’s notebooks, was a private act and should have remained private.
Or maybe it failed because I wanted too much to force an apotheosis—to present the poem made of names to all the names in the poem—which is something that is out of my control—only you, or God, can activate my inanimate language.
Or maybe it failed because it didn’t consistently use the full names of all the people named in it—again, that it was too private, too nestled in my interior.
Or maybe it didn’t fail at all, and it’s a fine poem. After all, someone liked it enough to publish it.
Or maybe it failed because it included names of people who are not poets, or people most poets (other than my closest friends) wouldn’t know. I did not create a context for the poem.
Which brings me to the question of audience. The poem, as with most of the poems I’ve written recently, was written for all of those named. Most of those people are poets. Some of those people are dead. Some I have no way of knowing. Some I know I’ll never see again. Some are my family. My idea was simple: create audience by naming as many of the intended members of that audience as I could, in its spontaneous moment of creation. It was a momentary gathering of forces, a confluence of forces for which I was the conduit. Which is maybe the realest reason why I feel like the poem failed: my expectations for its audience were too impossible, too high.
Though part of me bristles at this idea. Why shouldn’t my expectations be high? Especially when most of the audience is made up of other poets? Maybe what failed was that there was no apotheosis—the poem made of names never actually was presented to those named in the poem—I never sent the email with the link to “As I Write This.”
Or maybe the poem failed because I was listening to “For Kate I Wait” as I wrote the first draft—some demonic distraction all Ariel Pink’s fucking fault NOT MINE.
Or maybe it failed because I was too impatient. Did I just need to stay with the poem longer, rediscover its original impulse, grow with it?
Or maybe it failed because it was just a mediocre poem. In that way it didn’t fail, it just didn’t really matter much, which is a different kind of failure. A so-fucking-what, a Half Fail.
Or maybe the poem failed because it was too sentimental—too led by the syrupy drip of sentiment to convey anything other than “I am thinking of these people” or “I miss these people, even the assholes among them.”
Or maybe it failed because instead of “inventing a world to save us from the world,” as
Rob Halpern put in a poem in
Disaster Suites, I merely reproduced the world I was trying to save us from.
Or maybe it failed because instead of “inventing a world to save us from the world” I was casting out demons, and I then made the misstep of offering my cast-outs to the cast-out.
At this point I’m tempted to say fuck it, I quit: I’m tired of trying to figure out what went wrong. I’m tired of all these names, of the apparitions of faces I’ve seen and known and hated and loved. Fuck it. I’m going to write about something else: anatomy lessons gone awry, my premonitions, farts passed in Dairy Queen parking lots.
I’d love to just give it up, but I can’t, or I won’t—I’m never going to get away from any of you—YOU being all those whose names I’ve used, YOU who I think about as I write, and anyone else bothering to read this (thank YOU)—I’m never going to get away, no matter how much I fantasize about finding a little shack in the Idaho woods, hours away from the nearest wifi signal, and going there to grow a beard and a gut and a garden in solitude. No—I’m here with YOU.
What have I learned from writing all this work that names so many poets’ names? That poets are sensitive. Like REALLY sensitive. Like, poets fulfill all the sappy romantic clichés of poets. Which is why it’s dangerous to hurt a poet’s feelings. It will make their world collapse. And poets revel in ruins—when everything around them seems broken they feel entitled to act as shitty as they want (like anyone else). Understand: at the center of the THEY here is ME—I have acted perfectly shitty and I love to write about myself. I am a poet (like anyone else). Or, as William Carlos Williams put it:
I am a poet, I reaffirmed, ashamed
- JOSEPH BRADSHAW
Joseph Bradshaw is a poet, educator, and archivist. He is the author of several chapbooks, as well as the full-length In the Common Dream of George Oppen (Shearsman Books). He curates a readings series at Berl’s Poetry Shop in Brooklyn called Leslie Flint Presents, and is at work on a book about the afterlife of the New York School. 
So now we’ve come, dear readers, to the end of the road—and still I can’t let go. It’s unnatural. You belong to me. I belong to you. I mean, I’ve been writing this series for YOU, my loves, my poets, my unnameables.
I’ve received a few interesting responses from people during the process of posting “Total Fail.” My consensus from the responses is that the most compelling thing about the series has been in reading the description of my writing and revision process—it being (like shame) something a lot of poets don’t talk about. It’s odd—when I started the series it didn’t occur to me at all that that would be the interesting part. I thought it would be more in service to the idea of failure, and what makes a poem fail.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been keeping a list of possible reasons why “As I Write This” failed. I started the list the day I asked Sink Review to take the poem down, and I’ve continued it throughout the process of writing “Total Fail.” As a sort of preface, I should say that a lot of these reasons for my failure were passing thoughts—what’s most amusing about them (to me) is that I thought them at all. Which is another way of saying: I still do not know why “As I Write This” failed, though I’m sure it did.
So maybe the poem failed from the beginning because I changed the original title, “Welcome,” to “As I Write This.” Like I took away the welcome mat and offered a document of some dislocated present—and who likes dislocated presents?
Or maybe “As I Write This” failed because the simple act of naming is not enough—tagging is not enough—and other than naming the poem had no purpose. It was a mess—and it can be hard to know when MESS and RAWNESS are actually generative for poetry. My feeling is that they were not for this poem—or rather that I couldn’t handle the poetic mess. That messiness is such a poetic ideal, isn’t it? How many poets have you heard who say they want their poems to be messy, or that they don’t want to present the stuff of poetry with a neat little bow? It’s symptomatic of a poetry culture whose audience is made up mostly of other poets. Messiness, rawness, “the unfinished”—these are qualities that are not only desired but almost obligatory in many poetic circles these days.
Or maybe the poem failed because it created (as far as I could perceive) more negative than positive feeling in the world. In the poem’s moment I was trying to unify all the people populating my imagination, in some form of address. So when what I heard most directly were negative responses I felt like the poem failed.
Though this is a problematic way of thinking. Of course people will focus on the negative, if any sort of negativity is present. But it doesn’t cancel out the positives.
Or maybe the poem failed because:
it hurt people I care about,
it was careless in some of its inclusions,
it attracted unwanted attention from people I no longer want in my life,
it was not thorough enough,
I didn’t think through its social effects,
it caused the end of a relationship,
I chose not to defend it to those who criticized it.
Or maybe it failed because I let others’ criticism wear away at me—I took to heart what people said even if they did not say it to me directly, and even if I felt that what they had to say was disingenuous and/or harboring an agenda.
Or maybe I only THINK the poem failed because the response process made me paranoid.
Or maybe the poem failed because I over-edited the thing.
Or maybe it failed because it was not a poem at all, just crazy man writing in a notebook.
Or maybe it failed because I published what, like Thek’s notebooks, was a private act and should have remained private.
Or maybe it failed because I wanted too much to force an apotheosis—to present the poem made of names to all the names in the poem—which is something that is out of my control—only you, or God, can activate my inanimate language.
Or maybe it failed because it didn’t consistently use the full names of all the people named in it—again, that it was too private, too nestled in my interior.
Or maybe it didn’t fail at all, and it’s a fine poem. After all, someone liked it enough to publish it.
Or maybe it failed because it included names of people who are not poets, or people most poets (other than my closest friends) wouldn’t know. I did not create a context for the poem.
Which brings me to the question of audience. The poem, as with most of the poems I’ve written recently, was written for all of those named. Most of those people are poets. Some of those people are dead. Some I have no way of knowing. Some I know I’ll never see again. Some are my family. My idea was simple: create audience by naming as many of the intended members of that audience as I could, in its spontaneous moment of creation. It was a momentary gathering of forces, a confluence of forces for which I was the conduit. Which is maybe the realest reason why I feel like the poem failed: my expectations for its audience were too impossible, too high.
Though part of me bristles at this idea. Why shouldn’t my expectations be high? Especially when most of the audience is made up of other poets? Maybe what failed was that there was no apotheosis—the poem made of names never actually was presented to those named in the poem—I never sent the email with the link to “As I Write This.”
Or maybe the poem failed because I was listening to “For Kate I Wait” as I wrote the first draft—some demonic distraction all Ariel Pink’s fucking fault NOT MINE.
- JOSEPH BRADSHAW
Joseph Bradshaw is a poet, educator, and archivist. He is the author of several chapbooks, as well as the full-length In the Common Dream of George Oppen (Shearsman Books). He curates a readings series at Berl’s Poetry Shop in Brooklyn called Leslie Flint Presents, and is at work on a book about the afterlife of the New York School.