But this “ferment,” as District poet Kim Roberts calls what is happening in the scene today, also encourages a cross-pollination of forms — the traditional with the radical, the formal with the ordinary — is new for contemporary poetry. Whatever this new poetry’s politics or its background or its concerns, that crossbreeding is its strength.
One of the hardest-working redoubts of this movement is the Federal Poets, founded in 1944 for workers for the federal government and has been meeting ever since (members no longer have to work for the government). The group, whose original participants wrote mostly purply, rhyming verse on such subjects as the weather, or dessert, is now an unclassifiable mix of subjects and styles. Some of its members have backgrounds in writing, but others don’t. Most members have been attending meetings for years and some for decades.
On a Saturday afternoon, a dozen members convened for their monthly workshop at the West End Public Library. On this day, the first poem to be workshopped was “Tangerine,” by Michelle Seaman, a prospective member who wore her grayish-brown hair in pigtails. A tango class was practicing in the room next door, and at intervals the tinny strains of the bandoneon came wavering through the wall. Seaman read the poem, a wistful rumination on childhood’s losses, in a sighing singsong that seemed to temporarily hypnotize the room. “Loraxes, each of us, speaking / for the trees. Our little fists raised / in defense of thin-branched chokecherry…”
There was a short pause when she finished, and then the group descended on the poem like a swarm of locusts.
“Loraxes, define,” said Dean Blehert, a lean, bearded man who had joined the workshop in 1983, and who for 30 years wrote and distributed Deanotations, a broadsheet of his poetry, to subscribers worldwide.
“He’s the little character that speaks for the trees,” said Seaman, referring to the Dr. Seuss book “The Lorax.”
“Maybe it needs another stanza to kind of feel out the brother,” said Don Illich, in glasses and a T-shirt with the Chevrolet logo on it, who at 38 was one of the youngest in the room. “Where is he, what is he doing?”
“I see it as a fairly simple poem,” said Blehert after a moment, “and that’s its strength and weakness. The weakness is its fairly obvious message. I don’t know that filling it up with biography is going to do it.”
“Thank you, everybody,” Seaman said. It was her second visit to the workshop. At three visits, she would become a member, and there were muttered allusions to the hazing she would likely undergo the next time.
The group worked through several relatively straightforward descriptive poems, poems conceived around a single notion and its ostensible poeticness — a cave full of prehistoric paintings, for example, or an old bluesman in his shack — fussing with the mechanics of hyperbole and the effects of imagery. The day’s last poem was by Doug Wilkinson, who has a lanky guy in navy corduroys, with a boyish face and graying hair. Wilkinson’s route to poetry had been, even by Federal Poets standards, circuitous. He had grown up in the San Fernando Valley, in a household that was, he said, “against education.” His father, who ran a furniture refinishing business with Wilkinson’s uncle, felt that “men should work; that was what was appropriate.”
Wilkinson’s parents declined to send him to college, so after graduating from high school in 1974, he began working his way through with a series of odd jobs that included transporting diseased body parts for doctors in Hollywood and making artificial trees. (At one point, he needed his mother’s signature on a financial aid form; she refused. “I want to write a poem about that,” he told me, “but I haven’t figured out how to do it without sounding like I’m crying.”) Then, when Wilkinson was 27, his father died, leaving him and his brothers each $60,000, which Wilkinson promptly used to enroll in school full time.
Wilkinson’s studies were a search for what he calls, slightly self-deprecatingly, “the big answer.” “I took everything I could find with ‘religion’ in the title,” he says. “The anthropology of religion, religion and society, the history of religion.” He discovered philosophy when, in a course called “World’s Great Religions,” a student asked which religion was true, and the professor told him that that was a question for philosophers. For 20 years, Wilkinson steered a course through various higher-learning institutions, studying philosophy and religion. He began, and then left, a Ph.D. program in spirituality at Catholic University and a master’s program in Hinduism at American University. For a time, he thought he would become a monk.
But no matter what he studied, “I never found the big answers,” he says. Working as a bookseller, he began to read poetry. He assembled a collection of poems that had an element of spirituality or that grappled with the questions that dogged him. He wrote a poem after breaking up with his girlfriend. He began to think that poetry was the sort of methodology, applicable to life’s unknowables, that he had been trying to find; “a way of thinking.” He joined the Federal Poets and began writing regularly.
Wilkinson’s relationship to poetry has a devotional aspect to it. He keeps with him a folder of his 25 favorite religious poems, arranged in order of importance; the order occasionally changes. No. 5 is “Tasting Heaven” by Robert Bly; No. 3 is “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver, which ends, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
To support himself these days, Wilkinson is a driving instructor and sells books on the Internet. The demand is mostly for textbooks. In the 10 years he has been selling, no one has ever bought a book of poetry.
The poem that Wilkinson brought to the workshop was called “An Explanation.”
***
When I was fourteen, my brother
sprayed Windex into my eyes
and then laughed. Time froze
and a supernatural being
who looked just like a human being
pulled me aside and told me
that I had a choice
between being blinded but loved by my father
and retaining my vision.
I chose, and time began again,
and I didn’t remember the supernatural being
or the choice, and I ran
and told my father what my brother
did, and my father got mad at me
and told me that I needed
to get along better with my brother.
***
The group seemed underwhelmed by the poem. “Doug comes up with really interesting scenarios, but it just feels flat,” Don Illich said. “The father saying you just need to get along better ...” He trailed off.
“Maybe the brother could shoot a water pistol in your eyes,” someone suggested.
“Well, Windex is pretty good,” said Blehert, and there was a brief discussion about whether that would actually blind you. Blehert stared at his copy of the poem. “The indication is, if you retain your vision, you won’t be loved,” he said thoughtfully.
“Maybe look for a twist that matches the quality of your other twists,” someone suggested.
Wilkinson was sitting very still in his chair at the end of the table. “None of what you have said — is what was meant — by the title,” he said slowly. There was an expectant pause. “The choice that the supernatural being gave him is the explanation — for why his father — did not love him.” The room considered this for a moment, and then someone realized it was nearly 5 o’clock, and people began to collect their papers and push back their chairs.
Outside it was warm, and the sun was slanting across the sidewalks. Wilkinson and Illich and other members of the group retired, as they often do, to the Greek restaurant around the corner, where they crowded into adjacent tables to wind down the afternoon. They talked about writing, but they talked about other things, too.
Lauren Wilcox is a writer living in New Jersey. She can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.
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