Sandy Pool, today’s contributor to The Optimisms Project, sees no contradiction in being both mean and optimistic. “The willingness to be unpleasant (when necessary) in poetry,” Pool insists, “is the key to unlocking the crafty poet spy.”
Hey, no argument here.
For project curator Jacob McArthur Mooney’s introduction to The Optimisms Project please go here.
What makes you feel optimistic about the future of poetry in Canada?
On Being Mean and Meaning It:
the art of socio-poetic optimism
Poesis, or literally the act of making has always been imbued with a cock-eyed sense of optimism. After all, the question of what we are making, inevitably begs the larger question: why are we making it? As a political poet, my answer has undoubtedly been to create a kind of omni-directional hope; the kind of hope which questions and prods, not only the situation itself, but also the poetic container. To quote Tony Hoagland, “Once upon a time, meanness (in poetry) was poetically permissible, even celebrated.” This sense of being mean or brutal is often misconstrued as lacking in optimism. However, the willingness to be unpleasant (when necessary) in poetry is the key to unlocking the crafty poet spy. To quote Hoagland: “the willingness to be offensive sets free the ruthless observer in all of us, the spiteful perceptive angel who sees and tells, unimpeded by nicety or second thoughts. There is truth-telling, and more in meanness.” Unlike Hoagland, I don’t necessarily advocate documentary objectivity without a sense of poetic irony. The reason I am willing to show the unpleasant is that it allows me to shed a kind of fuzzy problematic light on the world; a kind of optimistic light, which searches, and asks for more. Of course, there is always a personal tone in my meanness, perhaps more rigidly pessimistic than I intended, but I do try to view poems as small, complicated containers for optimism. My poetic offerings are not glasses, either half full or half empty; they are grasshoppers covered in chocolate.
Sandy Pool is a poet and multi-disciplinary pessimist who lives in Toronto. She has been published in literary journals across the country and was most recently anthologized in TOK: Writing the New Toronto and Writing Without Direction, upcoming with Clark-Nova Books. Her first book, Exploding Into Night, was recently published with Guernica Editions, and her opera “One Lump Or Two” premiered with Tapestry New Opera Works in 2009. Currently Sandy teaches at Humber College and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Calgary.
