Love, Poetry, and Mixtapes
Making poetry into a deeply personal shared experience can save poetry. Revisiting an earlier essay.
Last month
over at created a post inspired by a Substack essay I written a while ago called Mixtapes Will Save Poetry. Of course, I think it is cool when people pick up the ball and start running with it, and I am grateful that David mentioned me in his post. Since a lot of people haven’t seen the essay I thought I would share a bit of it here with you since I have a lot more subscribers.It begins with lovestruck teenage Zina…
It was the 90’s. A heady time for sure, coming off of those big-haired Material Girlish 80’s when we Flashdanced into our dreams like Solid Gold dancers. I was in high school and developing my identity via fashion and music—while also falling madly in love.
Unrequited love.
Oh, no.
And it was a time when these contraptions existed…
Back in the day, people used to make “mixtapes” which were these totally illegal recordings of music off the radio and other cassettes. Making a tape was an act of love and vulnerability, hoping that whoever received the tape would love those songs as much as you did.
You may be thinking, Wait… Zina, you made a mixtape for a guy who didn’t love you?!
No! I wasn’t stupid. Young, yes. Impetuous, yes. But stupid?
Well, okay. Maybe a little.
What happened was that I fell for a boy who was so smart he was headed to a summer camp for gifted high schoolers — one where you had to be in the top three of your class to be considered for a spot. Never in my life had I been so incentivized to get my grade point average up. Anyway, I got into the summer camp. He didn’t like me — hence the unrequited love — but being a girl who liked smart boys I realized that I was at a camp where the smartest high school boys in the state were spending the summer. I found another boy.
But even better, I made friends with wicked smart girls. And one smart girl — I will name her Holly after the poisonous berry — was the bestest, coolest girl. She had blue hair, lived in Cambridge, and she made me the best mixtape ever — it expanded my thinking and those songs became a common language between us and influenced my vocabulary for the rest of my life.
Why are Gen Xers so nostalgic about mixtapes? What makes them so special? Mixtapes are an act of personal curation. We became our own tastemakers, gods of our own musical universes. We got to share the music that we loved, thereby enhancing our relationships with people who listened to those tapes. Sharing music allowed us to influence and shape each other.
So what do mixtapes have to do with poetry?
Sharing poetry allows us to influence and shape each other as well. So why doesn’t poetry have more of an influence on our daily lives? Our culture?
In 1991.
(that name again, get used to it) wrote a controversial essay called Can Poetry Matter? It begins:American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.
Poetry had become irrelevant because it wasn’t out in the world with the class of people who used to enjoy it. More than 30 years later we are still talking about the state of poetry in less than rosy terms. Take this First Things article by
, The Integrity of Poetry, where he writes,So where are we today, thirty years after Can Poetry Matter? We are still awash in mediocre verse. The only difference is that now people are reading it. Poets still write flat, fragmented verse to demonstrate they’ve learned the rules of the game and can now teach others those rules. Gioia rightly observed that this is poetry-as-a-means-to-an-end. But the ready-made and sloganeering work of the Instapoets is also poetry-as-a-means-to-an-end, though sometimes a more lucrative one.
Ouch. So basically poetry is alive and well, but a lot of what we see isn’t good enough to be influential.
Poetry is everywhere and there is so much of it.
How do you find and support a masterfully crafted poem that could influence the world? You need to have it influence a single individual.
This goes back to one of my friend’s comments:
I feel like there is poetry everywhere once you are aware of it, but it’s hard to find the exact poetry that speaks to me.
People now have access to poetry of all different types via the internet. Substack, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other outlets make poetry fairly accessible. However, there is so much poetry out there — How do you know what you’ll like?
If you go to someone you know, someone who cares about you, they will try to give you something you need. If you ask a friend for a poem chances are they are going to think carefully about what they send you. Make friends with people who absolutely love poetry. They probably have a breadth of knowledge and can suggest what poetry that will resonate with you.
But to make a point, I will tell you how I found A.E. Stallings. It was through
, an IRL friend who knows what my life is like and who over the years has proven to have sophisticated taste. What Holly was for music, Melanie is to my love of poetry. I read whatever she sends my way. The poetry we share with each other has become a common language between us. And it has allowed me to look at poetry — and the world — in a more generous and expansive manner.Find your Holly. Find your Melanie. In order for poetry to survive, especially in an age of AI where verse can be created with absolutely no soul, we need to make sharing excellent poetry an act of personal curation.
Who wants me to make them a mixtape?
Amusingly, I never made mixtapes in high school--I listened exclusively to classical music and had no one to share it with. (Though my oldest friend told me years later that she ended up listening to a lot I mentioned to her.) Musically I was largely isolated apart from some adults of my acquaintance. Funny story along those lines, once I was singing "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee," a fun Depression-era song, and my father started singing along and suddenly said, "Where in the world did you hear that?" Another time I was playing a recording of Walter Piston's Piano Concertino, and as he walked by my room he said, "Oh, Piston!" (It's a very obscure piece by a now-obscure composer, but I can see it being broadcast live in a concert back in the 1950s.) On the other hand, when we were in grad school my best friend/best man and I mailed each other mix tapes of our latest finds in the CD stores. And finally, one and only one time did I ever make a mixtape for a woman I was interested in, and of course, as fate has a sense of humor even more twisted than mine, she is the only ex I never ever want to see again.
As for poetry, that also was mostly individual and private for me, but not entirely. Two of my four semesters of independent study in classical Chinese involved me translating lots of poetry, which I have many warm memories of; and when I worked at a used bookstore in grad school, the owner, one of the most cultured people I've known, would urge all of us working there to borrow books from the poetry section on long-term loan. He loves poetry and saw that as his way of spreading it effectively, and I became acquainted with a number of contemporary-ish poets he pointed me to that way, like Nemerov, Levertov, Komunyakaa, and Hoagland. (The only case I can think of where we disagreed much was Tennyson's "In Memoriam," which he considers sonorous drivel and I consider sonorous somethings. It is also possible that he likes Alexander Pope rather more than I do, but I don't think that actually came up. We were more likely to wrangle over music, actually--he dislikes Claudio Arrau's Beethoven, whereas I'm quite fond of him, for example.)
Your posts are my "poetic mixtapes". They share the old and the new!