Review by Peter Mladinic

A shipment of books has come into a bookstore. Time to unpack the boxes and shelve the books. One employee might put Poetry & Pigeons (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, Russell, Kentucky) in the Poetry section, another, on the shelf for Literary Criticism. After all, this isn’t a book of poems. But then, it’s not criticism in ways that a book like Jay Rogoff’s Becoming Poetry: Poets and Their Methods is criticism. It’s not criticism along the lines of Harold Bloom, Randall Jarrell, and Helen Vendler. But the second employee, the more anal-retentive of the two, would be justified for their choice. George Franklin’s book is criticism, but its personal nature distinguishes him from the other authors, even the strongly opinionated Bloom. Franklin’s I is a gift to his readers: lucid, passionate, knowledgeable, and balanced. A clear-headed I whose biases are integral with his being open-minded. The word I is at the heart of these essays about the reading, writing, and publishing of poetry.

In a video, the fiction writer ZZ Packer talks about a writer who has written a long novel but never reads any other writers. She suggests that is preposterous, even absurd. George Franklin might share her sentiment. Franklin feels or, let’s say, suspects that poets today read only their contemporaries and are therefore limiting themselves. “Beware of poets who seek to avoid belatedness by not reading,” he says in the essay “Born Too Late?” His belatedness is a reference to poets of past centuries, such as John Donne, John Milton, and Christina Rossetti, and on up to the twentieth century. Nothing comes from nothing, and poets who don’t read their predecessors limit and deprive themselves of a cannon of good and great poetry. “We don’t become better poets by pretending the last few thousand years of poetry don’t matter.” Maybe this has always been the case: The only readers of poetry are poets, and maybe a few friends and relations. Why read poetry? Because “it struggles to create a reality that affirms our dignity as individual selves even in those moments when it despairs of its own ability to change anything.”

How to write poetry? In one essay Franklin describes the writing of poetry as “a lonely business.” He likens that writing to a person alone in a room with language. Rather than a way to write, readers will find in these essays wisdom threaded with wry humor and clearly stated ideas. “The image is at the heart of poetry.” Franklin’s ideas on how an image works are very good, every bit as good as Bloom’s, Jarrell’s, and Vendler’s. “The image is the re-creation of the exterior world.” He goes on to say, “While the image does not change the exterior world, it does manipulate the reader’s response . . . and it does offer the possibility of an alternative world.”

A human voice is like a person’s signature.  George Franklin talks about voice and its significance in the writing of poetry; he talks about poems being born out of inner conflict and there not being any one style, and he differentiates between poems and products that come off the literary assembly line. While he acknowledges the usefulness of workshops and prompts, he does not exclude himself from his criticism of their drawbacks: For workshops, only you can write your poem; for prompts, experiences that stem from inner conflict. “If we can deepen our experiences, which we do in all sorts of ways, we may well write better poems or fiction.” Readers can be sure he is mindful of Robert Frost’s saying that poetry is a kind of thing that poets write. Franklin says, “Poetry is a language-tool that human beings developed to communicate complex perceptional and emotional states.” He does not tell his readers how to write it.

The word is I. It’s very relevant to what he says about publishing. He’s been at both ends of the spectrum, as a person who submits poems to journals, and as an editor who reads poems for journals. “Most submissions will be rejected.” He elaborates, conveys ideas that come from his experiences. While the quoted statement might connote bad news, there is much good news. For one, there are more opportunities for poets to publish today than ever before.

“There are many thousands of literary magazines and journals in the United States alone. . . .” One myth he dispels is that poems are rejected because they are bad. Editors are human beings, and what one editor rejects another might accept. Writers want to publish because publishing is a releasing of the poem from the self into the world. He speaks of “an impulse toward autonomy” and “in the end . . . it’s a noble enterprise.” A tone of optimism underscores his essays on publishing; in so many ways he gives poets reasons not to be discouraged by rejection.

“There is no secret sauce. The skills of writing are learned in two ways, by reading and writing.” Said by one “who’s been there”; that’s the impression. Said with authority and humility, and generosity. One of the most compelling and poignant parts of this book is “On the Irrational,” which contains an anecdote about the author’s reading one of his poems at a church service for a close friend who died suddenly. The poem professed the author’s disbelief in God, and the minister thanked him for sharing it, but a reader can only imagine that in the midst of the poet’s grief there was this awkward, unsettling, true-to-life moment. Auden in his elegy for Yeats says, “He became his admirers.” Franklin says at the end of this essay, “Find a way to be present in the emptiness created by that death and at the same time to continue.” Readers will or should say at the end of Poetry & Pigeons, “Thank you for sharing.”  This book is a contribution to the canon of contemporary literature, deserving not only of readers but also of accolades.