Patrick Herron almost always has something interesting to say, viz this note to the ImitaPo list:

The presence of the quotidian in verse seems to remain an essential and perhaps even distinguishing characteristic of what is commonly lumped and labeled as "American" poetry.  We can find it in Whitman, Pound, Eliot ("hurry up please it's time"), O'Hara (who expands it to regularly include personal names), Ginsberg, and especially Ron all over your work ("Nissan stanza" or "The beer can on the sidewalk had been crushed flat" as two of perhaps thousands of examples).  Alan too.  I was just reading one of Kasey's poems on VeRT and it was laden with almost paranoiac quotidian statements, statements that should be shocking but just aren't.  I find myself using the web for finding and co-opting quotidian text from time to time (similar to what is in Kasey's poem I'd guess).  But I don't understand why or what makes the quotidian poetic.  Is it in the nominal grounding of the abstract, perhaps as some sort of exalted discrepancy with a vast valley between the peaks of the particular and the general?

Shklovsky somewhere talks about how the aesthetic – I’m not sure if that’s how he identifies the category, but it is how I remember it – always moves to incorporate all that is on its fringe, rather like The Blob. Or imperialism. Put more positively: one of the duties of poetry is to continually expand what poetry can include & discuss.

For me, at least, this isn’t about theory. I’ve written before about the importance of William Carlos Williams’ poem, “The Desert Music,” in shaping my recognition that I was to be a poet. While, in retrospect, this is the most traditionally narrative of Williams’ poems, it was precisely its other elements – especially the depiction of the person sleeping on the bridge – that enabled me at the age of 16 to “get” how poetry was uniquely able to incorporate what Williams would have characterized as despised materials, but which I would have identified (then & now) as the “invisible,” the background, the details that in fact make up the surfaces and textures of daily life. It was exactly this capacity for what Patrick calls the quotidian that brought me to poetry.

I had been writing since the age of 10 in order, I realize now – I couldn’t have articulated it then – to bring order to my world. Like more than a few other poets, I was raised in a classically dysfunctional family – the 500 pound gorilla in our living room that went unseen & undiscussed was my grandmother’s mental illness – and writing gave me not only a place to escape (although it did that also), but critical tools I could not have found any other way as a pre-teen.

However, raised in a house in which the only creative work around were four-to-a-volume Readers Digest Condensed Novels, the idea of poetry, let alone all its possibilities, was outside my field of vision until I picked up that volume by Williams in the Albany Public Library sometime around 1962. At that time, I was writing dreadful teenage fiction. I was under the impression – and I’ve seen some of the responses to Patrick’s post on ImitaPo that reflect this position – that one was constrained to craft novels around characters and action in order to get to this “real” material, the so-called background detail. From my perspective, the so-called elements of the “narrative drive” of a novel were really just an excuse for enabling the author to incorporate what mattered most: these tiny elements at the margins. The idea of a literature that could raise the invisible up to the field of vision, in & of itself, was a revelation.

So for me, the quotidian, to call it that (I never think of it as such), is not about adding a layer of texture for the sake of enhancing a reality effect. The invisible or marginal is not adjunct to the work: it is the work itself. I want you to understand that dust bunny in the corner under your desk. The whole of human history can be found there.

But how that history is to be discovered matters terribly. One of the primary objections I have to the school of quietude is its grotesque sense of heroism, even when it’s a heroism of everyday objects. A trowel is not a trope. This always seems to me a fundamental dishonesty, a true violation of any pact with the reader, even with the self. It’s a betrayal of the world of objects & of the objective. Such poetry is founded on precisely the dynamics that render the most critical elements of the world invisible. So when I take exception to the writing of a Robert Lowell or a Phil Levine or a Linda Gregg or an Alfred Corn, it’s really an allegiance to that ten year old boy I once was to which I continue to stand fast. I won’t betray him by creating a false world, a poetry of lies.

Against this I would pose Francis Ponge’s uses of the object as exemplary. His use of soap, his elaboration of fauna. His insistence on the thingness of things. To this I would add the thingness of words, their literal immanence, which is what I get out of Stein and so much of the best writing of the past thirty years. This has very little to do with any grounding of the abstract. Rather, I see it as an issue of being present in my own life. This is how poetry matters.