VI. Can We Train Poets to Perceive?
Murielle Mobengo: You’ve mentioned two things that seem closely connected: peer culture and training.
If poets and artists are going to develop a peer culture — if breakthroughs are going to become possible through something more than isolated individual practice — then training becomes part of the question.
What do you envision for disciplines like poetry and art?
Loïc Yengo: I’ve mentioned training, but I realize that in its current form it would be difficult simply to translate scientific training across disciplines.
The substance of what I’m trying to describe is more an ethos: placing a strong emphasis on continually improving the tools you use to observe the world.
Scientists do this all the time. We build or acquire technologies that allow us to observe with greater accuracy or better resolution.
Something similar may already happen organically for poets. You might be drawn toward philosophy, sacred texts, meditation, or other forms of knowledge. But perhaps training could help the poet understand those explorations differently: as ways of improving or acquiring technologies through which the self can be observed with greater accuracy.
Murielle: So training wouldn’t necessarily mean becoming an academic.
Loïc: Exactly. And that’s an important distinction, because I’m trying to distinguish science from academia.
If you’re a poet who doesn’t come from an academic tradition, some forms of knowledge — philosophy, for example — can appear very remote from where you are. Academic knowledge can feel encrypted.
But the point isn’t to become an academic. You’re on a journey that is yours, but it’s also a journey shared across the history of poets. Acquiring those tools can help you travel further along it.
And I don’t have complete clarity about what that training should look like, because science actually faces a similar problem: how do we train good scientists?
There is a tension between technology and science. For me, the scientist is fundamentally concerned with the question and the observation. Technology is a tool toward that.
But sometimes, in academia, we train scientists to master the tools and forget to teach them to observe the world — which is the most important thing.
Murielle: That’s interesting, because academia presents a problem for poetry too.
I’m going to take responsibility for what I’m about to say: many of the poets who have given humanity extraordinary, universal works weren’t trained academically as poets.
But we’ve reached a point where practicing an activity increasingly means having a profession, and having a profession means being trained for it, which usually means going to school.
And schools are wonderful. They’re places where we learn things.
But I’m wondering: if we actually had to design a curriculum for a poet, what would it look like?
Loïc: That’s a fantastic question.
Based on what we’ve been discussing, I think you could begin by asking: what are you describing as a poet?
Each person may have a subjective answer to that, but the answer still has to connect in some way to this shared problem we’ve been discussing.
And I think anyone who is sharing knowledge needs to be able to locate themselves within a greater scheme of things. Where do you fit into this?
That would be important to learn.
Then you could say: all right, this is what you want to describe. Now let’s talk about how you observe what you want to describe.
And that’s where perception comes in.
Perception isn’t simply sensitivity. There’s obviously an intersection between the two, and I imagine that people drawn to a curriculum like this would already tend to be very sensitive.
But perhaps the training could help move someone from being sensitive to being perceptive.
Murielle: Yes.
Loïc: To expand perception through tools.
Meditation could be one. Philosophy could be another.
Philosophy is an enormous world, so perhaps you would provide entry points — not to be restrictive, but to show very concretely how philosophy can provide tools for observation.
There are probably other things. I’m really just following what has emerged through the flow of this conversation.
But there’s one more thing that this conversation itself is demonstrating, and I would definitely include it: contact with other disciplines.
Create points of contact. Give people training as poets opportunities to speak with people working in other fields.
Murielle: That’s a great one.
It reminds me of something David Capps told me the first time I interviewed him. He had a student who wanted to write a dissertation on lesbian poetry. David asked her what angle she wanted to take and whether she was going to discuss Sappho.
She didn’t know who Sappho was.
And that brings us back not only to training, but to peer culture.
Because poetry has a peculiar problem: many of the poets who have given us the poetic material we continue to live with are dead.
Obviously, poets aren’t all dead. I’m here. David is a poet. Sourav is a poet. Valentin is a poet.
But death does something strange to artists and poets. It forces people to pay attention. The work is studied, transmitted, absorbed into culture. Suddenly the poet becomes eternal.
So perhaps we need to find a peer culture that allows us to establish meaningful relationships with poets of the past while we’re still alive.
Loïc: And that relates to the larger question of what training is for.
Because if your training as a poet is entirely about mastering techniques, eventually someone opens the door at the end of your education and asks: what do you want to describe?
And what happens if you’ve never really been asked that question?
This is also one of my criticisms of curricula. What determines whether you progress is generally how you’re assessed. And you’re assessed on things like: Can you reproduce this? Can you analyze this text? Can you perform this technique?
Those aren’t necessarily the questions that matter.
You can learn the techniques and the tools and still arrive at the end thinking: I haven’t learned what I actually came here to learn.
Because the thing that brought you there in the first place was creating.
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