The Outerview Series: Part XIV - Convenient Poetics

 

 

      "Poets: Really, they're the laziest, stupidest people I know." - Christian Bök, 2009

       Convenient Poetics is an "aesthetic" formed around ignorances.  If we have never learned basic scansion--which most haven't--then meter isn't necessary.  We can just write prose and let our ENTER key take things from there.  Sonics?  Too much effort.  Performance?  Why bother as long a publisher will put it in print?  It's not like anyone is going to want to hear or read this, right?

      When the failure of this approach is pointed out Convenient Poets ("ConPos") shrug and say:

"Poetry is subjective!"

      While this may be true, three goat herders in Outer Mongolia won't form a market large enough to make the effort worthwhile.  Yes, it does matter if people like your work.

       As poetry faded into obscurity an insignificant few keepers of the flame remained in the center.  Without prosody, the rest were left with nothing except Convenient Poetics and, of course, the dreaded Content Regency.

On the Right

       On the monied end of the spectrum are the universities, supported by the public, alumni, and tuitions, and the Foundation, supported by the Ruth Lilly (1915-2009) $200M donation in 2003.  To its credit, the Poetry Foundation has a comprehensive online archive and worked with the National Endowment for the Arts Endowment to give us "Poetry Out Loud!"  Meanwhile, Poetry Magazine and academia created cryptocrap:  artless pseudo-intellectual amphigouri.  Brain farts.  No technique.  No rhythm.  No performance value.  

    "It's too boring to be prose so it must be poetry!"

On the Left

       Performance fans skew younger.  We might see them as slammers, spoken worders or open mikers.  The content is all too "accessible":  Heart farts.  To their credit, these actors often memorize their presentations.  

       Thus, technicians understand that poetry is memorable speech while academics insist that it is forgettable writing.  And the spoken word poets?  By definition, they understand that poetry is speech and they do recognize the value of performance and memory.  They just have to add more mnemonics and find content beyond their own navels.  

Conclusion

        It follows that any hope of creating iconic poems and reviving poetry itself lies in educating spoken verse enthusiasts.

 

The Outerview Series: Part XIII - The Densuke Problem

 

      The black Densuke watermelon is grown only on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.  It is known for its sweetness and rarity.  An early crop might number as few as 65, fetching a price of $6,100 each.

      In gaming theory there is La Macheide:  "The perfection of an endeavor destroys it."

      The "Densuke problem" would seem a wonderful one to have.  Suppose you wrote the ultimate contemporary poem, one that towered over lesser products as the Densuke does.  If people were to read it they would immediately want to memorize it, making it the first iconic verse since that 1961 limerick about a man from Nantucket.  It could, conceivably, revive a dead mode of speech.  (For now, we'll ignore song lyrics.)

      So what do you do with this work?

      "Publish it!  In the biggest poetry magazine around!"

      Suppose this publication paid you for the rights to publish it but never did so, effectively killing it.  Would you be surprised?

      "I'd be shocked!  Why would they do that?"

      Suppose they published it.  What would be everyone's first thought?

      "It would be:  'Wow!  This is excellent!'"

      Okay.  What would the public's second thought be?

      "What do you mean?"

      Upon realizing that you've discovered a unicorn, what do you wonder?

      [Pause for thought.]

      "'Are there other unicorns?  A mommy and daddy unicorn...?'"

      And if not?

      "'...and if not, why not?'"

      Exactly!  Why can't more poems be this good?  Or, at least, close?

      "Because poems this good are rare?"

      Precisely.  To grok what is going on we need to understand Gresham's Law:

 "Bad money drives out good."

      Suppose you go to an auction with cash backed up by a gold standard.  Everyone else outbids you with crypto-coin "dollars", inflating prices in the process.  Knowing your money is being grossly undervalued you withdraw immediately.

      Now suppose you've written a generational masterpiece.  Look around at what publishers are putting out these days.  What few readers these enjoy are those trying to discern what type of prose with linebreaks the editor likes (e.g. cryptocrap?  Shaggy dog stories?  Long-winded aphorisms?  Rants?  Heart farts?).  Do you want your work to be associated with this doggeral and lineated prose?  Do you trust the aesthetic judgment of editors cranking this stuff out?  Not surprisingly, the best poets of this century don't bother with print publishing.  Bad poetry drives out good.

      Even when poetry was at its height, canonical poems averaged about one per year [other than the Shakespeare blip].  Since the death of poetry that may be less then one per decade.  There is a paucity of originality and a grotesque disregard for technique.

      Enter you, with your unicorn/Densuke poem.  The editor has to fill pages and your effort is going to make all others look bad by comparison.  Even if this editor were a technician--which none of the major ones are--the instinct might be to not publish it.

      It follows logically that if we want to reanimate this dead mode of speech we'll need to do so by performing it.