Greatest Poet Of Our Time

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #52

     What the word "poet" means to us can be very revealing.  And very convenient.

     Producers say a poet is someone who shares that avocation.  That is, at best, tautological and, at worst, presumptuous.

     Prosody geeks assume we're talking about those who exhibit superb technique.

     Performers think of their fellow YouTubers, slammers or open mikers.

     People who read or listen to poetry don't exist. 

     On the rare occasions when the public speaks of contemporary poets, it is usually in reference to those who bring us popular song lyrics.  For example, some might describe Elton John as a poet without knowing or caring that Bernie Taupin wrote the words to his tunes. 

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #156

     Naturally, Content Regents, regardless of their level of sophistication, rate and categorize poets according to their material.  Rebels love Charles Bukowski, romantics turn to Maya Angelou, and "critics" blurb an endless list of p[r]osers who can't write verse any better than they can.

     To be successful, one must appeal to all of these constituencies.  A great poet would be a modern Shakespeare whose audiences appreciate themes that stir blood and brains in language that survives its utterance.

     We don't have any of those.

     In order to produce a great poet we would need, in place and in sufficient quantity and quality:  education, performers, directors, critiquers, venues, networks and, above all, audiences.

      We don't have any of those either.

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Eratosphere

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #182

     In a CBC Radio parody, the fuddy-duddy Duddley Do-Right has tracked his quarry, Pierre La Puck, to an orgy.  As the two men confront each other the francophone fugitive expresses his surprise:

Pierre La Puck:  "Hey, English, what are you doing here?"

Dudley Do-Right:  "Nothing."

Pierre La Puck:  "That figures."

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Earl the Squirrel's Rule #73

     In "A Brief History of Time Online" we got a peek at the evolution of critical forums online.  In the beginning there was the unmoderated Usenet rec.arts.poems newsgroup, the first worldwide gathering of poets, critics, and innumerable TORLLS (sic, i.e. illiterate trolls).  When the web developed in the 1990s a few experts, including master trollfighter Gary Gamble, formed Poetry Free-For-All.  To this day the differences between PFFA and Eratosphere (or Gazebo) reflect the Usenet experience.  To wit, Eratospherean staff will show more patience with grousers within critical threads while PFFA closes fewer general conversation threads.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #80

     Compared to Face To Face ones, online workshops have a lot of conveniences and, yes, a few problems.  As an example of the latter, bad software virtually destroyed Gazebo and the Poets.org critical forums.  Regional and national disparities can crop up.  In any event, the commitment to honesty and improvement is what distinguishes this tiny community from the blurbosphere that constitutes the rest of the poetry world.  When their staff members tell us "PFFA isn't for everyone" they are well aware of the comic understatement.  In fact, very few are interested in learning how they can refine their poems, fewer still in helping them do so--especially if their "reward" is to be pointedly ignored or countered with defensive arguments.  Also, given what is being published, why bother?

     In a recent topic on Eratosphere, "State of the Sphere", members discussed the decline in traffic on that workshop.  In truth, "fewer dynamic discussions, less engagement, less energy, less creativity" has been the trend across all of the boards for more than a decade, resulting in these sites falling off Alexa.com's radar.  Why the drop?  Various causes are suggested:

1.  the rise in social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) offering a "better" showcase;  members who "only wrote for [their own] pleasure" or are "marched off this workshop" [by the unvarnished truth];

2.  fewer "posts about poetry than about people’s self-promoting interests";

3.  "a number of journals of not accepting any poems that have appeared anywhere online, if they can be found by searching";

4.  "occasional blowups of accusations and insults on the boards";

5.  "mediocrity";

6.  Gresham's Law;

7.  "shy folk";

8.  "the workshop as a showcase";

9.  a "convoluted double-somersault-with-a-reverse-twist approach to making a simple point."


     Here is our response in a nutshell:  People leave workshops for the same reason they come.

1.  Those who write for their [Facebook] friends and family don't want, need or appreciate critique.

2.  The 99+% who wish to discuss poets, not poems, will be better served elsewhere.

3.  Journals that exclude serious critique exclude serious poetry.  Ignore them.

4.  As we observed earlier, in conversational subforums various sites will treat disputes differently.  The most common administrative error happens after these exchanges occur in a critical thread.  Moderators who say "Settle down, you two!" should reconsider the disparate value of poets and critics in a critical environment.  Whiners are a dime a dozen, critiquers willing to contribute their time and expertise are gold.  If you think the poet-critique dynamic is a chicken-and-egg scenario involving equally valuable contributors explain why such forums have to place maximums on poems and minimums on critiques.

5.  Given that the idea is to improve the poems, mediocre would seem an appropriate, if not downright fortunate and propitious, place to start. 

6.  Ideally, a workshop is about driving out the bad, not the good.  Those who think "the bad" or "the good" refers to poets, not verses, are misguided, if not misplaced.

7.  Some gravitate to online workshops seeking anonymity, only to discover that having one's work examined by strangers in public is not a dream shared by many introverts.

8.  Workshops are not vanity sites.  They are not 'zines for finished products.  The critiquer's concern is the verse that emerges, not that which arrives or remains.

9.  Pedantry in technicians can be annoying.  Pedantry in ConPoets and Content Regents is unbearable.

      Why is this decline worrying?  Eratosphere is one of only two thriving sites where poets can come to get an expert opinion of their work.  These may be the only two gatherings in existence where the average denizen knows whether "Prufrock" and "The Red Wheel Barrow" are metrical or free verse.  As for past glories, we'll close by paraphrasing a poem that appeared originally on a less fortuitous venue: 

      This was the only place where verses could whisper their true names.

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Utile

utile

adjective
1.  an obsolete word for useful

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     To logicians, the word "utile" is hardly obsolete.  Nor is that a comprehensive definition.  It means, literally, "full of use(s)", as in "frequently employed for a variety of purposes." 

     To wit, if your home were about to go up in flames a fire extinguisher would certainly be useful.  Handy.  If that is its only purpose, though, it isn't considered "utile", even if you battle conflagrations with it every day.

     A Swiss Army knife has a number of various applications.  If it languishes in our drawer all of our lives, though, it isn't considered "utile".  Yes, it is useful, but only in theory.

     Let me cite an albeit crude example.  Suppose you decide to take salads to work for your lunch.  For a dollar or two you buy bowls like the one pictured here.  You mix in your dressing before going to work but the texture is unsatisfactory.  Plan B:  dressing on the side.  This works for a few days but carrying a separate container is inconvenient. 

     Buying salads at a restaurant or cafeteria is expensive and, perhaps, unpalatable.  While walking past a kiosk you spot the apparent solution to your problem:

     Brilliant!  A bowl with an insert at the top for a dressing canister!  All self-contained!  Just to be safe, you buy a few extras.  Toss a plastic fork into your lunch box and you're good to go!

     The satisfaction lasts a week or so.  Perhaps without a concrete, apparent reason, you lose enthusiasm and give up on your veggie lunches.

     What happened?

     Chances are good the hassle of remembering disposable utensils contributed to the loss of enthusiasm.  Maybe one broke, leaving you high and dry.

     As the picture to the right illustrates, something was missing from your kit:  a durable knife and fork that attaches to the box itself (along with a dressing vial).  In short, the two bowls above were insufficiently utile.  Lacking utility.  Inutile.

     If poetry's only purpose were to bore people with attempts to show how clever or profound we are it would be inutile.  Nobody would read it.

     Oh, wait...

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If Poetry Were Alive

From Nobody Reads Poetry:  No one, least of all death deniers defending the status quo, is more optimistic about poetry's reincarnation than we.  We also understand that it isn't something an editor will concede.  Some prefer the idealistic euphemism "Poetry needs fans", perhaps adding "because it's so hot!"  Close enough.

"One reader is a miracle; two, a mass movement." – Walter Lowenfels

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     Everyone knows that poetry is dead, as evidenced by the difficulty in imagining it alive.  Disingenuous or diplomatic deniers can be forgiven.  After all, how does it help a poet, critic or editor to admit that Nobody Reads Poetry? 

     More to the point, how can we judge something as dead if we've never seen it alive? 

     To put this in perspective, these are some things that have happened in our culture (in blue) or are happening in other cultures (in purple). Imagine:

• making $129,781,016.55¹ for one poem (as Robert Service did);


• turning down (before ultimately accepting) an offer of $109,000¹ for the rights to two poems (as Lord Byron did);


• topping the book sales charts for the 20th century (as Robert Service and "Dr. Seuss" did, along with Agatha Christie);
   
• routinely filling Carnegie Hall;


• appearing in syndicated poetry columns in every significant newspaper and magazine (ending with Edgar Guest, 1881-1959);

• people knowing and quoting living poets;


• people being able to recite poems written during their lifetime;


• bards traveling from town to town like rock bands;


• poets as sex symbols;
  


• a soldier writing the best known poem of that century in a letter home;


• poets inspiring scientific discovery;


• poets performing at ceremonies, including presidential inaugurations, without embarrassing themselves and the art form;


• trivia questions expecting you to finish lines of contemporary verse;


• impromptu recitation contests at your local pub.

     These are some signs that poetry is alive within a culture.  What, then, is the state of an art that we can scarcely imagine with a following?  Put another way, imagine if this were what being alive entailed.  Would we have bothered collecting and preserving the classics?  Why?  For whom?  Thus, even if one contradicts all of the facts above, as some ConPoets do, there remains the inescapable inference that contemporary verse has been, in other times and places, infinitely more visible than it is now.

     If poetry were alive one of the next five strangers you meet would be able to recite a recently written poem along with you.

     Spoiler alert:  You will win a lottery before that happens.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #50

Why Does It Matter?

     A friend who should have known better asked me:  "Why does it matter that contemporary poetry's audience has disappeared?"

     Sputter.  Gack!  Jesus.

     Ahem.  This is a cruel question to ask someone trying to reduce their use of hyperbole.

     We are talking about one of the most overlooked extinctions in human history.  The French dropped a verb tense, the past perfect, from their spoken language, relegating it to the mists of anachronism.  Not to be outdone, we English managed to misplace an entire mode of speech!  Of which we have only two.  What is more, we accomplished this feat in less than a century and without anyone noticing!  In 1920 Grade 6 graduates knew more about poetry than most PhD students² today.  We've gone from average people reciting verse at length to a time when few can cough up a single line of poetry written in their lifetime.

Gordon Ramsay

     It may be impossible to understand poetry's condition if we have never watched an episode of "Restaurant Impossible" with Robert Irvine or "Kitchen Nightmares" with Gordon Ramsay.  Here's the plot:  people "diagonally parked in a parallel universe" who have no knowledge of or interest in the restaurant business buy an eatery, often as a retirement strategy.  No, really.  These clowns spend no time considering decor, recipes, successful outlets or the business practicalities--not even after things go downhill.  Hey, what do atmosphere, cuisine, competition or marketing have to do with the hospitality industry, right?

     These triflers run their establishment into the ground until their houses are remortgaged, their life savings are gone, and the premises are overrun with grease, dirt and vermin.  Enter The Hero, whose first task is to convince the owners that the tasteless frozen cow pies they're slopping onto dishes just might be the reason why two hundred Saturday night diners have dwindled to four.  The Hero teaches the owners and staff how to cook, clean and present themselves and their food for the customers.  Meanwhile, an interior decorator makes the place look less like a dungeon.  Hatred of The Hero turns to love, the enterprise survives and everyone lives happily ever after.

     That's what has to happen to poetry. 

     The good news is that it only has to happen once.  Until then, for all we know, there may be a Homer, a Shakespeare or a Maz being ignored, as all contemporary poets are.

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Footnotes:

¹ - All figures converted to 2014 currency for convenience.

² - "The anti-Shakespeare crew tends to have a dollop
of class snobbery, and doesn't understand that a graduate
of a quality 'grammar school' in the late 16th century
had a far more thorough schooling in the classics than
today's undergraduate classics major."

  - Michael Juster ("Who Wrote Shakespeare?", Eratosphere, 2014-05-03)

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Links:

1. "Poets?  Conservative?"

2. "Poets?  Liberal?"

3. If Poetry Were Alive

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Preservation, Presentation and Promotion - Part IV of III

Imagine two people standing directly in front of you arguing about and guessing as to whether you like green versus yellow string beans.

What is wrong with that scene?

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This is the fourth in a three-part series on contemporary poetry communities: page, stage and pixel. Today we discuss the Demand Side; we do so as an abstract afterthought for the simplest of reasons: the Demand Side doesn't exist.

Like Billy Collins before him, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser endeavors to repopularize poetry. Say what you will about their poetry but, among us squirrels, Billy and Ted are among the good guys.

Under the auspices of The Poetry Foundation, Mr. Kooser runs the American Life in Poetry column, citing examples of poetry that he thinks would appeal to the American reader.

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"American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture."

"The poem in each column is brief and will be enjoyable and enlightening to readers of newspapers and online publications."

(Emphasis mine.)

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What kind of verse does Mr. Kooser think will appeal to avid American prose readers? Not wanting to single anyone out, I took the first poem with a permanent link at the time of this posting. Please take a moment to click on this link to read Column 354, "Sometimes, When the Light" by Lisel Mueller, which ends with these scintillating, original and non-manipulative Show-Don't-Tell lines:

so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.

Just for the sake of argument, let's say that I don't share Ted Kooser's opinion that "readers of newspapers and online publications" would be enthusiastic about this poem. I suppose we could argue about aesthetics, back and forth, forever. Due to the sample size, such a disagreement between the two of us would be pointless even as a move toward consensus. Here's a radical thought, though:

If we want to know what the reading public thinks of poems like this, why not ask them?

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