The Boring and the Death

      Traditionally, one way to mock a poem was to read it (often in what we now call "poet voice") aloud.  This was a way of saying that the words were neither memorizable nor worthy of memorization--in short, that they didn't constitute poetry by any useful definition.  Today, parody has met practice as poets are caught on camera, in public, reading their own work.  To be clear, these are not works in process.  These weren't handed to the poet minutes before going onstage.  And the poets didn't all suffer some catastrophic illness or accident that deprived them of short term memory.  We're talking laziness and lack of craft.  This being poetry's "norm" is proof of morbidity.  Audiences don't object because there are no audiences.

      Naturally, poetry editors, publishers and promoters can't accept this truth, even to the point of denying it.  After all, it undermines everything they're trying to do.  However, we can hardly cooperate in reanimating something without acknowledging that it is, in fact, dead.  (We'll discuss how page poets and outlets will benefit from stage poets in future posts.)

Consider this albeit perverse view

     You don't need to be a gardener to know that annuals die each winter.  Perhaps this was an Ice Age for poetry.  Can this be spring?  For an individual, this could be a "glass half full" opportunity.  The few great poets are retired and/or unknown to the public, the few that are recognized aren't poets, and virtually no one, least of all the authors themselves, can perform the stuff.  The path is wide open for anyone who knows the craft and can do or network with those who can do  the three P's:  Performance, Presentation (e.g. videos), and Promotion.  Note that, with the Internet in general, YouTube in particular, we have a facility humankind has never had:  the ease of individuals to find a global reception not just for text and still pictures (e.g. photos, paintings, graphics) but for video as well.  We can talk  to the world!

      It being a mode of speech, poetry needs to be performed.  Not read.  Would you watch a movie where the characters read from scripts?  Or woodenly from prompters?  And, no, we're not talking about equally unmodulated slammers screaming and gesticulating wildly for three solid minutes.  We're talking performance, something so rare that we have to re-use the same examples over and over again.

      To illustrate, compare Andy Garcia's performance of "The Goring and the Death" from Federico Garcia Lorca's "Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías" to the dreaded "poet voice" we know all to well:

      Brace yourself for Gregory Orr reading "Gathering the Bones":

William Ernest Henley's "Invictus", written in 1875, published in "Book of Verses" under "Life and Death (Echoes)", 1888:

Out of the night that covers me,
      Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
      For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
       I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
      Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
      Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
      How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
      I am the captain of my soul.

      Consider this appearance by Morgan Freeman on the Charlie Rose show when they discuss Nelson Mandala.

     Rewind a few hundred times over the moment at the :38 second mark where Morgan laughs and gives a doleful look at Charlie Rose's offer of the poem's text.  Note how incredulous the host is that a person--an award winning professional actor, no less--can actually [gasp!] recite a classic 16 line poem from memory.

     Charlie shows us how dead English poetry is.

     Morgan shows us how it can be reincarnated.

The State of the Art

     We begin by apologizing to Divya Victor for singling out "Locution/Location" from all the other vacuous dreck being put out today.  We choose this sample because even its preface is pretensious nonsense:

This is what writing is: I one language, I another language, and between the two, the line that makes them vibrate; writing? forms a passageway between two shores.

—Hélène Cixous, “Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing”

     This one seems to be about the weighty issue surrounding the pronunciation of the letter "H".  We won't need more than the first strophe to make our point:

She sings the letters
to my daughter, strings them
marigolds into garlands
in the order of the alphabet
E, F, G, she
tugs the haitch, taut and long
far from the breast, a letter
the length of a coast, the width
of a gull’s caw, she now carries
the haitch like I will carry the gurney
later, weightless
hammer
of feather
the letters swim with the orange petals
around & around
her, child & crone
milkflesh holme, mouthly
smelling of talc and gooseberry

      No one, least of all the author, would bother to memorize this word salad, let alone perform it.  Were anyone to do so the audience would look at them like pigs in "The Commissar's Report", as if to ask "Why are you inflicting this on us?"  One would look like a jackass.  Hence the "poetry reading", which doesn't involve the presenter looking listeners in the eye.  It is, in every sense, the antipodal opposite of poetry.

     Contrast the typical poetry reading  to Christopher Plummer's performance of "Brown Penny"  by William Butler Yeats.

     What is the upshot of this lack of exposure to good performance, let alone good contemporary writing?

     Recently, we posted this challenge here, in a [novice] showcase group, and in a gathering of most of the world's top poets and editors:

Describe a poem that Facebookers would Share.    

      No one could visualize such a thing.  Not only could they not recall a time they Shared or Retweeted any verse themselves, they could not envision what such a piece would look like. 

Thus, not only is poetry dead, but none of us can imagine it being alive.

     Think about that for a while.

Surviving the Death of Poetry

     If poetry is alive we should be undertaking to reach the public through it.

     If poetry is dead we should be undertaking.

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     Poetry, that thing that thrived on the audience's love of it, is dead.  A mode of communication that once rivaled the novel now fights for the same public attention afforded lacrosse--markedly less than curling.  In the last half century it has contributed not a single phrase, let alone an iconic poem, to the public discourse.

     Only two tiny minorities fail to understand this.  Stereotypical hipster muggles will roll their eyes in  exasperation at being told this for the umpteenth time.  Lacking empathy, they cannot imagine how frustrating it is for those who've had to tell them this obvious fact for the umpteenth time.
    

     Far more significant are those who have invested years in the art form and cannot bring themselves to acknowledge how far the stock has fallen.  Editors and teachers, especially, do not appreciate anyone spelling out the obvious because it undermines their prodigious efforts to revive a corpse.  Some reach for the flimsiest argument:  there is more poetry being produced by more people than ever before.  This dodge is beyond lame;  it is from where lame crawls off to die.  Leave aside the technicality that, despite there being more people than ever, there is no audience for any of this stuff.  Deal with the undeniable:  overproduction is, by definition, a problem, not a solution.

     These people are committed and, depending on how many other plain truths they deny, perhaps they should be.

     The question becomes:  How can we reconcile our love of poetry with our realization that it is a dead art form?

     Poetry has been gone for less than a century.  Granted, that lull is unprecedented in any culture, but it is barely an eye-blink compared to the silene stenophylla, a plant considered extinct but resurrected after 31,700 years under the permafrost. 
    
     Perhaps, if we can find enough of poetry's DNA, we can recreate a strain that can thrive in today's ecosystem.

     The paradox is that, in dealing with the death of poetry, we need to allow the death of poetries.  Whatever crackpot strains fail to find fertile ground need to be abandoned, not coddled in artificial environs or needlessly autopsied.  The last half century has taught us what doesn't work.  Let failure be its own post mortem.  Time to concentrate on what succeeds.  Whether tomorrow's breakthrough verses are retro or hypermodern is for audiences to decide on a piece-by-piece basis.  The only safe bet is that they will involve exemplary writing, performance and production.

    Put bluntly, those in denial regarding poetry's passing do the art form no favor. Like Elvis sighters, they trivialize the demise itself.  It was a sharp, painful decline that took place decades before most of us were born.  We are told that "thirteen is colder in the fall."  This was the bleakest of Autumns, made all the more so by not knowing that Winter would be longer than anything seen on "Game of Thrones".

     All of that said, the reincarnation of poetry could occur in the next few months or years.  Without reservation or hyperbole, it promises to be one of the most glorious events in human history.

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