Poetry in 2032 - Part III: Integration

"Always take known luck over purported skill."

- William Treble

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Poetry needs to get lucky.

It is caught in a chicken-and-egg Catch-22: it needs one--not a hundred, not a thousand, but one--breakthrough presentation to convince those who write, those who perform and those who support it to coordinate in creating such a presentation in the first place. Put bluntly, we need a second Shakespeare who, in turn and like the previous one, will require actors and backers.

Sounds simple, no? It might be if it weren't for a fundamental assumption that pervades every phrase of every argument, from the "those-are-our-choices!?" Hill-Duffy and Vendler-Dove controversies to the neverending "accessibility" debate. It is both endemic and pandemic, cancerous and carcinogenic. It is a mindset too universal to merit or require expression. It is the dumbest thing never said by poets. It is not the elephant in the room but the steaming pile behind it. I speak of the self-fulfilling prophecy that poetry cannot appeal to both academia and the public, to balcony and pits.

It is as if the first Shakespeare didn't exist, let alone a second.

The Past:

The relationships between the three poetry worlds, page, pixel and stage, have ranged from benign neglect to outright hostility.

The print community has largely ignored stage poetry but has been "all over the lot" in its treatment of onliners. Take the two major American organizations, for example. The Academy of American Poets (AAP) is forward-thinking, to the point of sponsoring one of the four major Internet workshops, the "Poets.org Discussion Forums". By contrast, The Poetry Foundation's and "Poetry" magazine's treatment of the pre-existing internet community has been marked by many lows:

• Allowing trolls to force "Harriet" to go from a blog (i.e. open to discussion) to a webzine rather than seek or accept advice from web administrators and staff with decades of experience in dealing with cyber-sociopaths in general, including most of those in question.



• Being the only major publisher to declare: "Work that has appeared online is considered to have been previously published and should not be submitted." This included any draft that appears in an online workshop "unless it is exceptional". Cynics may wonder what other kind of poems they publish.



• Refusing to acknowledge the passing of one of the greatest and most beloved online poets, critics and editors of our time.



• Banning an online community official from submitting to "Poetry" magazine for echoing advice given by one of its favorite contributors.

That last one is so bizarre that I had to check my facts and wording. How did Internauts react to all of this? By shrugging and walking away from the PoBiz in general and the Foundation in particular. Both subjects have been conspicuously rare in online fora.

This does not bode well for the prospects of any Lilly grant funds going toward popularizing poetry in the near future. As the parable about the miller's son demonstrated, it is facile to criticize an organization that endeavors "to keep free from entangling alliances with any single class or school" in order "to print the best English verse" "regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written." The Poetry Foundation, with its size and please-everyone support for everything poets claim as an aesthetic, will undoubtedly be among the last to join any communal effort. An army moves slower than a soldier.

The Present:

In addition to the AAP there are progressive e-zine editors like John Amen of "The Pedestal" and print editors such as Tim Green of "Rattle" who can lead the way. Indeed, "The Pedestal" has a "Spoken Word/Slam" video section. True, the examples confirm every stereotype we have of performers: in addition to the lack of subtlety and technique in the material there is considerable "who-talks-like-that?" artifice in the delivery. Nevertheless, one community featuring another is a step in the right direction.

There are a few aesthetic issues to settle. YouTube has plenty of classic poems being performed brilliantly. None has caught fire. Similarly, the Poetry Out Loud project serves up examples of good performance but the poem choices are arbitrary and not designed for a wide contemporary audience. Here, the "artifice" is in the language, which might appear dated or overly "poetic" to non-poets today. Whatever video goes viral, it will almost certainly be something timely, in today's language and addressing today's sensibilities.

"Where does money enter the picture?" you ask? Attracting initial attention on YouTube requires paying them in order to feature the video. It may take a few tries before something catches on. Production values and test marketing wouldn't hurt the cause.

Understanding that popular poetry doesn't equate to bad poetry is not the only attitude that will need to change.

Ask yourself this: When was the last time you saw someone, acting on his or her own initiative (as opposed to the NEA's and the Poetry Foundation's laudable Poetry Out Loud initiative), choose and perform a poem by another living poet? It's illegal at slams but why is it so rare at open mics, on YouTube and elsewhere? It doesn't seem likely to me that many authors would refuse permission.

How can poets--not publishers or blurbers but individual poets other than the author--expect the public to take great contemporary poems to heart when they, themselves, do not?

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Preservation, Presentation and Promotion - Part I

In addition to the usual spate of anthologies throughout the year, the end of 2011 was marked by foundations, publishers, critics and commentators making lists of top ten books. Missing from all of these is an English language poetry collection that:

1. outsold any of these books;



2. received more praise from arms-length critics than all of these books combined;



3. was written by a poet voted by 133 of the world's toughest critics as the one they'd most want to read;



4. was written by a poet of whom few, if any, critics or readers had seen a photo, let alone met; and,



5. contained the closest thing to a serious (i.e. not a nursury rhyme, bawdy limerick or efforts like those mentioned here) iconic poem this century has produced.

So why was this compendium overlooked by all of these listmakers? Was it a deliberate snub? Politics? Discrimination? A conspiracy? A scandal?


Nope.

It is merely a reflection of the fact that there are three discrete poetry worlds with varying degrees of awareness of the others. Each of these has its own raison d'être, promotional models, media, ethos, aesthetics, prominent figures and institutions. The tome in question was written by a leading denizen from another milieu.

The most obvious upshot of this narrow focus is that, if dramatic poet William Shakespeare were alive today, his work would appear in none of these lists or anthologies. If page poets were even vaguely aware of their counterparts we might see anthologies entitled "Best [insert nationality here] Poetry in Print".

Preservation

In general, paper outlasts electromagnetic storage which, in turn, survives longer than speech. Each of the three metacommunities derive their identity and Prime Directive from these lifespans. Thus, the Print World's principle role is the preservation of poetry, much as Dark Age Irish scribes protected so much classical literature against the ravages of time, ignorance and outright persecution. Every aspect of this subculture reflects this shared, noble goal. Today, Print Worlders range from vanity authors who want their thoughts and experiences archived to mentors who hope to obtain or retain a job teaching the thing they love to new generations of mentors. Due to the latter and depending on how sympathetic the speaker is, "professional" and "careerist" are terms commonly used to describe this environment.

So why does no one (at all, according to Giles Coren) except, perhaps, one's associates (according to Robert Archambeault), want to read the poetry produced here?

A cynic might answer with another question: "Would anyone want to watch football games played by NFL coaches?"

This isn't far from:

• "Those who can't do, teach" (Charles Shultz, "Peanuts")
  



• "Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- teach."
  H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)



• "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."
  
  George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
  



• "Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym."
  
  Woody Allen (1977)



• "Those who know do. Those who understand teach."
  
  - Aristotle

The last view may be the healthiest and most apt. As long as we're using sports-related analogies a better question might be: "Would anyone want to watch football games played by NFL referees, commentators and statisticians?"


Members of the other two supercommunities will likely never understand the concept or purpose of "art without audience". Nevertheless, the "publish-or-perish" need to create and sustain a CV based on prestigious publication of criticism and poetry serves a literary academic population competing for fewer and fewer positions. Here we observe a behavior that must baffle outsiders: having been published in an esteemed magazine, page poets tend to be less likely to resubmit.

"Once I can include that venue on a resumé why not move on to newer pastures?"

Print publishers face two challenges relating to the poetry they produce:

1. It is inaccessible.



2. It is inaccessible.

Debates rage elsewhere about poetry needing to make sense. Remove the audience from the equation, though, and this issue becomes moot.

Physical inaccessibility of today's print poetry would be the greater dilemma if the purpose were to promote the poetry rather than the poet. The chances of two people--even two poetry lovers--having read the same contemporary poem are remote--yes, even if the poem were to appear in "The Atlantic Monthly", "The New Yorker" or "Poetry" magazine. It is largely a matter of cost and inconvenience limiting the creation of icons. We can quote or paraphrase a movie (e.g. "May the force be with you!"), confident of recognition, but not a contemporary novel, let alone a recent poetry book. Even here in the poetry blogosphere we can and will discuss aesthetics, trends and poets but rarely individual poems (unless we bring everyone up to speed by including it, perhaps via a link). Not surprisingly, magazine publishers are branching out with webzine versions.



Notwithstanding the efforts of Helen Vendler and William Loman, criticism in the print world is rarely critical. Jobs are at stake here. Typically, it is blurbing and/or interpretive--"glorified footnoting" in one cynic's view. "From all appearance," said one observer, "its central purpose must be to serve as a lesson guide for teachers, uncovering all the clever [usually literary] allusions and references that can fill up classroom time."

Add up all the factors--the absence of audience and criticism, the professionalism/careerism, the focus on poets rather than poems, etc.--and the Print World's relativistic, laissez faire attitude toward "new prosodies" begins to make sense. Why get involved in definitions and aesthetics when the other person's future may rely on their acceptance? The banana you're trying to take away means much more to the gorilla.

Page Poetry is serious business! How different an enterprise would it be if its purpose were to sell books and magazines?

Next: Presentation Poetry