As you know, there are three essentials in poetry:
1. Audience;
We are witnessing the sad demise of the last generation to be alive while poetry was. It is grim accounting but we could, I suppose, take some tiny, cold comfort in knowing that the decline in poetry's audience is bottoming out. Is there reason to hope it might begin to rise soon?
Margaret Ann Griffiths
2. Writing;
The caliber of composition has obviously declined, slowly but steadily, since "Prufrock". Poetry fundamentals disappearing from our education system in the middle of the 20th century accelerated this process. Nevertheless, thanks in large part to the Internet, it can be argued that poetry struck its nadir in the 1980s and is beginning to turn around. Yes, I might be guilty of some generational narcissism but I'd have no reservations about pitting today's best versers¹ against anyone after Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) and Robert Frost (1874-1963).
3. Presentation.
No matter how we feel about the quality of text and the quantity of listeners (tanl), we can only be optimistic about the platforms for poetry: stage, video, multimedia, e-book, et cetera. In terms of performance, I believe that we are seeing less "Poet Voice" in readings. It seems academics are being shamed into learning the rudiments of delivery. [Shrug]
You know that parable about the frog on the hotplate that keeps adjusting to the rising temperature until it boils to death? You know how you're unaware that your house smells until you return from vacation?
Recently, I took an eighteen month hiatus from live poetry. When I returned to slam I assumed, based on how little had changed in the previous two decades, that I would be subjected to the usual diary entries and diatribes delivered with an auctioneer's pace and jet engine's volume. The focus was still bellybuttons and politics but the tone had morphed from strident to coaxing.
This was too good to be true so I discounted it as an aberration. Days later, though, I attended a youth slam where, much to my surprise, I encountered the same sea change² in approach. Slammers were talking like intimates, not whingers or demagogues, to audience members, not at them.
I reported this to some of my online buddies and was convinced that this phenomenon may not be as localized as I thought. Have you experienced a similar shift from screaming to speaking or are your open mics and slams the same as always?
Is emo dead?
Footnotes:
¹ - ...including that rarest of animals, the actual free verser. I'm not so sanguine about our current crop of prose poets, though.
² - I also noticed a profound demographic switch that we'll discuss in my next post. Stay tuned!
Your feedback is appreciated!
Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull". Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook. Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.
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We'd like to thank those who responded to our previous post, "10 Greatest 21st Century Poets - The List". As our regular readers know, it was a break from our tradition of talking about poetry and poems rather than poets but, as one commenter with a brilliant sense of irony said, it worked as "clickbait". (We have never opted for advertisements here and won't guess what people must think of other publications, most of which concentrate exclusively on poets and author-centric writing.)
If you want to make a point about people treating poetry as a professional or social enterprise rather than as a craft, though, check out this spike in our readership when we discussed poets instead:
Reaction was largely positive, with strangers thanking us for presenting an objective view of the great poets of the century. Most understood, at least instinctively, the authority's role in bird-dogging¹ great contemporary verse. There were a few who, not comprehending anything about geekdom, confused it with its antipodal opposite, the PoBiz, in suggesting that friendship played a role in the decisions. (Seriously? Geeks? Having friends?)
To accommodate those who showed such interest in the judges, we thought we would take a moment to define those who participate here regularly or as "Gray for a Day" or judges. With a hat tip to Jeff Foxworthy...
...let us examine the unbearable lightness of being a geek.
1. If your friends and relatives know that only you will give them an informed and honest evaluation of their writing, you may be a geek. Or obsessive. Or both.
3. If you know whether "Prufrock" and "The Red Wheel Barrow" are free verse or metrical you may be a geek.
4. Hell, if you care whether "Prufrock" and "The Red Wheel Barrow" are free verse or metrical you may be a geek.
Paul Stevens "discovered" both top poets.
5. If you can evaluate work without giving a shart about the author's age, size, shape, nationality, bank account, history, sex, politics or religion you may be a geek.
9. If you have ever quoted Debi Zathan's famous anti-whinger rant in whole or in part you may be a geek.
"But what really pisses me off when you get right down to it, is the unmitigated gall of so many who post here...who have the patronizing, self-absorbed opinion that the person who critiques their poetry has not a clue, has never loved, has never grieved, has never existed in all of the frames they write so badly about. THAT (at the moment) is what really pisses me off."
10. If you have ever quoted Gustave Flaubert's famous anti-corazoner rant in whole or in part you may be a geek.
"I should rather be skinned alive than exploit my feelings in writing. I refuse to consider Art a drain-pipe for passion, a kind of chamberpot, a slightly more elegant substitute for gossip. No, no! Genuine poetry is not the scum of the heart."
11. If you have had to restrain yourself, lest you quote Rob Evans in whole or in part, you may be a geek.
"Of all the branches of the arts, poetry continues to be treated with the most indifference by the general public. Why? Because practitioners like you continue to demand so little of yourself and others."
Usenetter Aidan Tynan
12. If you have had to restrain yourself, lest you quote Aidan Tynan in whole or in part, you may be a geek.
"Please give me one reason why the aforesaid could be classified as anything other than badly written, unimaginative and cliché-festooned. This poem, for lack of a more appropriate term, seems to represent, to me, everything poetry is not about, that is: vague references to vaguely traumatic personal events renumerated listlessly as a piece of abstract journalistic schlock (with random line breaks to disguise it as poetry) superimposed on a bland moral-aesthetic grid. Superficial in every way, and lacking any sort [of] effect." "Sadly, bad poems are not invisible." "Yes, how selfish of someone to spend time giving an informed critique of another's work."
13. If you understand the difference between annotation and criticism you may be a geek.
Peter John Ross, father of modern critique.
14. If you can say crap like "Poetry is lateral thinking stacked sonically" without people knowing that you're joking you may be a geek.
16. If you know or care who wrote "...the waiting moment, buckling into circumstance..." you may be a geek.
17. If you cannot read Ferlinghetti without quoting Manny Delsanto (i.e. "Please tell me there were no dice involved in choosing your words") you may be a geek.
18. If you cannot read Billy Collins without quoting Gerard Ian Lewis (i.e. "You use words like a magpie uses wedding rings") you may be a geek.
19. If you cannot read "The Paris Review" without thinking of Richard Epstein (i.e. "Many poems would benefit by having no text") you may be a geek.
20. If you cannot read Rumi without muttering "Shouldn't platitudes this trite rhyme or something?" you may be a geek.
22. If you accept that the final word on individuality and creativity came from a football coach you may be a geek.
23. If you understand that those telling you poetry is alive are trying to sell you something (i.e. bad poetry) you may be a geek.
24. If George Bernard Shaw wrote your life motto, "The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who don't have it", you may be a geek.
25. If you can keep your head when all about you are quoting Timothy Steeleyou may be a geek.
Footnotes:
¹ - A typical scenario is a depressed editor needing a jewel to caketop an otherwise mediocre publication. The conversation goes:
Editor: "Say, I'm in a bind. Do you have anything for me?"
Geek: "Utter contempt?"
Editor: "Very funny. Seriously, though, can you help me out?"
Geek pulls a frayed piece of paper from his or her back pocket (hence the expression "pulling [stuff] out of my ass"), shows it to the editor and another brilliant edition goes to print.
² - Indeed, antipathy toward the list and its progenitors rose and fell in lockstep with the level of the respondent's overconfidence. Who could have predicted that?
Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull". Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook. Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.
If you would like to follow us, contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please befriend us, "Earl Gray", on Facebook.
As a bayou metrist with a special interest in Russian literature, Jennifer is often compared with Georgian poet A.E. Stallings. This is like Derek Edwards being the second most famous person from Timmins. Without question, Ms. Reeser is the more accessible.
Her lesser works may suffer from clanging rhymes and incongruous voices but pieces like "Compass Rose" transcend what most are able to do in verse.
While "lightning stitching the sky" is remarkable, the text of Marc's poems will not win him any awards. Nevertheless, M.K. Smith (1949-Present) invented the slam and remains one of its bestleast awful performers. As such, one could argue that, so far, at least, he has had a far more visible impact on the world than all living print and pixel poets combined. True, given the choice between monotonous readings and 3-minute scream fests the public will still go with TV sitcoms, but at least Marc has given us that second option.
This recital with hand gestures and without eye contact may be about as close to narrative or lyric poetry performance as we've seen lately:
Geeks aren't swayed much by awards, but do give credence to contests, especially if they are judged blindly by authorities. An English professor at Savannah State University, Catherine Rogers wrote the Interboard Poetry Community's "Poem of the Year" twice, in 2006, judged by Mark Doty, and 2005, from Judy Kronenfeld.
why Ms. Rogers is on this list (and why many fine non-versers aren't); and,
why "Autumn Sky Poetry" is considered one of the two most astounding sources of poetry on earth; and,
the difference between free verse and non-rhythmic writing. After a mixture of iambic and anapestic strings we see the first section end with these anapests:
"Sure [Fred Astaire] was great, but don't forget Ginger Rogers did everything he did backwards...and in high heels!" -- Bob Thaves (1982)
Without question, Julie Carter is one of the best sonneteers to never win (or be entered to win?) a Nemerov. As you can see from the .pdf version of "pseudophakia" (2006), Julie's command of phrasing and imagery matches that of anyone short of Karen Solie and Dorianne Laux in the Print World...and Julie does it in verse. Her down-to-earth style stresses rhythm over sound.
Our spies tell us Ms. Carter is preparing another collection. If past experience is any guide, it rates to be the most tragically overlooked book of 2015. You read it here first!
The fact that Rose Kelleher is a programmer and technical writer may have helped her cause among our resident geeks. The mix of humor and elegance in her work reminded many of the poet who tops this list--as does the pacing in "Neanderthal Bone Flute".
Seventh was the lowest vote that Ms. Kelleher received in the initial voting. Over time, though, a strange prejudice against consistency seeped in. Rose's ability to do everything well, and do it in almost every piece, made her a Ted Williams among those wanting a Babe Ruth. I suppose that home runs give judges something to cite, even if it means burying the fact that Ruth led the league in strikeouts, too.
Born in the Dominican Republic in 1932, Rhina Espaillat is often mentioned as one of the top Spanish-language poets of our time. This raises an interesting question: "Is being, say, 15th in a culture where poetry is very much alive more impressive than being 5th where poetry is dead?"
As the finale in "Changleling" demonstates, Rhina's mastery of sound is exceeded by only one other living poet.
This stranger is you, is all the you there is, my mother, whose gentler face is gone beyond recall, and I must love you so, or not at all.
It isn't hard to see how she won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award twice. It's equally difficult to find fault with the author of these lines from "Find Work":
she spoke so little it was hard to bear so much composure, such a truce with time
That Derek Walcott (1930-01-23 to 2017-03-17) may be the most decorated poet on the planet meant nothing to the geeks. His medium made things difficult; some of this books were out of print, making them hard to find in stores or libraries. Once sufficient copies were located, Walcott's magnus opus, "Omerus", impressed everyone but that was 1990. "The Prodigal" (2004) and "White Egrets" (2010) drew considerable praise but what convinced skeptics was a technical article from a now-defunct online forum that someone had saved on their hard drive.
While she lacks the common touch we see in the top two, Alicia remains the class of the crossovers. "Antiblurb" is a masterpiece but what is more stunning is that it is representive of her work is a whole. If you want to make the argument that knowledge of fundamentals adds charm and consistency to an artist's work Ms. Stallings is your model.
At the beginning of her career Alicia had to use initials to resubmit poems that were rejected by editors who knew from her first name that she was female. As you can see, the online community in general and geeks in particular have no time for such discrimination.
When one's worst poem begins with "Let us speak of rumors first; the pallid truth can wait till later" and ends with "...it will rain champagne before I tell you that I loved her" the judges' job becomes a nobrainer. One of the best reasons for studying the elements of the craft is to appreciate everything DPK has been able to do with them.
Imagine if the most knowledgeable critics on earth voted T.S. Eliot the poet they'd most want to see in an anthology five months before he wrote his signature poem. Now suppose "Prufrock" was not a collaboration with the finest prosodist of the era but a solo, unedited first draft. Would anyone argue about who was the finest poet of the 20th century?
The moment Margaret (aka "Maz" or "Grasshopper") Ann Griffiths (1947-05-23 to 2009-07-13) entered a contest--slogan, jingle or poetry--the fight for second place began. If you ask poetry fans who the greatest poet of all time is you will get a variety of answers until someone mentions Shakespeare, whereupon everyone squawks "We assume you meant other than him!" When you ask who the best poet of the 21st century is you must explicitly add "...including Maz."
Needless to say, the vote for Grasshopper as this century's #1 poet was quick and unanimous.
Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull". Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook. Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.
If you would like to follow us, contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please befriend us, "Earl Gray", on Facebook.
