Soccer

     When his nemesis was hypercritical about a brick wall that Sir Winston Churchill had just finished building the statesman responded:  "Any fool can see what's wrong.  Can you see what's right?"

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Earl the Squirrel's Rule #113

     In North America, soccer is something parents take their children to play at some ungodly hour on Saturday morning.  Crowds, if that is the correct term, are limited to supportive family and friends.  Despite its popularity in all other cultures, soccer has resisted every attempt to revive its fortunes in English-speaking North America.

     The parallels between the fortunes of poetry and soccer are unmistakeable.  Soccer has been replaced by faster games that feature unlimited substitutions, sensible off-side rules (where applicable) and more scoring opportunities:  hockey, basketball and the other kind of football (i.e. CFL or NFL), all developed in North America and all making greater inroads elsewhere than soccer is in these two countries.  As one cryptic commentator quipped:  "Football has made a better export than import."

     While rules committees in these other sports have made significant improvements each year, soccer remains stuck in an era that predates the stopwatch.  This is why people say:  "Soccer is America's sport of the future...and always will be!" or, perhaps more tellingly, "Of course millions play soccer;  that way they don't have to watch it."

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #67

     Similarly, poetry was beaten at its own game--being memorable--by modern innovation when radio facilitated the distribution of songs in the 1920s.  Today, people who can sing along to thousands of tunes can't recite a single contemporary poem.  In the 90 years since that death blow we have seen the proliferation of other, unrelated media (e.g. CDs, DVDs, MP3s, videos, movies, television, the Internet, etc.) and pursuits.  Meanwhile, poetry is a verbal art largely stuck in anachronistic text mode.  In North America it is, at best, a participation sport, not conducive to spectating.  This is true even for slams, where everyone present is a participant or tagalong.

     Soccer is currently at the height of its popularity worldwide.  What can it learn from a moribund art form like poetry?  Where is the cautionary tale?

     Soccer risks losing its status to more modern pastimes over the coming decades, just as poets lost their audience to songwriters.  Both could stand to be more commercial-television-friendly.

Fans and Critics

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #55

     What can poetry learn from soccer's failure in North America?    

     To answer that question we must first ponder a more personal one:  When someone hands you something you've never seen before what is your first thought?  Its properties or how they could be enhanced?

     Some people, individually and collectively, are able to "see what's right", appreciating the existing, intrinsic merit of whatever they encounter.  Among other things, these people tend to make better students, teachers and graphic artists.  They often have better memories and presence of mind.  No doubt they are happier and live longer lives.  Call these people "happy-go-lucky", "survivors", "optimists", "realists" or "fans".

     Others will spot imperfections at a glance and begin wondering about improvements.  These are the mechanics and innovators.  The creative.  They might not be able to recall their own phone numbers but they can solve a Rubik's Cube in seconds.  Call them "pessimists", "analysts", "perfectionists", "idealists", "coaches" or "critics".  Their obsessions won't win them many friends, especially when they turn their reconstructive attention to those around them, but they'll earn dozens of patents, trophies and Nobel Peace Prizes before any realist will.  True, their sanity can often be called into question but this is because they deal almost exclusively with things that don't exist.  Yet.

     The joke about optimists constructing the airplane while pessimists invented the parachute may be technically true but every modification that brought us from Wilbur and Orville Wright's "Flyer" to the modern jumbo jet was created by someone who saw the inadequacies of existing technology.

     Most will agree that poetry needs more fans.  This is entirely obvious, intuitive and logical.

     It is also entirely wrong.

     Today's poetry fans aren't like those of other eras or endeavors.  For starters, they don't exist.  That is, virtually no one seeks out  poetry written by strangers with the idea of memorizing, performing or quoting it.  Instead, poetry "fans" publish stuff like this and this when not bestowing national awards on writing like this:

filled with love, delirious with love, lift up
your heart and sing, my heart dancing, how i
longed for you, all my life,

     Fans are the ones who insist poetry isn't dead because--get this--so many eye-gougingly bad examples of it are being produced every second of every day.

     Fans insist that poetry is about poets, not poems.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #45

     There is an old joke about two gentlemen in Las Vegas, standing around a craps table in the wee hours of the night.  An attractive woman enters and asks if they'd like a game.  The men nod.  She is about to make a throw when she stops and inquires if it would be okay if she removed her clothes, explaining that it brings her luck.  Again, they assent.  Once nude, she tosses the dice, shouts "I win!", and collects their bets and her clothes before exiting.

     A few minutes transpire before one man turns to the other and asks:  "By the way, what did she roll?"

     Comes the reply:  "I thought you were watching the dice."

     Fans don't bother to learn the fundamentals because they naively trust editors and poets to understand them.

     Fans are Gresham's bad money, driving out the good.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #58

     Fans delight in lowering technical standards to levels that even they can reach.

     Everyone in North America is aware of the extremes:  kids' soccer and the exploits of the American squad in the 2014 FIFA World Cup.  Few could name any players, teams or leagues in between, though.  Similarly, the average Canadian or U.S. resident might be able to recognize Leonard Cohen and the late Maya Angelou.  They may have seen teens enjoying slams.  Few could name a poet or poem from between these high profile bookends.  To put this in perspective, imagine everyone knowing the players in their child's Pop Warner league and in the NFL ProBowl but none of the NFL or college teams.  This is the surest sign that the endeavor is light years from the nation's zeitgeist as a spectator sport.  To get to that stage we don't need cheerleaders and blurbers.  We need informed and credible audiences, coaches and critics, people who can see what's wrong and work to fix it.  

    In the words of Thomas Edward Graves, "This is what poetry needs:  more hecklers."

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Forensics

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #93

     One of our readers sent in a piece for comment, asking us not to web search it before preparing our analysis.  Could we guess the author?

     The work is 14 lines of prose with some rhymes (i.e. heel/deal, who's/knew, drove up/grow up), a volta and a telltale "convenience store" (i.e. 7-11) syllable count.  In other words, it is an outline for a sonnet.  It begins with this reportage:

In the sixth grade I was chased home by
the Gatlin kids, three skinny sisters
in rolled-down bobby socks. Hissing
Brainiac! and Mrs. Stringbean!, they trod my heel.
I knew my body was no big deal

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #79

    Two things strike us about the writer:

1.  She hasn't mastered the finer points of punctuation, starting with quotation marks; and,

2.  she doesn't understand the concept of voice consistency, as evidenced by the same individual saying "trod my heel" and "no big deal" or, later, "shake them down to size."  The lack of originality in the latter two clichés, especially, is something we'd expect a more mature author to address in rewrites, along with meter and technique in general.

     Assuming that confessional writing is autobiographical is always dicey, yes, but far less so with adolescents.  The storyline of this diary entry is dull enough as it is;  that it might be fiction, requiring creativity, seems unlikely.  Seriously, whose imagination would be this boring?

     The request to not web search this outline was unsettling.  Certainly no one would publish such scribbling as a finished product.  Why did the author not take it to a first draft stage?  Is it hitherto unpublished juvenilia by a PoBiz type?  It would have to be a deceased one;  no living poet would permit the release of this stuff to the public.  If the writer is alive, it has to be a showbiz celebrity or politician who gave up on poetry before learning anything about it.

     My best guess is that it is an eighth grade effort by Michelle Bachmann.

     How did I do?

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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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