"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."
- Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
"News flash: poets don't have deeper or finer feelings than anyone else, they don't have more insight into personal relationships, they don't understand the cosmos better than ordinary people; they're not philosophers. They just have a gift for writing."
Sadly, there is a tendency among many to act like those six blind men trying to conceptualize an elephant based on the part they are examining. Such tunnel vision causes the classic synecdochical fallacy, confusing the subset (i.e. genre) with the whole (i.e. poetry).
That poetry is a mode of speech is not an opinion, a belief, a guess or an aesthetic statement. It is an incontrovertible fact. It is the most basic truth about verse--even more fundamental than its definition as verbatim speech. Failure to understand this leads inevitably to polemics, provincialism, pseudo-intellectualism and Content Regency.
Contrary to Lewis Turco's peculiar ideolect, poetry is not a genre simply because it has no single "form, content, technique, or the like." Poems can be fictional, non-fictional, romantic, tragic, comedic, dramatic, or any other topical category. They may have form or not. Ditto meter, which we can surmise is a fairly recent addition by asking ourselves how primitive societies could quantify or measure something² until after it existed.
Poetry is not¹ cryptic (no definitive meaning), vacuous (no significant meaning), obvious (one inescapable meaning) or ambiguous (two or more clear meanings). Not all [great] poems are multifaceted gems like "The Red Wheelbarrow", amphigouri like "Jabberwocky", dualities such as "Beans" or unidimensional perspectives like "Dulce et Decorum Est".
Poetry is not¹ profound writing. Those who swallowed this myth need to read better prose. Let me suggest they start with novelists Carol Shields and Timothy Findley before moving on to various philosophers.
Poetry is neither¹ humorous nor humorless. Paradoxically, in the case of the "Tay Bridge Disaster", it can be both at the same time.
Poetry is not¹ art. It can be and sometimes is but, as a mode of speech, it can be put to any purpose, from selling toothpaste to relaying the WORD OF GOD in holy verses. If you forget this you may end up having to argue that "Thirty days hath September, April, June and November" is prose rather than poetry--those being the only two options.
Avoid embarrassment. Repeat "Poetry is a mode of speech" like the truism that it is. Repeat it like a mantra, a catchphrase or a spell to ward off the most ghastly of aesthetic afflictions, Convenient Poetics.
"Poetry is a mode of speech."
"Poetry is a mode of speech."
"Poetry is a mode of speech."
"Poetry is a mode of speech."
"Poetry is a mode of speech."
Footnotes:
¹ - Not exclusively, at least. It's like saying "Humans eat gummy bears." Some do, but until all of us do the assertion, if intended as definitional, is an overstatement and therefore incorrect.
² - e.g. tempi, alliterations, assonances and--much later and only in accented languages--stresses. All [metrical] verse is poetry but not all poetry is metered; thus, everyone other than Mr. Turco understands which is the superset and which is the subset.
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
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 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.
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.
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."
The notion of allowing poems to speak for themselves, trusting the audience's judgement, is a distinctly progressive¹ principle.
Again, most poets are politically liberal but aesthetically conservative, postmodernrather thanhypermodern.
Q. What, then, constitutes a liberal aesthetic?
A. Respect for an audience.
Generally, conservatives concern themselves with groups/institutions: country, company, army, universities, religion, producers, and status, beginning with the status quo. Liberals worry about individuals/people: equality, rights, victims, students, faith, consumers, and improvement, beginning now. In poetry, conservatives support existing avenues while liberals dream of nonexistent audiences.
Whether confessional or cryptocrap, the vast majority of poetry published today disregards or disdains audiences. And readers (tanr). This and something else will distinguish conservatives² from liberals²:
Funding:
Other than Poetry Out Loud, a joint venture of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, not one cent of government or endowment money goes toward expanding poetry's audience. Rather, it is used to publish and promote poets/poems few care to read and to teach a new generation how to write more of same. It is as if there is a formal compromise between political conservatives who don't want to give money to a bunch of "hippy weirdos" and aesthetic conservatives assuring them that no funds will go to expanding that art's appeal. Thus, Norman Rockwell gives way to micturition (e.g. Marcel Duchamp and Andres Serrano), Robert Frost to bafflegab.
Agenda:
What would the poetry world be like if Lefties enjoyed similar support?
Personally, I would advocate a chronological approach.
1. Pragmatic.
Poetry being a primarily audiovisual art form, I'd begin with expanding the only successful project we've seen in the last half century, the aforementioned Poetry Out Loud, to an international World Cup style competition. It would include children and adults rather than just teens.
2. Multimedia.
I'd like to see contests for the best poetry videos on YouTube. Like the performance events, these would be judged by people who understand the expression "performance value" and the difference between iambs and trochees. (You might think this isn't setting the bar very high but, trust me, this is radical stuff.) Sites would be established to network poets, videographers, editors and performers. Nic Sebastian would be cloned and given carte blanche.
3. Poetry is international.
Pointedly ignoring the greatest poet of our time because she was British remains a stain on the institutional community. (Should we be happy they recognize Shakespeare?) The world has been miniaturized by the Internet. We have no time for nationalistic nonsense.
4. Comedy fests.
Aesthetic liberals--including some, like Dennis Hammes and Peter John Ross, who are politically conservative--have a monopoly on humor. The other 99% of poets can manage droll puns, literary references and dessicated wit but getting people to laugh is well above their pay grade. This isn't generalization or stereotyping. It is tautology. Entertainers entertain.
5. Critical fora are, well, critical.
Eratosphere, Gazebo or Poetry Free-For-All, the resurrected Poets.org and others would benefit from free web space and software as well as small honoraria for their administrators, staff, and most helpful critics.
6. Poems, not poets.
This is a fundamental aspect of the meritocratic approach, in stark contrast to The New Yorker poem at the core of the PoBiz philosophy. It seems only liberal editors can publish poems without including the author's complete and unabridged life story.
Conservative writing concerns only the poet and, perhaps, his or her psychoanalyst. Liberals concentrate on topics and styles that might interest and inform and/or [gasp!] entertain listeners. Therapy versus communication. Poet rather than poem.
7. Learning.
The case has to be made to academia that the repopularization of verse is in their best interests. One might think this an easy task, given that poetry's rebirth would create an explosion in demand for instructors. In truth, the transition from teaching the interpretation of poetry to its elements will spark resistance, as will attempts to educate the educators.
8. Surveys.
From Newsweek's "Poetry Readership at 16-Year Low; Is Verse Dying?": "Yet according to the NEA report, in 2008, just 8.3 percent of adults had read any poetry in the preceding 12 months. That figure was 12.1 percent in 2002, and in 1992, it was 17.1 percent, meaning the number of people reading poetry has decreased by approximately half over the past 16 years."
Unfortunately, these surveys don't specify contemporary poetry, don't account for overreporting (i.e. as long as poetry retains some cachet respondents will claim to be readers), and set the bar ridiculously low (i.e. people who have had a poem thrust in their faces during the last year are hardly "readers"). If we make reasonable adjustments or, better yet, conduct more pertinent surveys, we'll find the number of readers to be a fraction of 1%, consistent with the number of producers. In other words, Nobody Reads Poetry.
Conservatives have an ostrich attitude toward the death of poetry--when they're not denying it outright. As such, they won't be part of its resurrection.
9. Copyright.
Plagiarism was defined in 1615-1625, long before it was codified by the Berne Convention in 1886. We know that copyright law played a significant role in strangling poetry after WWI. Before, people would take and perform it at will. Individuals would stop short of claiming to have written it but few publishers would hesitate to anthologize it.
Today, ignoring copyright protection is rampant online (see plagiarist.com) but, in the eyes of many, outright theft--putting one's name on another person's work--remains indefensible. (Personally, I consider it the only sin worse than blurbing.) YouTube is filled with music "fanvids" and "covers", few of which have the original artist's authorization. Five years ago these were routinely removed at the copyright holder's request. Today, more and more musicians understand the positive result these have on sales in general, theirs in particular. Expect this evolution to continue until it is considered antisocial and stupid to take down such homages. This relaxation of attitudes³ will play a key part in resuscitating poetry. Verse is less likely to be internalized (i.e. memorized) and performed (or quoted at length) if their efforts might be greeted by a Cease and Desist order. In the meantime, the use of Creative Commons licensing should be encouraged, especially among our better poets.
10. Prosody.
Prosody was the study of fan reactions. No audience? No prosody. This dilemma serves those producing work that has never appealed to people, doesn't now, and never will. The rest of us are left to assess quality based on either what people used to like when poetry was alive (such that, paradoxically, traditionalism is a liberal aesthetic) or what other performed text they like (e.g. theater, film, radio, television and, ultimately, the Internet).
Footnotes:
¹ - There is duplication here as some academics are liberal.
² - Unless stated otherwise, we are talking about one's place on the aesthetic, not the political, spectrum.
One interesting resolution is "reverse licensing" (aka "What's mine is mine"): if you write a poem and John Doe releases a non-commercial performance of it you have carte blanche to use his video for your own commercial benefit, with or without John's consent or recompense.
Before proceeding, please prepare a list of what you consider to be the 21st Century's best poets.
Humor me.
Wallace Stevens
Let us paint in broad strokes. For our purposes, "conservative" interests include the status quo, religion, and war. "Liberal" values include egalitarianism, secularism and peace. While the majority of poets are progressive, the right is well represented among the elite print (e.g. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, et cetera) and online (e.g. Dennis Hammes, Peter John Ross, David Landrum) poets and institutions.
War Versus Peace
The arms industry dominates international trade. Oil? Weaponry is how we pay for petroleum. Not surprisingly, conservative poems glorify conflict, as we see in one of the 20th century's most famous poems, "In Flanders Fields":
Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep
We often need to look behind the title¹ to see what is being promoted. Horace's line, "Dulce et decorum est[pro patria mori" ("It is sweet and right to die for your country"), exhorted Romans to fight the Parthian enemy. "What joy, for fatherland to die!" By detailing the horrors of WWI and "glory, the old Lie" Wilfred Owen's sardonic "Dulce et decorum est" expressed a decidedly pacifist view.
Religion Versus Secularism
All poems and hymns that promote any particular faith are conservative, if only because of their tribal nature. Along with war, religion's place in the arts has declined since J. G. Magee's narrator "touched the face of God." It's safe to say that in poetry and song, at least, the liberal view of combat and denominationalism has prevailed. This is little more than an extension of our parents telling us to avoid discussing "sex, politics and religion."
So, how has the Left fared in the critical battle between "Status Quo" and "Egalitarianism"?
Status Quo
What fascinates us is how often aesthetics cross over: people who vote and argue for liberal causes usually embrace conservative poetic forms and arguments. Take, for example, meter, which some regard as traditionalist and, thus, conservative. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the latter, which concerns itself with the present, not the past. For example, at the Boston Tea Party conservative businessmen threw centuries of tradition overboard in order to protect their current [wealthy] status.
Conformity is conservatism. We need only look at what is being published to understand the conservative aesthetic:
...as well as friends and family...which is to say, no market at all.
Themes - Cryptocrap and diary writing...
...as opposed to drama, romance, comedy, tragedy or anything else of interest to humans.
Performance - None.
Screaming or droning one's autobiography onstage does not add value.
Technique - Negligible.
Who cares how something sounds on the page?
Gender - Male.
The John Barr Rule: When you add funding into the mix, as we see in institutional poetry circles, two things happen: conservatives take over and males dominate the conversation, lecterns, organizations, publications and awards ceremonies.
The above aspects describe 99% of the poetry being published, blurbed and criticized today. How accurately does this describe your own work? Or that of the poets you wrote on your list?
It really is that simple. If mention of the public brings up the image of pinheaded, beer-swilling brutes we have embraced the conservative perspective wholeheartedly. Call it "exclusivity" or "elitism", but disregard for non-poets determines which side will eschew efforts to reanimate poetry.
Meanwhile, a progressive approach relegates us to being voices in the wilderness. Again, most poets are politically liberal but aesthetically conservative, postmodernrather thanhypermodern.
Form - Meter, Free Verse and, occasionally, Prose Poetry.
In order to please an audience one needs sufficient flexibility and knowledge to choose and execute the most appropriate form for a particular piece. Stringing metaphors and iambs together won't cut it.
While it hasn't happened yet, the optimistic lefty has a "build it and they will come" approach to the fact that Nobody Reads Poetry. Consistent with their desire to maintain the existing PoBiz, conservatives blithely deny the problem. Liberals acknowledge and endeavor to solve it. (Dare I mention art imitating life?)
Market - YouTube.
The notion that poetry begins on the page is the antithesis of the viewer-oriented progressive spirit. Textual study is warranted only after poetry has proven itself. Readership follows audience.
Themes - Adventure, emotion, elegy, humor...
...and every other thing that people enjoy in literature, film, speech, and television.
Performance - On stage or video.
Was Shakespeare the last poet to understand that performance, properly produced, is half the game?
Technique - Paramount.
Who could guess that pleasing a crowd would involve using time-honored crowd-pleasing tricks?
Gender - Female.
When verse is judged on merit, either by geeks (who care about nothing else) or in a contest with blind judging (as with Maz's record of success), women win out as you might expect, given their greater numbers. The notion of allowing poems to speak for themselves, trusting the audience's² judgement, is a distinctly progressive principle.
It is a common battle tactic to make a lot of noise in order to cause an enemy to overestimate our numbers. Slammers rave about other slammers, institutionals blurb fellow academics, metrists praise formalists, corazoners swoon at heart farts. The factions are either indifferent or oblivious to poets beyond their niche.
If you look at your list of 21st Century versers, few--if any--will find support among 5+% of poets³, let alone .0001% of the population at large. This fragmentation benefits conservatives simply because their echo chamber is better funded.
¹ - Authorial intent rarely matters; the issue is a poem's effect. At first glance, "High Flight" would seem to be neutral, confining its scope to the pleasures of flying. However, we come to a very different conclusion once we consider the time and context. Commercial flight was in its infancy. In 1941, flying was a military pursuit. The Nazis had not established a flight training system. This, coupled with little propaganda attention to their pilots, cost them the skies and, in large part, WWII. By contrast, British losses during the Battle of Britain were fewer (because downed RAF pilots could be recovered while Luftwaffe ones were captured) and more efficiently replaced, thanks largely to the number of recruits inspired by John Gillespie Magee. We might wish to remember this the next time someone says that poetry doesn't change anything [when it has an audience or readership].
² - Restricting our target to the public's more sophisticated individuals changes little. However, if poets are our only audience then we, as poets, have no audience.
³ - It may help to bear in mind that fewer than 2% of poets have attended a college level Literature, English or Creative Writing class.
Let me ask you some ridiculously simple questions leading up to a ridiculously obvious conclusion. We begin by reiterating one recently posed in "Challenge":
1. If there were no fans or players, such that the scorekeepers and coaches had to take the field, would you call that endeavor thriving, like film or football, or moribund, like tiddly-winks and Ollamaliztli?
2. With little time and no flashlight, where should we look for our lost car keys? Near the streetlamps or in the pitch darkness?
3. Is it better to do one or nine things well?
4. Do we tend to look better at home, alone, or at work, meeting and greeting the public?
5a. Where are we more likely to find an item? At a kiosk or a marketplace (which contains many kiosks of every sort)?
5b. Where will we find an article more quickly? In a book with or without an index?
6. Where would you expect to find better jumpers? From the group who can leap over a 1-foot bar or those who can clear a 3-foot hurdle?
7. Which performances tend to be better? Dress rehearsals or opening nights?
8. Who knows your tastes better? You, a friend or a stranger?
9. Many will enjoy the book rather than the movie but how many will prefer the screenplay to the film? Does your answer change if someone is reading the script to you?
10. Would you prefer a doctor who has studied anatomy or one who hasn't?
11. When you want to say something do you prefer to be heard or ignored?
Connecting the dots...
1. If there were no fans or players, such that the scorekeepers and coaches had to take the field, would you call that endeavor thriving, like film or football, or moribund, like tiddly-winks and Ollamaliztli?
Everyone understands that poetry is dead, including those who deny it due to misguided self-interest.
2. With little time and no flashlight, where should we look for our lost car keys? Near the streetlamps or in the pitch darkness?
Rather than stumble around like a blind squirrel why not look for peanuts at the ball park? Why seek on dusty, far off shelves before you look on the same Internet you're using to read this?
3. Is it better to do one or nine things well?
Baseball legend Dagoberto Campaneris Blanco played nine positions and pitched ambidextrously. Not surprisingly, he was in great demand. One trick ponies seem to think that winning a niche prize like the Nemerov will establish them as a poet. That may be so but, with very few exceptions, those who win such awards or contests are versatile. For example, none of the canonical free verse poems was written by someone who couldn't write at least competent verse. Thus, observers will, consciously or unconsciously, rightly or wrongly, assume that one who writes only prose poetry or only villanelles is not a good poet in general.
4. Do we tend to look better at home, alone, or at work, meeting and greeting the public?
So, would you expect better poetry from those writing about and for their navels (or friends, family or fellow poets) or from those presenting their work to the public?
5a. Where are we more likely to find an item? At a kiosk or a marketplace (which contains many kiosks of every sort)?
Obviously, you'd go the the market that has the more variety and, all other factors being equal, the greater competition for your money. What is more, due to their proximity, if the shop doesn't have what you want they can likely point you to a nearby provider who does. Similarly, if looking for anything--contemporary poetry, in this case--are you better off in a book store, with a few hundred titles, a library, with a few thousand, or the Internet, with a few billion?
5b. Where will we find an article more quickly? In a book with or without a quick and efficient index?
6. Where would you expect the better jumpers? From the group whose members can leap over a 1-foot bar or from those who can clear a 3-foot hurdle¹?
In general, published work tends to be better than self-published writing, if only because the latter needs to please only the author. Similarly, poetry published in critical circles is going to be better than that produced among blurbers.
7. Which performances tend to be better? Dress rehearsals or opening nights?
Others from the theatrical community are often invited to serve as an audience at dress rehearsals. These allow the troupe to iron out any wrinkles before the big night. Only when they are ready for prime time can we expect perfection.
Similarly, the reason institutional poetry doesn't appeal to non-poets, regardless of sophistication, is that it isn't prepared--in both senses of the word--for them.
8. Who knows your tastes better? You, a friend, or stranger?
A Facebook buddy may well recommend a novel, play, television show or movie written by someone you don't know but will rarely, if ever, Share a link to a poem unless they or a close friend or relative wrote it. Strangers are more likely to be blurbers than objective reviewers. What few reviewers there are seem wedded to a failed aesthetic. Editors need to please writers, not readers (tanr). With nothing but broken filters, then, people give up on poetry. What little good stuff there is out there will be too hard to find until we can see beyond the tiny eddies² in which we are caught.
9. Many will enjoy the book rather than the movie but how many will prefer the screenplay to the film? Does your answer change if someone is reading the script to you?
The mere fact that we speak exclusively in terms of reading poetry is, paradoxically, the main reason that Nobody Reads Poetry. It's meant to be heard, if not seen. If a voice-over, it will be by competent performers who won't sound like they're reading from a script.
10. Would you prefer a doctor who has studied anatomy or one who hasn't?
If you prefer physicians familiar with human body parts why not apply the same logic in poetry? Why read poetry being written, published or blurbed by those who don't know iambs from trochees?
If you patronize healers who think "humerus" refers to the funny bone you should consider life insurance.
11. When you want to say something do you prefer to be heard or ignored?
If you prefer to be read you should write prose. If you want to be heard you're in the right church but the wrong pew. Post your finished products, not mere scripts, to YouTube.
¹ - Do you know any bridgeplayers? If so, they'll love this application of The Hurdles Rule. Ask them this: "The auction goes 1C-Pass-1S-Pass. Which passing opponent is [slightly] more likely to have the King of Diamonds?"
Answer: The original passer's failure to bid while facing a much lower obstacle than the second passer suggests a weaker hand. Thus, the second passer is somewhat more likely to have any outstanding Ace or face card, including the Diamond lord.
² - ...something that doesn't present a problem in any other endeavor (e.g. film, theater, sports, fiction, television, etc.).
³ - A word which brings out the poser in many poets today.
Your feedback is appreciated!
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When you speak of going to "a film" or "a movie" without qualification do you mean a script reading? A home movie? A panorama without a plot or actors? Or is it understood that you mean a feature film with actors who don't sound like they're reading from text, camera operators who know how to remove a lens cap and directors who know the difference between a script and a film?
While critiquing one of our reader's manuscript I remarked that the work lacked performance value.
"That's okay," she replied, "I don't plan on performing any of it."
[Blink]
I stopped myself from asking "Then why are you writing it? Why worry about the sounds and rhythms of something that isn't going to be spoken or heard? As a critic, on what should I comment?"
In this excerpt from the movie "Begin Again", down-and-out music producer Dan Mulligan, played by Mark Ruffalo, happens upon songwriter Gretta James, played by Keira Knightley, performing one of her compositions at an open mic. The crowd ignores the song, rudely conversing throughout it, but Mulligan hears it as it should be, with accompaniment and editing. As a producer, he "hears" the finished product.
Poetry has no producers. That most poets believe text to be a finished product--which is true only for writers--reflects the fact that Nobody Reads Poetry and explains why poets and readers ignore each other. It's a vicious circle. Why worry about quality in general and sound in particular when there is no audience? Why be an audience for something not designed to please us?
Imagine the film or television industries without those who turn a script into a production: no players, no producers, no videographers, no nothing. Whole generations have grown up without ever seeing¹ a finished contemporary poem.
Think about that.
Footnotes:
¹ - ...as opposed to merely reading...or listening to someone else merely reading...
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.
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.
If there were no fans or players, such that the scorekeepers and coaches had to take the field, would you call that endeavor thriving, like film or football, or dead, like tiddly-winks and Ollamaliztli?
But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
Obviously, whatever we teachers, critics, geeks, editors, performers, and poets are doing has not been working for more than two generations. Let's start with our educational system. Its mandate was to preserve and support the great poetry of the past, present and future. Our English departments have abdicated the latter two responsibilities. Prosody, which is the measurement we employ to judge technical merit, is no longer taught as a matter of course. Worse yet, we have abandoned the search for readers (tanr) to such an extent that only writers are hired to teach poetry.
With the benefit of hindsight we know that no generation has produced more than a handful of authors whose work deserves study. With so many positions and so few such worthy candidates, we have chosen as mentors mediocre poets instead of expert readers, critics, prosodists and analysts.
Despite being found almost nowhere else, cryptocrap is currently among the two dominant genres in academia² for a pair of reasons: it's crypto and it's crap.
Imagine giving a college class on, say, "Do not go gentle into that good night". For context, you might begin with a short bio of the author, Dylan Thomas, and some background about the terms (e.g. "gay", meaning "happy" will draw giggles) and times (1951). You recite the poem. Does the class have any questions? No. Perhaps you use the poem to describe its form, the villanelle. Questions? Still none. If you've done your homework and researched some of the available analysis you can talk about that. When you're done, you check the clock your watch your laptop and discover, to your horror, that only 25 minutes have transpired! What will you do for the remainder of your 1-hour class?
If you had chosen a postmodern poem you and your students could waste days, even weeks, guessing at the meaning of the poem--not its motif, technique, ramifications, significance or nuances, mind you, but it's actual surface meaning (if any). Selecting a great poem like "Do not go gentle into that good night" was a mistake you won't repeat. In the future you will ignore accessible poets such as Frost, Byron and the Brownings in favor of classical ones that let you kill time translating Elizabethan³ or earlier language into today's English...or go with contemporary cryptocrap.
In essence, the "poem" becomes a Rorschach test and the class becomes a group therapy session. Other than validating Law #92 and wiling away class time, what does this accomplish and what does it have to do with poetry? No one knows.
Crap
While their meaning mustn't be accessible, the poems themselves must be readily available and in endless quantity, such that if you need a poem about a 19th Century Outer Mongolian hemp farmer you can easily find or generate one. The recipe is easy to follow. The whole idea of crap is to lower the bar until enough college students say "Hell, even I can do better than that!" and register for class. Keeping up this vanity trap works perfectly as long as Nobody Reads Poetry. Once people are exposed to better contemporary poets and verse, such that they can pass simple tests like this one, the jig is up.
Suppose every poem published and taught today were as good as this one. Why, you'd never stop singing "What a Wonderful World", right?
Hardly. Verse is already dead on the demand side; this could kill it on the production side as well. We would have The Watermelon Problem on a pandemic scale. Publications would close down because their product couldn't compete. Whole faculties would disappear from universities because students would be discouraged and might wonder what could be learned from anyone who fails to distinguish this dreck from, of all things, poetry. In a worst case scenario [sophisticated elements of] the public could take an interest in poetry. That is the very thing cryptocrap seeks to avoid.
The best way to uncover an addiction is to quit--even temporarily. A few DT shakes should be enough to convince us that we really are alcoholics. Thus, I encourage every institutional publication to reserve one edition for non-academics. This exercise will raise awareness of the 98+% of poets from outside the Ivory Towers. If nothing else, this will serve as a foil for what is normally published. At the very least, it should generate controversy.
Meanwhile, I challenge independent venues to put out a "Best of..." list of poems online, similar to this one. By "Best of..." I don't mean "My favorite..." or "Our Best...". I mean poems that discerning readers (tanr) might enjoy based largely on objective technical merit, regardless of source [as via a URL]. It would be fascinating to compare these lists to what academic periodicals produce.
Footnotes:
¹ - Yes, we're quoting Billy Collins, including the completely redundant finale where, ironically, he beats us over the head with the moral--you know, in case we missed it being spelled out in the preceding strophe paragraph.
² - After confessional (aka "email from rehab"), of course.
³ - Shakespeare's plays may seem difficult to us in this century but his livelihood depended on illiterates in the pits understanding what was said. It was the farthest thing from cryptology. It observed Law #12 as distinguished from Law #2, which forms the credo of most academic writing.
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