APRIL 1997
Forum:
Can Poetry Matter?
Bart Baxter
Does Poetry Matter? The Culture of Poetry
by Bart Baxter
Before I begin my prepared remarks, let me ask for a show of hands in the audience, a scrupulously honest show of hands? How many of you here tonight are poets? [Half the audience raised hands.] How many of you would like to be a poet, have maybe written some verse, are looking for a publisher? [1/4 raised hands.] And how many here are friends of the moderator or someone on the panel? [1/4 raised hands.] Now, everyone in the audience who did not fall into any one of those three categories, who did not raise your hands before, please raise your hands now. [One hand was raised.]
I think if Dana Gioia
were here tonight, he would simply say: I rest my case.
Dana Gioia's argument,
which first appeared as an essay in The Atlantic and which later
appeared in a collection of essays published in 1992 called Can Poetry
Matter, runs like this:
1. The audience for poetry events usually consists of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author (or in this case, the panel).
2. Poetry has lost the larger audience of educated intellectualsthe doctors, lawyers, clergymen, accountants and business people, the literary intelligentsia made up of non-specialistswho once took poetry seriously; who are the market for jazz, foreign films, theater, opera, the symphony and dance; the broad audience who reads quality fiction and biographies and who listen to public radio.
3. Poetry now belongs to a sub-culture of academicians, funded by public subsidy through a complex network of federal, state and local agencies.
a. There are over 200 graduate creative-writing programs.
b. There are several thousand college-level jobs teaching poetry.
c. This decades long public funding has created a large professional class for the production and reception of poetry.
d. The contemporary poet makes a living not by publishing literary work, but by educating, usually at a large institution, most likely state-run, such as a school district, a college or university, or even (these days) at a hospital or a prison, i.e., teaching other people how to write poetry, orat the highest levelsteaching other people how to teach other people how to write poetry.
4. Since poetry professionals must publish for job security and tenure, academic literary journals have sprung up everywhere so that academicians can now publish each other's work. Fellowships, grants, degrees, appointments, and publications are objective facts, they are quantifiable, i.e., they can be listed on a resume.
5. Before the turn of the century, few poets were working in colleges, unless like Mark Van Doren or Yvor Winters, they taught traditional academic subjects. Poets were doctors like Williams, businessmen like Stevens, lawyers like MacLeish, farmers or bankers like Eliot and Frost. Most often they wrote in other disciplines like Agee who reviewed movies for Time, Weldon Kees who wrote about jazz, Robert Hayden who reviewed music and theater, or Archibald MacLeish who wrote for and edited Fortune.
6. In the process of narrowing the artform to conform to academia, poetry has become increasingly mediocre, or as Dana Gioia says: "the integrity of the art has been betrayed."
7. For this reason, few people bother to read poetry, even the poetry of other poets. As Auden put it: "Writing gets shut up in a circle of clever people writing about themselves for themselves."
8. And Gioia's pessimistic prognosis is this: A Society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language, will become slaves to those who do retain that power, be they politicians, preachers, newscasters, car salesmen or confidence-men.
9. Given the decline of literacy, the proliferation of other media, the crisis in humanities education, the collapse of critical standards, can poets ever again succeed in being heard?
Through page after page,
example after example, Gioia illustrates that poetry now belongs to a subsidized
subculture, and that this fact makes for mediocre poetry that no one really
wants to hear. But I would like to carry the argument one step further.
What is it about contemporary poetry, especially post-modern poetry,
that makes it so unfriendly to a larger audience, unfriendly if not downright
antagonistic? Why does Twentieth Century poetry lack the broader appeal
of say, song lyrics.
In graphic art, the widespread
use of the camera and photography at the turn of the century was a huge
aesthetic obstacle and challenge to modern painters. Impressionism, abstract-impressionism,
minimalism, Op-Art, Pop-Art, Color Field, Dada, Neo-Dada, photo-realism
and neo-photo-realism, can all be seen as a reaction to the threat of the
photograph as chronicler of creative reality. A retreat, if you will, before
the onslaught of a technology that not only rendered the world in a more
realistic way, but could be used by the least-trained novice. Whether Pollock's
splatters, Reinhardt's huge black canvases, or Don Eddy's and Ralph Going's
photo-realism (actually projecting photographs on a canvas and tracing the
images, filling in the colors the way a seven-year-old paints by numbers),
Twentieth Century graphic art must be seen as the final capitulation to
the camera and its exacting draftsmanship. Tom Wolf has said that 100 years
from now, art history students will look back on Twentieth Century painting
with "[snickers], laughter, and good-humored amazement."
How many times have you
heard some boorish lout in line at the museum of modern art mouthing off:
My seven year old daughter could have done this! The question for
us should be: Is he right? And we must ask the same question about Twentieth
Century poetry.
Will students of Twentieth
Century poetry be equally amused and amazed about open form and free verse?
The associated technical adversary might be the mass availability of popular
music. It may be said, perhaps fairly, that the finest poets of our age
produced their best work for the radio, the television, and the stage: from
Rodgers and Hammerstein to Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, from Cole Porter and
Irving Berlin to Joan Osborne and Big Head Todd. These lyricists have been
able to reach a broad audience and make fine livings by writing arresting,
accessible, and articulate verse. The academy has chosen to withdraw from
the popular forum of ideas, to retreat toward inaccessibility as characterized
by complicated trope, minimalism, allusion, ellipses, odd syntax, odd punctuation,
and open form, rather than compete with popular music for the intellectual
currency of a populist audience.
Twentieth Century poetry,
for the most part, can be characterized by:
1. Open form, if not aggressive free verse the deconstructionist antagonism to forcing the language into anything other than the most natural voice. Form in this sense is seen as repression. Free verse is the moral and aesthetic equivalent to abstract expressionism in graphic art. It is the minimalist canvas, the photo-realism, the easy retreat and final capitulation to popular music and greeting card doggerel.
2. Figurative language to the exclusion of any other poetic device. I call it the fascination with association.. Analogies are a huge part of academia--from the Stanford-Binet, SAT, the GRE to the LSAT, which all stress the intellectual rigor of seeing and making associations, of being cognizant of the fact that one thing is like another thing, often in odd and interesting ways. Eliot in his 1991 essay "Hamlet and His Problems" asserted that "a poet can express emotion only through an objective correlative." The use of trope is so pervasive that it often overwhelms most contemporary poetry. Many poets use no other poetic device than metaphor and simile. In any current literary journal one can find dozens of poems all written in virtually the same style, that is to say prose shaped on the page to resemble poetry, with line breaks and stanzas to simulate poetic form, but without any of the traditional poetic devices: rhyme scheme or rhyme, alliteration, consonance, assonance, onomatopoeia, meter or even the barest hint of rhythm. These poems derive their poetic raison d' etre by virtue of their figurative language, the poet noting cleverly, in conversational tone, sometimes five or six times in a short poem, how one thing is like another. The fascination with association, a particular construct of the creative-writing class or poetry workshop, seems to be the sole literary device of most contemporary poets.
3. Lyric form rather than Narrative: Twentieth Century poetry has tended away from story-telling, tended away from the legacy of Vachel Lindsey and Langston Hughes, away from the long narratives about great deeds and larger-than-life events, toward an introverted, introspective, I, me, we, autobiographical, confessional, isolated, self-absorbed, self-centered, self-conscious, self-righteous poetry that is little concerned about the audience.
4. Limited emotion: Even these confessional poets would toss out their journals before being thought sentimental. In the academy, poets are alert to the Freudian ambivalence of emotion, prone to intellectual skepticism (deconstruction a perfect example), so that they seldom speak with fervent conviction about anything. Charles Reznikoff said: "Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling." Heaven help the sentimental.
5. Persistent irony.
6. Meditative quality.
7. Impersonality: William Carlos Williams believed that with the publication of "The Wasteland" "the bottom had dropped out of everything" he had cared about in poetry.
8. Vagueness.
9. Contradiction.
10. Understatement
11. Economy.
12. Wit.
13. Fragmentation.
14. Discontinuity.
Dana Gioia wrote "Can Poetry Matter?"
long before he realized what was going on in the urban centers across the
country, in the night clubs and cabarets, at the Greenmill Tavern in Chicago
and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York, at the open readings and poetry
slams. In a lecture he presented at Poets House in New York on October 26
[1995], which became an essay published in Poetry Flash, "Notes
Toward a New Bohemia," his greatest fears about the future of poetry
seem to be assuaged.
His argument runs something like this:
1. The primary means of publication of new poetry is now oral. This applies to older established poets as well as new unknowns.
2. This represents an enormous paradigm shift away from print culture, in that:
a. The government is neither involved with subsidizing events nor appointing particular poets.
b. The physical audience listening to poetry greatly outnumbers the people who read poetry in books. (Do we need one more professor to tell us that the important thing is whether the poem will translate from the "stage to the page"?).
3. This is a populist revolution, a distinct move from print to oral tradition, largely among groups long alien to the traditional, dominant, literary, academic culture:
a. e.g., rap lyrics, in music and poetry.
b. Cowboy poetry.
c. Poetry slams.
4. Surprisingly, most of this new populist poetry is formal:
a. e.g., the four-stress lines in rap.
b. The English ballad form in cowboy poetry.
c. The merger of poetry and experimental theater in performance poetry at poetry slams often uses elaborate rhyme schemes.
5. As for the University, an institution better equipped to preserve old culture than foster the creation of new art, it will probably hold on dearly to Modernism, and will continue to do so until Post-modern poetry's last gasp.
Bart Baxter's work has appeared in Ergo, Seattle Review, Red Cedar Review, The Ohio Poetry Review, Raven Chronicles, among others. He won the 1994 Hart Crane Award for poetry at Kent State University; the 1994 Charles Proctor Award (Washington State); the 1995 MTV Poetry Grand Slam. His second book of poetry is Peace for the Arsonist (Bacchae Press,1995).
© The Raven Chronicles 1997