Showing posts with label Can Poetry Matter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Can Poetry Matter. Show all posts

Forum Thread: Is Poetry Dead? (Discussion)

From time to time, I will move up threads that seem to be relevant in the moment. New users jump onto Poets.net every day, and, perhaps, have missed some of the earlier threads.

This thread was originally posted on March 31, at 9:50 PM, when Poets.net was just a week old.

Dana Gioia, in the May 1991 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, wrote the still-controversial essay "Can Poetry Matter?"

Some relevant excerpts from Gioia's essay:


____________________________

American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

...

Why, for example, does poetry mix so seldom with music, dance, or theater? At most readings the program consists of verse only—and usually only verse by that night's author. Forty years ago, when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting other poets' work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author's ego. No wonder the audience for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author.

...

A clubby feeling also typifies most recent anthologies of contemporary poetry. Although these collections represent themselves as trustworthy guides to the best new poetry, they are not compiled for readers outside the academy.

...

Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia.

...

In 1940, with the notable exception of Robert Frost, few poets were working in colleges unless, like Mark Van Doren and Yvor Winters, they taught traditional academic subjects. The only creative-writing program was an experiment begun a few years earlier at the University of Iowa.

...

Reviewers fifty years ago were by today's standards extraordinarily tough. They said exactly what they thought, even about their most influential contemporaries. Listen, for example, to Randall Jarrell's description of a book by the famous anthologist Oscar Williams: it "gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter."...[Reviewers'] praise mattered, because readers knew it did not come lightly.

...

...no art faces more towering obstacles than poetry. Given the decline of literacy, the proliferation of other media, the crisis in humanities education, the collapse of critical standards, and the sheer weight of past failures, how can poets possibly succeed in being heard?

...

[Closing paragraph:]

It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.

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I have posted some highly relevant passages from Gioia's article, but this essay is well worth reading in its entirety.

Gioia also offers "six modest proposals" for how "poetry could again become a part of American public culture," good advice for 2011, but you can read that for yourself (link below).


From Can Poetry Matter?

William Logan Revisited

William Logan, in late 2006, posted on PoetryFoundation.org his viewpoints on the state of poetry. One passage has caught my eye:

Poets who write for awards are idiots. Poets who want awards are idiots. Look at the Pulitzers from the thirties: Conrad Aiken, Robert Frost, George Dillon, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Hillyer, Audrey Wurdemann, Robert P. Tristram Coffin, Robert Frost (again), Marya Zaturenska, John Gould Fletcher. One poet of the first rank, two or three of the third, and then oblivion. You don’t see Pound or Eliot or Stevens or Moore or Williams. If you think the poets awarded the prize in the nineties will fair better, think again.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t accept awards. It’s rude not to accept something people give you. Perhaps every award should be replaced with a saguaro cactus.


The rest of Logan's post is also enlightening.

His concludes his post with this emotional outburst:

My last words on poetry:

I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!

Guest Writer: A Message From Matt

(After announcing the launch of Poets.net, I received the following message from Matt K., a fellow admin at the now-closed Foetry. He was gracious to grant me permission to post his sage words.)

I trust your sense mission and drive. Like I said, it's hard for me to get a good picture of Poets.org because I have been detached...not reading anything on the forum (except a couple scattered posts recently that Jennifer linked in e-mails).

I meant only to voice the general concern that if you [Poets.net] aim too low, you might condemn yourself to failure, even when you win. What I really want to do is trumpet out to all of you: "Don't be humbled! Kick Ass!" If you say that stirring the pot on Poets.org is the thing to do, then I trust you. Obviously you are all in the right in the arguments you are championing...but that's always the most dangerous place to be.

When I got myself kicked off the the most popular Jungian forum (shortly before the end of Foetry), the admins thought a banning would silence me. When I started my own forum a short while later, the "enemies" of the folks who banned me came over to say hi and give me a "Welcome to the Neighborhood" basket. It was then that the people responsible for my excommunication came crawling back to me to make nice. I.e., I was more powerful and threatening to them when I had my own space to speak in and from...as a competitor. On their forum, between heavy-handed moderation and general ideological conformity in many of the most active forum members, I was relatively easily silenced. But on the other side of the tracks, I couldn't be silenced.

It's like opening up a blues bar across the street from another bar that refuses to showcase blues music. You blast your blues out onto the sidewalk and more people will hear it. Go into the other joint and try to play blues and the "consensus voice" will boo you off the stage or the manager will tell you to get lost. When people want to hear the blues, they know not to got to a place like that. They'll go across the street... because that's where one goes to hear the blues.

So, I'm definitely down with Poets.net. Wail those blues. Make it the best damn blues joint in town.

As for me, I'd like to help you out in one venue or another, but I'm not sure I'll be able to. I've done all my songs and dances, and I repeated them each ad nauseum back on Foetry. I haven't read a single poem since before Foetry shut down...and the last new poem I wrote was maybe 5 or 6 years ago. So far, I in no way miss it. And I definitely don't miss the ridiculous antics of the PoBiz powers-that-be. I can't help but find the whole culture demeaning and distinctly adolescent. The art, I respect...but where is it these days? Not in the PoBiz. And the PoBiz IS poetry today. Even if we could tear it down with our left hands, our right hands would still have to learn how to build something new, some new vehicle for the art of poetry to ride on. I don't think that poets are psychologically and creatively secure enough to accept destruction without alternative creation. The prospect of anarchy (even if temporary) terrifies them more than any failure of ethics, any selling out, any amount of demeaning.

It reminds me of the film of Horton Hears a Who I recently saw with my son, Leo. The Who-Poets need their protective elephant (the PoBiz) that they feel is the only power that really "hears" them (because--cue violin music--they are so small and needy). We outsiders and dissidents are like the mad kangaroos and apes that want to boil the little clover of Whoville in Beezlenut oil...as far as the establishment poets and those who envy and admire them are concerned. To these poets, their elephant savior is wholly good and must be believed in and worshiped at all costs. There is far more at stake for them than honor or dishonor. They see the PoBiz as essential to their very survival and their identities as poets...so survival and existence. I'm not sure that teat can be pried away from them. Perhaps they need some kind of transitional object. Not just a scolding, but a potentially attractive alternative. (And so, making that alternative attractive in various ways is also essential.)

Currently, I'm fighting in the Jungian Wars. There are many parallels with the old Foetry vs. the PoBiz dynamic. Probably another unwinnable battle, but of course, I wouldn't have it any other way. If I can find the time, I'll try to do what I can for the heirs of Foetry.com, but I don't think I'll be able to weave any A-to-Z arguments that the Poets.org "Poetry-Belt" (you know, like the poetry equivalent of the Bible-Belt) will find convincing or even considerable. I felt that even on Foetry, my preaching tended to be too doom-and-gloom, too severe to win many minds. I have no hope that Poets.org members would be more interested or persuadable. If I can ever help strike a precise death blow to some fortification of the PoBiz to support the post-Foetry/Poets.Net mission, I may crawl out of retirement. For now, though, I will probably just remain a loyal fan.

Yours,

Matt


(Welcome to the blues bar across the street.)

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