Poetry is in trouble. At least according to the NEA and Newsweek.
“In 2008, just 8.3 percent of adults had read any poetry in the preceding 12 months,” Marc Bain writes in an online article this week, citing January’s NEA report “Reading on the Rise.”
“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.”
The NEA report showed fiction readership on the rise, a fact met with general enthusiasm among literary types, but poetry readership in the dumps:
“Almost as an afterthought, the report also noted that the number of adults reading poetry had continued to decline, bringing poetry’s readership to its lowest point in at least 16 years.”
Is it because contemporary poetry is exceptionally bad?
Is it because advocacy organizations aren’t doing their jobs?
Is it because critcs aren’t doing theirs?
Is it because the public just doesn’t get it?
Is it because teachers haven’t read their Kenneth Koch?
The whole article, and a few answers, can be found here.
Poetry is dead? I had no idea. Was it a blunt instrument that did it? A small mind? A certain slant of doubt? A line without rhythm? Averse?
it’s even worse than it looks. they asked if people had read a work of fiction (which probably meant a novel for most who answered yes) in the last year, or ‘any’ poetry…any poetry at all, even a ten-line twenty-second something in the new yorker.
Judging from the news lately it seems to be the case that mainstream magazines like Newsweek are losing plenty of readers themselves.
another thing that seems to get poetry in hot water–it’s always ‘literary.’ if you asked how many people read ‘literary’ fiction, as opposed to, say, king or rowling, you’d get a more depressing number. still, five to ten percent doesn’t sound half bad to me.
Don,
Oh, snap!
Last night at the grocery store, I commented on the decoration that the cashier had affixed to his sweatshirt — he’s a friendly, sweet guy, and we’ve had real conversations, so it wasn’t out of the way for me to comment on his clothes, I don’t think. He had sewn a red cloth valentine over his heart, and a skull and crossbones over the valentine.
“Love and death?” I asked.
“It refers to an Oscar Wilde quote,” he said.
“‘You always kill the thing you love’? Is that it? Those probably aren’t the exact words, but Wilde has a line like that,” I said.
“No,” he said. “‘The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.’”
“Great quote!” I said. “I hadn’t heard that! Much better than the one I had, which is a depressing one. It reminds me of an E. E. Cummings line,” I continued — a line from the last poem Cummings submitted to Poetry magazine, for the 50th anniversary issue, though I didn’t tell the cashier that. “‘. . . that hugest whole creation may be less incalculable than a single kiss.’” I forgot where the line break went (after “less”), even though it’s pretty obvious.
He liked the line. “That gave me chills,” he said.
I’m not too worried about poetry’s declining market share.
I hate to change the subject, but – and maybe others have noted this also – the print & other news media, along with several major research organs in Washington, & maybe a dozen or so large universities across this absorbent country of ours, have expressed dismay over another, & perhaps related, crisis afflicting our national culture of late :
I’m referring to the mysterious decline in the number of weasel sightings in the northerly sections of Gawanook Co., Wisconsin, over the last several months. This is a real cause for concern, and I thought this might be an appropriate place to underline my own personal concern about that here, even though I realize we have mostly been talking about a similar crisis in poetry. Sorry.
When I don’t know what to do with my fingers, I smoke. When I don’t know what to do with my mind, I read Newsweek.
I think the decline of poetry was first reported shortly after Homer debuted the Iliad and has been making headlines ever since.
Thanks for sharing this, Travis. If nothing else, publicity such as these articles showing a decline of poetry is probably not good…even if it isn’t entirely true. Definitely a good thing to be aware of if one is trying to make a living as a poet.
In my humble opinion, analysis completed or presented by the large majority of news agencies in America is worth about as much as AIG stock (if you can call quoting numbers from various small and localized surveys analysis). In this case, it looks like only 1,000 were surveyed. Where…who…urban, suburban, rural…how has the sample changed since the 80’s, the 90’s, etc…? The list of questions regarding the credibility of the statistics is long.
How is the readership of poetry magazine? Up, down, flat? This is probably a decent gage.
Capitalism and poetry have something in common after all: they thrive on crises.
It’s not just poetry. One of America’s greatest photojournalists, John Suau, who just won this year’s World Press Photo of the Year award (follow the link below) complains of the following to Photo District News:
The last two months have been especially bad, Suau says. He hasn’t had a single assignment except for covering the presidential inauguration for a Japanese book publisher.
“If the situation continues like it has in the last two months, down the road I would be in danger,” Suau says. “Do I have to get another job to do something? I don’t know. I may have to do something else besides photography.”
Suau has covered conflicts and human crises around the world and has won two World Press Photo of the Year awards, the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, and numerous other recognitions….
Suau says he and other documentary photographers want to work on stories about the human impact of the economic crisis, but the decline in newspapers and magazines has made it hard to find funding. “It’s incredibly frustrating for photographers in America,” he says. “We need to be working.”
http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/content_display/photo-news/photojournalism/e3i6a1d515f274b8d4ec3fff05a9dcf0b5d
By the way. His winning photo was shot with a Leica M6, with Tri-x B&W film.
Martin
POETRY is up 300 percent. the sample size was 18,000, not 1,000. (did i read the same articles as marty?) but the rise in this one magazine is almost certainly part of a contraction, in terms of print publications. there is a limited number of publications that the main bookstores (e.g., B&N and Borders) can carry, and the rise of the mega-chains has meant good news in a small way, and they carry a lot more variety than they need to or were expected to.
but nobody (and you guys don’t count), nobody cares about poetry. that is, it isn’t a crisis. it’ll be a crisis when we can’t find poetry in the market place anymore. and the market is past the point of saturation, overpriced and underdemanded (like almost all books in america).
market economics are the last place to lay blame. poets get many times more attention than the marketplace would seem to dictate. the market is bending over backwards to give poetry its place on the magazine rack, and w/o much real incentive, and the public isn’t biting.
Travis:
Personally, I found the associated article, Bruce Wexler’s “Poetry Is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?”, much more engaging. Insofar as the NEA numbers are concerned, I was astounded by how high they were until I stopped to think who they might be polling (i.e. in my experience those who don’t read poetry don’t line up to answer polls on it, either) and realized they weren’t referring to contemporary poetry.
Is it because contemporary poetry is exceptionally bad?
“And Donald Hall, a former U.S. poet laureate, points out that most poetry in any age is bad, and that hasn’t kept people from reading in the past.”
Too true! One difference, though, is mutual indifference. Cue the late Adrian Mitchell: “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.”
Another difference is that 100 years ago a dissatisfied reader would label the product “bad poetry”. Today’s might not consider much of it poetry at all.
A third distinction is that the poetry reader of 100 years ago might be more inclined to read 999 pieces of doggerel in order to find the one gem. Today’s soundbyte audience is far less patient. Even if 2009 produces the same five or ten memorable poems that 1909 did it won’t be enough. Without the filters that were in place in 1909 today’s great poems are almost sure to be drowned in a sea of dreck. By “filters” I mean discriminating editors (everyone with a desktop publisher to web space is an “editor” now) and high-profile reviewers.
Is it because advocacy organizations aren’t doing their jobs?
Partly. Doesn’t the mountain-to-Mohammed strategy of helping poets define poetry for the public seem a little ass-backward to you?
Is it because critics aren’t doing theirs?
“Critics”? What critics?
It’s a chicken-and-egg scenario: why would someone who doesn’t read poetry bother to read poetry criticism?
Come to think of it, how can we expect reviewers to reflect the tastes of a broad audience when no such audience exists?
Is it because the public just doesn’t get it?
Get what? That they don’t understand their own tastes? That they need to be told what to like? Did the uneducated, illiterate louts in Shakespeare’s pits have any trouble “getting” it?
Is it because teachers haven’t read their Kenneth Koch?
For all we know, it might be because they have.
-o-
John Crowe Ransom killed poetry. His 1937 essay, “Criticism Inc.” killed poetry, in which he said Poetry Criticism is a Science and needs to be developed in the University. To appreciate ‘the new writing,” Ransom said, we need professionals, not amateurs. This killed poetry.
Dead is certainly the wrong word to use (portrait painting, for instance, is obsolete, but not “dead”). And it’s not poetry that seems to be becoming obsolete, it’s just poets. Poetry is thriving.
And let’s be clear: we’re just talking about print poetry. I mean, I can hardly throw a book of obsolete poems toward the garbage without hitting someone who either does Hip-Hop, slam, talks in spontaneous haiku, writes lyrics, participates in the almost liturgical word games that happen constantly on message boards , or posts their emo poetry to their myspace, livejournal, or deviantart page. Sure, no one reads poetry, but more people are participating in poetry than ever before.
It seems odd that we’d assume that the decline of print poetry means very much for poetry in general. I mean, for prose yes, prose owes its current popularity largely to the printing press, but poetry was around for probably thousands of years before even writing existed. The printing press had a good run, short in the big scheme of things, but, like the oil painting, I’m sure it will be around long after we really need it. Hell, books of poems will probably still be real popular at RenFest in a few hundred.
Or who knows, maybe society will collapse in a year or two, and we can shout poems to each other over the rubble of our former America. Whatever the future, we can be pretty sure that poetry will last far after the paperback has become an antique.
On another note, I wonder what the findings of this study mean for Bill Knott’s formulation of TAPP (The American Poetry Public). Knott’s formulation of TAPP is meant to be a reminder to poets to play to their audience. We’re supposed to believe that the measly amount of sales that it takes to put someone on a poetry bestsellers list is in some way indicative of how “accessible” they are. But how can we ignore that TAPP (as far as on Bill Knott’s terms it only includes print poetry) is practically nobody. In light of this article, how can people continue to argue that poets like Billy Collins and Mary Oliver are in way “accessible”.
I knew Don was Doodle. Knew it.
Poetry is dead? It’s about time, no? Wait, what was “poetry” again? I’d like to send the wine back.
iain,
the poll doesn’t concern itself with making any distinctions between print and electronic poetry. it just asks: ‘have you read any poetry in the last 12 months?’
poetry is losing ground because we’re ceding our memory to the digital media, that is, whatever was left over after putting it away in books in the first place. it’s an evident trajectory. a lot of don’t even listen to songs anymore, just ringtone-length song clips. a novel, while it requires sustained attention, requires zero memory. a poem only makes sense with slow reading, which is all but dead.
Ian, I agree with everything you say (especially the way you put the printing press into perspective – as an historical phenomenon). My only doubt is with your play on “dead” and “obsolete”…neither of them quite do. And I’m sure Lucien Freud, one of the most powerful painters at work today, would not choose “obsolete” to describe portrait painting. David Hockney would also take exception.
The backdrop to all this poll-taking and audience puffing is: how can artists continue to make their living. (Vide my comment above on John Suau’s current struggle to make a reasonable living.)
The internet, as it’s supposed to do – since its codification of content doesn’t distinguish between this or that, but rather uses this or that as its basic algorithm – inevitably reduces poetry to content,
like the downgrading of the photograph to the image, the physical to the digital. As for painting, I, for one, still need oil painting more than I need, for example, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”
Martin
I’ll bet you half the people they asked said they hadn’t ready any poetry because they were afraid of the next question about what it meant. I’d argue that poetry and poems–especially talking about them–makes many people incredibly anxious. So much so that a) they don’t read and b) when they do, they don’t like to talk about it for fear of sounding stupid. In my experience, people feel ashamed when you ask them to talk about poetry, and apologetic that they don’t get it.
I thin poetry is sick in the shadows….
There is another really great post about that, take a look, friends: http://bjanepr.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/poetry-literary-criticism-and-once-again-the-death-of-poetry/
Best regards,
Rafael
I think you make a very important point there, Cathy. The anxious aura around poetry. But I don’t think it’s only a matter of feeling intimidated by “not understanding”. If people can read & understand all kinds of prose books, they can understand poetry.
Poetry does not fit neatly into substantial “book” form. The reader cannot relax into the comfy alternate prose world. The “packaging” is thin. The difference between prose & poetry is this dramatic IMMEDIACY – the same sense of vague threat or discomfort you may feel from sitting too close to the stage at live theater. Is it “real” or is it “fiction”? Is it art, or is it this person in my face, so to speak, talking straight at me?
Poets in person have been Sacred Monsters, surrounded by this aura of unpredictable immediacy, since the days of Dylan Thomas & before (say, back to the Hebrew prophets, & Plato…). Popular poets sometimes get around this by assuming a kind of camouflage (familiar example : Robert Frost, in his complete Old Yankee outfit). You never know about poets. They are longhairs. They may be lunatics.
Accept the perennial reality of the Sacred Monster, folks. Learn to live with poetry’s essential strangeness. The straw man of “difficult” Modernism is not the problem. The dream of domesticating poetry, of measuring its “popularity” like other forms of art & entertainment, will never come true. It died with the Fireside Poets, smoking their pipes under the iron rooftops of Victorian Scientific Progress. It died with the Restoration Wits, jingling along with their metrical cribs of Rationalism. It’s always dying off, shedding its skin. Dionysius is always lurking in the woods nearby.
Since the death of preeminent American poet Charles Bukowski, there hasn’t been any poetry written in America that anyone who lives an average American life can begin to relate to. Perhaps that is the problem.
Cathy,
I think you’ve hit on something very important: the average reader (and even the professional reader) should probably not be asked that second question: what it means. For me, you’re comment recalls to mind Cleanth Brooks’s chapter in the The Well Wrought Urn, “The Heresy of Paraphrase” and the whole notion of the irreduciblity of poetry. The new essay by Mathew Zapruder featured on the main Foundation page (is it from the print version of Poetry?) doesn’t really call for a “new kind of poetry criticism” at all, but rather a return to Brook’s nuts and bolts approach. I think the “meaning” should be something that individual readers should be allowed to keep to themselves, a kind of no-go area. How poems actually work, the mechanics behind their construction makes for much more interesting copy.
Martin
Martin,
What I mean by saying “obsolete” is merely that it is technologically obsolete. Portrait painting will never be obsolete in the eyes of a contemporary portrait painter (or those that continue to appreciate it), but for good or for worse, our culture has moved on, and we no longer value it the way we did in an era when the making and distribution of images wasn’t instantaneous. This is the fact. As an aside, I think it both far too simplistic to say that this is “bad” as new media offers us very different but just as rich possibilities, and too simplistic to say it is “good” as the best work done in a medium can often be done long after that medium is “dead”. It’s just the way things go, and this certainly isn’t the first time a medium has completely changed the way we approach art.
As far as the question “how can poets continue to make a living”, I think it’s an important question. But I don’t trust the answer that print gave us. The Internet destroys the business models that went with print, but I think the free-speech benefits that it offers far outweigh the decline in profit margins that publishing companies are experiencing. And who knows, perhaps I’ll feel differently the day I receive payment for a poem. I hope not though.
To bring TAPP back in to it: I think if we poets truly cared about the American poetry audience, we’d just stop making poetry, as they clearly aren’t interested. But we won’t. Because that isn’t even remotely why we do this (or at least this goes for those of us who will continue with poetry after the mountains of money we’re rolling in dries up).
James,
Not to promote myself (sort of a odd expression, since that is exactly what I’m about to do), but I’ve recently tried to discuss (here) the new reading challenges presented by the Internet. A few of the things you’ve said about the effect of electronic media on our culture seem pretty reductive. Reading poetry doesn’t just happen at one speed (and it shouldn’t). And the Internet has complicated the way we read far more than just speeding it up (which also isn’t precisely what it’s done). Poetry (or whatever it’s called these days) is very much alive and well on the Internet.
“Since the death of preeminent American poet Charles Bukowski, there hasn’t been any poetry written in America that anyone who lives an average American life can begin to relate to. Perhaps that is the problem.”
Henry Chinaski, I address you directly: that is a pretty big statement. Do you think there is a woman in America who could “relate” to Bukowski?
Actually there are dozens of female poets average women could relate to.
Aw, Chinaski–Go back to your job at the Post Office.
Anonymous: Henry Chinaski is the name of the Bukowski-type narrator in Bukowski novels. As you can see, yes, there is a woman in America who can “relate” to Bukowski. Though I prefer his fiction to his poetry.
Daisy
P.S. So who is pretending to be Chinaski? Is that you, Ange?
The almost neglible response to ‘have you read any poetry in the last 12 months’ is troubling, I think, because it would be easy for respondents to lie and say yes.
Not only do people not read poetry, they don’t even want to appear to a be someone who reads poetry.
I think we need to look at such data full in the face and not run from it with hypocritical, elitist dodges.
Why don’t people even want to appear to like poetry?
Martin,
You wrote:
“For me, you’re comment recalls to mind Cleanth Brooks’s chapter in the The Well Wrought Urn, “The Heresy of Paraphrase” and the whole notion of the irreduciblity of poetry. The new essay by Mathew Zapruder featured on the main Foundation page (is it from the print version of Poetry?) doesn’t really call for a “new kind of poetry criticism” at all, but rather a return to Brook’s nuts and bolts approach.”
Cleanth Brooks, as you probably know, belonged to John Crowe Ransom’s New Critical, formerly Agrarian/Vanderbilt U. group which invaded the Academy between the wars, turning literary criticism into a “science.”
The New Critics wrenched poetry away from its old role of uniting people through art and put it to a new use: the creation of a professorial elite who carved scientific words in the tree of old song.
The intimidation factor, which Cathy raised, and which Henry brilliantly illustrated with his ‘sitting too close to the stage’ remark, begins its rise with Brooks and his ‘nut and bolts approach.’
We should call Brooks’ approach the ‘nut who causes audiences to bolt’ approach.
Or, ‘The Over-Wrought Urn.’
Thomas
Michael,
John is correct.
You are rudely forcing together Hercalitus and Plato, attempting to reconcile ‘never step into the same river twice’ with an ideal stream.
Look at the history of the sonnet. Through the ages they still sound like sonnets.
You might argue, well, sonnets are not really poetry…
But then, where would you be?
Thomas
Me, Daisy? LOL! But I must admit if there were a contemporary poet I would nominate as “relatable” to someone “who lives an average American life” it would be you — I say that with good-natured envy. But as to why Daisy Fried books aren’t flying off the shelves any more than idiosyncratic Ashbery books are — well, I don’t know.
What I do know is that the artform my husband has loved very much — jazz — is in much the same place as poetry, and the other art form I’m thrilled by other than poetry — dance — is equally obscure and tenuous. If we stopped beating up on poetry for a moment, we could maybe admit that poetry is not exceptional.
I do think something should be done about its teaching in the schools. I knew a h.s. teacher in one of the best magnet schools in NYC who told me other English teachers simply left poetry out of their syllabuses. They either hated it, didn’t understand it themselves, or didn’t know enough about it to teach it. That was breathtaking.
Thomas,
I think you’re spot on when you say that most people don’t want to appear to like poetry. On several occasions, I’ve had people, upon finding out I love poetry, wildly denounce all poetry, only to corner me later asking me who to read. I mean, I don’t want to sound like this happens all the time, but it’s happened more than a couple times.
I’d be very interested in a poll that asked people what stereotypes they associate with poetry and poets.
Martin,
You said “How poems actually work, the mechanics behind their construction makes for much more interesting copy.”
I really don’t think this can be emphasized enough. I’m very much interested in what any poem is doing, and not so much interested in why someone thinks a poem is “good” or “bad”. I’m perfectly capable of placing poems into reductive categories myself, and don’t need any reviewers’ help.
Just trying to call out the person least likely to impersonate Bukowski’s alter ego, Ange : ) Feeble head-cold driven attempt at humor. Also to say hello. Hello!
Do you think there is a woman in America who could “relate” to Bukowski?
Charles Bukowski was the greatest lover in the history of the world. Women threw themselves at him with reckless abandon, literally dozens at a time. It may have been this constant sexual activity that finally pushed him, prematurely, into the afterlife. It is the remainder of the male gender that women have trouble relating to.
I don’t understand the questions in Travis’ post. Isn’t the root cause the current state of society? Why would someone give a hoot about poetry when there’s profit to be made elsewhere, or new material goods to consume, or obnoxious forms of entertainment to easily amuse?
Sorry about the post above to Michael–that’s a thrashing-out which belongs in another thread.
Iain,
The 92% of the population which does not read–and does not want to even appear to read–poetry, reject poetry, I would assume, for the following two reasons: 1. It is socially irrelevant to them. 2. It gives no pleasure.
It’s too bad the survey didn’t ask about dirty jokes.
I suspect the percentage for those who say they read dirty jokes would be close to 92%.
A friend emailed me a terrific joke called ‘The Hippie and the Nun’ today which worked on many levels: social, sexual, religious, plot, character, surprise, form, etc. The author was anonymous. It gave pleasure and it felt socially relevant.
Here’s the thing. This vulgar joke, ‘The Hippie and the Nun,’ is actually more complex than almost anything a New Critic typically touches.
Yet it appeals instantly to a wide, non-literary audience.
So, is poetry actually defined in a sense, for us in the 20th century, as what REQUIRES a New Critic to help us with it?
If it doesn’t need criticism, it isn’t poetry?
Thomas
>>Isn’t the root cause the current state of society? Why would someone give a hoot about poetry when there’s profit to be made elsewhere, or new material goods to consume, or obnoxious forms of entertainment to easily amuse?
Um, you’ve described “the current state of society” for the last four hundred years, so yr explanations are obviously either wrong or incomplete. Or do you believe profit, material goods, & obnoxious entertainment to be exclusively contemporary phenomena? Let’s think a bit harder, people.
Fifty years ago Jarrell wrote: “One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during a year, no book at all.” So few people read poetry: a startling development if it weren’t also the default condition of the art since it was invented. In Poland people read a lot of poetry, I hear. Worldwide, however, throughout history the percentage of people who read any poetry in the preceding year has hovered around zero. I’m supposed to be shocked by an alleged fifty-percent decline in such reading over a decade & a half?
To take a more philosophical approach:
“Why should I do work for poetry?”
This is the question. Before the New Critics, poetry was equated with leisure, not study.
Poetry was a way in which brilliant thoughts could be made immediately and quickly accessible to everybody—this was poetry qua poetry’s whole point.
The mystery of life could fit in a sonnet.
All that was superior in thought and feeling could speak in a poem to any literate person without any indoctrination into what was ‘superior;’ the peasant could see for himself what the ‘superior’ was, and whether it was something he needed or wanted, as long as some vague idea of what was ‘superior’ lived in his aspirations, and if blood flowed in his veins.
Poetry was the complex put simply, and ‘put simply’ does NOT, as some may assume, imply complex issues do not abound.
Science studies the complex to get at the simple; no one seeks the complex for its own sake; complexity exists in nature until, simplified, it resolves into science on one hand and art on the other.
Tackling complexity is the act of the scientist, and the goal is that non-scientists will not be defeated by complexity; the simplicity the science has found saves us, whether from back-breaking labor, or superstition.
Poetry is the leisure activity of the scientist, in which the difficulty is drained out of the complex in a cheerful and cheering act, for the sake of all those burdened with complexity which is back-breaking, heart-breaking, or mind-clouding.
Non-scientists, too busy with ordinary work to see through the complexities scientists unravel, enjoy poetry that serves up understanding, not complexity.
Poetry has no commerce with difficulty in terms of its readership, for work overcomes difficulty, by definition, and poetry—the result–stands opposed to work in an absolute manner.
Work overcomes difficulty as a social aim, but not as a social act.
Poetry is a social act, without social aim; poetry is free of social aim, which belongs to work.
Poetry resides entirely in the social sphere.
Morale and social cohesion are poetry’s goal, shared understanding is poetry’s goal, not the studious overcoming of a difficulty, for this is how we define work, and to make poetry similar to work is to defeat poetry’s whole reason for existence.
Another thing to think about is that America has always been a pragmatic nation, a kind of Plato’s Republic that does not trust poetry.
Our most popular poets, like Longfellow, are not taken seriously today because they are considered mere European imitators. America’s Longfellow chapter was simply to show Europe, ‘we can do this, too’ and after that, except for Frost, there hasn’t really been a popular American poet.
The Modernist school, led by Eliot and Pound, was mostly European. The Fugitives, the American school of modernism, produced New Criticism as a sort of science in the universities, but as actual poets, produced almost nothing.
We are a country of Ben Franklin (who did just about everything except write poetry) not Byron.
Academia rescued poets like Whitman who were not popular during their day. Otherwise America is just not a country of poets.
Here is an interesting take by Arthrur Clutton-Brock:
“Prose is the achievement of civilization, of people who have learned to discuss without blows or invective, who know that truth is hard to find and worth finding, who do not begin by accusing an opponent of wickedness, but elicit reason and patience by displaying them. You cannot say in poetry what the best prose says, or accomplish what the best prose accomplishes. Civilization may not surpass primitive society in heights of rapture and heroism, but it is, if it be civilization, better for everyday life, kinder, more rational, more sustained in effort; and this kindness and reason and sustained effort are expressed and encouraged in masterpieces of prose.
If a writer continues long in this style (the poetic prose-style of Carlyle) he wearies us like a man talking at the top of his voice…”
I think modern poetry has attempted to listen to this complaint, and thus become more plain and modest than 19th century poetry, which tends to exclaim and shout and fall into raptures.
But has this helped poetry today? The more poetry becomes like prose, the more it loses its identity and loses an audience.
What can it do? It can’t rant like Pound, it can’t sound like Longfellow, if it sink into quietude it becomes too much like prose, if it attempt to wink and laugh, it turns into jokes…
Poetry is facing a lose-lose situation.
I don’t want to use this word…
Poets are facing a…
Crisis!
Great statements, Tom Brady. Worth pondering. But I’d hesitate to place the poet strictly on one side of the divide between work and play.
Work and play are in a kind of mutual relationship. Labor precedes Contemplation (see Pound, even). Work week & Sabbath day.
See Virgil’s Georgics. The Poet, remembering or anticipating the Golden Age, laboriously plowing his versus, expresses pity for the victims of the violent Iron Age – but sees something beyond the perpetual strife, & so provides hope.
As for the crisis in American poetry, see Edwin Honig’s intro to one of Oscar Williams’ much-maligned anthologies, the Mentor Book of Major American Poetry (1962). Just about every paragraph of this essay is focused on the problems you raise, & responds to them.
“Who in this bowling alley bowled the sun?”
- Edward Taylor
Hi Daisy!
It should be obvious why the vast majority of people do not read poetry. You should know it instinctively.
Alright… I only dived into the posts above about 6 or 7 deep, so if I’m repeating anything excuse I.
Poetry has declined.
In the sense of when Ginsberg and Cummings were doing their things.
We’re not superstars like that. We’re stars, sure. I’ve met many talented poets on the circuit, heading overseas to read. People “in the know” know their name, and those “in the know” aren’t all secret society. It’s not a handshake and a nose wiggle type of thing. Musicians know ‘em, but the people who know the musicians may not. See the difference?
I think I understand why this is.
It’s kinda obvious, I think.
I’m going to use Ginsberg as an example. He affected people. And the reason he did was because he ignored their sensibilities when writing yet included our internal self in his writings. He used poetic/literary techniques to, perhaps, center his writing for hisself, but that came second nature, he more so wanted to ’speak’ to ’someone’. The writing was to be performed, which means, to be received. Billy Collins syncs into this, as does Karl Elder, but neither has achieved Ginsberg’s spotlight.
This is also the same with Nabokov. Why was he such a literati? No playing it safe.
We’re too safe. And by safe I am not trying to say… for the sake of. It is removing this MK-Ultra type haze sweeping over our true selves.
Speak from a pure place, and that pure place is usually dark, happy, bright, conflicted, and all the very multitudes expressed by HOWL and LOLITA which caused such an uproar.
“You’re not supposed to say that” — that type of sentiment, which hooks into the ‘you’re not supposed to *THINK*’ that either. Or FEEL it.
And this causes a spark to become an ember to become a firebulb.
This is not about whether literary techniques or formal education alienates, because we have Ashbery as an example, although he hails from the aforementioned generation. And back then there was crowd, not those hovering over a trashbin spitting flames in the cold of night.
They were in the sun with sunglasses and martini’s and beers. Trying to block the photographers.
I kinda think we need to start saying how we really feel in our poems, and not what we may subconsciously feel we should say.
This is not done on purpose. It’s something which requires us to dissect our selves. To ask if what we’re doing is what we actually doing. Or if it is shaded in the wrong direction.
Shake the wet off our fur.
I think we ought to bring more competition into poetry, like the old Greek Play Festivals, very public, very competitive–
Dead poets can compete, too.
All we needs are brackets; put poets across the country into big halls with big screens and everyone who comes gets to vote, with electronic voting devices, so it’s a big, clamorous, public, democratic, voting spectacle, and we can all feel at once the real popular will re: poetry.
For example:
Welcome to the 20th Century American Poetry Brackets!!!!!
THE ROAD TO THE FINAL FOUR STARTS HERE!!!
Here are the Rankings of the 4 Divisions…
and the 64 Seeds are…
North
1. “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening ” Robert Frost
2. “Vanity of the Blue Girls” John Crowe Ransom
3. “Grass” Carl Sandburg
4. “Resume” Dorothy Parker
5. “Papa’s Waltz” Theodore Roethke
6. “End Of The World” Archibald MaCleish
7. “We Real Cool” Gwendolyn Brooks
8. “Evening In the Saniturium” Louise Bogan
9. “In The Naked Bed, In Plato’s Cave” Delmore Schwartz
10. “Miniver Cheevy” Edwin Arlington Robinson
11. “Dream On” James Tate
12. “Lucinda Matlock” Edgar Lee Masters
13. “The Wellspring” Sharon Olds
14. “The People Next Door” Louis Simpson
15. “For Allen Ginsberg” X.J. Kennedy
16. “Chinese Courtesy” Paul Engle
South
1. “Daddy” Sylvia Plath
2. “One Art” Elizabeth Bishop
3. “Supermarket In California” Allen Ginsberg
4. “Why I Am Not A Painter” Frank O’Hara
5. “Marriage” Gregory Corso
6. “Those Winter Evenings” Robert Hayden
7. “Forgetfulness” Billy Collins
8. “Some Questions You Might Ask” Mary Oliver
9. “Bored” Margaret Atwood
10. “Prospects” Anthony Hecht
11. “One Train May Hide Another” Kenneth Koch
12. “Utopian Melodies” Stephen Dobyns
13. “Letting the Puma Go” Stephen Dunn
14. “What I Heard At The Discount Department Store” David Budbill
15. “The Marriage” Yvor Winters
16. “My Father At 85″ Robert Bly
East
1. “The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock” T.S. Eliot
2. “Canto XLV” Ezra Pound
3. “The Red Wheel Barrow” W.C. Williams
4. “Poetry” Marriane Moore
5. “Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town” e.e. cummings
6. “Patterns” Amy Lowell
7. “The More Loving One” W.H. Auden
8. “Wakefulness” John Ashbery
9. “Interlude” Karl Shapiro
10. “Otherwise” Jane Kenyon
11. “The Game” Stanley Kunitz
12. “Idea Of Ancestry” Etheridge Knight
13. “The Groundhog” Richard Eberhart
14. “Dance Lessons Of The Thirties” Donald Justice
15. “Reading In Place” Mark Strand
16. “Poems” Tom Disch
West
1. “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” Edna St. Vincent Millay
2. “Emperor Of Ice Cream” Wallace Stevens
3. “Dream Song #4″ John Berryman
4. “The Truth the Dead Know” Anne Sexton
5. “For My Daughter” Weldon Kees
6. “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone” Galway Kinnell
7. “I Know A Man” Robert Creeley
8. “Love Under the Republicans (and Democrats)” Ogden Nash
9. “The Ball Turret Gunner” Randall Jarrell
10. “Two Voices In A Meadow” Richard Wilbur
11. “Not So Good Night In San Pedro” Charles Bukowski
12. “My Confessional Sestina” Dana Gioia
13. “The Immortal” Charles Simic
14. “For William Stafford” Henry Taylor
15. “At Pleasure Bay” Robert Pinsky
16. “Walt Whitman Bathing” David Wagoner
Stay Tuned For Exciting Playoff Results!!!
Henry,
Labor precedes contemplation? I always thought it was the other way around. How in the world is one to avoid labor, otherwise?
Thanks, I’ll look for the Honig.
Thomas
NO ONE is going to comment on my March Madness Brackets???
What a bunch of party-poopers!!
Show some life, people!
Muse in Heaven! And we wonder why poetry isn’t popular…
Well, two weeks ago I won a free ice cream at a glacerie in New Orleans by knowing that the author of a poem written on a blackboard was Dorothy Parker.
So I would say that poetry is neither dead nor unrewarded.
SHOCKER IN THE NORTH REGIONAL
LOUIS SIMPSON UPSETS FROST TO REACH SWEET 16.
“Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” was the favorite to go all the way.
But after Frost walloped Paul Engle in the first round, Louis Simpson’s “The People Next Door,” a 14th seed, fresh off a major victory over a 3rd seeded Carl Sandburg work, up-ended one of the most beloved poems in the language by hitting 10 straight free throws in the clutch.
“I thought ‘Miles to go before I sleep’ would close the deal,” Frost said, “but give credit to Lou; his lines kept coming up big in the end.”
“My poem was longer than Frost’s,” Simpson opined, “and I thought it might have been a tad rambling, but I guess it’s emotional punch had just enough to win.”
Simpson’s poem is beautiful.
Beautiful enough to take down a no. 1 seed.
In another major upset in the South, 13th seeded Stephen Dunn’s “Letting the Puma Go” knocked off Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” at the buzzer.
The other no. 1 seeds, Plath’s “Daddy,” Eliot’s “Prufrock” and Millay’s “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” coasted into the Sweet 16.
Edna Millay did have trouble, though, with a hard-charging Robert Pinsky and his marvelous “At Pleasure Bay” in second round action. Pinsky led buy 5 going into the final two minutes, but Millay’s sonnet stayed strong and came back.
In other upsets, a smooth and relaxed Mark Strand, with “Reading In Place” got by an emotional Ezra Pound’s “Canto XLV.”
“I think it helped that I chose that canto for my recent anthology,” Strand (calmly) said. “I knew what to look for. But I’m still just so amazed right now.”
Strand fell to another giant, however, in the second round: T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
No one thought Strand had enough to beat Pound and Eliot back-to-back, and they were right.
So here’s who made it to the Sweet 16:
Louis Simpson, John Crowe Ransom, Louise Bogan, Archibald MaCleish, Sylvia Plath, Stephen Dunn, Billy Collins, Kenneth Koch, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Etheridge Knight, Edna Millay, John Berryman, Galway Kinnell, and Ogden Nash.
“Poetry isn’t dead,” Ms. Zuk wrote in a rare editorial, “it’s comatose. Unfortunately, working under the cover of obscurity, the hospice staff are rendering the wrong cures in the wrong forms, the wrong dosages and in the wrong circumstances. Worse yet, oral remedies are being administered rectally.”
- from “The Big E.Z.”
20TH CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY FINAL FOUR: PLATH, MILLAY, SIMPSON, AND SHAPIRO
Louis Simpson Continues Wild Run, Joined In Final Four By Karl Shapiro
Louis Simpson’s poignant, mid-length lyric “The People Next Door” fought off a stubborn John Crowe Ransom-authored “Vanity of the Blue Girls” in another shocking upset as the Jamaican-born Simpson advanced to the North Finals.
Ransom, no. 2 seed in the North Division, giant in this tournament, with a sterling reputation as Classical/Romantic Modernist, Academic power and New Critical master, fell to the elegant Simpson, known for his insouciant urbanity and heartbreaking hooks.
Simpson then advanced to the Final Four by beating Archibald MaCleish’s haunting, fireworks of a sonnet, “End of the World.”
First seed Sylvia Plath, joining Simpson in the final four, thrashed Billy Collins to win the South, as “Forgetfulness” never had a chance against “Daddy.” As Collins put it, “my poem looked flat besides hers.”
March Madness 2009 saw the suicide of Plath’s son; mom is playing like a demon in this tournament.
Stephen Dunn’s “Letting the Puma Go” almost out-ran Plath in the South’s semi-final round, but “Daddy” finally took care of “Puma.”
T.S. Eliot, another no. 1 seed, lost in a squeaker to Karl Shapiro, in a shocking East Final.
“Prufrock” had proved too much for Etheridge Knight’s “The Idea of Ancestry,” a loose but strong evocation of family and faith, in the East semi-final. Eliot’s lyric formalism was too much for Knight’s strongly felt observation.
But Karl Shapiro’s “Interlude III,” a gem of a lyric, fresh off an upset against Auden’s “The More Loving One,” nipped “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to make the final four. Karl Shapiro shed tears of joy on beating Auden and Eliot back-to-back. “I can’t believe this!” Shapiro cried.
Edna St. Vincent Millay had no trouble knocking off Ogden Nash in the West semis.
Gallway Kinnell would not go down easily, however. “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone” and “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” went back and forth in perhaps the closest contest in the tourney. Millay’s artistry finally prevailed. An exhausted Galway Kinnell, said of Millay, “she doesn’t waste a word.”
This year’s 20th Century American Poetry Final Four features two favored women, Plath and Millay, and two upset-minded men, Louis Simpson and Karl Shapiro.
The money is on Plath and Millay, who “eat men like air.”
There was a brief scuffle outside the arena yesterday, when Hugh Kenner, carrying a placard protesting the fact that Pound was out of the tournament and Millay was still in, was hit by a pie.
Ashbery, Auden, Ginsberg, and O’Hara were seen in a nearby bar getting quite intoxicated with Anne Sexton and Mark Strand.
Thomas, here’s a comment for you: fantastic, this made my day. And my money’s definitely on Plath, she’s on fire. I hear she’s been dishing trash talk: “I am too pure for you or anyone.” Take that, Louis!
Robert Smithson put it nicely I think: “Poetry is always a dying language but never a dead language.”
Mairead, I missed your April 2 comment until now!
It thrilled me no end to mingle with the poets in that nail-biting tournament and to bring the results to you all.
Millay finally beat Plath in the final. It was one of those games that was so close it should have been a tie. Fans were screaming and weeping when the two women hugged each other at the end.
Thomas