“I do not know what you think of departments of English, but the good ones are not random collections of tedious pedants…”
So wrote Yvor Winters, who knew a tedious pedant when he saw one, to the father of an aspiring poet way back in 1954; he continued:
“[English departments] are rather carefully selected groups of historical scholars who work in fairly close collaboration with each other. Such a group, in two or three years of instruction, can save a student like [your son] (no matter what his genius) fifteen years of labor, simply by giving him a succinct outline of their own work in background materials and in historical outlines. And without these background materials and historical outlines, he will misunderstand at least in some measure, and often in a large measure, almost anything he may read; and if he is a poet, his development may be irremediably retarded… One’s scholarship improves one’s poetry; one’s poetry improves one’s scholarship. It is a unified life. Furthermore, like life in a law office, it is life; it is not an ivory tower. I have never really encountered an ivory tower, any more than I have encountered a unicorn or a sea serpent. And my acquaintance has not been limited: in my time, I have known Stock Exchange brokers (my father was one), Board of Trade brokers (my father was one), prize fighters (Leach Cross, for example), actors (Otis Skinner and a few others), coal miners (for two years I lived in a couple of coal camps in northern New Mexico), and so on. All of these people in retrospect impress me as having been more isolated from Real Life than I am. In fact they impress me as having been very severely isolated; I have seen a lot, and I talk daily with learned and brilliant men, most of whom have seen a lot. The only penalty one pays for this life is that one has to teach; but if one likes to teach—and I confess that teaching amuses me infinitely—it is no penalty. I find myself charmed by the intelligent young, just as I am charmed by beautiful puppies.”
You can read the whole remarkable letter, and another one as well, by clicking here.
Well, it’s August… almost back-to-school time, which causes me to reflect on the whole schools for (and schools of) poetry thing. There’s something quaint about the spectacle of Winters coaching would-be poets; and yet in some ways these fifty years later it seems as if not much has changed, beyond the sheer numbers of aspiring poets. Even so, I was surprised and fascinated to learn this weekend that Seth Abramson, a poet who has documented the phenomenon of writing programs in more depth than anybody around, has helped start up a consulting group – which you can read about here – to guide writing students to their educations. As he explains on his own blog:
“In making the decision to start ALC, I thought about all the poets I knew who did one-on-one tutorials and private workshops as side-jobs (for money). I thought of all the undergrads who pay thousands of dollars to take poetry courses during which their one-on-one time with the professor is limited to 2-3 hour-long meetings a semester. I thought of Kaplan. I thought of Sylvan. I thought of Princeton Review and BarBri, and the $1,000 I happily paid the latter (and would gladly pay again). I thought, too, of the exorbitant rates that educational consultants generally charge–$150/hour is a pretty typical figure–and how no one can afford to pay that much unless their parents are rich, given that most consultations span ten billable hours or more. I thought of all the doctors, lawyers, nurses, social workers, and journalists who’ve e-mailed me over the past few years saying–in so many words–that they don’t know any poets, that they write privately on their own time, and that they want to make a commitment to themselves as writers by applying to an MFA program (for the time to write, that is) but they don’t know the first steps to take toward that goal. I thought of the fact that MFA acceptance rates–which most programs had intentionally and systematically concealed from their applicants for nearly seventy years–had now been revealed, as a result of research, and that they indicated that (unbeknownst to applicants all these years) MFA programs were harder admits than medical schools…”
Wow.
My own early education in poetry was pretty naive, by comparison. The first living poet I ever saw was Allen Ginsberg, when he came to Tennessee for a reading. He opened by chanting for a good long while; then he played the harmonium while singing Blake’s poems; then he read his own. In preparation for the reading, I’d bought a copy of Howl and Other Poems – no easy thing to do in a Southern town with about two bookstores in it at the time, and before Amazon was a gleam in its founder’s eye. The only poetry I’d ever known was the stuff you’re taught – and taught to ignore – in high school: harmless, syrupy anthology stuff, although even “Howl” is in anthologies for schoolkids these days. It took me a while to realize that there even were living poets, because I’d only been told of the dead ones! And once I smacked myself on the forehead and figured out that of course there were living poets, I imagined that they were all ghostly gray-bearded men, 3D images of, say, Whitman or John Greenleaf Whittier (I was not to meet a female poet until I was out of college). Well, Ginsberg had a beard, alright, but he was the liveliest most exciting man e’re I laid eyes upon. I fell in love with him like almost everybody else did in those days, and resolved to escape the South and go to New York – which I did, in due course, at the age of 17, partly at his invitation (literally: scrawled on a scrap of paper).
Long story short: libraries. I learned about poetry by reading my way through two small libraries while holding down shit jobs, which come to think of it, didn’t suck so bad if they afforded me access to books and time to sneak in the reading of poetry. I read widely and recklessly; it was fun. And because nobody ever checked out the poetry books, and as libraries used to get actual funding to buy them, I had some mighty fine resources at my disposal. When library funding was flush and books were cheap, man, those libraries bought everything! Full runs of Kayak! Lovely small press titles! Collected poems of everybody! After a while, I added books of criticism to my diet, and those turned out – again, by chance – to be by the likes of Winters – who shocked me as he turned against Hart Crane!, Hugh Kenner on the “Pound era,” and Donald Davie, on everybody. Davie appealed to me most, and so as a young sprout I imbibed his notions of modern poetry, which leaned toward poets I immediately came to treasure – and still do: Bunting, Niedecker, in particular were revelations. His qualified approval of Olson coincided with my inevitable discovery of Eliot, Pound, and Williams; it was a short leap from Ginsberg to O’Hara, Koch, and all the folks in The New American Poetry. For a while, I couldn’t get Paul Blackburn outta my thick head, and wrote poems with too many indents in them; I still get misty-eyed reading him. What was clearly missing from this diet was work by Yeats, Hardy, Frost, Larkin, Lowell – you know, the non open-ended guys. But it so happened that I’d stumbled upon the goofy 1945 edition of Auden’s collected poems, in which the poems were arranged alphabetically by title (some of the titles concocted only for this purpose). A library had withdrawn it in favor of a later version, so I got it for a handful of change at a book sale. It was the oldest book I’d ever owned, and with its faded blue boards and whiffy odor, it was a treasure. Nothing opens the young poet’s eyes like pre-fifties W.H.A.! Then… oh, snap – Byron & Keats & Hardy entered the picture bigtime. From then on, my two favorite poets were Auden and O’Hara, and I carried their books with me everywhere – earning me some funny looks, because poetry simply did… not… exist… among the people I encountered in my hometown, which brings me back full circle, to Seth’s description of hooking people up with educations.
Not having been an English major myself, I neither benefited from nor was harmed by a curriculum in poetry. Nobody encouraged me, but then no one told me what to read or like, or tried to convince me that there were “schools” or “kinds” of poetry; if anybody had, I’d probably have found the whole thing a torment, and I’d have gone (as was my plan) to broadcasting school as did my best friend, Mountain, who quit high-school to work in radio. Instead, a kink was put in me by verse, as Kavanagh calls it.
Yet people don’t want kinks, they want credentials and mentoring, which is understandable. So…
From whom do we do our learning? What is it we hope to learn??
Isn’t poetry itself the teacher? “You who have ears to hear.” It’s like hearing a sound & following it. It may lead to school, it may lead to non-school, it will certainly lead to a lot of tragicomic stumbling around… but all that is after the fact. No one can advise anyone about poetry, because poetry itself is the wild school.
don,
moral and constitutional aspirations are consumer decisions. if i want to be a poet, esp. a good poet, how do i spend my money right?
what are the consultants? vanity agents?
a commitment shouldn’t rack up so many billable hours, am i right, seth?
winters may have bristled at the criticism of his ivory tower perspective,as if we’re just jealous of the great, egalitarian view he had.
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buying unwanted books on the cheap from libraries seems much more valorous. but what do you think of stealing from libraries? something i spent my youth doing to build my own wall-anthology. more recently, i inherited twenty boxes from an invalid bachelor/professor.
seriously, commitments are free, even indigently so. and time isn’t money.
james
Well, this is a good day on the Harriet blog! Lovely romp through an enthusiastic self-education. As Abramson has revealed, the job of poet has become so professionalized that virtually everyone in, for example, Best American Poetry has an MFA and a job in academia. So the answer to the question “For whom do we do our learning?” is “For the editors of poetry journals who look askance at poets without MFAs.” I’m not saying Poetry is particularly guilty of this, but it would be interested to see a Poetry Magazine issue devoted only to living poets without MFAs and who work outside academe, the poetry equivalent of Obama’s promise not to work with lobbyists. I wonder if it would have a different flavor.
the question was “from”
Iolanthe– You ask, “What would a non-MFA issue of Poetry look like?” And one could equally ask, “What would an all-MFA issue look like?”
The sad (or happy, depending on which ways you look at it) thing is that I reall think it would make no difference at all, aesthetically. That’s something to think through carefully. It’s not because there’s no general pressure to tend towards a norm / set of norms, because there is. And I’m not saying the MFA system does not exert some kind of influence or shape the field in some ways because it most like does, by its vast presence if nothing else. But the proportion of writers who do their own thing seems to be the same inside or outside of the programs. Not so?
Vivek, is that you? Were you an undergrad at Clarkson? If so, I still remember your blues sonnet.
Iolanthe, as Matt points out, you’ve got my question wrong there!
Anyway: I can’t speak for any other magazines, but Chris and I do not look “askance” at poets without – or with – MFA’s. In fact, when we read the poems submitted, we usually neither know nor care about it.
As it happens, many of Poetry’s contributors do not have MFAs, and elsewhere on Harriet I’ve written about them already. Among them in recent issues are mothers, fishery scientists, soldiers, public defenders (which Seth has been, it’s worth pointing out) – and just about everything you can imagine!
Well, and that’s the thing right there, Don. You could take creative writing courses from junior high through the PhD and turn out to be a terrific poet or a dud. You could never take a class other than the seminar in your own mind and then sit down and bang out a doozy . . . or a dud. Some people are going to thrive within the structures of the educational system and some are going to suffocate in it. Some people are going to teach themselves how to write well and others will merely imagine they’ve done so.
You ask, “From whom do we do our learning? What is it we hope to learn??” I’d ask in response, “Who’s ‘we’”?
Ah, yes: as Eliot said, it’s a mug’s game. For sure.
Oh – by “we” I just mean us poetry chickens (see Eileen’s posts). Seriously, I mean those of us who would learn about the reading and writing of poems; we contain, of course, multitudes.
These are wonderful comments, and I am grateful for them.
Oh my gosh, even “mothers”? This seems to me a funny addition to this list of inherently non-MFA’d citizens.
Yep. Ange Mlinko, for example, who will weigh in if she finds the term offensive, I’m sure. (She has used the terms “poet-mother” and “writing mother.”) Or Daisy Fried. Mothers are not all they are any more than Peter Munro is just a scientist: it’s the work they do in addition to the work of writing.
(Mlinko, by the way, addresses this in a piece forthcoming in our September issue, “As If Nature Talked Back To Me,” in which she addresses, among other things, “the intellectualization of the mammalian.” Fried, in the July/August issue, took on breastfeeding and reading Milton).
Is this really a problem? Who has othered the mothers? Seems a bit ginned up. I guess some people feel more inspired to write when they’re carrying some righteous anger around.
Thanks, Don, for this lovely meditation on poetic education and poetic self-creation. I think the goal is, as you say, a cross between monastic dedication to reading, on the one hand, and lively conversation with the real world, on the othe. But we all start as young sprouts. And that tender green must be protected.
Don,
Your education in poetry and mine were remarkably similar—right down to Ginsberg chanting and me thinking poetry was a dead art. As Homer would say, “Doh!”
I think self-taught is great. But it sometimes isn’t possible. I don’t remember my town library having even one book of poems by a single author, just a handful of tatty old anthologies. Nor did my town have a bookstore. Except one that sold used romance novels for a dime each or a dozen for a dollar. I wore out the only anthology my high school used (Immortal Poems of the English Language) and the teacher took pity on me and gave me the copy I’d dog-eared nearly to death. I still have it.
So I did what most Americans try to do and went to school—in my case grad school because I’d already studied something else as an undergrad and only knew slightly more about poetry than I had at 17. I did my research online when schools were just beginning to jump on this here whole internet thingy. I asked former teachers. I wrote letters to living poets and asked them (and got answers). I learned. I applied.
As far as Seth Abramson’s enterprise goes, well, I think on the one hand if some poor sucker will pay for his help, then caveat emptor, etc. But I do think it is always going to be an ethical concern when you aim your money-making schemes at the needy and insecure and desperate (pawn shops, loan sharks, bail bondsmen, lotteries). If he sees such a need for guidance, and, having been through a single program, he feels he is expert enough to act as mentor, I guess my question is why not write a book and let anyone who wants to pay fork over their fourteen bucks? Or is he hoping to actually get rich off the hopes and dreams of newborn writers, especially poets? Because that always works.
The man has a J.D. from Harvard. Can he honestly be that hard up for ways to earn a living? Or is he just a brilliant middleman—bellied up to the academic trough while grabbing goodies (and a whole lot of ink) with both hands from the piglets down below?
If so, maybe he should set up a consulting firm getting wannabees into top law schools. Nobody would find an ethical concern with that. And he’d eat better.
Hi Don:
I enjoyed your re-cap of your “poetry education.” It sounded wonderfully promiscuous.
FA
Thanks, Don et al, for the civil discourse. I regretted it the moment I posted it, but there was no way to delete! Thanks again for the lively trip through Yvor Winter’s mind and your personal journey. I enjoyed it.
IIT, the “Indian Institute of Technology” scattered across different campuses, is India’s most desirable and difficult-to-get-into institution for higher education– mostly because doing well there guarantees you a scholarship at Stanford, MIT, and so on (depending on which campus you went to). The IIT entrance exam is so competitive and brutally difficult that, a few years ago, an enterprising individual set up “Brilliant Tutorials”, an extra-curricular network of coaching classes that kids would start from the equivalent of tenth grade, two years or more before the exam. Brilliant became hugely successful; each year it posts the photographs of IIT “toppers” who came through its coaching classes. However, this made Brilliant itself popular and difficult to get into, and now there are other extra-curricular coaching companies that start from the equivalent of sixth or seventh grade, I think, that are designed to help you get into Brilliant Tutorials.
This suggests that in a few years time I may be able to start a consulting firm that prepares people for coaching by Abramson & co. (The unsaid on their website is their set of connections to the actual people of the poetry world and writing programs.)
Reading that Menand essay in the New Yorker, I got the sense that the great hope of creative writing programs– quite apart from producing great writers on an assembly line– was that they would bring a “little of the outside into the inside”, that is, make a place for the values of holism, irrationality, transgression and unprofessionalism in the university, and thereby help the more locked-down disciplines to unravel themselves too, so that we would be not only taking apart the categories of “poetry”, “fiction”, etc. but also “history”, “writing”, “research” etc. and the very structure of knowledge itself, our easy divisions between emotion and thought, rational and irrational, form and content, style and content, synthesis and analysis, etc.
I suppose that was (is) asking too much. I suppose that what most people are searching for in these times is the sustainable business model. Me too.
Thank you for your account of your making as a poet. That too, will continue to be that way.
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My life changed recently for the better, & I’d like to tell you about it. In 1957, at age five, I first discovered I had great difficulty in spelling the word “elephant”. No matter how hard I applied myself to learn how to spell this valuable word, I always misplaced or switched some letter – alfbat, alfaburt, Alafent, elefunt, etc. etc….
2 weeks ago, however, on a sultry, rainy evening in mid-July, in the Dept of Motor Vehicles parking lot, in Pawtucket, where I had installed myself, around 9 pm, in order to insert myself, bright & early next morning, into the license registration line, I happened to meet a gentleman named Adolphus N. Quigley, Esq., who was also planning to renew is license the following morning.
Mr. Quigley, a tall, portly fellow, with a florid face, and a very florid orchid in his ambidextrous lapel, informed me, after a few minutes of light chit-chat, that he was an attorney; moreover, I was startled to learn, Mr. Quigley specialty in the law happened to be in the obsucre, little-known field of Verbal Construction Litigation, otherwise known as Habemus Verbum Spellosimi Liboolium, known in gossamer circles as Verbal Counseling. For a modest fee, Mr. Quigley offered to assist me with my entire legal & financial quandary with regard to the spelling of the word “elephant” – and any other words I might have trouble with at a future date or time, up to and including the day after my decease & burial, with a codicil happily applied if necessary to immediate & proximate heirs & occluders, if warranted!
You can imagine how pleased I was to meet Mr. Quigley, especially under such trying & stressfuyl circumstances as the DMV parking lot, Pawtucket RI, near midnight. Though the lighting in the lot was rather dim at that hour, I lost no time in signing the necessary papers (which Mr. Quigley providentially provided on the spot!) to assign Mr. Quigley as my executor in all maters with regard to Verbal Construction.
& I would not hesitate one whit, one millisecond, to recommend Mr. Quigley’s services to any of my fellow poets out there who may be in some kind of quandary like mine – which I am gratified to say is now behind me!
When will Harriet implement the collapsible comment feature?
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First poetry loves: Milne and Seuss. Wrote a several-page-long rhymed narrative in 4th grade. Set my first poem to music (early Blake lyric) in high school. Took poetry workshops at U-Michigan with Best Teacher Ever Ken Mikolowski, who set me merrily on a lifetime of reading. Published poem in obscure Detroit journal (Beatniks from Space), with whom I had no personal contact or connection, when I was 21. Have not sought publication since, except in an arts-&-politics collective ‘zine I was part of in the ’90s, and on my blog, and occasional verses in comments sections of other blogs, of which Harriet is the only poetry blog (my other blog-comment verses have been limericks). Until taking up blogging a few years ago, never talked about poetry with anybody for almost 20 years, with the exception of one friend, a fellow Alice Notley devotee. Am currently working on 3 series of poems, one made up of fairly long, one of extremely short, and one of medium-length poems; I do hope to publish them, assuming I’m happy with them when finished (it’s not only length that unites them). Have written probably around 300 songs, including a couple dozen settings of other people’s poems and prose, and performed or recorded most of them, though never been “signed.” I have recited other people’s poetry at parties many times, including twice in the past month. Have hosted reading parties devoted to Chaucer or the Gawain-poet a few times at my house, though not as often as play-reading parties, mostly Shakespeare.
From whom learned: parents, grandparents, one teacher in college, and then, mostly, myself.
What I’ve learned: stuff to enrich my life, to feed my writing, to feed my songwriting, and just to read; but also, stuff to provide vehicles for rich social-reading experiences. Those reading parties — we do them annually, around Christmas — are great, great experiences, especially Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Gawain-poet. Highly recommended!
Thanks for the wonderful post reminding us that libraries are still a treasure to behold! I had read the blog storm these last couple of days regarding the MFA issue at hand and it was refreshing to read commentary. I would love to have a second go at education and get my MFA, but, real life will probably prevent this pipe dream. All is not loss, however, for I work in a public library that promotes learning through its collection development. That being said, I hope to “teach” by continuing to add to our poetry collection with hopes of inspiring those few souls who search our stack and decide they would like to become the next contemporary or postmodern voice .
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Sorry, I don’t understand this. Human beings write and read poetry. I’m one. Ginsberg was one. You’re one. The people I grew up with and around are human beings. This is all about flesh and blood stuff: what happens to real people who are drawn to poetry is the very subject of this thread. Emily Dickinson was a human being, too, duh, but beyond that, I’d never say I was like her in any way, and I didn’t bring her up, you did. More importantly, my topic is not isolation, but its contrary. And that Winters troubled himself to write, however bloviatingly, to a young poet and even his father, is a sign of his humanity; if you read the intro to the letters, you’ll see that W. tried to do whatever he could for Cal Thomas, Jr. – and that Cal resisted the sway, and found his own path…
Just wanted to say that my comment above was not meant as a retort (”Gould’s Retort” – sounds like a title. “Gould’s Book of Fish”).
Nor am I recommending isolation. What I’m referring to, by saying “poetry is the teacher”, is the process – which I think Don describes well – of affinity, osmosis & imitation, by which artists learn by doing.
The pedagogical hierarchy of teacher/student, mentor/ephebe, can obscure this reality : that we are all collaborators.
Maybe it’s just a truism, but I’m trying to observe the rubric “first things first”. The structure of this situation, in which everybody – old/young, masters/beginners – are learning together, directly, from the praxis – is a slightly different structure from the pedagogical (though Socrates might disagree). The academy is buttressed by standard knowledge, texts, exams, authorities. One advances by “degrees” toward “higher” learning, where one is allowed finally to participate (collegially, creatively) in the production of more knowledge. The craft-world of an art form, on the other hand, exhibits dimensions of unaccountability, mystery, unpredictability… there are no “degrees” in art, because 1) there is always the potential for seeing the traditions of the past in utterly new ways, 2) there is always great potential for non-recognition or mis-recognition of new art, and 3) art is future-oriented, embryonic – you can’t grant degrees for what is just now being born. cf. Auden’s remark :
“Whatever his future life as a wage earner, a citizen, a family man may be, to the end of his days his life as a poet will be without anticipation. He will never be able to say: ‘Tommorow I will write a poem and, thanks to my training and experience, I already know I shall do a good job.’ In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.”
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Today, by the way, is Shelley’s birthday.
Shelley Duvall’s birthday was July 7, Shelley Long’s is coming up on August 23. Today should be a federal holiday in celebration of all three.
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Are you kidding? You can’t even wish someone a happy birthday without sniping about the modernists for the millionth time?
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Of course I do, we’re celebrating three birthdays here. Three times the ice cream.
Ice cream? Here ya go:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/30/ice-cream-libraries-ben-and-jerrys
I recommend the Malt Whitman.
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Not just modernists; his contemporaries Byron, Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and William Hazlitt all wrote terrible things about him. Readers of the Forgotten English calendar may turn to today’s entry, “holy-cruel,” for a hair-raising sampler. (Via Jim Sitar)
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Forget all this Shelley birthday b.s. Let’s get back to the consultant firm for potential masters of the fine art of poetry!?!? Kaplan for poets? Are you serious? Someone (besides Seth) please tell me why this isn’t an awful idea?
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Terreson,
I’m not sure that I completely agree with your reading of Don’s post; I don’t think that Don intended to disparage the “shortcuts” that a teacher can provide; but regardless of Don’s intention (Hi Don!), I think your reading is plausible, and I enjoyed reading it, even though I’m grateful for the shortcuts that my (one and only) poetry teacher (in undergrad) gave me. I’ve certainly read a lot more since then, and far beyond the (New American Poetry, approximately) canon that he outlined. But my teacher’s enthusiasm for poetry — and his kindness toward me — were the main things, and they’ve stayed with me.
I wouldn’t have bothered saying any of this to you, except that I saw that stack of “dislike” votes for your post, and I wanted to go on record as having liked your post. I also share your disinterest in the aesthetic influence of the academy/poetry nexus — it’s sociologically interesting, and has its aesthetic influence, but a poet’s education has never been a determining factor in my interest in their poetry.
Your comments on Montaigne intrigue, and, I agree, Don’s post was a dandy.
Utterly baffled by the amount of dislike directed to your comment.
Cheers.
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Who hates Shelley? I’ve never met anyone who hates Shelley. Indifferent, maybe, but hate?
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It wasn’t a termination, and there was nothing hasty about it. Cal quit to marry his girl. Winters’ attitude toward Poe and the Romantics had nothing to do with it. Cal passed the 19th century, so someone taught him something about it, eh? To this day, Cal recalls his teachers and mentors with admiration and gratitude, and he still writes poems. I say this not to debate with Thomas, but to correct misunderstandings his comment might generate.
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I’m obviously in touch with Cal. Who was there.
impatience (pardon my french) is the price you pay for free shipping. it seems that fully-funded (gratis) MFA programs that stress their impotence or even desire to teach a teachable skill do little to foster poetry but are like a depositional cholesterin–that is, if journals are the venues, so many MFAs pumping out wannabe poets (indistinguishable from the real thing, in source or shape) is causing dangerously high blood pressure.
i’ve heard seth’s argument before, that these graduate programs are not actually in the business of getting people published, but the criterion for creative-writing teachers is just that, and the modus operandi of students are all sorts of unsolicited cries for attention. the rise of the MFA programs exactly corresponds to the rise in submissions (which were overwhelming even before most journals would consider e-poems)
“The actual views held by poets and critics interest me, as do the machinations of the grooming process, and how the grooming process and poets’ ideology may mutually interact; I find this fascinating.”
Do you think anyone else here finds “the machinations of the grooming proces” fascinating in the way you do? This kind of speculation about poets, connecting the dots when you don’t even know all the dots, obviously driven by a desire to create a sordid picture or to bolster some pre-conceived notions about “networking” in the poetry world, says more about you than your targets of speculation. At least without Foetry to sustain you, you are forced to exercise your exposure compulsion on (mostly) non-living poets. Here, you can do no harm, just bore people.
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If only you had any erudition to apologize for.
People have been railing against the New Critics for over 50 years. Check out Rexroth’s (hugely entertaining) attacks on them. I do believe that much marvelous poetry has been written for many many decades that never took Eliot or Ransom or Tate “and the rest” (to quote the original version of the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song; or maybe it was the later version) into account at all. So what’s the problem? I would imagine that, more than 40 years after his death, Eliot’s disparagement of Shelley doesn’t have a whole lot of sway any more, especially since H. Bloom loves Shelley, and H. Bloom has had been making huge splashes for over 35 years, or is it 45.
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Bloom’s first book, I just found out, is 50 years old this year! Title, you ask? “Shelley’s Mythmaking.” He was such a big Shelley fan that he edited the Signet Selected, a widely disseminated book. (I love the Signets.)
http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poetry-Prose-Shelley/dp/B000BLPOJU
And also wrote two more books about Romanticism. A big champion. (As was Northrop Frye, another anti-New-Critic critic.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom#Bibliography
To whom is this news?
I was surprised to see that the book is 50 years old.
Why do you ask?
Thomas tries to dismiss Bloom’s championing of Shelley as only “an early interest” and that Bloom isn’t known for going out of his way to champion him. Not true. A whole book, plus a substantial part of another, plus an edition of selected poems; and, to refute the “early interest” stuff, Shelley remained a central player in Bloom’s history of poetry; a decisive influence of — through his decisive influence on Browning, who decisively influenced Pound — modernism!
Perhaps a whisper was born before the lips,
And leaves whirled in the woodless world,
And those to whom we dedicated our experience
Gained their traits before any experience.
- O. Mandelstam, from Octets VII (trans. by D. Smirnov)
*
Strange sense (”through a glass darkly”) of literary time, wherein the work precedes the life, the poet’s chronological “development” is only its afterthought.
Spell cast by powerful work of art. Sort of a mirror-effect : life itself becomes the play-within-the-play, its author becoming more & more enigmatic.
*
And through the fetters of a flimsy lattice
or stage-struck curtain– an extended paw
quilled with fabled disappearances–that
mole of metaphysical law–
Shakespeare vanished into pseudonyms
trimming his nails frozen sheer
another line for venerable joe:
“and the tongue, they tell me, kept speaking in the grave
wouldn’t follow the soul”
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& corrals wayward blowhards.
Yes, it’s too bad they don’t all sign their names to their thumbs like the admirable “Terreson” does with his comments!
Surely everybody has noticed how some individuals get an automatic thumbs down no matter what they say on any topic.
Obviously, for some, this is just a game of popularity. Sometimes I think I accidentally stumbled on to a teenage social site.
And this very thing was predicted some time back…how a small gang of groupthink bullies would take over what had been a public forum open to everyone. It’s called shunning.
Maybe the same people always get thumbs-down because they always say stupid things. Just a theory.
Some individuals comment automatically, at length, while riding their volatile hobbyhorses, blithely riding over the topics & themes of the original post. & these discourteous noble riders get many thumbs down from the peons below, on earth.
Speaking of comments, Mr. Gould, I see that you did not reply to my comments at HG Poetrics.
Poetics, that is.
No offense meant, Mr. Fitzgerald. I just didn’t feel like defending my original post, or getting into further debate about it.
I dislike the last paragraph.
signed,
Not Anonymous
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Understood. I just like discussing religion/philosophy and there are few poetry places that focus on it. I got the impression that you were trying to start a debate. Sorry.
The above reply was intended for Henry Gould, but it didn’t show up there.
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Or maybe I’ll bring them to one of yours. How do you like them apples?
OK by me, as long as they remain anonymous.
You know, of course, Henry, that my tomato thing wasn’t directed at you personally. I do think it’s a good comparison, though. All of you click-happy ‘Dislikers’ out there should consider how it might feel to be courageously expressing yourself in a public venue and have a big, fat, red rotten tomato land right in your face. Nobody seems to have enough class to show even a modicum of respect to anybody anymore.
We hear about the continuing decline in morality and ethics in this country on the news every day but, Jeez, even a poetry blog? Et tu, Brute?
I don’t see anything especially courageous about sitting comfortably at a computer & using its broadcast power to amplify one’s own oh-so-sweet nothings. & there is a difference between dialogue and self-expression. A good conversation involves both, but not by emphasizing the latter at the expense of the former. Commenters take advantage of the forum offered here, & set up their gold-plated soap-boxes, & expect others to sit there docilely & spend their time a-listening? That’s a cozy expectation which richly deserves the juicy, over-ripe tomato & the peanut shells.
I agree. As a poster with generally brief comments, I think I was one of the first to complain about people posting short stories here (or, as John Oliver Simon said, novellas.) Those endless diatribes are annoying at best. And some people are definitely overbearing. But it’s a community. You should at least engage the offender and tell them to pound sand. It’s not so much what people actually say any more as it is who says it and, like Terreson said, anonymous condemnation is cowardly.
And I like your ‘peanut gallery’ reference. It’s true that the term originated with the throwing of peanut shells.
Could be some of the thumbs-downs are for straying off topic? As has happened yet again on this thread?
Topic, shmopic.
Eventually you will learn, Mr. Harr,
that the original posters are less literate than we are.
(No offense, Don. Please approve my Poetry submission.)
Like Hell!
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Tom Harr says: “Could be some of the thumbs-downs are for straying off topic? As has happened yet again on this thread?”
Mr. Harr, my comment was in response to a response to a post of mine. Please note that the greater portion of my post was devoted to Don Share’s article.
Henriette says: “Yes, it’s too bad they don’t all sign their names to their thumbs like the admirable “Terreson” does with his comments!”
Henriette please be advised that Terreson has been my nom de plume since ‘91. The L of C has it registered, attached to the poetry and prose I got copyrighted. More recently, the Tor House Foundation poetry contest, ‘08, shows my name. Easily googlable.
Harriet people, ya’ll wont listen to me. But already, because of the like/dislike function, the community is getting polarized. Those who favor the feature, because it is management generated, will win. Those who oppose it will lose and fade away. The really big loss will be the quiet folk who will vote with their feet.
Terreson
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It’s interesting to me, Seth, how you response to James Stotts parallels Sheila Chamber’s response to Thomas Brady. A conjunction of opposites – hypocrisy meets cynicism.
For you, MFA programs are not about publishing – oh no! It’s all about CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT, SELF-EXPRESSION, LEARNING THE CRAFT…
For Sheila, on the other hand, MFA is not really about publishing, because all the AWP vets are sort of disillusioned, disenchanted about that – given up on the mirage which an MFA degree was supposed to hold out (success, publication, grants, jobs, prestige, etc.).
So po-biz is a little like health insurance. You pay all these middle-men to give you access to doctors; doctors, hospitals, drug cos. & middle-men split the profits. (Health insurers are sort of like bankers : experts at money management. So expert, in fact, that they forget it’s YOUR money.)
Kids, all you need is a good elementary & secondary education. You don’t need an MFA Guide to Future Poetry Writing; you don’t need a Legal Eagle to monitor your advanced degree expenses & receipts. If only more American kids learned to read & write, so they could write poems & short stories by 7th grade. If only some of the po-biz MFA people would find a 2nd career in elemenary education (or even basic English lit – or Latin – )
But the ironies are piled on ironies, actually…
Yet, on 2nd thought, maybe deep down Poetry NEEDS Po-Biz (USA) and Writer’s Unions (USSR)…
because Poetry, my friends, is the veritable Fisher King…. the Old Man of Crete…. the Sick Man of Europe…. the bloody key to the Golden Bough…. & all that….
it’s a deep game of human frailty…
Herodotus noted that the warlike Scythians had a special class of effeminate soothsayers, called “Enarees”, who twirled willow twigs as they sang & prophesied (about future marriages & battles)… poets are still, here in USA, marked out, “special”… MFA programs & “creative writing” play into this agonic drama in diverse ways (emphasizing or effacing it)…
What does it all mean?
Henry,
I didn’t follow most of what you said, except to gather that you’ve called me a hypocrite. Okay; not sure why, though, as one could hardly claim I used my MFA to publish. I was publishing regularly before I entered into an MFA program, wrote my first book before my MFA program, got my first book contract before my MFA program…
In any case, your one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t jive with my experiences in education–as either a student or a teacher. Sure, for some aspiring writers having Mr. Holland teach them in high school will do the trick–WCWs in no time. For others, some college exposure to, say, Paul Muldoon at Princeton will do it. And for some–sad to say, Henry–having three fully-funded MFA years to do nothing but write poetry will be something of an aid in their development.
Or maybe it takes twenty to thirty years to know what helped a poet along, and anyone trying to nip the process in the bud (because of some benighted sense of foresight or self-righteousness) is just plain foolish?
I wouldn’t trust anyone who said everyone needs an MFA–which is why I don’t say that. Ever. But I also wouldn’t trust anyone who assured me, with equal confidence, that absolutely no one can benefit from getting paid to do nothing but write for several years.
S.
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Oh good grief, Henry. You know, Henry–you know full well–that MFA students are “paid to write” (in the sense you’re using that phrase) only if one intentionally misconstrues my words. I mean, of course, that MFA students receive financial support for living expenses so that they can focus all their energies on writing, and thereby serve but the _one_ master.
On the other hand–and I say this seriously–I wish people were as candid as you’ve been about the radical bases for their anti-MFA opinions. I think that if these bases were fully articulated, their extremity (and ill-informed nature) would be absolutely crystal-clear–most of those opposing MFA programs don’t even seem to understand what an MFA is or does or what it’s like to attend one, let alone allow for the possibility that the MFA model is ever-changing and ever-improving (and that it takes continued effort to change and improve it).
S.
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“Poe has long passed casually with me and with most of my friends as a bad writer accidentally and temporarily popular; the fact of the matter is, of course, that he has been pretty effectually established as a great writer while we have been sleeping.”
–Yvor Winters, “Edgar Allan Poe: A Crisis in the History of American Obscurantism,” American Literature, January 1937
Many would like to believe that the writing industry–from publishing to academia to little magazines–is really about one thing: good writing and good writing, only.
These true believers want to believe that rivalry and politics are a very minor part of Letters, and rivalry and poltics only concerns a few bad people–who, of course, can’t write well themselves, because if they could write well, they would be good, too, and never complain about the writing industry.
And so good triumphs, and any reports of trouble in paradise are dismissed as a lie by a bad person.
This is why a consumer protection site called Foetry was so reviled; it upset the apple cart of American Letters’ rosy vision of itself.
How could writers be anything but good? The world may be bad, but writers are good, right? And those who award and publish writers must be good, too, right? So goes the logic of the true believers.
Something as simple and basic and necessary as consumer information has been, and still is, treated as a cancer by po-biz, simply because it interferes with the rosy myth–all poets and critics and editors are good.
Desmond is right when he says not many know of Yvor Winters, and this is true; he wasn’t a very good critic and he wasn’t a very good poet.
But we should know our history. Yvor Winters was influential, and he did contribute to the literary climate in which we live today.
Many in po-biz (especially the ‘good writer’ true believers) reject criticism and judgment and comparison, and yet these things operate continually and we shouldn’t be ignorant of their history and their effects.
True, this is not the 20s and 30s, or even the 40s and 50s; we no longer live in a time when a few dozen, well-placed essays could alter entire ways of thinking about poetry, but that doesn’t mean we should be ignorant of that slightly earlier time when a concentrated dose of rhetoric–during an academic take-over by a small coterie–did effect a tremendous change.
Mr. Brady/Monday Love, it is hard to know where to begin here, you persist in your reductive thinking to the end, but I will give it one more shot.
“Many would like to believe that the writing industry–from publishing to academia to little magazines–is really about one thing: good writing and good writing, only.”
First, anyone who holds such a belief is either not involved in the field of writing, is living on an island, is in high school, and/or is just beginning to write. Second, the “writing industry” is a shorthand way of speaking about many aspects of writing and publishing (and academia and publishing are not part of the same “industry,” while “little magazines” comes under “publishing.”) Poets involved in teaching, for example, know that the publication of their poetry does not come about through their schools, even though the schools may prefer or require a resume that shows publications. For that, they need magazines and presses (also separate entities with their own procedures, people, goals, etc.). In fact, the editors of magazines they might submit their work to, are in turn often trying to get their own poetry published by submitting to other magazines. Some magazines (and presses) solicit work they like, some have open submissions, some contests or readings (both usually fee-based to support the press, which is usually a tax-exempt non-profit, which depends on donations, like a charity). Most do all of these things. Academia, on the other hand, is concerned with, among other things, education. Schools have a different set of goals and activities than presses or magazines. MFA programs do not concern themselves with helping their students get published, for example, at least in any official way (sometimes a particular teacher has influence with a press, but that’s an exception, not the rule, and certainly not advertised). Magazines and presses are not concerned with the educational status of the author who submits work. Of COURSE, as in any other field: dentistry, undertaking, computer programming, psychiatry, etc. the people in the field of writing often get to know each other and refer to and/or recommend each other. The “writing industry” does not operate in a vacuum. If anyone is naive about that, it is you, Mr. Brady. Your naivetee and idealism about writing as a world apart shows everytime you express surprise/horror that there is anything like politics involved. Your anger and disappointment about that has taken some weird form of vengefulness against poets/editors/teachers and it found a home, for a while, in Foetry. Third and last, what is “good writing?” You say that as if it is in simple opposition to something else. Everyone is looking for “good writing,” that’s understood. But again, any writer or editor knows the complexity behind this notion, that it is a far from simple concept, that writers spend a lifetime defining and pursuing it, that teachers spend lifetimes trying to teach it, that editors and critics spend lifetimes looking for it. So even if the “writing industry” were only interested in this “one thing” how is that simplifying the picture? Or making it rosier?
“These true believers want to believe that rivalry and politics are a very minor part of Letters, and rivalry and poltics only concerns a few bad people–who, of course, can’t write well themselves, because if they could write well, they would be good, too, and never complain about the writing industry.”
See above. No one who is involved in the field believes that rivalry and politics are a very minor part of letters. Only an idiot would believe that. Nor does any non-idiot think that rivalry and politics in letters only concerns “a few bad people” or people who “can’t write well themselves.” Many great writers were/are completely immersed in rivalries and politics. I know you know that. It’s what you most like to talk about. Furthermore, EVERYONE involved in the so-called writing industry complains–constantly. It’s a pastime. If you were a writer you would know this, too. Go to AWP sometime and just listen in to conversations in cafes, on the elevators, in the bars, etc.
“And so good triumphs, and any reports of trouble in paradise are dismissed as a lie by a bad person.”
I don’t know what world you are referring to here, no writer I’ve every known has done anything but perk up their ears if there are reports of “trouble in paradise,” and some aspire to be that trouble. The reason Foetry was finally dismissed was not because of lies (although that surely happened, especially if you count reductive distortions as such) or because of its hysterical finger-pointing, but because it was perceived to be rather more in love with the idea of muckraking and “exposing evil” than helping anyone do anything but run for cover. It pointed out problems with the contest submission system. It raised consciousness about contests, and poets now probably do more homework before submitting their manuscripts and editors and presses have become more transparent about posting their procedures. And that’s all to the good. But beyond that–what? Really, what?
“This is why a consumer protection site called Foetry was so reviled; it upset the apple cart of American Letters’ rosy vision of itself.”
No, Brady, that’s not why it was so reviled. It was reviled because it got the bit in its teeth and was a runaway nightmare. It engaged in anonymous attacks. It harressed people, on and off screen. It was not a consumer protection site. Poets needed protection from IT. Speaking up against Foetry ensured harrassment, so few did (or even will now). Speaking up meant being INVESTIGATED. Because surely only someone corrupt would speak up, someone with something to hide–so let’s go digging, find out the REAL reason, connect the dots…and anyone who has done anything in the field of writing besides sit on their couch and write has dots to connect, even if it was only that coffee they shared with someone who ended up being a contest judge 5 years later, or that they went to Iowa anytime in the last 20 years.
“How could writers be anything but good? The world may be bad, but writers are good, right? And those who award and publish writers must be good, too, right? So goes the logic of the true believers.”
I don’t know even one writer who thinks this way. Not one. Unless you are one. But then, you’re not a writer, right?
“Something as simple and basic and necessary as consumer information has been, and still is, treated as a cancer by po-biz..”
Consumer information? Only if you believe that say, the National Enquirer’s goal is to dispense consumer information.
“…simply because it interferes with the rosy myth–all poets and critics and editors are good.”
Whose myth this is I think I know, his mind is in the belfry though, his only listener, Mr. Poe.
Mr.Brady. Try to think. Just try. That’s all anyone wants here. Btw, who IS Po-Biz?? Is it that Don Share again?
Sheila,
You write as one who professes to understand every aspect of the writing industry from top to bottom, as one who is very familiar with ‘rivalry’ and ‘politics’ in Letters, as one who understands the nuances of good and bad writing, and as one who has followed Foetry closely during its entire history. You also write as a close reader of mine.
I can’t say how much I admire this. I am really flattered. You surely have a great deal of experience as a writer, and you must have overheard many conversations in cafes and elevators. You must know great deal.
I am really glad you are here.
I couldn’t find anything specific in your lengthy remarks above, however. Was that intentional?
I said there are rivalries in Letters. You agreed there were. Yet you disagreed with me in tone, and gave no examples of rivalries yourself. I found that a little confusing.
You told me publishing involves publishing, while academia was concerned with education. It was nice of you to tell me that. Were you going anywhere with that, or was that it?
You compared Foetry to…was it the ‘National Enquirer?’ I guess that does reveal how you feel, if nothing else.
Again, you were short on specifics, but maybe that was because you were feeling a great deal as you were writing.
But as I said, you sound as if you’ve been around and have read and experienced a great deal.
I look forward to your future posts.
Thanks, again, Sheila.
Thomas
Sheila, it’s a no-win plan. Better/best to vote with one’s feet and walk away/change the channel. Neither reason nor well wrought argument clothe the obsessed. Personally I’d rather listen to this other Thomas:
by Thomas Merton:
Pardon all runners,
All speechless, alien winds,
All mad waters.
Pardon their impulses,
Their wild attitudes,
Their young flights, their reticence.
When a message has no clothes on
How can it be spoken.
margo
Margo,
“Pardon?” Who are you “pardoning?” And do you think “pardon” means to give up and walk away, as you advised Sheila to do?
And again, what is your specific issue? Is this the sort of rhetoric to which you aspire? Vague rebuke? Wouldn’t it be quicker and easier to hit ‘dislike’ and steal silently away?
Sheila is obviously upset. She claimed poets were INVESTIGATED.
This is simply not true.
Contests were INVESTIGATED.
NEVER was a PERSON INVESTIGATED.
I would NEVER, EVER condone such a thing. If I ever seemed to do so, that was NEVER my intention, nor will it EVER be my intention. No one has EVER pointed out such a thing to me, nor am I aware of it. When consumer protection is greeted with mere hysteria, does it make you ever wonder?
As you and Sheila must both know, the contest is quite a special thing.
If, like Harriet Monroe, you have the sagacity and the drive to start your own poetry magazine, you can publish anyone you want in that magazine. The key there is to sell enough copies, or, to raise enough money, to keep the magazine afloat. Then, you as editor can do any thing you want, and publish any poet or any type of poem you want. If Ezra Pound is dominating the editorial tone of the magazine, the public can see that, and can step away–or not.
The manifesto-ism of Pound failed in the marketplace, but, thanks to enterprising and brilliant friends such as Allen Tate, Pound’s manifesto-ism gained a foothold in the academy, and has been there ever since, quietly canonizing what the public has never accepted.
Poetry has never seen such wide divergence between popular and critical interest; poetry considered critically meritorious has gone begging; history has never seen anything like it.
John Crowe Ransom published Robert Lowell’s poems in the ‘Kenyon Review’ many years ago, and this fact was used by Dana Gioia to illustrate how wonderful & open things used to be. The ‘Kenyon Review’ was one of the nation’s leading magazines of poetry criticism, and wasn’t it great, Gioia exclaimed, in his famous essay which attacked the insularity of po-biz, that Ransom, a critic, was beneficent enough to publish poems by Robert Lowell? Lowell and Ransom??!?? This needs no further comment. This is one of my many hobby-horses–but I do ride my horse in the zone of facts and truth.
But, as I said, the poetry contest is something a little different.
The contest is indeed a special thing. I shall not speak further of the contest’s necessity–the public does not buy poetry, so revenues for publication of poetry books must be raised; this is well understood.
I shall only summarize briefly the importance of contests–and this too, should be well-known by now:
Contests furnish credentials for academic resumes, furnish credentials for further publications, sometimes furnish credentials for the canon, and also directly raise funds for those entities involved in contest governance. Contests rob Peter to pay Paul, Peter being the contest hopefuls who send manuscripts of poems with submission fees, Paul the contest winner who reaps all sorts of tangible and intangible rewards, including book publication–paid for by the losers’ submission fees.
None dispute the above. Also, none would dispute the importance of the poetry contest being clean and fair. This goes without saying. “Clean and fair” is not always easy to measure when it comes to the subjective judgment of poetry, but difficulty of measurement does not lessen the importance of what is measured: “clean and fair.” This, too, goes without saying.
I don’t know if you and Sheila are following what I have written so far, but this is what I look for in writing: a wee bit o’ truth and a wee bit o’ clarity.
Now, one can argue and disagree with specifics, and I welcome dispute, as all true intellectuals do. Please, disagree specifically, if you wish. Or, remain silent. Or, remain silent and hit ‘dislike.’ It is all good.
Thomas
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” I find myself charmed by the intelligent young, just as I am charmed by beautiful puppies.”
Wow, what a prick. Students, never take a class from someone who would condescend to you like that.
If I had the chops, which I don’t, I’d consider an MFA in musical composition, figuring that at least I’d learn a heckuva lot of harmony and counterpoint.
What does an MFA in creative writing teach? I had an interesting talk about theories of plot with a Ph.D. in English lit at a party this evening. Seth, in a comment I can’t find (I don’t know why I can’t find it), seems to be saying that people who oppose creative writing MFAs have no idea what goes on there. True!
So, what goes on there? What does one learn?
(Please consider this a variant of the question with which Don began this discussion.)
Thanks.
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Song lyrics usually suck when you read them as poetry, without music. But they’re not meant to be read that way. So why read them that way?
seth,
you’ve said that before–that mfa programs and publication are two independent variables, that mfas [successfully (and this is implicit in your claim, if not explicitly stated)] discourage students from publishing, and that you believe time to write should be subsidized more than it is already (that is, more free and fully-funded mfa programs). also, that teaching positions are not based on publication history (wait, did you say that, or just dodge it?, anyway…) well, to set up your argument on the claim that mfa students aren’t trying to get their work published is to make it practically baseless. they are trying, en masse.
well, i don’t know why writers in any other field would publish, rather than to be get paid, so getting a scholarship and stipend is effectively a very similar proposal to a book deal, though i know you don’t think of it that way, and answers the need of publishing, which is to get paid for work. unless…there’s no work involved. so, an mfa program that doesn’t offer help publishing (that actually wants its writers not to publish), that doesn’t make any claims about its teachers’ capabilities, or its curriculum’s merit, that has no attendance policies, etc., etc. how can you keep advertising the wonders of this product, the mfa, that you’re not willing to make any real claims for? is free time what you’re spending so much time and energy defending? is that what poets need, the only definite thing they need (since you are so resolutely ambiguous about anything else)? and why do you bristle when your bag of wind gets pricked?
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zealous?
and you’re argument here is, what? that if i don’t think a scholarship is a good idea, then it’s because i don’t know what it is to work a real job and put in long hours. time, of course, isn’t worthless, but invaluable–so what does make me feel icky is when people are determined to stick dollar values to it in so many ways. the way i see your argument, public housing, because it would ease a writer’s financial obligations, would be a public arts project. that’s a faulty analogy.
and you won’t hear me defending yaddo.
there is, at least here, a disconcerting mentor-dependence. why does an institution have to subsidize your free time and provide you with [arguably] good poet-teachers for you to learn to read your poems out loud to yourself?
though i haven’t put in the same hours as some compiling statistics and tracking trends, i have had a good luck at a few institutions.
and, so you don’t misconstrue my argument, i didn’t demonize or blame MFAs for anything. i don’t think they’re bad. or, that is, i don’t think they hurt poets in any appreciable way. but the system is a microcosm of a boondoggle, and the poets are like so many barrels of honey sitting in a warehouse, already paid for, and never to go to market.
forgive the typos (*you’re* for your, and cetera).
and let me just take a sentence to extol the wonders of wild honey, where you can taste the flowers, and guess from which fields the nectar was gathered, and you can’t taste the barrel, or the plywood. and which is absolutely free, even if it’s a bitch to gather, and you can find even in the cities.
James,
If you’re asking, as I believe you are, why I didn’t learn certain things on my own–isolated from any guidance–and instead had to discover them in/through an educational environment, I’d say, I don’t know, I’m human?
Take care,
S.
i guess what i’m asking is, why should you learn that in an apparatus where peter gizzi’s being paid to teach you something seemingly elementary and you’re being paid to learn. you’re human, so your poetry education should be public+you should get a paycheck (even a meagre one)yourself?
and, if you’re going to be advising young poets as a consultant, and expecting those reasonable billable hours…
everybody wants a piece of the pie, self-education is almost dead in our education system, and yet i don’t ask a consultant to find the right library for me.
though, seeing as how don and i started out, maybe i should at least be tipping my librarian.
but an education is what you make of it, and far be it from me to tell anyone they should pay what college costs. harvard law won’t make you a good lawyer, but it offers prospects. and iowa won’t necessarily do anything for you as a writer except teach you how to list your caveats generously. why it is a writer who’d already started publishing, and who has vocally downplayed the concept of institutional cachet would seek out that school and face the intense competition in a search for further and higher confirmation of their talents, all when what they proclaim is that they just want a little free time to write–that’s beyond me.
this country is in a bad way, and people with more and more education seem to know less and be less capable of educating themselves. i think MFAs just add to the resentful feelgood institutional dregs. these mis-educated become the teachers (you said you’ve taught, right, and edited?)
if it seems to you like a shaman scared of hypodermic needles, maybe it’s because in your arrogance you can’t see that i’m actually a qualified country doctor who wonders if my patients need orange flavoring in their IV drip.
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A lot of people did regretful things in the seventies, from what I’ve heard. (Right? I didn’t exist until ‘82, so I wouldn’t know.)
Thomas,
The mirror-image trajectories of poetry and popular music that you describe ring true. I always appreciate a historical anthology (Victorian Verse, 18th Century Verse — any period or topic) that includes anonymous ballads or lyrics — and many anthologies do, though few general surveys of the history of English poetry include one-hit wonders or anonymous poems more recent than the Border Ballads.
There is no culture of anonymity in poetry today, when there was as recently as 100 years ago. Some years back I found at my parents’ house a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from a century ago, put together by an unknown relative. Many dozens of poems in there, almost all contemporary, from the daily newspapers, and many of them unsigned or signed only by initials. Most of them are too sentimental even for me, but there are some dandies and doozies, including a blistering anti-imperialist satire of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” written within a year or two of Kipling’s publication, by someone identified only by initials.
The exceptions to the general rule of professionalism in songwriting in pre-rock 20th century pop music are fascinating. One of Glenn Miller’s biggest hits was written by an amateur, “Elmer’s Tune,” a delightful song written by a man named Elmer (who didn’t write the words; a professional did). Folk songs sometimes hit it big, including “Home on the Range” in the 1930s, published by John Lomax in 1910, who learned it from an African American saloon keeper in San Antonio (scholars have since traced the song’s origin to a 19th century white lawyer in Kansas).
People who note the loss of poetry’s cultural capital usually neglect to mention one hold-out: The academy. Poetry still has cultural capital in the academy. I wonder how long that will last.
I love “Elmer’s Tune”!! There’s a charming version by Peter Stampfel, he of the Fugs and Holy Modal Rounders:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002D3YBKW/
My version, sung in the voice of Elmer Fudd, is a big hit with the 6-year-olds in the car pool. It got them to learn the song anyway!
And, contra Matt, lots of pre-rock lyrics are very readable, at their best comparable to Elizabethan or Cavalier song; Woody Guthrie’s best ballads are as good as the classic ballads; some rock lyrics are highly readable too.
What makes a lady
At 80
Go out on the loose?
What makes a gander
Meander
In search of a goose?
What puts the kick in
A chicken,
The magic in June?
It’s just Elmer’s Tune!
(Words by Sammy Gallup, an excerpt.)
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I was going to reply to this, but apparently the discussion has ended.
And I was trying (with tongue in cheek, or at least touching my favorite upper right quadrant molar) to suggest that poetry manufacturers make a stronger case for a role in the zeitgeist. Enough already with the cheap white wine.
Re: professionalization, 2 more things.
First, the Slam Movement has, or originally had, a strong anti-professional component, which might explain why pros and academics of all aesthetic schools and stripes seemed as united in their indifference and/or opposition to it as they ever have about anything.
Second, Sheila’s snide comments about Thomas not being a writer can only be understood as, “professional writer”; agree with him or not, Like or Dislike him, Thomas is a writer, regardless of his pay scale. By Sheila’s accounting, I guess Emily Dickinson wasn’t a writer either. (Not comparing Thomas with E.D. here; only making a pitch for the standing of the amateur.)
Third, and I hadn’t thought of it until thinking about the song in the context of professionalism, the lyrics of Elmer’s Tune could be seen as making fun of amateur Elmer, though they’re also marvelously, giddily mystic.
I think slam sucks and I’m about as academic as a table leg.
Not all pros are academics, but I have no problem with anybody disliking slam (neither a slammer, nor academic, nor pro here), just noting the phenomenon — and my generalization could be overstated anyway.
I think thinking things suck sucks.
Right on, John. Matt’s just a technobrat.
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Dunno, Thomas.
I think End of the World succeeds because of the exigencies of music…the plot around and within the authentic cadence (including tonal lyricism and syncopation). The lyrics are nice…yes. The crossover (country to pop) is not so much an appeal as a phenomenon.
Music has the authentic cadence.
We have the iamb.
Let’s get to work.
Oh…and we have the trochee.
(which rock stole…)
Oh goodness gracious Thomas, your assertion won’t get you hanged, merely Disliked. But I like your comparison, in part because the self-pity of the Yeats poem is no less sentimental than the self-pity of the Skeeter Davis song — Skeeter’s more hyperbolic, which rings true to me.
As for crossover in poetry, Annie Finch has crossover appeal, with feet in the “formal” and “experimental” camps. I went looking for one of her books at the Best Poetry Bookstore in the U.S. (Open Books, a poetry-only bookstore in Seattle), owned and completely staffed by a lovely couple who are both poets themselves, and one of them remarked on how impressive is Annie’s gift for having alliances from opposing camps. (They had a few of her books, but not the one I wanted.)
Pop music doesn’t frown on crossover any more, nor does classical. Star violinist (and hottie) Joshua Bell does albums of The World’s Most Beloved Melodies. (I looked, and, no, it didn’t have “Happy Birthday,” which disappointed me. False advertising!)
Thank you, John. I’d like to see ‘cross-over appeal’ become more of a virtue in poetry. Annie Finch is a good example; she certainly was good at engaging all sorts of different people on Harriet.
This is great: an entire thread where almost the only thing Thomas Brady has to say is “(click to show comment)”! OK, I’m in favor of the thumbs (especially since they also shut Woodman & Abramson up).
Noah,
It works this way. Most clicks on ‘click to show comment’ wins. This is TRUE notoriety. All the rest is mere chumminess.
Thomas
Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Willie Nelson, U2.
Walt Whitman, William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost and Yeats.
Everest, McKinley, The Matterhorn, Kilimanjaro, Mauna kea, K2.
Every range of mountains has its peaks. Why is this so? Consistency! When even the bad ones are better than the rest.
So many ranges and mountains, but few true pinnacles upon which all may gaze.
Consistency! Always there and always tall.
“Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Willie Nelson, U2.
Walt Whitman, William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost and Yeats.
Everest, McKinley, The Matterhorn, Kilimanjaro, Mauna kea, K2.
Every range of mountains has its peaks.”
Gary,
Ah, the Thomas Carlyle ‘Great Men’ theory that Poe used to mock. To blindly worship excellence is never a good pedagogical strategy. Yes, respect true greatness wherever its found, but blind hero-worship is quite something else.
Bob Dylan loved to tell stories but he’s no Debussy; some people love the early Beatles but find the Sgt. Peppers era pretentious and some would add the early Beatles just ripped off other sounds, and that fortuitous ‘image’ aspects contributed more to the Beatles’ success than real poetry. Some find Whitman bombastic, Poe-haters are legion, Frost and Yeats hit a few homeruns, but much of their work is didactic or even doggerel, and one could go on and on.
There’s other considerations, too. We can heap together what we love, hoard it, and play it for ourselves over and over again, and then we find the magic we used to love fading. Aesthetic pleasure, as with any kind of pleasure, is a fragile and elusive thing; in some ways criticism is more lasting, and more true. I know this is a difficult concept to grasp, for criticism–to many–is the villain, while the lovely poem or song is the beautiful planet we should protect; but I don’t mean the specific criticism is necessarily true, or that we should cynically spurn the beautiful poem, what I mean is that the ability to judge truthfully is what is finally the most valuable to human survival, and (bonus points) the critical faculty itself aids poetic composition…
Thomas
Okay, Thomas, let’s try this:
I believe that the Earth is round and the sky is blue on a sunny day. What do you think of that!?
But I’m sure you’ll find a way to disagree.
Gary,
Thy own prophet says, ‘the first one now will later be last.”
Woe unto thee if thou wouldst not dare to dispute Thomas Brady.
Do you allow George Martin on stage with your “Beatles?”
Anyone could name thousands of obscure artists more profound than your obvious peaks.
Is it the spark of individual genius you seek? Upon what hearth do you seek it?
Would you pit Edgar Poe in all his genius against Walt Whitman? Whitman’s skin would, before you could say ‘Eureka,’ flutter in the wind.
Do you think the chorus of life is sung by Bob Dylan? It is sung by everyone.
Oh, and by the way. Our planet is oval, and early this morning, as the sun burned off the mists in the forest where I walked, I looked up, and saw the sky was more white than blue.
Thomas
Everybody’s a comedian.
You did not address the point of my post, which was consistency, a regularity of quality over time in an oeuvre. That is what makes greatness, not wondrous one song.
Consistency of quality? But isn’t the quality far more important? Are you saying the consistency produces the quality? Isn’t the opposite true? I guess I’m not sure what you are saying…
Consistency is certainly worthy in an argument–but here Emerson disagreed with Poe and said ‘consistency was a humbug.’ Is that what you mean?