It works this way. Most clicks on ‘click to show comment’ wins. This is TRUE notoriety. All the rest is mere chumminess.

Thomas
Report this comment

Consistency is certainly worthy in an argument–but here Emerson disagreed with Poe and said ‘consistency was a humbug.’ Is that what you mean?
Report this comment

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.
Report this comment

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.
Report this comment

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
Report this comment

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.
Report this comment

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.
Report this comment

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.
Report this comment

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
Report this comment

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.
Report this comment

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.
Report this comment

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.
Report this comment

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!)
Report this comment

(which rock stole…)
Report this comment

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.
Report this comment

Within these stock responses: one view of ‘poetry’ by the naive, who don’t really care for it, and two views of ‘poetry’ by the sophisticated–acceptable, academic poetry and ‘trash’ which lives outside the academy, there are obviously plenty of sub-categories: rhymed and unrhymed, perhaps, for the naive, and historical periods for the academics: romanticism, classical, modern, etc., but ‘cross-over’ appeal cannot operate here, since a ‘Romantic’ type of poem composed by Milton or Pope only ruins the edifices of the historical scholars anxious to keep Romanticism, for instance, in its place.

This leaves only one area remaining for any real ‘cross-over’ appeal, and that is when a contemporary ‘school’ crosses over to another in some poet’s work–but I can think of no real example of this, so one has to ask: why doesn’t poetry have ‘cross-over’ appeal?

Does this mean poetry is bereft of actual categories? Is poetry, finally, as the naive public sees it, one category?

The song, ‘End of the World’ was a ‘cross-over hit’ for Skeeter Davis, a country singer. The song earned her a mega ‘pop’ hit, which actually hurt her career as a country artist, because ‘country’ DJs resented her sudden ‘pop’ stardom.

I’m not sure there’s a equivalent of this in poetry.

But let’s look at the song as a poem:

Why does the sun go on shining?
Why does the sea rush to shore?
Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?
For you don’t love me anymore.

Why do the birds go on singing?
Why do the stars glow above?
Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?
It ended when I lost your love.

I wake up in the morning and I wonder,
Why everything’s the same as it was.
I can’t understand, no I can’t understand,
How life goes on the way it does.

Why does my heart go on beating?
Why do these eyes of mine cry?
Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?
It ended when you said goodbye.

Let’s compare it, shall we? with a Yeats poem:

Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtain drawn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.

How can we judge the worth of these two poems?

The first is more classical in both theme and form.

The second is more unique, but rather sloppy, and the poet’s use of terms like ‘unfriendly’ and ‘yet again descant’ and ‘the supreme theme of Art and Song’ are harsh, straining, unearned, and mawkish.

To assert this will get me hanged, of course.

Finally, the former work, the cross-over ballad, appeals poetically to a large population which the academy, or even society at large, hardly recognizes as having poetic qualities at all. Surely, this should be taken into final consideration when judging the poetic quality of any work: the amount of ‘poetry’ administered by the work in context of the ‘poetry’ existing in the audience to which that work appeals.

On this level, ‘End of the World’ wins hands down.

I don’t know if this factor is ever taken into account by literary critics.

But shouldn’t it be?
Report this comment

I misunderstood your comment on creative writing faculties; I thought you meant that their students’ publishing successes aid their own career prospects, which is not true. If you’re saying that folks get hired based on their own publication histories, yes, that’s true–though you’d probably also agree that the pressures of publishing diminish somewhat once one has gotten a job in an MFA program (mind you, not because the pressures disappear, but because journal publications are no longer as necessary and, frankly, at that point, are easier to come by, and the real tenure-track necessity–publishing books–is often easier if one has already done so and has some contacts in the publishing community, which [publishing a book I mean] one would have to do several times over, usually, to get an MFA job in the first place).

I decline your invitation to put myself between a rock and a hard place. If I argue (dishonestly) that MFA programs are dedicated to publishing, not art; if I argue that they are pedagogically rigid, with strict curricula and high-school-like rigidity (e.g., firm attendance policies and such); if I say anything of the sort, you will rightly accuse such MFA programs of being antithetical to art by focusing on business not aesthetics and on hierarchical instruction rather than open-ended self-discovery. But you’ve got a shrewd gambit here: If I say, instead, that MFA programs are primarily an opportunity for young writers to explore their craft and art away from the worries of the world–in a fashion no different than, say, artists’ colonies (not that I’ve heard you suggest we burn down Yaddo)–you’ll say that there’s no _there_ there. Is that because you’ve never worked a job? I don’t know you, so I can’t say. But you wouldn’t be inquiring as to the value of _time_ to an artist if you’d worked in the legal system (for instance) or any other job that demands much of one’s time and attention and emotional energy, which is most jobs everywhere. My ability to improve my work while spending five days a week in court is not the same as the improvement I saw while in an MFA. There’s no comparison. The improvement (IMHO) I saw in an MFA helped me to do in two years what would’ve taken me a decade while working as an attorney.

And yet this isn’t an either/or: I never said that there’s no value to the guidance of faculty in an MFA. With Cole Swensen I learned valuable literary theory, which better allows me to understand my own worldview and aesthetics as an artist (i.e., what I “want to do” with my poetry); with Peter Gizzi I learned the simplest thing imaginable–to always read my own work out loud to myself while drafting, which I’d never done before or (if you can believe it) thought of doing–and to not be so quick to destroy the integrity of my own lines, and (perhaps above all!) his reading recommendations let me for the first time discover poems and poets from whom I can readily draw both enjoyment and inspiration. And so much more, from both writers. The basics of literary criticism that I learned from Tony Hoagland still inform how I teach undergraduates today–and the leaps in understanding and skill I’ve seen in my young charges when I differentiate, in reading poetry, between (say) image and diction and rhetoric, have been extraordinary. They have given these young writers (so my students tell me) new ways of “seeing” how a poem can be constructed. And they have allowed me to see, for the first time, the role of rhetoric in my own poetry, and my aversion to “description,” which now a) helps inform my poetics, and b) helps me resolve my poet and attorney selves. But none of my instructors/mentors ever told me, nor would they, nor would I ever tell my own students, how or what to write. For instance, when Cole Swensen noticed a (brief and temporary) shift toward post-confessionalism in my work, an aesthetic she doesn’t herself favor, it wasn’t to chastise me but rather to make certain I saw and could identify the how/why of this trend myself. She wasn’t going to stop or dissuade me whatsoever if I wanted to go down that path; she just wanted me to be self-aware. Every teacher I ever had was 100% forthcoming about their own biases, and bent over backward to either not teach from those biases or else to frame lessons in _terms_ of those biases (i.e., to openly say, “here is one perspective on things; after we discuss it, we’ll discuss an entirely different one…”).

I never said that MFA students don’t _ever_ try to publish. But I’ve been a poetry editor, James, and I can tell you that while countless MFA graduates try to publish in journals (naturally), the percentage of submissions coming from _current_ MFA students is well below their percentage of the poetry community (given that there are presently between 8,000 and 13,000 individuals total, across all genres, in graduate creative writing programs of one kind or another, and approximately half of those are in poetry).

You write, “getting a scholarship and stipend is effectively a very similar proposal to a book deal.” What? I don’t see this at all. Are you telling me that spending two years in Iowa (or anywhere) just writing and reading and discussing poetry with talented poets (young and old) was the equivalent to signing my John Hancock on a legal contract? In any case, I’m not bristling, James–the internet can’t convey tone well, but if it helps, just think of me as someone accustomed to being a zealous advocate for things (in-court and otherwise) but without ill will attached to that zeal–but if I were bristling, it would probably have been because I see you are using sophistry, not reason, to approach the topic of MFAs. Why not just admit that they feel icky to you, like the steam engine did to those who saw it for the first time, or a sub-Saharan shaman faced with a hypodermic needle, or anyone faced with something they don’t understand and therefore instinctively don’t like? I’d more respect a claim that MFAs “simply feel wrong to you” than an attempt to articulate the basis for that gut feeling using bad analogies and faulty information.

Seth
Report this comment

I agree with Matt that very often song lyrics either ‘suck’ or depend on the music to such a degree that they cannot sustain themselves as poetry alone.

But this ignores the following: song lyrics, even as they succeed within their musical universe, still exist as words and succeed as words, to some degree at least, and if popular, shape poetry in society at large, whether poets like it or not.

I always found the lyric “She Loves You” of paramount quality simply because ‘she loves you,’ in so many dramatic ways, is a qualitative improvement on ‘I love you.’ True, ‘yea, yea, yea’ fails miserably as poetry, but this doesn’t cancel out the excellence of ‘she loves you’ in its wonderful simplicity.

There is a lot of gold to be mined in mawkish crap, and there is a lot of ‘sentiment’ which is worthy, even though it is popular.

‘Professionalism’ tends to reject what it considers ‘sentimental,’ and I’m not talking about ‘the childish,’ which is something different.

I consider the ‘sentimental’ lyrics, for instance, of the ‘oldie’ pop hit, ‘End of the World’ to be worthy poetry, though I don’t know anyone who would give that song a second glance. A bereft lover wonders why the world goes on–it’s a marvelous combination of solipsism and naivete which unconsciously creates its opposite in the simple artfulness of the lyrics themselves.

There was a day when music writing and lyric writing were considered separate arts in the music business: a writer would come up with a tune and desperately ask around town for a writer who could come up with the perfect lyric. There is something quite charming in this.
Report this comment

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.)
Report this comment

I think thinking things suck sucks.
Report this comment

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.
Report this comment

I didn’t think so. End of discussion.
Report this comment

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002D3YBKW/
Report this comment