David Biespiel Stirs the Pot

The Huffington Post picked up Biespiel's feature in this month's Poetry magazine, "This Land is Your Land," and some of the HuffPo readers have taken issue with his claim that "American poetry and America's poets remain amazingly inconsequential to the rest of the nation's civic, democratic, political, and public life."

From the fray:

"Biespiel makes an essential case for poets to act like full citizens, but doesn't identify the source of the problem. Technological changes in the last 10 years have been so unprecedented it has been difficult for anyone, much less those given to the quieter, reflective arts, to grasp how truly historic it all is. The only credible media figures these days are satirists like Jon Stewart. There is no way to quiet the beast down, to slow the rhythms of our hyperactive national heart. American mass culture has reached a point where it cannot concentrate for more than 30 seconds, at the outside.

"You have to be a celebrity in order to penetrate American culture for more than a few minutes. Celebrity status is awarded mostly to the young and charismatic. Our older poets are from a different world, a world which ended in 2001. Most are just beginning to realize the difference between the 20th and 21st centuries. But look out. In about 5 years, we're going to see these years as possibly the beginning of one of the greatest renaissance periods of creative endeavor since the 1920s. It's just budding, new sprouts, and it is young - very, very young, but I have a lot of faith in this new generation of media savvy visual, musical, and traditional poets. They just haven't been discovered yet."

Read the rest here.