THE BLANDIFICATION OF THE WORLD

Brian Austin Whitney, founder and tireless promoter of the remarkable grass-roots music organization, Just Plain Folks (of which I'm a member -- even performed at one of his benefits when he swung round in his van thru Montreal last June), is also an eloquent and impassioned commentator where it comes to moral as well as morale support for independent artistic expression in any form. I post this from my archives because I found it inspiring ... whatever we may think of what I take to be a folky affectation -- that reference to "the most important Poets in US History" -- well it is all up to US, when it comes down to it . . . anyway, this should perk a few of you up. Enjoy!

Welcome to Just Plain Notes!
Just Plain Notes: Volume 1.138, April 19, 2004
Written by Brian Austin Whitney
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Just Plain Quotes:

"I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents." -Sir Winston Churchill

"While we have the gift of life, it seems to me that only tragedy is to allow part of us to die - whether it is our spirit, our creativity, or our glorious uniqueness." -Gilda Radner

"The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!'" -John F. Kennedy

"Being an original artist often means accepting that your talent, passion and vision must rely more on your self motivation, self preservation and self esteem than anyone else's."
-Brian Austin Whitney

My Take:

It's always been tough to be an original. Our society has long embraced the familiar, more now than perhaps ever in history. We seem to flock to the same stores and the same restaurants and the same movies and the same music no matter where we go. When I travel around the US it seems there's less and less to distinguish between one city and the next. Fortunately at least the terrain is different, otherwise I wouldn't know the difference between Denver, Portland, Indianapolis, Tampa, Houston or Los Angeles.

The music industry and many of their practices simply reflect much of this preference by the public. What artists see as watered down, ho hum music on radio is really just the equivalent to having a Gap, Walmart, McDonalds and Best Buy in just about every city you visit. People also flock to the same sporting events, buy the same books, watch the same TV shows and so on. Our industry is really no different. Radio consolidation has created the musical version of the fast food restaurant chain. (Would you like a McSong with those radio advertisements?) But somehow, we still need to soldier on if we want to be artists and not simply tools of commerce.

Don't get me wrong, there is convenience and comfort in familiarity, and with all our lives being bombarded by more stimulus than any humans have previously had to face, I don't see an end to what I consider to be the "blandification" of our world. (Yeah, not a real word.. but you can tell folks I coined it here first!) Even with the new digital technology that will make our music available to anyone on demand anytime they want it, don't get your hopes up too much that the Britney's of the world won't still rule. They probably will.

Throughout history, being an original artist and creator has always meant having to rely more on your self motivation, self sufficiency and self esteem than that which you get from others. Sometimes the work you do will blaze a trail (often long after you're out of the picture) that will eventually become part of the mass market (and thus bland) world. Rap music is the most recent example of this. Once considered the most controversial and ground breaking genre of music, it's been watered down for the masses to become the same homogenized and palatable mass market product that R&B, Pop and Country have all become.

Sometimes people will get up in arms against what you do (which means you're probably really on to something good). And other times, people simply won't notice what you're doing at all. But if you're an artist, you'll do it anyway. And you'll perfect your own brand of unique vision and output in the context of your abilities and resources. If you do that, you're not only a real artist, but a legitimate success at it, unless of course you only validate your art based on commerce. I've long believed that art and commerce are two separate things. Most successful artists understand that and work to make sure those two things cross paths enough to pay their bills.

There's always hope your art will be discovered, even if it's later than you planned. Emily Dickinson, considered one of the most important Poets in US History, had only a handful of poems published in her lifetime (all without her knowledge) and the few she actually submitted were roundly rejected. Of course immediately after her death her work was "discovered" along with hundreds of poems she had never shown to anyone. Commerce never found her, but society and the world did. Her art transcended contemporary commercialism.

Believe in yourself and your work on it's own merit. Let the critics and the mass market catch up on their own. If they do, just like Emily Dickinson, your work will eventually be available in every town in every country in the world. If they don't, to paraphrase what William Hung said on American Idol, "you did your best and that's all you CAN do."

CHASMS

After some 20-odd hours of work (actually it's very hard to estimate the length of time, what with my pacing around, general distractedness -- 14 hours? 25 hours?), the article I've written for the Rock Salt Plum Review, "Can Poetry Matter?": 15 Years Later, is just about done. It was much harder than I imagined, weaving the rough, weedy patches of four meandering blog posts into the smooth, rolled lawn of a continuous article. Just the act of pasting the four posts together in consecutive order -- with the first post at the top and the last at the bottom, rather than the reverse as they appear in this blog, lead to some glaring revelations about form -- just how Blogger format shapes the conventions by which we cobble our posts together, and just how tangential blogs inherently are. Although the entries seemed quite polished per se, suddenly, imagining them out of this personal context and under the masthead of that review, a good deal of my chattiness seemed impertinent, language lazy, and references unacceptably imprecise -- and yet I still wanted to preserve the wit, playfulness -- and at least some of the informality -- of the original.

Good news is, I think I've managed to do so. There may even be more wit in the article version. The title still seems a bit clunky. Maybe I'll come up with a better one. (If something strikes you, let me know...)

In a matter of hours, my server (Bell Sympatico, which has been rather Antipatico with me) will be disconnected; Videotron will be installed Monday morning, and I'll be without internet for almost two days. I expect I'll suffer nervous tremours, skittishness, hot fevers, the whole bit -- that at certain moments, I'll be looking and feeling rather like the Simpson girl below. Wish me luck as I cross the chasm of incommunicado.

PS. Hmm... "Can Poetry Matter?": 15 Years After That's catchier. At least, it rhymes. (Sally Potter would approve. So would Dr. Seuss....)

LISA MEETS EDVARD

"ASSONANCE" IN EDUCATING RITA

In the 1983 film Educating Rita, Rita (Julie Walters) asks Professor Frank Bryant (Michael Caine) the meaning of assonance. Here's an excerpt from the script, which believe it or not, I was able to find on the net:

R: What does assonance mean?
P: What?
R: Don't laugh at me.
P: Er, no. Erm, assonance, it's a form of rhyme.
R: Erm, what's an example?
P: Do you know Yeats?
R: The wine lodge?
P: No, WB Yeats, the poet.
R: No.
P: Well, in his poem The Wild Swans At Coole, Yeats
rhymes the word "swan" with the word "stone". You
see? That's an example of assonance.
R: Ooh, yeah, means getting the rhyme wrong.
P: I've never thought of it like that.

OK, you students of verse, what's wrong with this dialogue?

Well, what the professor is actually describing is consonance, which according to my Holman's
Handbook, is the use of words in which the final consonants of stressed syllables agree but the
vowels that precede them differ, as in "add-read,", "bill-ball," and yes, "swan-stone."

Assonance is the resemblance or similiarity in sound between vowels followed by different consonants, as in "lake-fate," "dike-knight", and "trodden-cobbles."

Personally, I prefer my own definition of assonance: the sound assholes make when they're
describing slant rhyme.

It was a delightful movie, by the way, charming and witty and profound by turns (I rented it last night). Michael Caine and Julie Walters were perfect for their parts. Highly recommend this one, as (yes, it has become) an old-time treat.

SURPRISE...

Jalina Mhyana, editor of Rock Salt Plum Review, dropped this little note into my inbox yesterday (and today, gave me permission to post it):

Hi Brian,

I've been spending some time on your blog, and I'm blown away. I love your clean, engaging writing style and your clarity of thought. I've been looking for a writer for a regular non-fiction column on RSP, and your four-part article "Does Poetry Matter?" would be an excellent starting point. Are you interested in adding your name and talent to RSP? Please let me know as soon as possible, and we can publish your article in this issue (it will probably be published in
a week). This issue has an interview with Li-Young Lee and some great poems. I hope you'll be interested!

Jalina

Needless to say, I've accepted. All this from a query for a poetry submission. Who knows where these things will lead!

P.S. Thanks A.D., Gina, Emily, et al. for your kind comments to the original post. I had to delete and repost it because it caused template problems in Explorer.

FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE POESIA DE COSTA RICA

Norberto Salinas, our editor, who founded and runs almost singlehandedly the Festival Internacional de Poesía de Costa Rica, tells us that some important poets like Ernesto Cardenal, Claribel Alegría and Thiago de Mello (the latter two I've never heard of) are coming to the 5th Annual Festival, which takes place this year from May 27 to June 4; each of 15 of this special guests will have a small volume of selected poems published for the occasion, and in addition 16 books will be published and launched by Editorial Lunes at the festival.

It seems that the Festival Internacional de Poesía de Costa Rica is indeed an enormous cultural initiative, and that's why it's attracting some of the biggest names in Spanish and Latin American poetry today. According to Norberto, who tells me he's already given 80% of his working time to the festival (and he's a self-described workaholic), he's organized readings to more than 40,000 rural , public school and university students as well as general public throughout the country. Talk about dedication! We have to credit people like him for helping make poetry matter, wherever they may be...

P.S. Norberto sent me the information about the festival, which is too exhaustive to summarize here more than I have done. But since the festival as yet has little Internet presence, I thought it would be of interest to post their guest list of internationally invited poets, since I'm sure it includes many names that those outside Latin American literary circles wouldn't know. I see also three poets who do not write in Spanish, including one Ron Riddel of New Zealand. I haven't bothered to change the Spanish place names:

1- El Salvador-Nicaragua: Claribel Alegría

2- Argentina: Vicente Muleiro

3- Brasil: Thiago de Mello

4- Colombia: Juan Manuel Roca

5- Cuba: Nancy Morejón

6- Chile: Raúl Zurita

7- Eslovakia: Lubica Somolayoba

8- Eslovakia: Martin Solotruk

9- España: Rodolfo Häsler

10- Guatemala: Héctor Rodas

11- México: Ernesto Lumbreras

12- México: Guadalupe Elizalde

13- Nicaragua: Ernesto Cardenal

14- Nueva Zelanda: Ron Riddell

15- Puerto Rico: Antonio Ramírez

Can Poetry Matter en español

In the comments to the post below, A.D. inspired me with a superb poem by Ernesto Cardenal. Also an apt quote of William Carlos Williams; thanks A.D. Obviously all that chatter on whether poetry matters is silenced by poems like these...

Francisco Santos, by the way, has a powerful take on the subject with this poem, an elegy for Leonel Rugama, a very talented young poet who died at the hands of Somoza's Guardia Nacional at the age of 20. Be sure to read the translation of Leonel's poem below in the same post.

The editing of Undressing the Night is almost done; the definitive edition will be off the press ... well, we hope, soon (although it may take a month or two more before I receive it). Some of the introduction had to be rewritten because we failed to mention Ernesto Cardenal. Cardenal had been one of Francisco Santos' poetic mentors. For several months in 1969, Francisco and his brother Mario (also a poet as well as short story writer) stayed in his artistic community in the Solintename archipelago of Lake Nicaragua. (They must have been among the first to stay there, since internet sources I've come across tell me that Cardinal started his community around 1970 or so...) For Francisco, it was a very productive time -- besides getting his first book manuscript together with editorial feedback from Cardenal, he read voraciously whatever poetry in translation he could get his hands on, particularly 20th Century American poetry (Eliot, Pound, the Beats), much of which had been recently translated by Cardenal and another Nicaraguan poet, Jose Coronel Urtecho (mentioned in Francisco's poem hyperlinked above). Apparently EC was quite taken aback when Francisco showed him our first draft of the book and the intro failed to mentioned him, although it described quite extensively Pablo Antonio Cuadra's shaping influence on Francisco. Oh well. I'm glad we can rectify it before it goes to print...

"Can Poetry Matter" debate part 4 of 4

Another highly engaging essay I found in my "Can Poetry Matter?" search is Jake Berry's "Responding to Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" in the Oct., 2002 issue of Muse Apprentice Guild. It begins with this:

My initial response to the question, before I read the essay –– to think, "Can Poetry Matter?" was "I hope not!" Why would I respond in this way? I am a poet and should have much at risk, I should want to see poetry matter as much as possible. The problem lies in what matters culturally and who decides what matters. Despite the fact that more books are sold now than ever before, that more books are purchased and presumably read, we seem somehow less erudite, less intellectual than we were even thirty years ago. And the cultural artifacts, the phenomena that matter, even to the intelligentsia often seem so insignificant when compared to art, past or present, that in order to matter one would have to sacrifice the very art one hoped to foster in the first place. So is it better to be irrelevant than relevant in a vapid culture? Am I cynical? Of course I am. What was once known as pop culture seems now almost universally accepted as the only culture.

etc. Actually, Jake Berry's attitude to pop culture turns out to be far more open and nuanced than this opening paragraph would suggest; and although he claims that in many ways poetry is just fine on the margins, he shares an abiding concern about poetry's social role at least as intense as Gioia's. His though is the perspective of a profoundly alienated outsider, particularly from academia, of which he is not a part. He (citing Frank Lazer's two-volume OPPOSING POETRIES), sees the academe, dominated by "plainverse" writing school poetry, absorbing the opposing "language poetry movement", much in the way that free market capitalism devoured the burgeoning '60's "revolution" in the name of style and fashion and sold the trappings -- clothes, haircuts, symbology -- in slightly refined form to the culture at large. The result he describes as a "great homogenization." I am not at all convinced of this -- in 2006, this seems a blinkered perspective -- but doesn't the following scenario have an all-too-familiar ring?

One can practice the accepted forms or resign oneself to obscurity, and many, most, of the poets outside the academy have done exactly that. They pass poems to one another and publish in the handful of publications that accept outsiders. Primarily they work and either self-publish or publish one another in small inexpensive editions that the general public would not even recognize as a book. Most of the poetry I read that might "matter" has almost no exposure at all to an audience beyond a few interconnected renegade cabals in what remains of the literary underground.

Close to the end of the essay, Berry asks a series of questions that I'm sure all practicing poets have asked of themselves at one time or another:

Should we as poets be prepared to accept, even embrace, obscurity in order to practice an art that is important to the deeper, more complex, conditions of our species? For what reason? Does reason have anything to do with it? Do we not practice this art out of some obsession that forever seems to remain just beyond our ability to describe and name? Or do we practice it to keep the poetic faculties alive regardless of who or how many may subscribe to that experience? It is certain that our culture contains a great many people that are broadly intelligent enough to appreciate and generate poetry that is populist in its scope, and to recognize and call it an art. Do they constitute an "educated public"? Probably not, for the most part, in the sense that Gioia means it. Does that kind of public still exist? Yes, but most likely in a diminished percentage.

We do as we must, simple as that. Like Simon in the post below, I've come to conclude that from the point of view of creation, publication, even audience for live readings, poetry is just fine, considering how non-commercial and non-marketable an artform it inherently is. With the internet, a vast spectrum of diversity is literally at our fingertips. Blogs, for one, are making a difference. What interests me in particular are is the emergence of publishing venues that are not under the auspices of academe, that are also not caught up in their own tiresome version of "being cool" (Fence, Shampoo and Exquisite Corpse come to mind), but that in an independent, understated way highlight, on a consistent basis, excellent work. These include the net magazines Dusie, Nth Position, and No Tell Motel, to name a few. Among high-circulation reviews that reach a broad public and yet are open to poetry on their pages, fresh arrivals include Addbusters and Maisonneuve (also irksome in their efforts at "cool", but I like their broad audience). Weird top-down initiatives that are certain to bring seismic shifts in the poetry landscape include the Griffin Prize here in Canada (of prizes there's a plethora, but this one is the biggest yet for a single book of poetry) and the recent Ruth Lilly donation of $175 million to Poetry Magazine. To read more about upcoming initiatives related to the latter, see here.

All that is really lacking in this present Poetry Age are prominent critics in prominent places to perform that crucial function of finding the diamonds among the mounds of broken glass, and of pointing out with passion and critical intelligence, the differences. As far back as 1978 Robert Bly published an essay called, "Where Have All the Critics Gone?" ; there he pretty well outlined the malaise: widespread critical nepotism, praise of mediocrity, etc. Unless I'm blind as I describe the elephant, the situation hasn't substantially changed.* I won't make the space here to go into the nuances of Bly's essay, but its final gruff lines are

In our situation we need poets and writers who are willing to do the hard work around literature, that is, to separate the weak from the strong, photography from art. In brief, we need people with joy in their own intellect and judgement.

Echoed 13 years later by Gioia with, "By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its own art."

Think though -- with a few shifts in the cultural climate, we could have what Latin Americans have enjoyed for decades in the Mexican Excesior or the Nicaraguan La Prensa Literaria, a whole section of a widely circulating newspaper dedicated not just to reviews but exerpts of fiction and poetry by established as well as emerging writers. Wouldn't that be something! (Dream on.)

To borrow a page from pop culture, before the media spotlight turned on the likes of Ashley MacIssac, Nathalie McMaster and Kenneth Flatley's River Dance, celtic dancers and violinists played in kitchens and the occasional festival -- and the probably will go back to that again (if they haven't already). Poetry is in such a kitchen state. (Actually, I prefer Hart Crane's line: "In this town, poetry is a bedroom occupation.") In the present circumstances, my suggestion for most poets out there is: find a lover who enjoys your work. Who knows what'll become of it; it may go no farther than that.

_____________

*voices like Joan Houlihan, Ron Silliman and Canada's Carmine Starnino -- do they have the wide sweep and depth of a Wilson, Bloom or Sontag? Are they and others like them enough to make that substantial difference? Rather doubt it, as yet...
_________

A few of other links of interest:

Mark Pietrzykowski writes a critique of privatization and manages to relate that to the sociology of poetry and the Gioia essay. Densely written (this poet writes like an economist, if not economically), this is nevertheless a cogent read and includes a few wildfire suggestions on how to loosen the stifling grip of monopolies that be. Among them: send your poetry to mainstream magazines, newspapers, etc. Of course your work will be rejected out of hand, but maybe, just maybe, you'll jog those iron-clad assumptions a touch!

Joan Houlihan weighs in with a survey of graduates of MFA programs, and confirms my hunch that my money has been better spent on wine and books. (Not to mention women and song -- serious sources of expenditure over the last decade or so!)

Finally, a 1995 interview with Dana Gioia, where he counters some of the criticism levied against "Can Poetry Matter?" Whatever one thinks of his poetry, this too is a very engaging read.

CAN POETRY MATTER debate -- PART 3 1/2 of 4

Perhaps the most incisive response to the posts below is from Simon DeDeo, whose poetry review blog is, by the way, one of my favourites on the net:

This question used to bother me much more than it does today. From my vantage point -- publishing and reading mostly on the internet, and reading things that I find absolutely fantastic and in no way slick or derivative or clubby -- things really are quite fine.

And I grow to distrust people who worry about this a great deal (not you Brian, don't worry.) I mean, there is poetry, it is out there, 90% of everything is fake, fraudulent, made in bad faith. I can say this about science definitely and without reservation, so why not poetry? What do people like Gioia want? What would it mean for poetry to "matter" the way Gioia wants it to? (My guess would be that Gioia wants *his* poetry to matter to everyone, which it can't, because Gioia's work is crap.)

Does abstracted, theoretical science matter to anyone? Not really, except for the practicioners, the afficiandos, and the students. Similarly for poetry. I don't find science to be in a bad way, and neither do I find poetry so.

That's quite a head's up. Gioia's poetry is crap? From a writer I've called the Hazlitt of the net?

Frankly, I had only really read Unsaid, which struck me a profound admission with a resonant last line, besides showing an assured mastery of form. I'm sure, like me, most readers who have responded to Gioia's essays haven't bothered to actually read his poetry, or much of it at any rate -- call it laziness, or more charitably, symptomatic of our all-too-lazy human condition. Anyway, I decided to go to his site and give the poems he has there a good read.

Well -- guess what? Besides Unsaid, two poems have something: Sunday Night in Santa Rosa, and Insomnia, although the latter is has plenty dull notes (tho it could be taken as a confession of a certain all-too-human dullness). The rest of it is crap. Planting a Sequia, California Hills, Rough Country, the Next Poem, Summer Storm, are almost embarrassingly bad -- embarrassing, perhaps, because I took the man seriously. Country Wife starts to have something, but is also pretty lame. Money, a clever kind of joke poem, is also a Rorcharch poem -- what you say about it shows you who you are, at least in relation to its form & subject. I could see some people getting off on this, but me it's a mini-Frankenstein's monster, a stitching together of dead metaphors that produces a half-dead result. Litany is somewhat interesting at points, but the final summation dross. Interesting that he has this apologetic footnote to that poem -- what kind of concept of audience is that, and what kind of inibitions is he working against in himself? Anyway, in these selected poems, I see plenty of turgid sentimentality, heavy-handed use of structure, and dull language. And these are his selected.

Kind of undermines the thesis, eh? (Excuse me, we actually say eh up here...)

Also, just to be true to a new-found purpose, I decided to look at Simon's poems (to be found in his links list). Simon's work tends toward the cryptic and elusive, a kind of abstracted theoretical science in itself. But I frankly enjoyed it more than Gioia's (well, there's no comparison, really) -- there is an alacrity in his suggestive sparks and minimalist adventures with syntax, images that stay, and no cliche or sentimentality here, no sirree! Interesting that he also has a poem called Money. I'm not sure why this poem is called Money, but trying to figure out why has been a good mind-sharpener for me. My question for you, Simon is: could this poem be influenced by Gioia? In calling his work "crap", could there an oedipal complex at play here? ;-)

"CAN POETRY MATTER" debate Part 3 (of 4)

Of the dozen or so articles I found in response to Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter?, John Palattella’s 10 Years After, Poetry Still Matters, published in 2002 in the Higher Education Chronicle, is one of the three or four well worth reading in its entirety. Not to say there aren’t a number of things I found gratingly annoying therein. Although bios I have accessed on Palattella list him only as a “writer on poetry” for The Nation, London Review of Books and a number of other august publications, I can’t help but imagine him firmly ensconced in Higher Education himself, what with his thinly-veiled condescension towards the mere “executive who ... once managed the Jell-O account at General Foods”, who had the audacity to shake up the poetry world by publishing a book of essays on contemporary poetry. Aside from suggesting that Gioia’s argument in Can Poetry Matter? is couched primarily in unsubstantiated assertions and “bombastic” analogies, the most disingenuous aspect of Palattella's review is that he doesn’t clearly acknowledge that Gioia, whatever the limitations of his purview, went to considerable lengths in other writings to show how the growth of spoken word and the internet has changed the character of the poetry scene since the writing of his landmark essay. Palattella does, however, make a some interesting points along the way. I like this one:

In 1991, the year Gioia's argument appeared in the Atlantic, nearly 5,000 poets were listed in A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers. According to the Directory of American Poetry Books, which is maintained by Poets House, in New York City, nearly 7,000 volumes of poetry were published in the United States from 1990 to 2001. (That figure excludes poetry CD's, audiotapes and videotapes, and other multimedia recordings of poetry.)

The situation in the mid-20th century, which Gioia treats as a golden age of poetry-writing and poetry-reviewing, was considerably different. According to a bibliography published in the magazine Accent, there were 151 American poets in 1941; from 1931 to 1940, they published a total of 264 books of poetry (excluding doggerel and inspirational verse).

Commenting on those Accent figures in 1989, in an essay later collected in Outside Stories, 1987-1991, the essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger offered an explanation that remains sound today: American poetry "was once a village where neighbors chatted and feuded. Now American poetry is a little nation of citizens who are unknown to each other, a federation of cantons where the passes are snowed in and the wires are down."

...Not all of the wires have remained down, since the Internet has not only facilitated communication among cantons but also opened up territory for new cantons. But the poetry world is still a federation, not a republic, and whether its decentralization has fostered pluralism or balkanization remains an open question.

How about pluralistic balkanization – is that a possibility? Reading that last sentence, my own tongue feels balkanized. But I love the Weinburger quote. Palattella’s concluding remarks, mirror my own evolving view of the contemporary poetry world I as explore its permutations:

What's certain is that, given the changes in the country's demographics, the rise of mass university education, and the growth of poetry as a middle-class profession, that little mid-century village has vanished for good. Perhaps the term that best sums up the current state of affairs is motley -- a mix of dazzling, foolish, and banal work that cuts across styles, movements, and schools. The murky certainties of the title essay of Can Poetry Matter? have grown only murkier in 10 years' time, which is why wandering around a motley poetry world remains more appealing to me than the solicitude of Dana Gioia.

In my search, I found a couple of other essays worthy of consideration that I don't have time to go into now. Thanks, Simon, A.D.T., et al., for your comments on the previous posts in this series. (Now it is a series -- something I, for one, never expected!) Look forward to a concluding part 4.

CAN POETRY MATTER? debate Part 2

A couple of posts down I wondered if anyone had made a substantial contribution to the “Can Poetry Matter” debate since Gioia. I appreciate the comments I did receive, but no one has yet responded to the question. That’s hardly surprising: apart from the advent of the internet, which has lead to an explosion of writing by poets about poetry (in blogs such as this one, for one) some interesting new outlets of publication, not to mention intriguing (to some) Google-based techniques and poetries – i.e. flarf -- the climate of poetry, particularly print-based poetry, continues pretty much the same and the trends unabated, so not much more need be said: the same institutions dominate, as do the same writing programs and journals; MFA poets keep being churned out by the thousands, prizes have proliferated to the point where it practically seems a distinction not to have won one, and contemporary poetry continues to be all but ignored in major media. A poetry world that could once be described as balkanized is now atomized; now we're going into poetry's sub-atomic age, I suppose.

Nevertheless, to satisfy my own curiosity I decided answer my question myself, by simply typing “Can Poetry Matter” into Google and seeing what came up.

In a 1997 article entitled Does Poetry Matter: The Culture of Poetry, originally a talk at a Raven Chronicles poetry forum, poet Bart Baxter starts off in an amusing fashion:

Before I begin my prepared remarks, let me ask for a show of hands in the audience, a scrupulously honest show of hands. How many of you here tonight are poets? [Half the audience raised hands.] How many of you would like to be a poet, have maybe written some verse, are looking for a publisher? [1/4 raised hands.] And how many here are friends of the moderator or someone on the panel? [1/4 raised hands.] Now, everyone in the audience who did not fall into any one of those three categories, who did not raise your hands before, please raise your hands now. [One hand was raised.]

I think if Dana Gioia were here tonight, he would simply say: I rest my case.

In this short article, Baxter gives a good synopsis of Gioia’s main points in Can Poetry Matter, and describes also how his opinion has since changed since writing that article:

Dana Gioia wrote "Can Poetry Matter?" long before he realized what was going on in the urban centers across the country, in the night clubs and cabarets, at the Greenmill Tavern in Chicago and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York, at the open readings and poetry slams. In a lecture he presented at Poets House in New York on October 26 [1995], which became an essay published in Poetry Flash, "Notes Toward a New Bohemia," his greatest fears about the future of poetry seem to be assuaged.

Everyone likes to sound authoritative in his opinions, but it’s getting harder and harder these days to say anything authoritative about anything. We have to give Gioia an E (Excellent) for Effort. In Bohemia, Gioia concludes along these lines (quoting again from the Baxter article):

The primary means of publication of new poetry is now oral. This applies to older established poets as well as new unknowns.

2. This represents an enormous paradigm shift away from print culture, in that:
a. The government is neither involved with subsidizing events nor appointing particular poets.
b. The physical audience listening to poetry greatly outnumbers the people who read poetry in books. (Do we need one more professor to tell us that the important thing is whether the poem will translate from the "stage to the page"?).

3. This is a populist revolution, a distinct move from print to oral tradition, largely among groups long alien to the traditional, dominant, literary, academic culture:
a. e.g., rap lyrics, in music and poetry.
b. Cowboy poetry.
c. Poetry slams.

4. Surprisingly, most of this new populist poetry is formal:
a. e.g., the four-stress lines in rap.
b. The English ballad form in cowboy poetry.
c. The merger of poetry and experimental theater in performance poetry at poetry slams often uses elaborate rhyme schemes.

5. As for the University, an institution better equipped to preserve old culture than foster the creation of new art, it will probably hold on dearly to Modernism, and will continue to do so until Post-modern poetry's last gasp.

Anyway, I have more to report, particularly from the side that finds the whole debate tedious as hell, that says poetry is just fine on the margins. Attitudes I also appreciate, in my way. But I’m running out of steam here, and this post is has gotten rather long. Stay tuned.