CAN POETRY MATTER? 15 YEARS AFTER (Part 1)

Have been away a rather long bit from this blog -- a lot of work and a number of personal matters to attend to. Even now I have a number of deadlines I'm working on. But I thought, over the coming month or so, I'd share with you this: an essay I wrote that first appeared in Rock Salt Plum Review in Spring, 2006, that surveys reactions over the previous 15 years to Dana Gioia's seminal essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" Unfortunately, RSPR, one of the finest online literary reviews on the net, ceased publication a couple of issues later. Now I discover it's gone *Poof!* out of existence, taking into oblivion not only this essay, but interviews and poems by the likes of Li Young-Lee, Denise Duhamel, Duane Ackerson and other noteworthies I can't rightly recall: yet another prime illustration of the ethereal nature of this etherish medium. Since it's a lengthy essay, I thought I'd publish it in serialized form, and then do an update, providing links to more recent material that bears on the topic. That'll be four or five installments altogether. Here's the first:

CAN POETRY MATTER? 15 Years After

by Brian Campbell

(first published in Rock Salt Plum Review, Spring, 2006)

In 1991, poet and business executive Dana Gioia published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly called “Can Poetry Matter?” While it may seem to readers today a self-evident summary of a well-established state of affairs, it caused a storm of controversy (tempest in teapot? saké cup?) in the North American poetry world when it first appeared. Its opening, oft-quoted paragraph reads as follows:

American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

Gioia goes on to describe what he aptly calls a “Zen riddle of cultural sociology”, wherein poetry publishing and programs proliferate on a historically unprecedented scale, while the art itself remains a “distressingly confined phenomenon” that has all but disappeared from public view – much of it, as always, of highly questionable worth, appreciated, if at all, by only a tiny coterie of other poets. Here he writes very much along the lines of Joseph Epstein’s mordant "Who Killed Poetry?", a polemic he references and which I remember both impressed and very much depressed me when it came out three years previously in Commentary. In it, Epstein argues that poetry is "flourishing in a vacuum", that an overwhelming production of essentially insipid work is being artificially stimulated by the grants and MFA system, which has helped to choke off poetry appreciation in the culture.

Looking up the Epstein piece on the net for further parallels (it was not readily available), I came across this 1989 article by Donald Hall, “Death to the Death of Poetry”, one of a spate of about thirty articles written around that time intended to refute it. I daresay that I loved it. It convincingly nays the naysayers of contemporary poetry (excuse my neighing!), and gives a bang-on diagnosis of much of the so-called "problem" of poetry appreciation in our culture. Vis-a-vis an oft-lamented decline in quality of contemporary verse-writing, Hall describes how, because readers in general and particularly the media are slow to catch on to a poet’s significance (as compared to say a novelist’s), a paradox ensues that we could call “The Giant/Pigmy Syndrome”:

Time, which reported The Waste Land as a hoax in 1922, canonized T. S. Eliot in a 1950 cover story. Certainly Time's writers and editors altered over thirty years, but they also stayed the same: always the Giants grow old and die, leaving the Pygmies behind. After the age of Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Moore, and Williams, the wee survivors were Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, and Bishop. When the survivors died, younger elegiac journalists revealed that the dead Pygmies had been Giants all along--and now the young poets were dwarfs. Doubtless obituaries lauding Allen Ginsberg are already written; does anyone remember Life on the Beat Generation, thirty years ago?

Hall argues with considerable force that there is a definite and growing audience for poetry, evidenced in the numbers of readings and sales of poetry books, that latter of which, at the time of the writing of his essay, had gone up at least tenfold over the previous thirty years. A dozen or more American poets, he reports, had recently sold books by the tens of thousands: Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Galway Kinnell, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, Carolyn Forché, and certainly others. Galway Kinnell approached fifty thousand with Book of Nightmares, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind, a trade paperback, sold more than a million copies. These sales figures, as always with poetry, are cumulative over years; this means of course that they consistently fall under the radar of best seller and yearly book sale lists.

The problem, Hall is ready to acknowledge, is one of cultural perception: Although there is more poetry today than ever, there is less poetry reviewing in national journals. Examples are plenty, and he mentions some of them: Harper's and The Atlantic had recently abandoned quarterly surveys of poetry, New York Times Book Review had diminished its attention, etc. Aside from any deliberate editorial policy on the part of these journals, one reason he pinpoints is purely socio-economic:

In the past, men and women like Conrad Aiken, Malcolm Cowley, and Louise Bogan practiced literary journalism to make a living. Their successors now meet classes MWF. People with tenure don't need to write book reviews.

(Tenure? It seems permanently provisional contracts are enough.) This dearth of course leaves poetry – and poetry readers – greatly disadvantaged:

… we need a cadre of reviewers to sift through the great volume of material. The weight of numbers discourages readers from trying to keep up. More poetry than ever: How do we discriminate? How do we find or identify beautiful new work? When there are sufficient reviewers, who occupy continual soap-boxes and promote developing standards, they provide sensors to report from the confusing plentitude of the field.

(See Parts 2, 3, 4)

Some notes...

Robert Archambeau writes an amusing entry about Don Hall's recent accession to the the post of American Poet Laureate. Seems he has a compelling theory that Yvor Winters is controlling the demimonde of American poetry from the grave. Actually, I'm quite happy with Hall's appointment, although I only have a passing acquaintance with his poetry. His essay, Death to the Death of Poetry, positively rocks; it's a vital contribution to the "Can Poetry Matter?" debate which some of you will remember I wrote about at length here and in this Spring's Rock Salt Plum Review.

Lately I've been getting multiple visits on my site meter from a new site called Headlines Poetry, a catalogue of the latest Poetry blog entries painstakingly set up by a pair of curiously dedicated souls. I wonder whether this one will become something of a means of exchange in Poetryblogland or will peter out.... I also wonder if some kind of automatic feed mechanism keeps it going on automatic. (It looks like that: the site updates ongoingly and has no archives.) In the meantime, I appreciate the selfless effort, automatic or no.

I myself seem to have been spending more time looking at my site meter than reading more useful things like poetry lately. Visits from an Unknown Country have died down, for reasons as mysterious as they sprang up in such great numbers. But someone in Tajikistan is giving me daily visits, an unknown country for me until he or she came knocking at my cyberdoor. Saturday, for obvious reasons, is a relatively dead day in the virtual world -- too many things to do in the so-called real world. On my tombstone some day: He Watched His Site Meter.

The Festival de Poesia de Costa Rica is over. It seems to have been a resounding success. I've left Norberto, it's chief organizer, a few days to overcome the effects -- and now, at last, we're working on the final touches of the definitive edition of Undressing the Night (selected poems of Francisco Santos, trans. by yours truly)... I expect it will be finally out by the end of the summer. At last...

DEATH TO THE DEATH OF POETRY

I may be reporting old news on old men again, but looking over my post on Joseph Epstein below, I realized I had forgotten to mention he was the author of a much-talked and written-about article, "Who Killed Poetry?" -- which I remember both impressed and very much depressed me when I read it in Commentary back in the late 80's. In it, as I recall, Epstein argues that poetry is "flourishing in a vacuum", that an overwhelming production of essentially insipid work is being artificially stimulated by the grants and MFA system, which has helped to choke off poetry appreciation in the culture. Viz. Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter?, a thesis written along the same lines only two years later. Looking up the Epstein piece, I came across this 1989 article by Donald Hall, Death to the Death of Poetry, which is intended to refute it. I daresay I loved it. It convincingly nays the naysayers of contemporary poetry (excuse my neighing!), and gives a bang-on diagnosis of the so-called "problem" of poetry appreciation in our culture. Wish I had read it back in '89 when it first appeared.
______________

Well... "Bang-on" may have been facile. Actually, looking over Can Poetry Matter? again, I see Gioia takes many of Don Hall's arguments into account, and that his article is meant to gainsay boosters like Hall. A kind of synthesis of the two antitheses, in other words. A number of Gioia's observations I feel are quite astute, particularly vis-a-vis the self-imposed limitations of a great many poetry readings (poetry only readings, authors reading their only own work -- those limitations still largely hold today). However, I'd say Don Hall's feisty essay injects a positive note that makes it necessary reading for anyone with vital interest in the issue.

I wonder, has anyone convincingly raised the cudgels since? Or could these essays, dating from more than 15 years ago, be considered "the last words" in that debate?

COMMUNITY, ROBERT BLY, ETC.

The following is from an interview with Robert Bly on Bly's website -- it's a fascinating site... but then, I'm a huge admirer, esp. of his criticism and translations:

Donald Hall and I have been sending poems back and forth twice a week for forty years. At one time, we had a 48-hour rule: the other had to answer within 48 hours. My generation did a lot with letters. Galway Kinnell and Louis Simpson and Don and I and James Wright would often send five- and six-page typed letters commenting on and arguing with each others' poems. I'm amazed we had the time for that. Tranströmer and I exchanged hundreds of letters. The gist of it is that no one writes alone: One needs a community.

Voila! The way in which poetry lends itself to community -- glorious get-togethers with writerly company for sharing, feedback, wine, song, etc. -- is but one thing which brought me back into its fold after a haitus of nearly a decade (during which I wrote songs, recorded an album, even tried to get a music career off the ground...something I rarely talk about on this blog.) Trouble is, these get-togethers don't always manage to coalesce (this I write after yet another fell through earlier this month...). People are so busy these days, with family obligations, house repairs, etc... it requires a degree of commitment and availability that not many of us can muster at any given stage of our lives.

Hence the usefulness of poetry boards -- in particular, Eratosphere. Discovered this one through Whimsy Speaks (Jeff Bahr). In some post of his he mentioned that of 60 poems he had gotten published, only 2 hadn’t gone through the acid test of a poetry board like this one. That in itself was remarkable piece of information. Following the link, I was truly impressed by what I saw. The discussion is at a pretty high level -- as were a number of the poems on the boards. The site appears to have had the likes of Richard Wilber and Anthony Hecht as visiting “Poet Lariats” for a day. There is an interesting division between beginning and advanced levels of metric poetry (an area I probably won't participate in much -- there seemed to be a lot of light verse there, which I rarely enjoy). I also liked some of the open discussions. Most certainly in the coming year I'll be spending more time on on-line boards such as these -- even though, of course, that means an even more inordinate amount of time with my eyes glued to a computer screen.

Back to Bly though -- one thing you can say for him, with all those books, translations, appearances, review editing, etc.: he had (and has) one serious work ethic worked out there. Serious, yet joyful, as he obviously loves what he does. He's still got quite a gig-list going, for a man just shy of 80!

If you want to hear a recent Robert Bly reading, check out this site. I enjoyed this reading a lot.