Anis Shivani: What Is the State of American Poetry? Leading American Poets Speak

Anis Shivani: What Is the State of American Poetry? Leading American Poets Speak

When this article appeared in Huffington post three weeks ago, I immediately posted it to Facebook, as a kind of bookmark for myself, where it also got some positive response from literary readers. Posting there was a simple click-click process. It's more cumbersome to cross-post attractively on Blogger -- especially to import an eye-catching image.

Anyway, at the time I was too busy to read it myself, but there's a lot of worthwhile material here, which I'm reading now -- interviews with Clayton Eshleman, Annie Finch, Ron Silliman, and Danielle Pafunda, along with videos, poems on pdfs, and further links to their works. Anis Shivani did a really good job in bringing these poets to a wider audience. (CBC could take a cue here...)

To me articles like this are of particular interest, since they form a natural follow-up to my own article "Can Poetry Matter -- 15 Years After", itself a response to the seminal essay by Dana Gioia that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, now 19 years ago.

Robert Graves: The Poets and the Gleemen

Gleemen's Dance, 9th Century. From Cleopatra, Cotton Ms. (British Museum)

Picking up Graves' The White Goddess, I came across this intriguing passage on poetry in midiaeval Wales.  If you substitute "print poets" for "court poets" and "spoken word artists" for "gleemen", you might find a not-so-far-off description of the state of poetry today!  Perhaps I'll call spoken word artists "gleemen" from now on...and bring gold torques, honey cakes and beefbones (especially beefbones) to the next poetry slam.  The parallels are fascinating...

In a sixth-century Welsh poem, the Gogodin, it is remarked that “the poets of the world assess the men of valour”; and the combatants—whom they often parted by a sudden intervention—would afterwards accept their version of the fight, if worth commemorating in a poem, with reverence as well as pleasure. The gleeman, on the other hand, was a joculator, or entertainer, not a priest: a mere client of the military oligarchs and without the poet’s arduous professional training. He would often make a variety turn of his performance, with mime and tumbling.

If the gleeman’s flattery of his patrons were handsome enough and his song sweetly enough attuned to their mead-sodden minds, they would load him with gold torques and honey cakes; if not, they would pelt him with beef bones.

… it is a paradox that in midiaeval Wales the admired court poet had become a client of the prince to whom he addressed formal begging odes and forgotten the Theme almost entirely; while the despised and unendowed minstral who seemed to be a mere gleeman showed the greater poetic integrity, even though his verse was not so highly polished.

NB:  ... by "the Theme", Graves means “the single poetic theme of Life and Death… the question of what survives of the beloved.” Here he quotes from the Welsh poet Alun Lewis...

Thanks to Peter Pereira, an excellent article written by David Biespiel. Check it out:


Now consider the balkanized world of American poetry. Like Americans everywhere, America's poets have turned insular and clustered in communities of aesthetic sameness, communicating only among those with similar literary heroes, beliefs, values, and poetics. Enter any regional poetry scene in any American metropolis or college town, and you will find the same cliquey village mentality with the same stylistic breakdowns. Over here you have the post-avant prose poets, over there the kitchen-sink confessionalists, and across the road are the shiny formalists--and no one ever breaks bread together. As with politics, where you have "I'm voting for That One" liberals and "Time for a Tea Party" conservatives, poetry has evolved into a self-selected enclave, and also--exactly like other sectors of American life--it has stratified into enclaves within enclaves that are hyper-specific and self-referential.

Is the Canadian poetry world as balkanized?  Precisely because there aren't as many of us here, the blurring of distinctions between us is more apparent than in the US, where, owing to sheer numbers, the illusion of self-referential, polarized camps is more easily maintained.

Revenge of the Nerds

The Berryman video brings to mind a highly engaging article by Amy Shearn in the March/April issue of Poets and Writers, entitled Revenge of the Nerds -- where are the badly behaved writers? Why, she asks, don't writers get to be barely functional, substance-abusing eccentrics anymore? She recounts that during her years in University of Minnesota's MFA program,

... my classmates were more egghead than cokehead. At our parties we played dominoes, complained about the school's administrations, and went home early so we could get up the next day and write.

She goes on to observe that "as a whole, today's eminent writers are not known for Keats-style stunts like boozy fistfighting. One is hard pressed to imagine John Updike or Jhumpa Lahiri or even Jonathan Franzen leaping Byronically into the Gowanus Canal for a swim ..."

Why are writers no longer glamourous, edgy, Big Personalities anymore? Some factors Shearn cites are the greater difficulty making a living as a writer; the fact that many have to teach to make a living ("you can't go around getting drunk if you're trying to get tenure" writes one; and another, "I basically work four jobs.... There's little time for me to indulge in anything rehabworthy"); that in today's professionalized literary climate, the heavy promotional demands require qualities of sobriety, control, and cheerful persistence more than ever before. Meanwhile, the public demand to know writers is diminishing -- vanished, even. As novelist and essayist Charles Baxter puts it,

It has to do with glamour, a despised category. But glamour is a quality of the aura surrounding someone, a sort of magical charisma: It reflects our wish to be that person -- Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, back then -- and our wish to tear that person to pieces, as the Furies ripped Orpheus to pieces. When an artist is no longer envied, the aura fades, as does the glamour. Rock stars still have the aura; they are gods, and gods drink and get drugged up and go wild and have sex with everybody and die young. Writers are no longer gods, and everybody knows that.

Pretty sobering stuff. Even if some writers are living lives of edgy, irresponsible chaos, Shearn writes, who is there to notice it?

If a novelist goes wading in the fountain at the Plaza and no one recognizes him, does it count as an irreverent stunt?

Lots of wading into public waters in this article. But to put it another way Shearn doesn't: To that generation of writers (especially poets) of the 50s and 60's, the ideal of the inspired genius, formed during the Romantic period, was still pretty prominent.The alienation that arises in an increasingly anonymous, stratified and indifferent society was rendered all the more painful by the prominence of that ideal... and many of those writers -- so many it became downright stereotypical -- responded in ways that unwittingly matched social expectations, at least for the Romantic, inspired geniuses they were or aspired to be. Nowadays, it seems, substance abuse, marital instability, moodiness and outrageous public behaviour have themselves become tiresome Romantic cliches. And I can't help but concur with Shearn's concluding words: "Whether this is a blessing or a curse I suppose time will tell, but one thing is certain: The next generation of literary biographers (if there is one) will have some pretty dry material waiting for them."

ON THE LEFT-WINGISHNESS OF POETS

Robert Archambeau, one of my favourite poet bloggers, writes an engaging post about the left-wingishness of poets. (I, of course, share that left-wingishness, as does he.) In an essay in this November's Poetry, he delves further into the issue. He asks why contemporary poets, in their "totalizing visions", are "overwhelmingly left-leaning". For me the reason is dead simple: poets, and artists in general, are not into making money. Nor are we into the power and status symbols that go with. We're not businessmen. Nor are we (save for rare exceptions) soldiers, nor policemen. It's no accident that most of us are teachers. Our ideal lifestyle is one of comparatively modest means that avails us the time and resources to create art, raise children if we have them, and enjoy the simple pleasures of life. By a kind of projection, our ideal society would be one where such means are available to all. Hence a kind of soft socialism -- social security and health benefits for everyone, a healthy environment, a solid educational system (well, it does employ most of us, among other things), funding for the arts (it's also the hand that feeds us), freedom from war and exploitation -- as a direct corollary. All sounds rather cushy, doesn't it? But we're also free thinkers -- so we're into freedom of expression, critical thinking, a [usually] vaguely defined libertarianism. It seems to me also that the artist's focus on feelings and on the drama of human suffering lends itself to the compassionate values of the left. Anyway, Archambeau's self-admittedly rambling essay sheds some light -- mostly through quotes, interesting citations -- onto this rather self-evident state of affairs.

LTAC

Last night, Phyllis Aronoff, president of the Literary Translator's Association of Canada, invited members to her place for a potluck supper and to read selections of their work by candlelight. A friend of mine suggested that being in a roomful of literary translators would be like being in a roomful of well-groomed cats. There was some truth to that speculation; of the fifteen or so people who were there, most were, I'd say, professional translators for whom literary work can only serve as icing on their cakes. All were well-read, cultured, and pleasant, and there were some delightful creatives among them to delighten the mix. The seven people who shared their work read very poetic prose, if not poetry. Beautiful stuff! Naturally, I read some of my translations of Santos, and I'm gratified to say they were well received. It seems this is an annual affair. I look forward to next year's.

Hate to say it, but the LTAC site gets my vote as possibly the ugliest on the web. I know literary translators frequently complain about being invisible; this kind of visual presentation pretty well ensures that! Time for an upgrade, obviously... in the meantime, the art of literary translation remains (to use a Buddhist metaphor) a hidden wish-fulfilling jewel that could bring peoples together and kindle refreshing trends if brought into the light. Earlier remarks on cultural diplomacy (see label below) are a propos.

Apr. 22: Just got a note from Howard Scott, the webmaster of the site, acknowledging that the site is very dated, but that redoing it is always being put off due to lack of time...

CCA SYMPOSIUM: A REPORT

Last weekend, as I said before, I attended the Canadian Conference of the Arts 2007 Symposium on The Role of the Arts and Culture in Canadian Public Diplomacy. This is a draft of a report I’ve written for the League of Canadian Poets. It was not requested of me; but since they paid my way in, I figured certain people there might benefit from more than a thirty-second synopsis on a conference call. And maybe you, as well. (If not, then scroll way down.)

As a working artist, of course, it was hard to get my mind around the notion of “public” or even its subset, “cultural” diplomacy. Public diplomacy can be defined as cultural and academic exchanges between nations and more broadly, the promotion of cultural and national values so as to create a favourable image of one's own country abroad. For me, this seemed an almost theoretical issue, the concern chiefly of politicians, academics and arrangers of international events. My own preoccupation as an artist is surviving while putting out the best art I can, and publishing or performing it in the best (or at least decent) places; for the rest, come what may.

Part of the haziness of the topic, of course, lies in the terms in question. Culture can be defined in at least a hundred ways, from the fine arts to fast foods. The working definition for this conference seemed to be products and performances of the various disciplines conventionally understood as “the arts”, with the values and experiences of the culture as a kind of matrix or background.

“Diplomacy”, also, is a particularly sticky word: it suggests not only reasoned negotiation, but doing some sort of PR for your country. What if as an artist you have serious issues to contend with, and choose to show your society as you see it, warts and all? Isn’t social criticism one of the fundamental purposes of art? If you as an artist engage in such exposés, does that rule you out as a cultural “representative” of your country? These questions I had in mind as I went to the conference.

Although, as I said before, I imagined the conference would consist of so much complaining about our present arts-unfriendly government, which was conspicuously absent from the proceedings, the moderators tried to set a higher tone by presenting the day as one of “gentle reflection” on the role of the arts in international affairs, and stressing that we would try to “s’elever de la politique malgré tout” – to rise above politics, despite everything.

This, perhaps, was easy to do, considering that we were sitting in a plush auditorium among comfortable, distinguished company.

Here, in any case, are some of salient points made by various speakers. (I must stress that I did find this an educational experience: otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this.)

A concern frequently expressed, not only by the Canadians on the panels but even a Japanese diplomat, is that despite a few major coups on the international stage in the last number of years, the general perception of Canada around the world is still that of a country lacking in cultural sophistication. The popular image is that we have plenty of natural beauty and resources, produce lots of hockey players, but continue to club our seals. Canada’s cultural diversity and urban character are relatively unrepresented and unknown. A lot of this is due to a lack of promotion of Canadian culture abroad. Unfavourable comparisons were made to other middle powers – France, Germany, and Britain – that spend a lot more per capita on international communications, cultural centres in foreign lands, representation at festivals, etc. than Canada.

A number of commentators stressed, of course, that cultural representation abroad is a kind of “soft power”, a sharing of our values, dreams and experiences that peels away prejudices and heals divisions between nations and peoples. Even if our art challenges common assumptions or is sharply critical of our society, that goes to show that Canada champions one of its core values, freedom of expression. The dissemination of our culture abroad redounds to our benefit not only in terms of international respect, but cultural tourism. (We need only think of all the Japanese tourists flocking to see the site of Anne of Green Gables. I hope someday I can come up with a better example. As a side note – this is my note, not one made during the conference – even the film Borat, a film of low jokes about Kazakhstan, has apparently resulted in a multi-fold increase in tourism to that country.)

One commentator – a marketing manager for the Stratford Festival whose name I failed to note -- suggested that ideally, if we were truly committed to enhancing our international “brand image”, we would create an independent entity along the lines of the Canada Council, but entirely devoted to the promotion of Canadian culture abroad. This would include enhanced budgets for touring, in order to “push our arts” around the world. To have the kind of muscle needed to do the job properly, he figured 150 million dollars per year would be suitable. As he put it, “Do it big or stay in bed.” If such an agency could be supported by an endowment, to make it impervious to the vagaries of changing government policy, so much the better. At the present time, international cultural promotion is a “poor stepchild of (the Ministries of) Foreign Affairs and Heritage”: this arms-length relationship creates a credibility gap. It also feeds an inferiority complex among artists: aren’t we worth being validated outside our country? Wouldn’t it be great to be told a little more often that we are outstanding, and to be so treated? Of course, such a commitment would imply greatly increased financial support for culture inside the country as well.

A commentator from Quebec pointed out that la belle province has fared better, perhaps, through its cultural promotions than other provinces. The international success of Cirque du Soleil has put forth a strong image of imagination, expertise, style and excellent management all at once; so, too, the films of Denys Arcand. A rather minimal provincial arts promotion budget –some 8 million dollars annually, all told – goes a long way, especially considering how little artists actually demand for their work. Left begging, however, was the question of whether artists should be content to receive so little.

Other notable contributions were made by the likes of former Foreign Affairs (and recently, Defence) Minister Bill Graham and Communications Minister Marcel Masse.

Bill Graham reasserted his statement, made while he was Foreign Affairs minister, that culture, following peace and security and economic development, was the “third pillar” of foreign diplomacy. He openly admitted that his own government did not do enough for the arts, although of course, the present government is “far worse” in ignoring that third pillar entirely. He praised the former Gov. General Adrienne Clarkson’s insistence that her foreign visits be accompanied by a cultural entourage, even though it was so roundly deprecated in the press for its “extravagance”, arguing that it impressed upon some important leaders that Canada, culturally speaking, is indeed a major player on the world stage.

Marcel Masse was actually refreshing in how he spoke about Canadian culture in terms that have been quite absent from discussions over at least the last two decades: how we Canadians are both awash in American culture and yet need to distinguish ourselves from it, how we need to express and export our distinct sensibility, etc. While Americans have a particular genius for marrying culture and the private sector, Canada clearly has to go another way. At the same time, he stressed, it is disturbing how rarely cultural questions are debated in parliament: cultural questions are simply not on the minds of our political decision makers.

Many other things were said, some of the most stimulating and insightful by artists on the panels and question period. I shall never forget, for instance, famed dancer/choreographer Judith Marcuse’s dance/pantomime expressing isolation and communication, or her inspired presentation afterwards. What I came away with from the conference was a heightened sense of the international ramifications of my own work, however small a poetry audience might be – how it can bring people together beyond the national sphere, and put a human face on the nation. Art is an important way to share who we are, in all our passions and particularity. As Judith Marcuse put it, a culture that doesn’t share its stories “gets sick.” And as Guilloaume Sirois in one of the background reports for this conference writes, “Whether they like it or not, artists and culture professionals carry the national flag abroad.” At the same time, modern medias present new opportunities to do some informal “cultural diplomacy” of one’s own: I need only think of various online reviews I’ve published in, YouTube, or for that matter, this blog.

HOW THE END OF THE COLD WAR LEAD TO CUTBACKS NOT ONLY IN MISSILES, BUT THE ARTS

Tomorrow I'll be attending the Symposium on the Role of Arts and Culture in Canadian Public Diplomacy, held here in Montreal. The League of Poets asked me to represent them there, because, well, I am the Quebec rep on its National Council and live in Montreal. I actually imagined this affair might be drab as dishwater -- and it may well be -- but a research paper sent to me as preparatory reading, by Rachael Maxwell with the rather straightforward title, The Place of Arts and Culture in Canadian Foreign Policy, surprised me by being quite engrossing, and made me privy to the astounding bit of information that I'm going to share with you now.

In an overview of the history of public diplomacy, Maxwell says that the Cold War set the stage for "what was arguably the largest and most ambitious public diplomacy program ever put forth". (Public diplomacy can be defined as cultural and academic exchanges between nations and more broadly, the promotion of cultural and national values so as to create a favourable image of one's own country abroad.) I quote from her paper:

It was, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda program that aimed to encourage anti-Communist psychology and create allies for the cause. With the help of the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the goals were largely pursued through the dissemination of "anti-Communist culture" directed at foreign publics, and thus was a large-scale exercise in cultural diplomacy. The U.S. government sunk large amounts of funds into the CIA's campaign to "culturally" fight communism, culminating in the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) that was set up by 1950 and three years later in the creation of the United States Information Agency (USIA) that was devoted entirely to public diplomacy. The idea of the Congress and the USIA was to display art, primarily visual art, literature and music, that was directly opposed to Soviet dictates about what art should be. Art was to represent the freedom of American life, that being, the freedom of the individual as opposed to the collective ideology of Communism.

Basically, the CCF sponsored art that was banned in the Soviet Union. As an example, they put on the International Conference of Twentieth Century Music in 1954, which concentrated heavily on atonal music, for the express reason that atonal music was not allowed in the U.S.S.R. In 1959 the Congress for Cultural Freedom sponsored the Masterpieces Festival of modern art, which was to display great works that could not have been created under totalitarian regimes such as Nazism or Communism. The primary art of this exhibition and a number of other widely publicized art extravaganzas during the fifties was Abstract Expressionism. According the the CIA and American government, the art of Abstract Expressionism represented the antithesis to Communism. At the same time, the USIA facilitated numerous cultural and educational exchanges and was responsible for the allotment of Fulbright Scholarships and international radio broadcasts of the Voice of America (VOA).

American Ambassador Cynthia P. Schneider notes that this was a turning point for the instrumentality of cultural diplomacy; in fact, it was the "heyday" of cultural diplomacy. America went against the Soviet Union clad with, "jazz, abstract expressionism and modern literature." Musicians like Louis Armstrong were sent on government-funded tours throughout the Soviet Union and to countries such as Iran, Iraq, Nigeria and Egypt. In fact, American cultural centres during this time prospered in Islamic capitals. Schneider surmises that cultural diplomacy worked so well during the Cold War because it seemingly opened space for critical voices to be heard, in fact, "it even allowed and fostered dissent". Since [artists], actors, musicians and writers in any culture act as the national conscience, reflecting them often critically, on society" they were the most fitting ambassadors to send abroad to promote freedom, as they embodied the ideal of democratic societies, that being, freedom of speech.

Other countries were also active in cultural diplomacy programs, notably the UK, France and Germany; still, nothing compared to the potency and presence of the American program... Moreover, just as the U.S. used culture to undermine the authority of the Communist Party, so did the Soviets with their cultural achievements of the time. For example, the Soviets organized a momentous exhibition in New York in 1959 to display their cultural achievements and often sent their National Ballet on extensive touring programs around the world.

Public diplomacy experienced somewhat of a 'death' at the end of the Cold War. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the United States shut down more than 80 of its cultural centers around the world, under the rather short-sighted belief that "cultural outreach had outlived its purpose." This happened in combination with an anti-arts movement in the American Congress, which further led to cuts in American cultural programming both nationally and internationally and to the eventual elimination of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1999. Such short sightedness failed to account for nationalist movements that would spur religious and ethnic conflict, notably in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, and in general, across much of the Islamic world and many regions of the African continent, such as Sierra Leone and Rwanda.

As goes Mr. Bush, so goes Baby Bush (otherwise known as Stephen Harper.) Despite our massive national surplus, Harper's government has slashed virtually every penny for promotion of Canadian arts abroad, and made it clear through his policies, communiques and express indifference that the arts couldn't be a lower priority at home. (Margaret Atwood has a number of caustic things to say about this...) Indeed, it is to discuss and raise awareness about these concerns that this symposium is being held. On the panels I see a couple of former federal gov't ministers, namely Bill Graham, former Foreign Affairs & Defence minister, and Marcel Masse, former Communications minister. Too bad, though, that no one from the present government is on any of the panels. Did they decline to send anyone at all? If so, I may be in for a day of futile griping and bickering...

Past the post

Robert just wrote a wonderful post on "The Poet as Specialist". Well worth reading.

My previous post, by the way, was my 500th since joining blogspot nearly three years ago.

This MUST have been said before ...

TV, the movies, rock and pop music -- we speak of these as popular culture. Does that make poetry unpopular culture?

Seth

It was amusing to read Seth's rant on the sociology of poetry, a post from a couple of years back that still holds true... although he nearly goes apoplectic about Ron Silliman.

Some reflections on political poems

If you write a political poem, there is a good chance that it will lose its topicality, or at least become somewhat dated, by the time it gets published (if indeed it does reach that fortunate end). I am thinking of a poem or three of mine which have , because contexts have shifted somewhat, gone past their political "due date" languishing for months in slush piles of various magazines. The slowness of reviews to consider, accept, and publish work acts itself as a sort of censor. This aside from the unwillingness of many reviews to venture into unsafe territory (call it middleclassness, apolitical bias, what you will.) If you need to rush a poem into print so that it have the impact of timeliness, you have to be either some kind of celebrity (at least in the poetry world), or lucky. The alternative is self publication -- blog or otherwise -- with its inherent limitations.

P.S. This post provoked some good discussion which has helped clarify my own views on this subject. Just click on "comments" below... Bravo, Rob, Andrew, Jill & Pearl!

Margaret Atwood at the Bleu

I just came back from Blue Metropolis (Metropolis Bleu) Festival, where I took in an interview of Margaret Atwood by Jian Ghomeshi, host of Q, a new daily arts show on CBC radio. It was a remarkably entertaining and insightful interview. Although I've heard tell of Atwood's caustic wit, it surprised me to discover just how quick-witted and downright funny she could be. (This woman really speaks her mind, and speaks it well - to have that liberty, she pointed out, it's a great advantage to have no boss or grants dependency to make you look over your shoulder.) After icebreaking trivialities that went on long enough that I started to wonder if they'd take over the interview, the discussion got suddenly serious when it veered towards Atwood's attitudes towards mortality, aging parents, and then, cultural politics. If I synopsise some of the things I found she put exceedingly well, I imagine they will sound banal -- i.e. how we are never really prepared for the shock of seeing our parents suddenly rendered helpless by aging, the role reversals that entails, & how the same goes for that final journey: how can we be prepared for what no one has come back to (convincingly) describe? So too with many other unknowns, including the subconscious we live with every day (and night). At the same time, she has always "loved to travel...", ha ha. For a taste of some of her political views, try out this entertaining and frightening article, published in the Globe and Mail three months ago, slamming the Harper governments' cutbacks to cultural promotion abroad, and to culture in general. Atwood still holds to those views, although they're criticised as harsh, feeling that -- although this government does its best to remain inscrutable -- its arts policies are quite knowing and deliberate. In this interview she likened the cutbacks to the NHL destroying its farm teams and thereby sabataging any future hopes of producing more Wayne Gretskys. She pointed out that if it hadn't been for the funding back in the 60s and 70s of little magazines and publishing houses like House of Anansi (which published her first books) and Coach House Press (with which Michael Ondaatje among others was closely associated), Canadian authors of international stature like herself probably wouldn't be where they are today. Probably the Harper government would wish that we fall back on a system of private foundations like we find south of the border, but we have none of America's advantages: no grand-scale corporate philanthropic tradition, which was, after all, begun by a class of robber-barons trying to clean up their tarnished public image. Wagering our cultural future is economically wrongheaded, she argued, considering that the Canadian arts and cultural industries bring in at least $40 billion a year, more than many major industries.

$40 billion a year -- it's hard to know how she (or her info. sources) arrived at that figure. Is it by defining the arts so generally as to include, say, sports, tourism and leisure? Then possibly a much larger figure could be generated -- but it would seem a specious argument, confounding much of that cultural-economic activity with, say, Canada Council fine arts funding and its spinoffs.

Even so, reflecting on the economic spin-offs of my own relatively modest cultural activities, it would be easy to see how one could arrive at a humongous figure, even if one limited the definition of culture to literature, film, music and the fine arts -- & if you included those spinoffs. Two weeks ago, I put on a musical event at a local cafe with three other musicians. We attracted, despite inclement weather, a crowd of about 50 people, who spent a total of about $900 on booze and food. Factor in the costs of transportation -- many took taxis, including the performers -- and we're at over a thousand dollars in spinoffs for the local economy just for that event. A poetry reading with 18 people benefited the cafe at least $200 (including a modest space rental of $40). There were photocopy bills for posters, & LCP handouts. Those 18 people probably spent about a hundred dollars to get there. Multiply that by all the events across the country, including advertising, hotel bills and airfares for festivals, + factor in expenditures on raw materials for cultural activities (photocopies, computers, art supplies, musical instruments & equipment, postage, etc.) + book & CD buying and I'm sure you're well into the billions. (The artists, as always, get a miniscule slice of that pie.)

Of course, regardless of dollar value, the arts -- as she pointed out -- are essential to being human, and cutbacks in that direction could be construed as an attempt to cut back our humanity. Anyway, all very thought-provoking and worthwhile.

Another article on the "Who Killed Poetry?" theme -- this one by DW Fenza. Poetry dies a thousand deaths -- or is it reborn through a thousand reincarnations? I ask this in the present tense, because it seems routine, a thing of every day. Anyway I make note of this contribution to the ongoing discussion, as this forensic work seems a specialty of mine.

On the isolation of poets -- and blogs as symptomatic of the problem.

A brilliant article by Adrienne Rich on the importance of poetry, especially in these dark times.

To your health!

Andrew Shields has some interesting points to make in response to my Rock Stone Plum Review essay on "Can Poetry Matter". As he says,

One very good reason for poets to want to get credentialed (MFA) and tenured (Professor of Creative Writing)—or even just working for a university in some way—is to get health insurance.

This is particularly true of American poets. Here we have public health insurance -- although a succession of "conservative" governments has hardly helped to conserve the quality of that care, and private care is starting to make serious inroads. Right now waiting for a doctor in a Canadian hospital is a cross between Waiting for Godot and Fear and Trembling Unto Death.

Neglectorinoitis (zat spelt rite?)

I have to thank C.Dale Young for pointing out this article in the Globe and Mail on the upcoming GG's & the glut of poetry books and prizes and the like. It includes this quote:

"I can't see any reason to publish because there's more people out there writing it than reading it. . . . We have so much information that we don't want and don't need in this world and writers have to take a measure of that, I think. If you don't have anything new to say, don't say it."

As I said in my reply to his post, after writing my lengthy essay in Rock Salt Plum review on the "Can Poetry Matter" question, I for one feel quite cured -- at last -- of the old neglectorinoitis that afflicts so many poets (including, of course, myself once upon a time.) Now it seems so much crock. Write for the joy of it -- of doing the best at what you do best. Take pleasure in sharing with those worthy few. Let the world catch up if it will.

Bipolar buddies

Jamison in the chapter on Artists in Manic Depressive Illness (1990) writes that of 36 American poets in the most recent Oxford Anthology of the time, more than a fifth exhibit well-documented histories of manic depressive illness severe enough to have warranted at least one hospitalization: namely, Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath. Of these five committed suicide.

Among the romantics, of course, we need only think of Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Clare.

In the 18 century, the so-called "Age of Reason", we have Christopher Smart, William Collins, William Cowper, Robert Fergusson, Thomas Chatterton, and William Blake, to name a few likely candidates.

Of course accounts are purely anecdotal about these fellas, plus of course their literary traces. These do provide quite strong indications, however...

Are poets more likely than others to have bipolar affective disorders, as they are called? Assuming a general population rate of 1 to 2 percent, well, it's a question that scarcely needs to be asked. And its almost a tautology to show, as Jamison does, that poets as a group are more likely live out (and die out of) these conditions than biographers or research scientists.

Linguistic affective flattening

Attributions once made to the gods or the muses (Gerard Manley Hopkin’s “sweet fire the sire of the muse,” Emerson’s “all poetry is first written in the heavens”) have been transformed into the 20th century’s rather more prosaic constructions of “primary process,” “prelogical thought”, and “bisociative thinking.”
-- Manic Depressive Illness, p. 337

This process of toning down -- a kind of linguistic affective flattening -- has become so pervasive as to be preemptive. It certainly doesn't make the world easier for poets, not to mention receptivity to poetry. There is an enrichment in the shift of point of view, in the addition of terms. We have more at our disposal. But we are losing direct and easy access to whole ranges of emotion. More and more of our verbiage has become simply disposable, like newspapers: to be scanned on the way to the garbage can.