Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Today's Poetry: Flipping the Figurative Bird?

Today, I had this short piece in the Daily Herald. The purpose of the piece was essentially to argue to people who don't read poetry that the genre has merit, and can be rewarding. However, because I think that some people who might read this blog have more experience with poetry, and might be more literary-minded than the general newspaper audience, I'd now like to take a minute to be completely honest about the dying literary art.

In short, much of today's poetry flips a the figurative bird at its audience.

By saying that I mean to point out that the poetry being written today is often impossibly hard to comprehend. Poets, in an effort be "true" to their message, forget that someone is supposed to read their work. They cram poems full of semantics and syntax that are painfully opaque, and as a result effectively tell readers to f--- off.

And readers typically oblige. If there's anything in America that's read as infrequently as scholarship, it has to be poetry. Unlike scholarship, however, can really be fantastic, so it's a shame more people don't read it.

Here's how I see the problem: the people who write poetry are often either academics, closely allied with academics, or very highly educated. The vast amount of knowledge they've acquired makes their poetry dense. That makes it rewarding for people familiar with the canon of western literature, but impossible to read for everyone else.

For example, an SLC-based poetry once came to a class I was taking and described herself as a "maximalist poet." I think that was to contrast her work with minimalists like William Carlos Williams, but it was also to point out that she tries to pack as much into her work as she possibly can.

Fair enough, but it literally took me 20 minutes to decipher a few this woman's lines. The poetry might as well have been either A) random assortments of words, or B) a foreign language. (This is not an over exaggeration.) And I was a MA candidate in English, willing to look for meaning even under those circumstances. Imagine how a more typical reader, without a deep background in poetry and less desire to understand it, would feel. It'd be like trying to glean complex meaning from cracks in the pavement. In other words, contemporary poetry often doesn't make sense to me, and I can only assume it makes even less sense to readers unfamiliar with it.

I genuinely think that many poets are out of touch with this reality. I love poetry, but I don't have the energy to look up 50% of the works in a 14 line poem. I don't have the time to spend an hour figuring out what a sonnet says (not what it means, but merely what it's superficially about). I suspect that poets either have forgotten how much (or little) knowledge their readers possess, or simply don't care. In other words, they mistakenly believe that their poetry isn't impossible to decipher, or they think that readers who are unwilling to spend a lot of time investigating poems are hamstringing their own intellectual development. And maybe they are, but that doesn't leave a lot of room for enticing new readers or drawing people into the art form.

This isn't to say that poets should write simple, easy to read poems, or that complex work isn't pleasurable. Quite the opposite, in fact. And hopefully there will always be people willing to decipher difficult works and rejoice over arcane syntactic tricks. But a person can't really be a "writer" —of poetry, scholarship, or anything else—without acknowledging a reader. There are also poets who appeal more broadly, like Billy Collins, but they are too often ostracized in the academic establishment, or altogether ignored. (My impression is that Collins is viewed by English professors they way Thomas Kinkade is viewed by real artists. That's also a shame, because not only is Collins good and fun to read, but his work can actually touch on profound topics.)

This situation is not helping poetry. Few people read it now, and poets aren't only doing nothing to attract new readers, they're actually alienating people. The poetry sections in most books stores is already tiny, so how long will it be before publishers finally decide to give up? Unless poetry is to be relegated to a form of writing that is personally and professionally fulfilling for a few academics, but meaningless or extinct in larger culture, something has to change.

If it doesn't, we might watch as humanity's first art form is snuffed out by those charged with preserving it.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Jim,

    Me again. This is such a complex issue that I couldn't help adding my thoughts.

    Frist--You may have a point that contemperary poetry is alienating. But so what? So what if poetry flips the bird at its readers? The "plain -reader-be-damned" attitude served the modernists well enough, writers that not only will be studied for centuries, but whose work effects me, and many others, on a very emotional level, even on my first, uneducated reading of them. James Joyce said that he wanted to provide literary scholars with enough work for a hundred years. Sounds snooty, bird-flipping, and misguided. The poetry of today, you claim, is equally opaque. Maybe. If yes, I still don't know why that's bad. We still read Joyce, and the other modernists. And not just academics. All you have to do is give his stuff the time of day, and you will weep. You don't have to have a PhD, or any degree, to love "The Dead" for instance.

    Second--Since when was difficulty, opacity, complexity, hardness, (whatever you want to call it) a contemporary thing? Many, if not most, poems of centuries past were equally difficult. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Whitman, Dickinson...the list goes on and on. We seem to value difficult poets most.

    Third--But, in a way, I know exactly what you mean. I have a subscription to Poetry Magazine. I only read the prose in it (reviews, commentary, letters to the editor) because the poetry sucks. It seems to be the kind of poetry you describe: non-linear, fragmented, experimental, impersonal, over-personal, elusive, allusive...just plain lame. But now I'm contradicting myself--all those adjective describe my favorite writers, the ones I just listed above. So what is the difference? Why is the poetry in Poetry lame, and the poetry in the Norton Anthology isn't? I can't answer that question. Anyone?

    Another thing that makes this issue so complex is that the kind of poetry you and I dislike is only a fraction of the poetry being written today. There is SOOOO much good stuff out there, stuff that the public could get into if only they gave it a chance. You mentioned some in your most recent post, but the list goes on (Seamus Heaney, Richard Wilbur, Paul Muldoon, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Philip Levine, Derek Walcot, and dozens of others. Really.) Which is just to say that poetry is just like movies of novels or anything else--you gotta find someone you trust to get you the good stuff. Cause the good stuff is definitely out there.

    Also, if contemporary poetry is alienating readers, surely it can't be intentional. Poets, just like all artists, are dying to get their work read by more people. No one wants a small audience. So I just don't believe anyone is intentionally flipping the bird. It doesn't make sense.

    Also, so what if poetry has a small audience? Poetry will never die. Poets should just count their blessings that their art form hasn't been diluted or destroyed by mass consumer/corporate consumption. Just think of TV.

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  2. You are so right about it being complex. I think that probably every poet in the next post falls into the catagory of too difficult for average readers, and yet I still really enjoy them (as is the case with several of the people you mentioned).

    Also, I hadn't heard that thing about Joyce and scholarship. I laughed when I read that.

    But I think there are a couple of things that are problematic about the poetry situation. First, there's nothing wrong with being a small, difficult, niche genre. You and I can still read and enjoy it. But at the same time, it makes me sad that so many people are missing out on it. I actually think the world would be a better place if more people read poetry, but that's not going to happen if more "gateway" poets don't start getting recognition.

    Second, though I think it's unlikely that poetry would ever completely die, I do think that it can continue to be displaced by new artforms. I think that film, TV, new media has just as much artistic potential as literature, painting, etc. Plus, both these old and new art forms are largely the products of technological developments (the advent of language, the printing press, electricity, etc.), and it seems that eventually artforms that use new technology do eventually replace old ones.

    You're right, for example, that, historically, poetry by Shakespeare and Chaucer wasn't easy for people, but during those periods oral and written tradition had a place in society that has changed today. So, in many ways, I'd argue that poetry really began dying when printing became widespread, because it was originally oral (and more widespread/culturally prominent when it was).

    My point here is that, as a result of many factors, the poetry world continues to shrink. Presumably it'll bottom out eventually, but wouldn't it be great if it wasn't shrinking at all?

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