"Poetry Month" and a little bragging

Yesterday I learned that if you google the words "poetry month" this Rhombus article is in the top 10 hits. What makes that amazing is that I wrote that article!

Now, granted, not a lot of people google "poetry month," but the search returned about 4.3 million hits when I tried it. That means of those millions of hits, my article is deemed by google to be one of the most relevant. Huzzah!

I discovered the high ranking of this article, btw, when I was curious why the article has consistently been in the top 10 articles on Rhombus lately. Other articles I've written, such as this one on the Neon Trees, will show up in the top google results, but only with more specific queries (googling "neon trees provo" will get you to that one). "Poetry month" on the other hand is something that's pretty general and which people who have never heard of Rhombus, Provo, etc. might look up. And apparently they are because the article continues to get traffic.

Obviously this could change at any moment, but I was both thrilled and astonished by this news. It was a great reminder that the internet is a crazy place where something can blow up or go viral at any minute.

Poetry Recommendations

Because my last post sharply criticized contemporary poetry, I thought it might be good to mention a few fantastic poets who are worth reading. These poets are amazing and enlightening, though some of them do fall into the "overly-difficult-for-lay-audiences" category. Still, with my education, I'm not really a "lay audience" member when it comes to literature, and even people who don't read a lot of poetry can still get a lot out of many of these poets. Also, the way I discover new music, movies, books, etc. is through recommendations, so I figured I could hardly advocate the reading of poetry without offering some suggestions.

Living Poets:
Stephen Dunn (One of my personal favorites. He has also written a book on creative writing called Walking Light, which is fantastic)

Robert Hass (For some reason, I've heard him reading on NPR a bunch of times in the last year or two. He was the U.S. poet laureate for a while.)

Li Young Lee (The poet I mentioned in my Daily Herald piece. I love some of his stuff, and am indifferent about other works, but he's definitely worth reading)

Kim Johnson (I've taken many classes from Kim. She is an amazing person, and an master poet. And lest this recommendation merely seem like plugging an old associate, her two published books have been very well received.)

Mark Strand (I saw him read once in Salt Lake. I think Trent Hickman once said he liked the world-weariness of Strand's poetry. I think that sums it up well.)

Jay Hopler (Friend—and, as I just discovered on wikipedia, husband!—of Kim Johnson's who read at BYU. There's a whole bunch of BYU students and recent alumni who are fans of Hopler. Part of that is probably just because he came to the school while we were there and was a really cool guy, but it also has to do with the fact that his work is among the most vividly evocative of anyone that has come to BYU for a reading.)

(this list could go on and on, but these are a few people that came to mind in the short time I had to spend thinking about it)

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.