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.

Reading Books Discourages Reading

For the last six months I've been reading The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. I began it right around the time I graduated last year under the assumption that I would need to try extra hard to read once I was no longer a student.

I read the first 100 pages of the book quickly. They were interesting and entertaining and I was surprised at how funny James could be. However, since that time I have slowed down considerably. As of today I'm just over halfway through the book, which unfortunately is 300 pages in. I'm to the point where I've invested enough time to not want to quit, but I've also pretty much lost all interest in continuing.

The result of this situation is that I rarely read. And when I say that, I don't simply mean that I rarely read The Portrait, I mean I rarely read anything at all (other than massive amounts of news). Despite having two degrees in English, my literary consumption has dwindled to almost nothing. Since I began teaching at Salt Lake Community College this month I usually have an hour or so between classes, so sometimes I read then. That means that on a good week I'll read for maybe three hours.

I think that this is one of the great problems with literature and one of the reasons many people today never read at all. The "good" books that people are told they should read just seem insufferably boring. Though The Portrait is a classic and a relatively entertaining book, it drags on for over 600 pages without ever doing much. It describes settings, attitudes, and lifestyles that modern readers not only can't relate to but that they can't even visualize or comprehend. It's so utterly foreign in its sensibilities that it hardly even makes sense and whatever "meaning" an average reader might glean from its pages becomes lost.

Consequently, reading classic literature is a discouraging activity. Every time I think about reading I think about what a chore it is and how it brings me no pleasure. And eventually, I just watch videos on Hulu instead. Of course, I do enjoy reading (even some classic books), but having to slog through The Portrait has forced that interest into dormancy.

A similar situation happened to me last summer. I had just finished my master's thesis and decided I need to read something. I picked up Willa Cather's The Professor's House and almost the exact same thing happened: I started off strong, lost interest, didn't want to give up, and thus barely read anything at all for a couple of months while I tried to finish the book. Sure I could have picked up a second book to read simultaneously, but when the first book had already got me so down on reading I couldn't find the motivation to do that.

I can only assume that this is the sort of thing that happens to the masses of people that don't ever read literature. They try to read something (or are forced to do it in high school), find that they hate the experience, and never try it again. The problem, then, isn't TV or "the media" or whatever else is the fashionable thing to accuse of corrupting society. The problem are the books themselves. Luckily in my case I read Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick in between Cather and James, which book reminded me that there is in fact some literature that is both entertaining and edifying.

This post is, of course, diagnostic and not prognostic or proscriptive. I have no solution, (other than to encourage people to stop forcing others to read things like Shakespeare that will turn them off to reading, which is hardly a solution). However, I think that those who are interested in literature need to acknowledge the fact that reading can be a tremendous pleasure for some, but a tremendous pain for a lot of others. Simply saying otherwise isn't going to change that fact.

You're Not Hard Core Unless You Live Hard Core

I’ve seen every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  If that isn’t very impressive, I saw all of them many years before the advent of DVD.  That means that I watched nearly all of them when they first aired on network TV, and all the rest I had to catch during the rerun season.  (I saw every episode before the series was playing in syndication for six hours a day on Spike, G4, etc.)

Still, these days it doesn’t sound like much of an accomplishment to have watched every episode of a show.  Because of DVD and the internet, even casual fans of a show can see it all.  If a 10 year old kid in the early 90s was hard-core by faithfully tuning in every week, the digital age has completely changed what it means to be hard-core.

This phenomenon is even more apparent as Laura and I have been working our way through Battlestar Galactica.  (Yes, I like Sci-fi and I guess that makes me a nerd.  I compensate by trying extra hard to be cool and by subsequently developing a complex.)  At this point, it’s basically a given that a fan will have seen every episode.  Real fans, I’m discovering by watching the BSG special features, go online and participate in online communities.  They go to conventions and have action figures.  Some of them even start marriages based on their love of the TV show. 

While science fiction TV probably has an unusually devoted fan base, the bar seems to have risen for what it means to be a fan of anything.  Other TV shows like The Office or American Idol have their own cadre of devoted fans, as do performers like Miley Cyrus or the Jonas Brothers.  In each case being a fan of these phenomena doesn’t mean simply putting up a poster or talking about the characters with your friends.  Instead, it means reading about them online, knowing back-stories (that were never a part of the show/public persona/etc), and finally immersing yourself in the culture of the show or performer.  Basically, fans today are more hard-core than ever before because they’re living within the culture of their obsession. 

The result of all this hyper-fandom is that people know a lot about the things they love and, more importantly, build their communities around those things.  One hundred years ago for example, if you loved the theater, you might go every once in a while but you’d still have to go home to friends, family, and neighbors who wouldn’t necessarily share your particular interests.  Today on the other hand you can go to a cultural event and then return to people who are connected to you because of that event.  In other words your friends, family, and neighbors are determined more by your interests today than ever before.  Battlestar Galactica or American Idol aren’t just shows, they're lifestyles.

Ultimately, the communities created by fans are places where people think long and hard about what culture means to them.  I wrote before about how TV and movies might be more important than reading, but I think that the real issue here is simply that the conveyances of culture are currently visual and digital, as opposed to literary or theatrical.  With that shift our society may have lost some things (a literacy in the art forms of the past, for example), but I also believe that we’ve gained a great deal as well.  I may have a harder time being a hard-core fan (it really requires so much more work), but I think it’s good that someone is picking apart the meaning of just about everything.   

Reading, Books, and Things That Are Way Better

There’s nothing inherently good about reading.  Especially literature.

 

A few days ago some of us graduate instructors were talking about what we were going to do after we finished school this summer.  I mentioned that didn’t think I wanted to become an English professor because books just aren't any more important than other kinds of media.  For example, reading “The Wasteland” is fine, but in the end there doesn’t seem to be any reason why that's better than watching Kill Bill.  In fact, if we see the point of reading literature as making us more critical thinkers, more understanding of the human condition, more active participants in our culture, etc., “reading” other media (like film) actually seems better than reading books. 

 

Obviously reading literature is a good thing.  It can be both fun and enlightening; however, I also haven’t seen any reason why it should be privileged over other activities.  When pressed to give good reasons why literature is better than TV, for example, I’ve heard people say that reading engages the mind more, that TV rots the brain, that TV is passive and books active, etc.  Obviously certain kinds of media are different from one another, but the reasons for elevating literature generally seem both vague and unsubstantiated.  Why is one more active than another?  Are the ways we approach different media inherently embedded in that media?  Might some people approach media differently than others?  In the end I’d take something by Alfred Hitchcock over something by Herman Melville any day.  Frankly, I’ll also get more intellectual stimulation (as well as all those other things that supposedly result from reading literature) from watching The Office than I ever will from reading “Beowulf.” 

 

All this isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy reading.  I do.  Probably quite a bit more so than a lot of people (after all, I did get a master’s degree in English).  My point however, is that there’s no reason to fixate solely on literature.  Some people like it and others don’t and it appears that the value of literature boils down to personal taste.  Whatever we’re trying to get out of reading can also be accomplished through other means, and those means ought to be given the same esteem.  On the other hand, if we claim that literature is the only way to achieve certain ends (like critical thinking, or better citizenship, or greater empathy, or whatever), then those people who end up disliking books may also end up disliking those ends as well. 

 

For example, I once read an essay about teaching poetry to high school students.  The author of the essay wrote that she told her students to read a classic poem and if they didn’t understand it to read it again.  If they still didn’t get it, they had to read it over and over until they did.  This approach to teaching paints a romantic and mystical image, but ultimately just alienates people.  It implies that there is something to get, and that that something will eventually reveal itself to the worthy disciple.  Yet, imagine if this was the way English speakers were taught Russian or Chinese.  The teacher would give them some text in the language and tell them to stare at it.  If they didn’t get it just keep staring until they did.  Obviously that would be ineffective and would probably lead the students to lose interest in the learning process altogether.

 

As a reader of literature and other media, I hope that we begin to see literature as simply one of many valid forms of discourse.  It is good, but so are a lot of things that also need to be taught, read, and discussed.  Hopefully in the future things like TV, movies, fashion, food, etc. will get just as much attention as traditional books.  In the meantime, I just can’t see how insisting that literature is great will ever prove that it is.