Refutation

Over here Allen Taylor takes me to task for writing against LangPo, performance-obsessed Spoken Word, and experiments for experiments' sakes. He rightly clocks me for taking an intellectual shortcut. Mea culpa, canis. The problem, however, with picking out examples is that I can be accused of cherry-picking. To that end, viddy the above link. It's the glory-hole of avant-garde "poetry" -- some of it is quite good as art/propago. Some of it is crap. Very little of it is poetry.

At any rate, I view this blog as one half of a debate. A debate that attempts to define poetry, resartus-style. I am, then, refuting the line of poetry that extends from Whitman/Dickinson down to Hejinian/Silliman today*. If the other side would like to show up, the comment box is open.

The side I'm defending has Poe and Tennyson and Plath. All have been shredded or relegated by the academy. The reputations of Poe and Tennyson still haven't recovered from the early 20th century. Plath is pooh-poohed as a sad little woman who wrote some good poems and a good book before she offed herself. I think the Academy does this because, if an eager young fan of poetry shows up at a college, the poet will be a fan of one of these three poets (if not all three [it took me until after my BA to discover Tennyson]).

The problem for the Academy with that is, if you're a lover of The Raven and Blackberrying and Annabel Lee and Daddy, you look at this and go "what the hell?" And if too many sincere poets (who will become alumni and critics and teachers and professors) ask "what the hell?" the Academics will get booted out on their asses.

So the Academics disparage real poetry and put in its place a false god -- experimental poetry.

The problem being, of course, that experimental poetry is so far from real poetry that, contrary to Mr. Taylor's assertion, poetry's tent really isn't big enough for both camps. My earliest solution was one of semantics: divide the world at the point of aurality. Work that exists independent of the page is poetry, work dependent upon the page is propago. Not too shabby for a first effort but the neologism/redefinition doesn't seem to be catching on.

I could propose, Mencius-like, that both schools quit the use of the word poetry until a proper poetry can be determined, but that doesn't make much economic sense (think, where would one shelve works? under Verse and Line-breaks? Goodness, who knows?) and anyway, producers of propago would have to agree with me and give up their grip on the word poetry and why on earth would they do that?

So here I sit. Writing both instructions for writing and distributing real poetry while at the same time both defining what real poetry is and what real poetry isn't. Because a recipe without ingredients is just a list.

M

*and there's no way that I'm saying there haven't been good poets who wrote real poetry out of this school -- but the school is so broken that it no longer educates -- it only indoctrinates.

Why I am a Skeptic

So someone with whom I generally disagree (and who is a big fan of 2d art and the avant garde) gave me an excellent explanation of why I heartily dislike all things trendy, flashy, and "experimental" in poetry. She says:

"Further, intellectuals have always been skeptical; that's what they do. Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Margaret Mead, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thorough, Walt Whitman, Charles Olsen [sic], Gary Snyder....name any intellectual who accomplished anything and see if he or she was not skeptical of previous work in his or her field."

Too right.
Post Modernism and the Avant Garde (good band name, btw) is the previous work in my field. Ergo, I am skeptical of it.

The work, of course, is finding out what the new work in my field will be.

Narrative long-form poetry anyone?

Continuing the thought

The whole blame thing just gets weird. Because "progressive" poets wrap themselves in the flags of egalitarianism and ars sola fide, my attacks can be labled crankery. It's tiresome, really -- the verse that I, and from what I can tell, most people prefer is dismissed out of hand as "the school of Quietude" or, in a quote directly from Silliman: "good for what it is." Their words are accepted as from on high. But if I say language======= poetry is not poetry at all but 2d art or that no experimental poet has really done anything that wasn't first famously done by Stein and cummings, or famous Spoken Word poets (like the ones in the several collections I own) would really benefit from editing, I'm expected to defend these statements with example upon example.

You know what? We live in the google age. If you aren't sure what I'm talking about, friggin google it. If you want examples, google them. Seriously. The avant garde poetry, langpo, and Spoken Word you find will almost invariably fit into the criticisms above. The defense of my criticism is the works themselves.

And anyway, instead of concentrating on blame, my concern is to illuminate what does and doesn't work in the production of poetry and to encourage the production of strong verse -- verse that is clear, communicative, and excellent.

I hope to get back to that soon. While we're waiting, google Gabriel Spera. Best poet I've seen in years.

supposing the answer

And I suppose I will be answered by someone quoting a libertarian strain of thought -- that if the poet is harming no one, then why care?

But, of course, the destruction of language and the destruction of literature are harmful. So I will continue to call bad poets and bad schools of poetry out on this.

I may not be able to destroy the ill-built house or dig up the field of weeds, but I will certainly let everyone know who is screwing up what.

Answering a friend

A good friend of mine asks:

you're in serious danger of becoming just another "i'm a badass cuz i'm 'unfashionably' oriented in my aesthetic tastes" old-skool-wannabe crank. . .who are you making all this bluster of arguments in the service of? is it really in the service of the poor, ign'ant, under-educated, artless, lost "masses" who need a revived and truly democratic art to enrich their lives, or is it in the service of yourself and some other more or less aligned artists who feel slighted at not getting enough attention/rewards/recognition for yer hard work? or maybe you say it's both?
but who does your line really, finally end up supporting? if your line were followed faithfully through by a majority in the poetry world today, who would ultimately benefit, and who would pay?

I answer:

First, you have to remember that my problem with avant garde/language/concrete poetry is not that it exists but that it calls itself poetry. I would feel the same if I were a glass blower and some guy smashed coke bottles and made them into mosaics and called it glass blowing. It might be good, hell, it might be great -- but it isn't glass blowing. To that end, I came up with a new use for the old word Propago to mean writing that is dependent upon visuality for its communication (like Comix).

The reason that this is a problem is because so many of those canon folks you mention ARE these credentialled AG/L/C people -- and they continually present what they're doing as the only sort of poetry worth doing and that communicative, aural poetry is worthless (see Silliman's term "school of quietude). So then the only poetry that gets taught in High Schools and Colleges is difficult and reader-unfriendly and so not only do high school and college students not get exposed to poetry but (much more importantly) neither do their teachers -- even their English teachers -- who went through school after the 1970s. If you doubt me, just look at what's happened to UF in the last year or so. So I have a problem with AC/L/C poetry because its practitioners choke off the poetry that should be feeding the public.

Second, I have no problem with Spoken Word. I have lots of problems with badly written Spoken Word. The reason that this is a problem is because Spoken Word is at its heart a form of sound entertainment MUCH more than poetry (which is sound worship/communication/communion). Not that Spoken Word can't be (or isn't often) poetry -- but you can take ANY piece of writing and turn it into an effective SW piece if you are a good enough reader.

Result?
Good and great readers get a pass on spewing unschooled and ignorant lines because it's fun to listen to them. I don't have a problem with this per se, but I do have a problem with worrying that SW is too ephemeral and I think that poets (and artists in general) should strive to make work that lasts.

My main concern is not that poetry doesn't exist in the country. Of course it does. Poetry is unkillable.

The problem is that the community of poetry has been killed -- that is, the communal nature of poetry. Poetry used to be in all major newspapers. People used to read it and buy books of poetry. They don't now. And if you look at the poetry of the 19th century vs the poetry of the 20th and 21st, it's easy to see why. The poetry of the 19th century spoke to the people -- the poetry of the 20th and 21st often speaks to the elite. Where poetry has been wildly successful (Plath, Collins, Spoken Word) it's been because the poetry spoke to everyone and not just academia.

The community of poetry has been killed by tenured academics and critics who wrap their ignorance in European loan words and tired French linguistic theories. It's been killed by teachers too lazy to do any work. It has been killed by people who are afraid to do the difficult thing -- which is to write with a level of craft that would make Dante proud and at the same time write in such a way that the common reader can understand and enjoy their work.

It's easy to write enjoyable, understandable poetry. It's easy to have esoteric and impressive skills. It takes hard work to do both. That's the crux of my problem with most poets since the mid-19th century. They have either prided themselves on being accessible (Whitman, Collins) or fantastically proficient (Pound, Hejinan) at the neglect of the other, equally important skill.

Of course I want my work to benefit myself.
But what I really want is to help create a world (or at least an America) that buys more than one book of poetry for every one hundred people in a year. And the reader unfriendly practices of the academic avant garde and the resonance unfriendly (or ephemeral) practices of "popular poetry" don't help in this regard.

And this is why I'm not content to just "live and let live."

If you saw a neighbor building a house, and he was obviously building it incorrectly by, say, not putting roofing sheets on his house, would you not at least suggest the right course of behavior to him? What if his shoddy construction would patently lead not to water damage, but to a fire? Shouldn't you let him know what he's doing wrong? And furthermore, what if you lived in a neighborhood so compact that his house fire would surely jump to yours? You would still feel like you should "live and let live"?

A man was sowing his fields. Instead of sowing wheat, he was sowing tares. When another farmer asked him why he was sowing tares instead of wheat, the man replied "the tares are more interesting, even if they feed no one." The farmer then asked "what if your tares infest my wheat fields, and the surrounding wheat fields, and no one has a crop?" The man then replied "tend to your own fields, I will tend mine."

Would you let him continue to sow weeds? And before you say "but this or that poetry is not a weed!" please show me how it has fed the people.

I don't think I'm a badass. I'd like to get talented poets convinced that wasting their talents trying to please the academy is pointless when there are a hundred million reading Americans who are much more in need of their words. I'd like to get charismatic poets to see that their charm and cleverness could be polished to brilliance with a little erudition.

I'd like to see these things happen, but I probably won't -- so I hope that the poets stuck in between will find each other (and me, obviously) and begin to work toward a common goal.

Modern Aesthetics as Sola Fide

This post requires background. For Christian thought in the current State, I recomment this post and especially (as the post is quite long) this link within the post. Teh Wik can help us define sola fide. If you need more info, contact this guy. Suffice it to say that the flippant version of sola fide is "I'm saved because I say I'm saved."

This was a fairly radical notion when it was invented by Martin Luther. Indeed, it became the cornerstone of Protestantism. The traditional thought on salvation is that though "faith is the beginning of human salvation," "faith without works is dead." The sola fide folks just skip that second part. They don't have to do any work to get saved, so why should they do any work at all?

Why is this important, you ask? What does this have to do with poetry? Easy. If you did the above reading, you'll know that an de-Jesussed form of Protestant Christianity is the dominant religion in the West. Ever wonder why Barack Obama sounds so much like a preacher? It's because he is.

Since Godless Christianity cannot use sola fide to justify salvation, it uses it to justify something just as undefinable:

art.

That's right. It didn't happen overnight. Luther introduced sola fide in the early 16th century. It began to catch on in the arts at the beginning of the 19th century, concurrent with another silly idea. It was gaining solid ground by the Victorian age and was firmly entrenched by the middle of last century.

The mantra of the artist is no longer "I am an artist because I work hard to create works of art." It is "I am an artist because I say I am."

In this feeble tautology there is no work, there is no schooling, there is no difficulty. There is only shoddy work, quackery, and showmanship.

I have often wondered what happened to craft and hard work in art.
Now I know.

Perhaps there's hope.

Silliman's blog put me on the blogroll. Woot.