Can Poetry Matter?

[kasie]

kasie... I believe that was my link you are referring to....

Whoops, so it was - - many apologies!

[Jozanny]

I apologize, luke, kasie, if my tone suddenly adopted the characteristics of a snapping turtle's bite, to some degree. I am not the idiot I once was, with my aspirations swelling to some kind of crescendo about what I was going to achieve. I no longer feel that expansiveness. William Styron had a very good conversation about that with Charlie Rose, before he passed away. They dwelt a little on the differences between being young in the writers life, and getting old in it. You gain with practice and maturity, but lose something as well in the process. Disillusionment has been a powerful force challenging me in recent years, and I don't know what to do with it.

There is nothing wrong with honing one's talent and using that to get a doctorate to earn a living, but there just doesn't seem to be many other avenues left for poets and creative writers who don't. I certainly don't want to run live poetry workshops. I may still have the intelligence, perhaps, to teach, but no longer the health or the energy.

What I would like to do outside of what I still do to the degree that I can, is write at least two good critical works, maybe more than that, but I need to put a hold on that commitment until certain things stabilize.

The genre of poetry, however, dissuades me, and it has little to do with the artistry or craft of the academic poet. Some authors in APR display a skill worth imitating.

Discernment, however, is lacking. Everyone tries their hand at the genre, everyone loves sonnets, or haiku. Not I. Hello, this is the 21st century, can we aim for new forms? Then the students love confessional narratives.

Now, I write confessional pieces
here
http://www.sundress.net/wickedalice/...thPreston.html

or here:
http://www.public.coe.edu/coereview/...thor_index.htm

I was going to post the link to Gin Bender but apparently that is another dead domain! (I am going to have to rethink where and how my website material goes and is archived online. I think this is going to become a difficult problem for writers over time, but the GB publisher did print me a web copy and mailed it to me, which was a nice precaution.)

But they glut the market beyond the pale. The literary journal, as a cultural artifact, has not been changed by the Internet, only made worse. The independents don't have to pay to print any more. All they need is a domain name, and the critic not only becomes overwhelmed, but irrelevant as well, unless, like Bloom, as luke mentioned, they operate in the same sphere of influence as the Linda Bierds of this world.

Level playing fields in the Western world hasn't helped poetry. I cannot speak for the poets who have more recognition than I do. They might just say I'm resentful.

Well, yes. I am, because the alternatives toward a success independent of collegiate connection are few. The same holds for fiction writers, and luke knows better than I do why the art world seems rarified and inaccessible.

[Virgil]

There is nothing wrong with honing one's talent and using that to get a doctorate to earn a living, but there just doesn't seem to be many other avenues left for poets and creative writers who don't. I certainly don't want to run live poetry workshops. I may still have the intelligence, perhaps, to teach, but no longer the health or the energy.

I guess this is Gioia's point and perhaps I've been a little insensitive to the concern. There has always been a clique of writers who constitute the establishment. Notice how Whitman had to push his way into the New England class of writers in his day to get noticed. Is it any different today that the establishment congrgates in graduate program writing departments? I don't know. Notice that Whitman eventually became known and other than for historical reasons no one reads most of those New England writers today. (Emerson and Thereau excluded of course). Certainly the establishment mediocrity will get published and the amateur mediocrity won't, though they be at the same level. That is unfair, justice has never been perfect here on earth. But I suspect over time the great writers will shine, though they be part of the establishment or not. The only reservation which makes me now more sensitive to StLuke's and Gioia's point is that the potential great writer may get stunted and aborted before he blooms out because of the current system. But still i just don't know if that's any different than the past. It has always been hard. To some degree I see it as easier today.

[Jozanny]

Certainly the establishment mediocrity will get published and the amateur mediocrity won't, though they be at the same level. That is unfair, justice has never been perfect here on earth.

But the aesthetic values are harder to judge today than they were even in Whitman's time, that is one. What you call mediocrity may simply be sheer volume, and two, the function of poetry has changed, which goes to the heart of luke's question about its relevance.

The epic was very nearly a biological necessity, not so today.

I don't have the words for what poetry is now, in the modern era, but as it becomes mostly a play thing in the sandbox, it no longer is as vibrant to the social fabric as it used to be, and it was still vital to the fabric in Pope's day, even though I consider him secondary to other poets in other periods.

I don't know about Whitman, so I'll beg off on that, even though I recently viewed a video bio.

[stlukesguild]

But the aesthetic values are harder to judge today than they were even in Whitman's time...

But is that true? Perhaps there was more of an established notion of what constituted good art... where we often seem stuck with this directionless relativism where "everything is art" (which by a turn of Borghesian logic is the same as saying "nothing is art."). On the other hand... the strongest works have quite often faced the challenge of incomprehension or derision. Surely, as Virgil notes, Whitman was not immediately recognized... nor Dickinson. The same was true of Blake, Keats, Picasso, Matisse, Schubert. Hell, J.S. Bach essentially worked in obscurity in a version of the academic post: as Capelmeister and Organist for a mid-sized German town. By the end of his career he was seen by most of the "cutting-edge" composers as hopelessly outdated... in spite of the fact that he was composing the most advanced music of the era.

[Chester]

Which is why, from the artist's or poet's standpoint, one continues to create for the only real, true reason to create, in my estimation, regardless of whatever current conditions one finds the marketplace: because creating is what one does.

[stlukesguild]

Of course that goes against Dr. Samuel Johnson aphorism: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Not that he made a fortune himself.

[blp]

I'm not going to try to comment on everything, but as I've been hanging around the periphery of the art world for some years here in London and trying to write, writing poetry in particular, I thought I'd throw in my two cents.

I've pretty much sworn off the art world now because I find it so oddly intellectually vacant. I don't just mean stupid. Lots of the people involved aren't stupid. I mean something more ghoulish or zombie-ish, as if there's nothing much going on behind the eyes. I think it's something similar to what the author of your article is describing about the poetry world, a network of institutionalised cliquery in which the only criteria for valuing works can seem to be trendiness and position and a certain vague notion of theoretical justifiability. The last of these is, if it's possible to impose a hierarchy of disgust here at all, is possibly most abhorrent to me. Stlukesguild, I know you expressed some antipathy to philosophy and theory elsewhere recently, but I'm not sure if my objection's the same as yours. I like philosophy. At the moment, I like it more than anything else really. What I can't stand is the way it's seen through a distinctly warped glass darkly in the art world and used thereby as a means of policing and self-censorship, often in ways that are simply absurd. What we end up with are fatuous prohibitions against being 'expressive' or 'romantic' or trite illustrations of philosophical concepts such as the indexical sign or the uncanny and, even, as philosopher's critical of hegemonies or dominant ideologies are purportedly being touted (like ambiguously benevolent father figures), hegemonies and ideologies become entrenched. The grossest absurdity of all this is that, if the people responsible really understood the stuff with which they were claiming to align themselves, they'd realise that there was simply no way at all it could be read as prescriptions for anything.

Ohh. I'm going to be late for the cinema. I will return anon! Presently.

[stlukesguild]

I have little use for art based largely upon theory. Theory and Philosophy and art are not one and the same. Art need not be rooted in some grand new philosophical understanding of reality. In many cases, art largely reiterates long-held beliefs, or universal human experiences: birth, death, sex/passion, desire, envy, anger/hatred, beauty, spiritual longing. Again... as I stated elsewhere... it is perhaps stated best by Alexander Pope. Art not not espouse some grandiose, self-important, pretentious, inflated pseudo-philosophy, but rather it may merely convey "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." You are certainly right in suggesting that in reality this work which puts forth great show of such intellectual rigor and profundity is actually entrenched in the cliches of the moment and rather intellectually vacant. All of this, again, traces itself back to Duchamp, who as an artist feared being thought of as "dumb as a painter" (a common phrase thrown around at the time). In reality, he virtually brought nothing to art that Picasso had not already placed on the table... and never with the Spaniard's artistic vision... but he is very seductive to the type of young "artists" being churned out of art departments in colleges and universities (where ideas and theories are valued over hands on rigorous effort and practice as taught in the traditional art schools and apprenticeships)... an "intellectual" (if only in appearance) respected for his brilliant ideas... his challenges to the close-minded petty-bourgeois... and never forced to really get his hands dirty and put forth some serious effort. He was the founder of the notion of the "artist as thinker" as opposed to the dated notion of the "artist as creator... or maker".

Just today I came upon this gem by Arthur Craven, writing in an attack upon the very notion of the Modern art school: "I am astonished that some crook has not had the idea of opening up a writing school." So the crooks today know better.

[Jozanny]

Just today I came upon this gem by Arthur Craven, writing in an attack upon the very notion of the Modern art school: "I am astonished that some crook has not had the idea of opening up a writing school." So the crooks today are know better.

Me thinks that last line needs a tweek , but, who reads contemporary poets? I do, but I believe luke and kasie (though eloquently) and Virgil bowed out. But I'd like a show of hands.

And how do we define Virgil's mediocrity if we do not read it? I think Tennyson is mediocre, as well as some of Browning's early works, and Pope, despite technical competency, is a trivial satirist. Did Beats like Ginsberg and Creeley destroy poetry? I met Robert and I sat before him with my hands shaking, but I sensed some attempt on his part to temper the excesses of the era.

I think Virgil condemns too widely. And as to the definition of amateur, I'd quibble with that, in part on the basis of my oeuvre, but not only. I am going to dig up some APR issues.

[stlukesguild]

...but, who reads contemporary poets? I do, but I believe luke and kasie (though eloquently) and Virgil bowed out.

While I am surely not as entrenched in contemporary poetry as I would like to be you will note that earlier I wrote:

"Largely... I have seriously limited my reading of contemporary poetry. There are but a few contemporary or near-contemporaries I read with any frequency: W.S. Merwin, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, Richard Howard, Charles Simic, Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, Yves Bonnefoy, Ann Carson, Charles Wright, Yehuda Amichai, Adam Zagajewski, Wislawa Symborska, Geoffrey Hill, and a few others. I've tried to come to terms with John Ashberry... and while I find I like some works... most often he strikes me as simply trying too hard to be clever. Or is it just me?"

There are others as well... A.R. Ammons, Galway Kinnell, Phillip Levine, Charles Olson, Robert Pinsky, Mark Strand, Paul Muldoon, Henri Michaux, Bella Akhmadulina, Joseph Brodsky... and a number of others. Part of the struggle is to slog the way through the dreck... to unearth the few works and few writers who resonate among the sheer volume of what it being churned out. As a visual artist I have the advantage of being able to rapidly discern that which is worth closer inspection to that which is not. This takes longer with reading... and one cannot trust most critics to offer much assistance in this direction when almost everything garners unqualified praise. I will often stand in the poetry isle and leaf through the books... but discovering gem is so rare that one begins to wonder if the effort is worth it.

By the way... Tennyson mediocre? Surely you jest!

[Virgil]

Me thinks that last line needs a tweek , but, who reads contemporary poets? I do, but I believe luke and kasie (though eloquently) and Virgil bowed out. But I'd like a show of hands.

I haven't bowed out. Here's my hand. I haven't had a need to comment on anything since my last post.

And how do we define Virgil's mediocrity if we do not read it?

Hey, hey. I can make fun of my own work. Not anyone else. Of course I'm kidding.

I think Tennyson is mediocre, as well as some of Browning's early works, and Pope, despite technical competency, is a trivial satirist. Did Beats like Ginsberg and Creeley destroy poetry? I met Robert and I sat before him with my hands shaking, but I sensed some attempt on his part to temper the excesses of the era.

I think all the poets you mention have good and mediocre work. I'm less reluctant to include Pope because he stands well above all his contemporaries. There is something to be said for being the best poet of your age. It could be that the age itself lacked vision.

I think Virgil condemns too widely. And as to the definition of amateur, I'd quibble with that, in part on the basis of my oeuvre, but not only. I am going to dig up some APR issues.

Well it won't be the first time I've been accused of that. How have I condemned too widely? I thought I was defending the system for the most part.

[blp]

Me thinks that last line needs a tweek

So does the last word of that line, Jozanny. You could even argue the first two do too.

[stlukesguild]

Me thinks that last line needs a tweek

So does the last word of that line, Jozanny. You could even argue the first two do too.

She caught me in a typo which certainly made that rather brief quote not quite come off as intended. I've since rectified the problem.

[kasie]

[QUOTE=stlukesguild;605909.....By the way... Tennyson mediocre? Surely you jest![/QUOTE]

A tad sweeping, I agree, but there is some awfully dry stuff in there, as there is in Wordsworth - and I've been quoting WW in another thread, so that shows I do like his work. It took a particularly passionate tutor to show me the pleasure to be found in the pages of Alfred, Lord T.

I meant to comment on Jozzany's reply to my 'ivory towers' charge - I understand the need of which Wordsworth wrote for the poet to retire and reflect on emotion in tranquillity. I think I was objecting to the poets (and any other artist) who remain in this isolation, living on self-generated emotion, and do not emerge to engage in life with the fellow humans with whom they communicate in their art, so engendering further material for their art.