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'poetry seems to be doing well'James Engelhardt over at the Prairie Schooner blog responds to Patrick Gillespie’s “Let Poetry Die” article : “I want to assure Gillespie and others that poetry—even outside the academy—seems to be doing well. At least, if the number of books, presses, online spaces, slams, and zines is an indicator.” Read both. What do you think? 4 comments to ‘poetry seems to be doing well’ |
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I think there is much to be said for what Gillespie has to say. From my understanding of Economics, Engelhardt is way off base.
When the mantra of the state of poetry today is that there is no money in poetry, when there used to be (not huge buckets, mind you) and the only exception to that is in the cloistered setting of The Academy, then perhaps something is wrong somewhere.
We do live in a time when interest in poetry is incredibly low, and there have to be some decent and explainable reasons for that state of affairs. There is probably some truth to both columns, which I had read before this.
Good subject to bring up here.
Lots of reasons: I think the least likely is the one most often put forward, that poets suddenly became bad. That’s just silly.
Partly there’s a certain saturation level: there’s a LOT of really good verse in English, and it’s easy to get. I can buy a used complete works of Shakespeare for the price of a chapbook of new poems. If you’re the sort of person who will read poetry at all you’re probably also happy to read old poetry. There’s not so much room for new poetry in English.
Also there’s recorded music of singer-songwriters occupying much of the cultural space that used to be occupied by written verse. The teenagers who made Byron famous in his day were being blown away by Dylan in ours. Neither of them great poets, maybe, but they felt like lifelines in their time.
I don’t think the universities have produced a lot of good poets, but I don’t think it’s their fault that people stopped reading. Either Ashberry and his ilk are not saleable poets, or else they were what drove the nonacademic poets out of the market — but you can’t have it both ways. They can’t be both.
This has been a great topic. Just finished both posts and find myself in agreement with Gillespie.
I have been reading mostly poetry for about six years, and writing for three. I am the only person I know who buys poetry books and reads them.
I am new to blogging, but have been somewhat heartened by all of the poetry I am seeing. But how many of us are there really? And are we the public poets are looking for?
As for the audience of the “general public,” I am frightened by how little they seem to know (about anything, not just poets’ names), how little they seem to read or think, and how short their attention spans are.
bd
I find myself agreeing half with Gillespie and half with Engelhardt.
I have had trouble getting published in standard literary journals, although the last couple of years have been rather kind to me. I *do not* write academic poetry, and I *never want* to write what is perceived as academic poetry. I write from the chest, the cranium, the third eye, the solar plexus, and the genitals. I tell stories, I make you feel. That is my *job*.
I’ve tossed up the idea of going for my MFA, but I wonder if I took the better road of schooling on my own and through my eyes and ears by reading and hearing verse (spoken word, printed page, and song). I have learned more from Maya Angelou, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake, Langston Hughes, and a whole passel of truly professional and skilled spoken word/slam poets than from anyone in academia.
So I get what Gillespie is saying. Believe me, I *so* want to make a living out of being a poet. And at some point, I intend to do it. For now: I work a day job that pays my bills but doesn’t use much of my background, skill, or talents. I help my fiance take care of his aging parents. I goof off a little on the weekends. But sandwiched in between all of this, I write my fucking ass off. We (my fiance and I) try to make it to every open mic that we possibly can, given our schedule, so I can read my work. I have binders stuffed full, stacks piling up, and a thumb drive that is slowing filling up with poems. “There is nothing than stinks worse than unpublished poems”, Sylvia Plath said, and I can smell it to high heaven in my house — so I’m working through the piles, trying to find the stuff that really matters, and trying to get it to markets that want it.
But I do have to ask Gillespie a question. Fine. So he wants to drive poetry out of academic with fires and pitchforks. But what suggestions does he have for poets to find an audience for their work? He claims that irrelevant academic poetry has turned the average public off from the art form. Fine. But what do we do now? How does one compete with American Idol, Biggest Loser, et. al.? This is where I have to agree with Engelhardt:
“Is our culture too obsessed with the easily consumed? Fast food. Light beer.”
and
“It’s fair to wonder about a culture that doesn’t favor the meditative, the reflective, the contemplative. What kinds of pressures does a large, potential audience of that character put on its poets? Perhaps it drives them into academies.”
But then again, what do folks like me who are a bit wary of academia do?
So…????? Where to go, what to do? One of the commentors remarked that he is “taking the third way”, which is what I mentioned earlier — poeming and working a day job (or night job or whatever). How many of us will it take to make poetry become more culturally relevant?
Are we broken? Or is the culture broken? Or both?
My apologies for this extremely long post. Both of the columnists got me going and thinking about this.
-Nicole