Does Poetry Matter_ the Culture of Poetry _ Bart Baxter

8/10/2019 Does Poetry Matter_ the Culture of Poetry _ Bart Baxter

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8. 11. 2014 Does Poetry Matter? The Culture of Poetry | Bart Baxter

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APRIL 1997 T H E RAVENC H R O N I C L E S

Forum:

Can Poetry Matter?

John Olson

Bart Baxter

about

Bart Baxter

Does Poetry Matter? The Culture of Poetry

by Bart Baxter

Before I begin my prepared remarks, let me ask for a show ofhands in the audience, a scrupulously honest show of hands?

How many of you here tonight are poets? [Half the audience

raised hands.] How many of you would like to be a poet, have

maybe written some verse, are looking for a publisher? [1/4

raised hands.] And how many here are friends of the moderatoror someone on the panel? [1/4 raised hands.] Now, everyone in

the audience who did not fall into any one of those three

categories, who did not raise your hands before, please raise your

hands now. [One hand was raised.]

I think if Dana Gioia were here tonight, he would simply say:

I rest my case.

Dana Gioia's argument, which first appeared as an essay in

The Atlantic and which later appeared in a collection of essayspublished in 1992 called Can Poetry Matter, runs like this:

1. The audience for poetry events usually consists of

poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author (or in

this case, the panel).

2.Poetry has lost the larger audience of educated

intellectualsthe doctors, lawyers, clergymen,

accountants and business people, the literaryintelligentsia made up of non-specialistswho once

took poetry seriously; who are the market for jazz,

foreign films, theater, opera, the symphony and dance;

the broad audience who reads quality fiction and

biographies and who listen to public radio.

3.Poetry now belongs to a sub-culture of

academicians, funded by public subsidy through a

complex network of federal, state and local agencies.

a.There are over 200 graduate creative-

writing programs.


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b.There are several thousand college-level

jobs teaching poetry.

c.This decades long public funding has

created a large professional class for the

production and reception of poetry.

d.The contemporary poet makes a livingnot by publishing literary work, but by

educating, usually at a large institution,

most likely state-run, such as a school

district, a college or university, or even

(these days) at a hospital or a prison, i.e.,

teaching other people how to write poetry,

orat the highest levelsteaching other people

how to teach other people how to write

poetry.

4.Since poetry professionals must publish for job

security and tenure, academic literary journals have

sprung up everywhere so that academicians can now

publish each other's work. Fellowships, grants,

degrees, appointments, and publications are objective

facts, they are quantifiable, i.e., they can be listed on a

resume.

5.Before the turn of the century, few poets were

working in colleges, unless like Mark Van Doren or

Yvor Winters, they taught traditional academic

subjects. Poets were doctors like Williams,

businessmen like Stevens, lawyers like MacLeish,

farmers or bankers like Eliot and Frost. Most often

they wrote in other disciplines like Agee who

reviewed movies for Time, Weldon Kees who wrote

about jazz, Robert Hayden who reviewed music andtheater, or Archibald MacLeish who wrote for and

editedFortune.

6.In the process of narrowing the artform to conform

to academia, poetry has become increasingly

mediocre, or as Dana Gioia says: "the integrity of the

art has been betrayed."

7.For this reason, few people bother to read poetry,even the poetry of other poets. As Auden put it:

"Writing gets shut up in a circle of clever people

writing about themselves for themselves."


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8. And Gioia's pessimistic prognosis is this: A Society

whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape,

appreciate, and understand the power of language,

will become slaves to those who doretain that power,

be they politicians, preachers, newscasters, car

salesmen or confidence-men.

9.Given the decline of literacy, the proliferation ofother media, the crisis in humanities education, the

collapse of critical standards, can poets ever again

succeed in being heard?

Through page after page, example after example, Gioia

illustrates that poetry now belongs to a subsidized subculture,

and that this fact makes for mediocre poetry that no one really

wants to hear. But I would like to carry the argument one step

further. What isit about contemporary poetry, especially post-modern poetry, that makes it so unfriendly to a larger audience,

unfriendly if not downright antagonistic? Why does Twentieth

Century poetry lack the broader appeal of say, song lyrics.

In graphic art, the widespread use of the camera and

photography at the turn of the century was a huge aesthetic

obstacle and challenge to modern painters. Impressionism,

abstract-impressionism, minimalism, Op-Art, Pop-Art, Color

Field, Dada, Neo-Dada, photo-realism and neo-photo-realism,can all be seen as a reaction to the threat of the photograph as

chronicler of creative reality. A retreat, if you will, before the

onslaught of a technology that not only rendered the world in a

more realistic way, but could be used by the least-trained novice.

Whether Pollock's splatters, Reinhardt's huge black canvases, or

Don Eddy's and Ralph Going's photo-realism (actually projecting

photographs on a canvas and tracing the images, filling in the

colors the way a seven-year-old paints by numbers), Twentieth

Century graphic art must be seen as the final capitulation to thecamera and its exacting draftsmanship. Tom Wolf has said that

100 years from now, art history students will look back on

Twentieth Century painting with "[snickers], laughter, and good-

humored amazement."

How many times have you heard some boorish lout in line at

the museum of modern art mouthing off:My seven year old

daughter could have done this!The question for us should be: Is

he right? And we must ask the same question about TwentiethCentury poetry.

Will students of Twentieth Century poetry be equally amused


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and amazed about open form and free verse? The associated

technical adversary might be the mass availability of popular

music. It may be said, perhaps fairly, that the finest poets of our

age produced their best work for the radio, the television, and the

stage: from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Bob Dylan and Paul

Simon, from Cole Porter and Irving Berlin to Joan Osborne and

Big Head Todd. These lyricists have been able to reach a broad

audience and make fine livings by writing arresting, accessible,

and articulate verse. The academy has chosen to withdraw from

the popular forum of ideas, to retreat toward inaccessibility as

characterized by complicated trope, minimalism, allusion,

ellipses, odd syntax, odd punctuation, and open form, rather than

compete with popular music for the intellectual currency of a

populist audience.

Twentieth Century poetry, for the most part, can be

characterized by:

1.Open form, if not aggressive free verse the

deconstructionist antagonism to forcing the language

into anything other than the most natural voice. Form

in this sense is seen as repression. Free verse is the

moral and aesthetic equivalent to abstract

expressionism in graphic art. It is the minimalist

canvas, the photo-realism, the easy retreat and final

capitulation to popular music and greeting carddoggerel.

2.Figurative language to the exclusion of any other

poetic device. I call it thefascination with

association.. Analogies are a huge part of academia--

from the Stanford-Binet, SAT, the GREto the LSAT,

which all stress the intellectual rigor ofseeingand

makingassociations, of being cognizant of the fact

that one thing is like another thing, often in odd andinteresting ways. Eliot in his 1991 essay "Hamlet and

His Problems" asserted that "a poet can express

emotion only through an objective correlative." The

use of trope is so pervasive that it often overwhelms

most contemporary poetry. Many poets use no other

poetic device than metaphor and simile. In any current

literary journal one can find dozens of poems all

written in virtually the same style, that is to sayprose

shaped on the page to resemble poetry, with linebreaks and stanzas to simulate poetic form, but

without any of the traditional poetic devices: rhyme

scheme or rhyme, alliteration, consonance, assonance,


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onomatopoeia, meter or even the barest hint of

rhythm. These poems derive their poetic raison d' etre

by virtue of their figurative language, the poet noting

cleverly, in conversational tone, sometimes five or six

times in a short poem, how one thing is like another.

Thefascination with association, a particular

construct of the creative-writing class or poetry

workshop, seems to be the sole literary device of most

contemporary poets.

3.Lyric form rather than Narrative: Twentieth

Century poetry has tended away fromstory-telling,

tended away from the legacy of Vachel Lindsey and

Langston Hughes, away from the long narratives

about great deeds and larger-than-life events, toward

an introverted, introspective, I, me, we,

autobiographical, confessional, isolated, self-absorbed, self-centered, self-conscious, self-righteous

poetry that is little concerned about the audience.

4.Limited emotion: Even these confessional poets

would toss out their journals before being thought

sentimental. In the academy, poets are alert to the

Freudian ambivalence of emotion, prone to

intellectual skepticism (deconstructiona perfect

example), so that they seldom speak with ferventconviction about anything. Charles Reznikoff said:

"Poetry presents the thingin order to convey the

feeling. It should bepreciseabout the thing and

reticentabout the feeling." Heaven help the

sentimental.

5.Persistent irony.

6.Meditative quality.

7.Impersonality: William Carlos Williams believed

that with the publication of "The Wasteland" "the

bottom had dropped out of everything" he had cared

about in poetry.

8.Vagueness.

9.Contradiction.

10.Understatement

11.Economy.


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12.Wit.

13.Fragmentation.

14.Discontinuity.

Dana Gioia wrote "Can Poetry Matter?" long before he realized

what was going on in the urban centers across the country, in thenight clubs and cabarets, at the Greenmill Tavern in Chicago and

the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York, at the open readings and

poetry slams. In a lecture he presented at Poets House in New

York on October 26 [1995], which became an essay published in

Poetry Flash, "Notes Toward a New Bohemia," his greatest fears

about the future of poetry seem to be assuaged.

His argument runs something like this:

1.The primary means of publication of new poetry is

now oral. This applies to older established poets as

well as new unknowns.

2.This represents an enormous paradigm shift away

from print culture, in that:

a.The government is neither involved with

subsidizing events nor appointing

particular poets.

b. The physical audience listeningto

poetry greatly outnumbers the people who

readpoetry in books. (Do we need one

more professor to tell us that the important

thing is whether the poem will translate

from the "stage to the page"?).

3.This is a populist revolution, a distinct move fromprint to oral tradition, largely among groups long alien

to the traditional, dominant, literary, academic

culture:

a. e.g., rap lyrics, in music and poetry.

b.Cowboy poetry.

c.Poetry slams.

4.Surprisingly, most of this new populistpoetry is

formal:


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a. e.g., the four-stress lines in rap.

b.The English ballad form in cowboy

poetry.

c.The merger of poetry and experimental

theater in performance poetry at poetry

slams often uses elaborate rhyme schemes.

5.As for the University, an institution better equipped

to preserve old culture than foster the creation of new

art, it will probably hold on dearly to Modernism, and

will continue to do so until Post-modern poetry's last

gasp.

Bart Baxter's work has appeared inErgo, Seattle Review,Red Cedar Review, The Ohio PoetryReview,RavenChronicles, among others. He won the 1994 Hart CraneAward for poetry at Kent State University; the 1994 CharlesProctor Award (Washington State); the 1995 MTV PoetryGrand Slam. His second book of poetry is Peace for theArsonist (Bacchae Press,1995).

The Raven Chronicles 1997

Does Poetry Matter_ the Culture of Poetry _ Bart Baxter

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