World Class Poetry Blog

Come Join The Poetry Revolution
27 December 2007, the poet @ 9:33 pm

Thanks to Jim Murdoch for engaging in dialog with me over the matter of poetry. Other voices added to the conversation would be nice as well.

I wanted to add a little something extra. Of course, the spark that started it all was Dana Gioia’s essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” While retrieving the essay so that I can quote from it for this post I found another, shorter, essay written by Gioia, which I had read before but forgotten. The essay is aptly titled “Being Outed.” In this essay, Gioia talks about his hidden secret while in the corporate world - he wrote poetry - and how it came to pass that his secret was let out. I can honestly say I’ve never felt the need to hide my passion for poetry. I probably should have. But it never occurred to me to do so. Nevertheless, I do sense a common theme, that non-poets, when they find that someone they know writes poetry and they would have thought otherwise, have the same reaction. Funny, that.

Now, back on the poetic matter at hand. Gioia wrote of six things that poets can do to make poetry matter again. I’d be curious to know your thoughts:

1. When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people’s work—preferably poems they admire by writers they do not know personally. Readings should be celebrations of poetry in general, not merely of the featured author’s work.

2. When arts administrators plan public readings, they should avoid the standard subculture format of poetry only. Mix poetry with the other arts, especially music. Plan evenings honoring dead or foreign writers. Combine short critical lectures with poetry performances. Such combinations would attract an audience from beyond the poetry world without compromising quality.

3. Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively. Poets must recapture the attention of the broader intellectual community by writing for nonspecialist publications. They must also avoid the jargon of contemporary academic criticism and write in a public idiom. Finally, poets must regain the reader’s trust by candidly admitting what they don’t like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.

4. Poets who compile anthologies—or even reading lists—should be scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely admire. Anthologies are poetry’s gateway to the general culture. They should not be used as pork barrels for the creative-writing trade. An art expands its audience by presenting masterpieces, not mediocrity. Anthologies should be compiled to move, delight, and instruct readers, not to flatter the writing teachers who assign books. Poet-anthologists must never trade the Muse’s property for professional favors.

5. Poetry teachers especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry’s future.

6. Finally poets and arts administrators should use radio to expand the art’s audience. Poetry is an aural medium, and thus ideally suited to radio. A little imaginative programming at the hundreds of college and public-supported radio stations could bring poetry to millions of listeners. Some programming exists, but it is stuck mostly in the standard subculture format of living poets’ reading their own work. Mixing poetry with music on classical and jazz stations or creating innovative talk-radio formats could re-establish a direct relationship between poetry and the general audience. The history of art tells the same story over and over. As art forms develop, they establish conventions that guide creation, performance, instruction, even analysis. But eventually these conventions grow stale. They begin to stand between the art and its audience. Although much wonderful poetry is being written, the American poetry establishment is locked into a series of exhausted conventions—outmoded ways of presenting, discussing, editing, and teaching poetry. Educational institutions have codified them into a stifling bureaucratic etiquette that enervates the art. These conventions may once have made sense, but today they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto.

My Thoughts On Gioia’s Poetic Proposal

1. I agree that some time should be spent reading the poetry of others. It’s a poetry reading, right? So why not?

2. Again, that’s a great suggestion. I know two poets in my local area who do this well. Rich Hemmings in York, Pa. is the best promoter of poetry I’ve ever met. He often mixes music with art with poetry and isn’t afraid to take risks. I’m not just talking about his own poetry. I’m talking about the open mic readings he organizes in York and the features that he presents in those venues.

Another poetry organizer I admire, who incorporates open mic readings with discussions of dead poets, is Daniel Armstrong in Frederick, Md. He has a weekly poetry reading where every other week a featured poet is invited to read and the weeks in between are spent reading the poems of dead poets. Great idea. And it works.

3. Another good point. I do agree that poetry critics need to be candid. And it helps to have an idea of what you stand for, what you consider “good” poetry and what you won’t stand for. We all have our prejudices, but we ought to be able to back them up with reason and not wear our poetry on our sleeves.

4. Bravo! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve picked up a journal or a book of contemporary poetry hoping to find a gem only to be met with feeble attempts to impress someone who has no bearing on my enjoyment of the poem. Mediocrity should not be allowed in poetry. Period.

5. I’m OK with Gioia’s position on this one, but I cannot deny my own tendency to criticize. I am not a performance poet. It is difficult for me to perform. I read and I believe I read well. I’ve been told that I have a good reading voice, but I am not a performer. To some extent, my poetry is intended for the written page and I hope that some reader 100 years after I die can enjoy it as much as my audiences do when I read at open mics. Nevertheless, reading aloud aside - and I do agree that high school students should be met with the reading and performance of poetry with the intent to enjoy - there should be some analysis and criticism involved in the education process, particularly for poets who are learning to write.

6. Again, Gioia’s insight here awe-inspiring. But keep in mind that his essay was written in 1991, a time when most people in America had never heard of the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee had coined the phrase “World Wide Web” just one year earlier. The Internet went commercial in 1993 - after Gioia’s essay was published in The Atlantic Monthly.

Why is this important? Because when Gioia wrote and published “Can Poetry Matter?”, the radio was the dominant medium for voice transmissions. The Internet was still a science and military-industrial complex tool. The commercialization of the Internet made many things possible that before were only a pipe dream. Poetry is now popular again in ways that Gioia was talking about in his essay, but primarily right here on the Internet.

Just look around. There are countless blogs and websites that consist of published poetry. Much of it - most of it, in fact - is garbage, but it’s there. It’s being written and published by ordinary people - not by tenured professors. And some of it is good.

Then there are poetry podcasts - the Internet’s equivalent to radio. Internet radio has ten times the potential that traditional radio has. It has a broader appeal, can transcend national boundaries, and overcomes obstacles related to time as well. If I’m invited to read a poem on National Public Radio next week, there is a point at which that recording will enter an archive, and who knows when it will be revived? If I record the same poem by digital recording and upload it to a website on the same day then that recording can potentially remain in its location for the next 50 years, assuming I maintain the website for that long, and I could direct my living heirs to maintain it long afterward, which they could certainly do. This is what I mean when I say we are on the verge of a new revolution in poetry. We have the medium. Now we just need the move.

1 Comment a “Come Join The Poetry Revolution”

1. Jim Murdoch — December 28, 2007 @ 7:29 am
   

   I was not aware of Dana Gioia back in 1989 but I know very well what it likes to be, if I can borrow from Little Britain, the only poet in the village:

   COMING OUT

   “So you are a
   practising poet ?”
   she asked,
   and I felt unclean
   and wanted my closet back.

   23 March 1989

   At that time, and this still remain true, I had only ever been to one poetry reading. I have no idea if it was typical – I was only there because I had been invited to submit a poem to a competition and this was the prize-giving. I went alone and never socialised. I didn’t feel like I belonged. Yes, I was surrounded by other poets but I was so used to being an outsider that I didn’t quite know what else to be.

   I agree with #3 because, even now after 35 years of writing poetry, I still don’t consider myself well-educated when it comes to poetry. The poet Basil Bunting kept explication of his poems to an absolute minimum – “Never explain” he advised fledgling poets “your reader is as smart as you.” No we’re not. I spent a couple of hours yesterday flicking through the various poets included on the Electronic Poetry Center’s site (http://epc.buffalo.edu/) and I was dismayed by how obtuse some of the writing was. It makes me wonder what the end of poetry should be. Naively I’ve always thought that the bottom line should be meaning, a poem should make sense, but I can see that, for other poets, the bottom line is thinking, a poem should make you think – but how does the unsuspecting reader know what’s expected of him?

   As regards #5, judging by the state of poetry education in the UK, which has been commented on in the press recently, it’s pretty clear that the teachers themselves need to spend more time on analysis before they have the brass neck to step out in front of a class. Since the majority of my poetry is very short, I’ve never really considered poetry as a thing to be performed.

   On #6, this obviously has been superseded by the internet. podcasts have the added benefit that you can play them again and again. A poet can include a text copy of the poem and even notes on the poem. The internet is definitely the place where educators should be setting up camp.

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