According to this volume we are a country overrun with talented poets. I am reminded of well-intentioned coaches at little league games who constantly shout encouraging yet meaningless words—“Good eye! Good eye!”—to the little batters frozen at home plate, who do not swing at the wildest pitches yet also allow perfect strikes to whiz by. Perhaps, if these poets or the editors had some sense of the Olympian task of writing something more than daily poetry, Americans in turn might have some genuine awareness and appreciation of the ability of a poem to evoke national or universal issues. But that may only occur once or twice in a century; certainly not annually or even biannually. And it may require poets that are not entrenched in the unreal self-absorbed self-important worlds of their universities and writing academies.
Sunday, January 01, 2012
Collective mediocrity ...
... The University Bookman: Celebrated Minor Contemporary American Poetry. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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it's an interesting review from the viewpoint of looking at the discourse around poetry these days. I agree with some of the points, including the last sentence, but I find the overall tone to contribute to the problem rather than solve it. Yes, American poetry is small-scale and narcissistic a lot of the time: a lot of people writing about small things, perhaps because they can't handle the larger things in their poetry. It doesn't have to be that way, but is, perhaps as a result of the poetry is bound up with MFAs and academia these days. But so are all the arts right now. You can single out poetry, but it's worse in visual art, which is mannerist beyond belief. I dunno. Maybe I'm just tired of critical dyspepsia: everybody complains, nobody provides a solution. It's certain that a return to some nostalgic idea of poetry's mythical golden era, when everything rhymed in iambic pentameter, would not work: you can't go back, you just have to find new roads.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you, Art. So what if a lot of people are writing a lot of poetry and most of it will prove ephemeral? It's good that people engage themselves that way. What's Sturgeon's Law? Ninety percent of everything is crap. But you won't get the other 10 percent if you'r enot willing to risk the other 90 percent.
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