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Catching Up on the Death of Poetry

I was catching up on some blog reading this past weekend. I read Joan Houlihan’s blog entry titled “The Poetry Rapture – Who’s In?” (Yes, I’m that far behind in my reading…piles of The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, National Geographic, etc., are sitting next to me…and the blogs too.) Basically, the blog and several blogs/articles it leads to mention the declining readership of poetry (and also that the “death of poetry” essays, statements, and so on have been around for a long, long time). Fewer and fewer people self-acknowledged to reading poetry in the past 12 months in a poll.

Poetry reading, at least anecdotally and according to polls, is on the decline. More seem to write it than read it. But I don’t want to add to the Chicken Little blogs and essays. Rather, I want to state that poetry will survive. Its end is not near, nor shall it be. Poetry, as I have suggested on this blog before, is central to being human. We may not often recognize the poetry around us (and for that, I think we miss out on much that is beautiful), but it still consciously works on us. Commercials for the NFL season are pretty rampant now. I do not watch football, but there is a poetry in these commercials. This poetry hearkens back to Homer. I am not saying they are of equal value, but what I am saying is that there is a recognition that language can state passions better than anything else. Sometimes this language operates in parody, but we understand the parody because we recognize the truth.

E-Books and the Future of Poetry, Part 5

Once inexpensive methods have become available for practically anyone to create attractive websites (and websites that act as journals), then anyone can act as an editor. Hence, one of the critical barriers the MFA programs has created can be circumvented. All those poetry MFAs entering the world and acting as editors of traditional print journals are no longer in a monopolistic position to give legitimacy or not to a poet and his or her poems. Now someone with an interest in poetry can create a website, get submissions, and publish a journal, all with very little cost.

Will this happen? Well, it has already. Its success and its influence may not yet be widespread, but I think it is only a matter of time as the web becomes more accessible and easy to use. (More accessible? Well, the spread of broadband, the reach into ever more rural areas, ever more general use.) As web journal publishing becomes more widespread and profit margins continue to squeeze out poetry publishers, the use of the web as a primary publishing source will increase. I think this is further out, and the web may not be the web as we think of it today, but again, I think it inevitable that more and more poets unable to find publishers for their books and recognizing the inexpensiveness of electronic publishing will win out. Today you can publish a PDF on Amazon. The negativity of self-publishing is still widespread, but C.P. Cavafy essentially self-published his poems. Seems that turned out well for him. Oh, and that Whitman guy did too. Hmm…. As a friend of mine once told me: If he played his guitar and recorded some music and put it on a CD and then played a gig and tried to sell his CD there, no one would think anything of it. If he read his poems and then sold copies of his self-published book, many people would view that negatively. Again, I think this is fading.

Now if you asked me to provide proof of that, I can’t. I’m prognosticating more than anything else, but I think the trend towards online journal publishing will spill over to online book or electronic publishing. I not only think but I hope that the new era of electronic publishing and access breaks the gridlock of MFAs on publishing. I think breaking that gridlock means more vibrant and interesting poetry. I hope.

…finis…

E-Books and the Future of Poetry, Part 4

If one thinks of some of the recent achievements in cinema (Easy Rider, John Sayles, etc.), the  advancement of the art is often from outside the system. I very much admire Sayles’ movies. He has often worked as a screenplay fixer/re-writer/writer of studio genre films to finance his independent efforts. Additionally, Sayles produces, writes, directs, and edits his own films, which gives him complete control over the vision of his art. One of my favorites of his, Men with Guns, seems to me inconceivable coming from a major American studio.

While I could suggest that Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; Penguin; and other major publishers followed by a litany of non-profit minor publisher of poetry (Copper Canyon, Red Hen, etc.) are the “big studios,” I do not think that is the case. Instead, university poetry MFA programs seem be in that role in poetry. They set the criteria of success (i.e., getting an MFA, getting a job teaching in an MFA program), promote their particular interests, and control access to journals (by acting a editors) among other things. To “break through,” you have to play by their rules or face exile. The barriers are essentially controlled by them and if you don’t show the requisite credentials, they will keep the barrier up. Publishers, in this sense, act more as distributors. Here is an author with a built-in platform. Poetry book sales are pretty bad as it is, so it makes complete sense market-wise. Many publishers do offer first-book poetry contests: Pay a fee, have an established (i.e., MFA) poet judge the contest, and call it a victory for the poetry. Not surprisingly, it seems that mostly MFAs win these contests.

Obviously, I am describing an overall trend or state, for there are exceptions as there is everywhere in life. A good poet without an MFA credential and working a normal job (i.e., not in the university) can get his or her poems published in book form. But this is so rare and even then so invisible to the general culture as to be nonexistent. Also, this is very much a system that has shown its power and influence in the past couple of decades, really. MFAs existed prior to the 1990s, but the volume of graduates, their imprisonment to the system, and the reach and control over journals and other forms of distribution really only became overwhelming in the late 80s and early 90s.

Enter the Internet. More specifically, enter the World Wide Web and all the variety of technologies it engendered. Poetry slams developed independently of MFA programs. They are, in essence, anti-MFA poetry readings. Harking back to Beat expositions, harking back even to ancient Greek literary contests, poetry slams have sought to revive community participation in the final artistic expression of poetry as language and sound. Poetry slams share something in common with the web: They are cheap to host. You need a location (bars and coffee shops are ideal because they do not mind attracting people to their establishments without any investment except maybe a microphone on their part).. Some photocopied flyers or even word of mouth. Having a website is also cheap to set up and maintain and you do not have to have much programming knowledge to make it work. One can spend a lot of money, but one need not. As Internet connectivity has increased, the potential to have many readers has increased.

…to be continued…

E-Books and the Future of Poetry, Part 3

In our modern or post-modern or whatever you want to call it era (I really mean the times we’re living in), a poet stating that they want readers is, perhaps, a bit off-putting. Yet, no matter how much one may state that they disdain readers or they don’t care, they really do want readers. What’s the point of art if it cannot be shared? Shakespeare most definitely desired readers (i.e., in the concept of attendees, but still paying customers for works of art), Keats wanted readers, Picasso wanted viewers, etc. So while the times perhaps suggest that I deny the importance of reader, I prefer to say I want readers.

Of course, wanting readers and having them is one thing. Also, wanting readers but writing to the truth of your art (or fealty to your vision for a work of art) is another. Neither is contradictory, neither assumes the fealty to your art and the number of your readers are on opposite sides of the scales. There may be a link between the two, but they are not necessarily zero-sum. I’ve seen Pound’s Cantos being read on a plane. I’m sure Pound was faithful to his vision and his poem is most assuredly not an easy read, yet he had a reader. Still, Pound’s vision probably did turn readers away. That is not the same as saying he did not want readers. But the level of difficulty is not directly correlated to a lower number of readers. All this is to say, that an artist can both be true to his or her vision and desire a large number of readers without any necessary contradiction.

So now I need to track back, a bit, I think. As a poet, I desire the greatest number of readers as I can get reading my poems. It seems logical and desirable that having my poems appear in online journals makes more sense. Additionally, publishing online is viewed less negatively now, though it is still not without bias. Some will, perhaps, never ascribe that the online publishing business can ever publish as high quality of poetry as print journals. But journals are only as good as their editors, and there is no monopoly of editorial talent in the universities. This, in fact, may drive the most significant changes in poetry.

…to be continued…

E-Books and the Future of Poetry, Part 2

My last post was all in the way of prefacing how I view the current state of electronic publications. The ebook reader is here to stay and more and more books will be read on e-readers. Poetry journals have been moving to more and more of an online only presence. Some of these sites (Innisfree Poetry Journal and Barefoot Muse) are simple and present the poems cleanly but without much fuss. Other (The Monongahela Review) attempt to preserve more of the flavor of a print journal. Print journals, of course, have been living on the edge for decades if not forever. Only a few are truly successful (that is, they can cover their costs by subscription and newsstand sales without government, university, or charitable support). Even very successful ones (Poetry, for instance) for most of their lives have barely covered costs and profited (and Poetry is only now set because of a giant estate donation). I ran a journal, and I know how much work goes into it and how little costs are covered, and my journal was nothing fancy with a very short subscriber list. Despite the limited visibility of my journal, I received hundreds upon hundreds of submissions a year.

Most journals do not reach very far in terms of readers. Those that do often carry few poems and the competition to get in them is fierce…and if Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky, Mark Strand, or other “top-flight” poets that (some of whom I like, many of whom I think their work is, well, not good) submit and you’re out. As an editor, how could you not publish them…. At least that’s what I envision editors of such journals thinking to themselves. Online journals, though, are now numerous, cheap to produce, and visible to more people for much longer. I could get a poem published by the Southern Hills Indiana Literary Review, but how many will get to see that poem? Very few, because most people will not be able to obtain a copy and many would not want to pay for it. You cannot find it at your newsstand. You may be able to find it at the local library, but probably only in southern Indiana and only then if the publisher/editor has sent the library a copy. So probably not even in the library. But if the Southern Hills Indiana Literary Review were published online, then any one with an Internet connection, browser, and rudimentary ability to surf the web can find my poem and read it. And because the review will keep archives available for at least a couple of years, the browser does not even need to see it at publication time. As a poet who wants readers, this latter story is far more exciting to me. The fact is, I want readers.

…to be continued…

E-Books and the Future of Poetry, Part 1

In the next few posts, I want to explore poetry’s future in regards to the act of publishing, whether journal or book. I work in publishing (technical computer books) and have some insight into the rapid revolution in the rise of non-print media. While the Sony Reader has been out for a few years and is an excellent device, it’s acceptance has been meager, primarily because Sony was not thought of as a place to buy books. The Kindle is a significant step forward in the advancement of e-publications, primarily because Amazon is a place one goes to buy books, despite the fact that the first Kindle was significantly less advanced and sleek than the Sony Reader. Apple’s iPod was able to create a revolution in the purchase of music because iTunes became the place to purchase music online. The Kindle offers some similar opportunities.

When I think of how my music purchases have changed since I bought my 2nd generation iPod, I immediately notice that I am nearly 100% digital. I only buy CDs anymore when the title is unavailable on iTunes or Amazon (after their introduction of downloadable music). Similarly, I’m making a slow change to digital only movie and TV show rentals, though this is slower than my music switch. I think, however, when I finally purchase an Apple TV and can watch on my full screen, my rentals will veer more to digital.

Apple’s Media Tablet may provide competition to Amazon’s Kindle and could remake the iTunes store into not only a place for music, movies, and TV shows, but also a place for ebooks. We shall see. Additionally, the Kindle does not yet deal with poetry very well. If you increase the size of the font too much, you destroy the line breaks, which death to reading the poem how the poet has constructed it. However, I view this as a temporary issue that will be resolved sooner rather than later.

…to be continue…

Cinema Moments: Another’s Description of Such

I have often described what I call “cinema moments,” which are these points in time when everything seems perfect…as if in our heads we are watching a movie of ourselves that fully captures the ideal. As it happens, I have encountered another source that describes essentially the same thing, though I think he does it more successfully than I. On my to-read list for some time has been Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which I started this past weekend. (For those interested in my reading habits, I recommend GoodReads.)

In the introduction, Taylor describes these moments as “the alignment in us of desire or the drive to form.” This enigmatic experience, this “fullness” he says, “We struggle to articulate what we’ve been through. If we succeed in formulating it, however partially, we feel a release, as though the power of the experience was increased by having been focussed [sic], articulated, and hence let fully be.”

I find this definition spot on, especially the enigmatic, difficult to articulate nature of these moments. And poetry and art are, I think, often efforts to articulate and illuminate these. Taylor perhaps finds them more common that I do, for he also discusses how they can be terrifying, confusing, and destabilizing. He mentions at one point how the real world is abolished and something other appears, noting that Robert Musil called it “‘der andere Zustard’ (the other condition).” The experience can be either frightening or uplifting or both. My point is that Taylor seems to accept it more often than I do. Taking his definition, poetry and art thus more frequently serve as bridges to understanding cinema moments.

Reviewing this post, it all seems to be out there and too strongly to suggest that “unreal” situations are the point of art. I only wish to suggest that this is a part of art’s purpose. The mundane, the normal, the real are just as valuable for art and a source of inspiration.

Titian and the Emperor Charles V

Years ago I read a paragraph from Philip Ball’s wonderful book Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color that has stuck with me. I’ve even tried to fashion a – as yet unsuccessful – poem from it.

Legend has it that Emperor Charles V stooped to pick up a brush that the master [Titian] dropped as he worked in his studio, a gesture of supplication the gravity of which it is hard for us to appreciate today. For centuries afterward, painters must have felt that they were working in Titian’s shadow.

While probably apocryphal, the story resonates and must surely have resonated with the people of the 16th and 17th centuries, when hierarchy, class, and respect for order permeated more deeply into core values and attitudes than anything we could possibly recognize in today’s world.

Here is a version of the poem I’ve been working on based on this legend, “Titian and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V”:

The world’s ancient order overturned briefly
By a single act and long told after
The master’s death by apprentices who
Still smelled of egg and cochineal, whose hands
Still blue from azurite flitted gestures
As they told when the studio fell swift
To rare silence as the master’s brush fell
From his arthritic fingers
And the Emperor stooped and gave the brush back.

When Charles returned to his white marbled
Palace, he sought to set the world aright,
To lift up again the scales of Empire
By razing four rebellious towns, torching
Thirty heretics, and beheading his uncle
For plotting his own separate kingdom.
With blood, Charles found the scales even again
And retired to live his last with monks.

The master returned to his work
For the years left to him, never once
Noting the day that unbalanced Europe:
When the Emperor knelt not to God but to art.

I do wonder if it might work better as

The world’s ancient order overturned briefly
By a single act and long told after
The master’s death by apprentices who
Still smelled of egg and cochineal, whose hands
Still blue from azurite flitted gestures
As they told when the studio fell swift
To rare silence as the master’s brush fell
From his arthritic fingers
And the Emperor stooped and gave the brush back.

The master returned to his work
For the years left to him, never once
Noting the day that unbalanced Europe:
When the Emperor knelt not to God but to art.

Paul Muldoon’s “Moy Sand and Gravel”

I’m trying to square Paul Muldoon’s comment on The Colbert Report, “What poetry is attempting to do, of course, is to help us make sense of our lives,” with the utter mess of Moy Sand and Gravel. The casual “of course” in the statement is telling and completely Muldoon. Here it is a toss off, a seemingly empty phrase that actually carries a great weight in meaning. “Of course” brings the theorizing about the art to a mundane, casual, obvious statement: “Of course this is what poetry does. Why bother talking about it beyond that.” At the same time, it is a grand statement about art and poetry and its purpose, nor is it a statement I am in the end about to disagree. One of the purposes of art does, it seems to me, to attempt to help us to make sense of our lives. How it does this we can discuss endlessly and will ultimately remain as much a mystery as it always has been. We are as likely to understand how art and why we pursue art-making with such relish as we are to understand the motivations of the aurochs on the walls of Lascaux.

As I read Moy Sand and Gravel I kept coming back to Muldoon’s statement and I kept saying to myself that I do not see how these poems help me to make sense of life. They routinely fall flat. There are some pyrotechnics, but to what end:

Brillo pads? Steel wool?
The regurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgitations, what,
of a long-eared owl?

Perhaps this is meant humorously, but I never get these sense that that is Muldoon’s attempt. Certainly he’s more capable than most poets of injecting sly wit into poetry (read some of the poems in Hay, for instance). This book is continuously just blah. Razzle-dazzle but no guts, no feeling. It feels like a poet putting in the motions. Give me bad poetry over this. At least then we can wrangle about its merits, but this “blahness” just provokes boredom. Oh, and this won the Pulitzer…

Perhaps one poem in the collection merits a more positive assessment, “Cradle Song for Asher”:

When they cut your birth cord yesterday
it was I who drifted away.

Now I hear your name (in Hebrew, “blest”)
as yet another release of ballast

and see, beyond your wicker
gondola, campfires, cities, whole continents flicker.

Even then this poem seems built on a house on the sand. The opening couplet is striking in its imagery, takes me someplace I had not expected, while the last couplet brings this poem to a strong close. “Whole continents flicker” is particularly evocative with imagery and emotion to me. The middle couple seems precarious. The parenthetical in particular seems contrary to the flow, the rhythm of the poem. Specifically, as I scan this poem (iambic pentameter with half-foot opening foot – or one could describe it as trochaic that ends with an extra stressed syllable, but it sounds iambic to my ear):

Now | I hear | your name | (in He | brew, “blest“)

the parenthetical phrase interrupts in a very jarring manner the iambs, breaking down the tonal rhythm of the poem. If a reason for this wrenching break exists, I am not sure what it is. I am sure it could be justified any number of ways (the jarring first breath of the baby…but the listener hears the name, not the breath). My point is that this parenthetical disrupts the whole flow of the and thus tone of the poem, which lingers on the edge of melancholy and joy.

Much of Moy Sand and Gravel reminds me of Stephen Spender’s comment on James Wright: “To me, this conveys more the feeling of a kind of poetry that Mr. Wright has read than of an experience he can really have had.”

That Beauty Thing Again, with Essays

Recently, I’ve been forwarded a couple of articles. One, Roger Scruton’s “Beauty and Desecration” in the City Journal, is about beauty and it’s place in the modern world, particularly in the arts. Jed Perl’s “Slaughterhouse” in The New Republic is, in its way, about the same subject, though it focuses on a retrospective of the painter Francis Bacon at MoMA.

I have often blogged about the subject of beauty, particularly as it relates to poetry, so my sympathies with these two authors is pretty clear. I will not rehash my Wilfred Owen commentaries though. This is where Scruton’s essay is particularly interesting to me. He notes the change of value of art from beauty to expression. In essence, anti-art is valued more than “art.” Opposition to beauty is seen as necessary (at least by academics and decision-makers in arts).

For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, and Wallace Stevens, ostentatious transgression was mere sentimentality, a cheap way to stimulate an audience, and a betrayal of the sacred task of art, which is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty—as Stevens reveals the beauty of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

Of course, Scruton hits on three of my favorite artists of the 20th century in this paragraph. He continues this paragraph:

But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront of modern culture. So far as the critics and the wider culture were concerned, the pursuit of beauty was at the margins of the artistic enterprise. Qualities like disruptiveness and immorality, which previously signified aesthetic failure, became marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty became a retreat from the real task of artistic creation. This process has been so normalized as to become a critical orthodoxy, prompting the philosopher Arthur Danto to argue recently that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art. Art has acquired another status and another social role.

Barber certainly has lost his place, but I might disagree about Stevens, who seems to have only risen in poetic value. Nonetheless,  L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry and oodles of gagging confessional poetry and the perceived high value of these modes of expression seem to me the very essence of pushing “beauty” to the margins, that tricks and expression are more valued. Scruton’s article also addresses how we often find beauty, which I’ve broached in my way in talking about finding “quietness” or “cinema moments.” Essentially places of stillness. So much of the world around us is ugly. Ugly is easy:

In art, beauty has to be won, but the work becomes harder as the sheer noise of desecration—amplified now by the Internet—drowns out the quiet voices murmuring in the heart of things.

Scruton is liable to be skewered for his “romantic” fantasies of beauty, of his reaches for understanding of what beauty is, and for his frontal assault on bad art for its desire to push beauty out as a value. Jed Perl, by contrast, will probably be broiled for his unwillingness to simply accept Francis Bacon’s art as great simply because others say it is. Both Perl and Scruton are small cries in the wilderness, and I hope they are not overlooked simply because they challenge preconceived notions.

Perl’s strand really follows up on the idea of expression, that the artist is more important than the art (I think of Andy Warhol with this statement). And Perl says something extraordinarily true and so matter-of-factly that I wonder if it will be noticed at all:

The fact is that an artist’s outward behavior has no fixed relationship to the development or the value of his or her work. But to accept this fact, which really ought to be self-evident, one must accept also the freestanding value of art, an idea that today is devalued when it is not entirely rejected.

Art necessarily stands outside of the artist. We may be fascinated by artists (I am by Shakespeare, Shostakovich, and Caravaggio), but that interest is different than the value of the art. I’m led to my interest by the art (as I’m interested in Roosevelt by his actions) – without the art, I could care less.