Poetry on the sidelines
And the benching appears to be self-imposed:
Despite the panoply of awards and prizes and fellowships (including the Pulitzer), most people get along fine without poetry. This is probably due to the fact that poetry has sidelined itself. It has divorced itself from the fairy tale, to be sure: and despite a raft of indications that its language has devolved into Warholian childishness, it has eloped from childhood. It is full of fantasia and false, passion-toxified images: it is empty of fantasy.
The sidelining of poetry has been abetted by a rejection of work in language. I will list some concepts that have been renounced in most contemporary poetry: structure, decorum, tradition and myth, real symbol. Everything today is negotiable. There seems to be one axiom, and that is the hegemony of self-consciousness: everything else is arbitrary and absurd.
This is not to insist that every poem must consist of, say, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme that never goes farther afield than E; but a fragment of prose with variable line length and seemingly-random capitalization doesn’t suddenly become a poem, no matter how much we may want it to.
Now we are bobbing up and down, as flotsam, in an age of fractured thought. Memories are not organized. Stories are not remembered. The experiences of a day are not threaded onto the skein of meaning.
This is distressing, because — I think — poetry is the threading of meaning, and thus a little bit of poetry is necessary to the work of belief. And if you think that there is no work to belief, then you will never be able to read a poem.
There are times that belief seems to be the hardest thing in the world. A poem which seeks to punch holes in that belief, seemingly for no other reason than that it can, ought not to be silenced: belief must be tested, must pass the test, or it is nothing more than wishful thinking. But that same poem is more likely than most to be hailed as the Harbinger of a Coming Age or some such tautological twaddle (“Contemporary standards are neither contemporary nor standards. Discuss.”), so I reserve the right to take it exactly as seriously as I think I should.
Lisa Paul »
25 August 2010 · 12:28 pm
So I’m guessing you are no fan of William Carlos Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Brian J. »
25 August 2010 · 1:04 pm
Like drama, the academics and the writers have taken poetry and plays from the public. They don’t write poems to please people; they write poems to please other academic poets.
Fortunately, they haven’t quite taken away novels yet, as serious genre writers manage to transcend genre from time to time.
CGHill »
25 August 2010 · 1:07 pm
That Williams verse is very carefully structured; it’s not just thrown up against the wall to see what sticks.
Then again, it took me rather a long time to figure out e. e. cummings.
Baby M »
25 August 2010 · 1:25 pm
There is some extraordinary poetry being produced these days. Good, solid, well-structured, consistent meter, great use of figurative language, poems that work on multiple levels.
It can all be found on the lyric sheets of some recent album releases.
I’d suggest taking a good close look at “My Little Basquiat” by Cowboy Junkies, or pretty much anything by 3 Doors Down, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Vienna Teng, or Over the Rhine.
CalvinsMom »
25 August 2010 · 3:22 pm
Ah, well. This is not the first time poetry has been eulogized, nor will it be the last.
CGHill »
25 August 2010 · 4:18 pm
Well, it’s too early to slam the lid shut, but I’d feel better if some of the newer stuff could resonate with me in the same way as the ones I studied back in the Pleistocene era.
Lisa Paul »
25 August 2010 · 8:48 pm
Then again, there was much poetic crap spewed out in the Olden Days, say, the gallumping rhymes of Alfred Noyes:
THE wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
CGHill »
25 August 2010 · 8:55 pm
I always figured that stuff like that was intended, not to be read, but to be sung. Which makes me wonder when Lady Gaga is going to try her hand at some of Edgar Allan Poe’s tintinnabulation.
Side note: “Tintinnabulation” doesn’t make Firefox’s spellchecker see red. Imagine that.
Charles Pergiel »
26 August 2010 · 3:00 am
Supposedly my father liked poetry. I have a friend who sends me short poetic bits from time to time. I didn’t care for the stuff we read in school, I thought it was mostly drivel. I would say more but my brain has stopped.