Art Scene

Authors and After Words

By Henry C. Timm , Peninsula Pulse – April 1st, 2009

Here in Door County we live in a very special neighborhood in the Land of Making Poetry. I know this because, in an effort to catch up with back issues of Poetry, a publication of the Poetry Foundation, I had a gestalt about my growing indifference to poets writing beyond our county boundaries – certain poets excepted. Perhaps I try too hard to like all the poetry I read in the New Yorker, for example, but more and more I just sit and shrug. But then, in the October 2008 issue of Poetry, I read something that brought my malaise into focus. I wish I could report that my “gestalt” came from reading a poem but it did not. It came from reading a critique by the Toronto poet, Jason Guriel. Herewith is the crucial paragraph of an essay which appears under the title “Not Just Poetry.”

“Our most honored poets are gifted and prolific,” writes Camille Paglia in her recent anthology Break, Blow, Burn, “but we have come to respect them for their intelligence, commitment, and the body of their work. They ceased focusing long ago on production of the powerful, distinctive, self-contained poem.” Clive James makes a similar point when, criticizing Charles Olson’s viral influence on free verse, he praises Frost’s “aspiration to self-containment,” to the “choppily well-separated thing,” to “writing a poem, not just writing poetry.” This shortage of choppily well-separated things is, it seems, pandemic. “We forget that a single poem is an independent work of art, no less than a painting,” observes the Canadian poet Robyn Sarah, diagnosing the tendency of poets to fatten their collections with empty carbs, plumping manuscripts up to the forty-eight page minimum that makes them eligible for awards and publishing subsidies.

A poem, not just poetry. That’s what our era is lacking, claims a growing chorus of pundits…

For years Camille Paglia has given me “guilty” critical pleasure. For all of her flamboyant provocations she is usually, to my mind, right. In the introduction to the above cited book (Break, Blow, Burn, New York, Vintage Books, 2005), among other worthy things, she attacks head on the post-modern critics with their deconstructionist elitism. She then goes on to examine 43 poems, old and new. All of them glisten in the light of her passion for the art and craft of making poems.

Paglia (and Clive James as cited above) are not alone in their concern for the drift of contemporary poetry. In 1992, Dana Gioia posed an interesting question in the title essay of his book, Can Poetry Matter? (Saint Paul, Minnesota, Greywolf Press.) Although, in the essay of that same title, he does not directly describe the condition that Paglia decries, he does wonder about the impact of institutional creative writing programs on the way we understand the creative process. His considerations make me wonder if it could be that such programs, functioning under the need to institutionalize the craft through the publish or perish discipline, might encourage poets to write too widely, producing the kind of authorship that Paglia and others have described. How many poems are written because they absolutely must be written out of a deep and profound need to capture the poet’s feeling at either the highest pinnacle of joy or the deepest agony of despair? This was the challenge presented to me by one of my mentors concerning play-writing with the caveat that scribbling anything in between those two poles was simply not worth the trouble.

But Gioia’s concern goes beyond the individual poem or even poetry. Having noted how poets and their poetry have narrowed the audience to other poets and their students, he goes on to state that:

The most serious question for the future of American culture is whether the arts will continue to exist in isolation and decline into subsidized academic specialties or whether some possibility of rapprochement with the educated public remains. Each of the arts must face the challenge separately, and no art faces more towering obstacles than poetry. Given the decline of literacy, the proliferation of other media, the crisis in humanities education, the collapse of critical standards, and the sheer weight of past failures, how can poets possibly succeed in being heard?

Gioia maintains that “All it would require is that poets and poetry teachers take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public.” He suggests six ways to help accomplish that goal, then ends by telling us that:

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 have once made sense, but today they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto.

It’s time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy not trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let’s build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.

As for bringing poetry to our public in Door County, this April we once again celebrate National Poetry month. Check out the April Harvest Calendar and the events calendar in the Peninsula Pulse, both in print and on our Web site. Then, find someone who has never quite warmed to poetry and bring them to some readings. You’ll both relish in the wonders of our annual April harvest of poetry, grown here in Door County, right before our very ears.

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