[Quincy Lehr]

Mark raised a question about the importance of reading contemporary literature on the "poetry book prices thread." It was a good question, but I'll save Tim Love the e-mail notifications and give my answer to Mark's question in a new thread, as well as give others the opportunity to do the same.

"Keeping up with the contemporary scene" (via books, readings, or whatever) is, in my view, both essential and utterly beside the point. While I don't take "poets" who don't read poetry very seriously, at the same time, I don't take poets who have never seen the point in reading authors born before World War I very seriously, either. Writing poetry involves a dialectic with the language that is both intensely personal and historically specific. That is, virtually all "Elizabethan"-sounding verse (I don't mean nicking a rhyme scheme from Spenser here) written today is crapola. It sounds mannered and shitty.

Engaging with contemporary literature is one way--often an important one--of coming to terms with where one's own relationship to the language is. It's by no means the only way. There's also history, the newspaper, the girlfriend, microwaved shepherd's pie, military service, making a point of not joining the military, a packet of potato chips, internet poetry workshops, and what have you. But even if one has a viscerally negative reaction to most contemporary poetry, if one wishes to write the stuff and see it in print, it's worth knowing what's "out there." I was elated when I discovered, to my surprise, that there were serious venues for contemporary metrical verse.

But while it's good to "know what's out there," one has to take a longer view. Talking to many MFA types (not all!), one gets a senhse that they only read contemporary verse, or at least primarily read contemporary verse, that they have been encouraged to be good little citizens of the po-biz juggernaut and position themselves in one of the present-day camps. "Oh, I'll be a Neo-Formalist and read Dana Gioia and Anthony Hecht!" "I'll be a Women's Poet and read Marge Peircy!" "I'll be a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poet and read Bernstein and Silliman!" "I'll be a Black Poet and emulate Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka!" "I'll be a post-Confessionalist and ape Sharon Olds!" BULLSHIT. If you have any creative spark in you at all, you'll have a certain distrust for this.

I suppose I'm a "formalist" insofar as I mostly write metrical verse, but it's really not how I think of myself. I'm more of a non-MFA expatriate Oklahoman poet influenced primarily by writers born in the late 1800s and early 1900s who tends to write relatively long, often faily dark pieces that tend toward the lyrical but frequently have narrative and satirical elements in them. But that's a mouthful.

Quincy

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Quincy, see my answer to Mark in the previous thread - I've left it there as it was about buying books, & not just contemporaries. But of course I do think it is vital to be part of the dialogue, however that may be defined.

I read about half current and half older poetry, plus criticism, plus magazines, plus blogs, plus reviews on the web, plus I go to readings. I'm lucky - mind you, it's not luck. I chose to live in London for a reason, and I put up with a lot to live here. I've seen lots of excellent and wonderful poets read in recent years, ranging from the likes of Les Murray or Paul Muldoon to people I'm friends with - or not!

Of course it is temperament: I'm a mixer. But even a solitary person, if they are writing really seriously, should have some sense of what other artists are doing. Well, that's my view. I buy books - I don't think it's necessary to, but I do think it is necessary to keep as much going into one;s brain as going out of it. And it needs to be high quality input, proper ideas and art and discourse.

Blah di blah. Time for bed! How I do go on.

KEB

[Mark Allinson]

Well, that was full and detailed response, Quincy. A new thread and all.

I think it was Katy’s word “tools” that set me off in the “Poetry Book Prices” thread. I don’t think of other people’s contemporary work as necessary “tools” for working on my own stuff.

I am not AGAINST keeping up with contemporaries, but I wonder how necessary others believe it to be.

My geographic situation (rural Oz), economic condition (pauper) and psychological state (borderline loony), all conspire to keep me in the dark regarding the contemporary scene. If not for the internet, and this place in particular, I would know nothing of it whatsoever.

But as I say, I don’t feel this to be a crippling disadvantage. Having a fairly solid knowledge of poetry from Homer to Heaney helps me cope with the absence of much present-day stuff.

Like Katy, to a certain degree my situation is a product of my temperament and needs. I am by nature a solitary being, almost to the point (some might say well-past) of sociopathology. So I don't miss any of the social aspects of poetry, such as readings or meetings, etc.

If I could buy a great deal of contemporary stuff, I would. But will its lack limit my own work?

I really don't feel that it will.

[Janet Kenny]

Let's say published contemporaries.

We are now, for our pains, in a global society. Although it's obvious that people want to feel at home in poetry and read things that resonate personally in their native dialect, publishing being a monopoly mostly owned by a few major economic powers, means that we are trained like Pavlov dogs to salivate on hearing some names propped up by the industry.

Serendipity often has more to do with publication than quality.

Let's not kid ourselves that we're keeping up with anything. My advice is be guided by appetite and the devil take the rest which will be last year's skirt length before you can say Jack Robinson.

[Quincy Lehr]

Katy, Mark--

I'm relatively outgoing myself where the poetry's concerned (and I started a new thread because I thought the conversation had shifted). I suppose that my point is rather similar to Katy's, except with the caveat that schools are real when it comes to publishing and reading networks, but they're dangerous. This is a mixer's game (and Mark, I'm afraid that includes the internet), but not a joiner's, if that makes sense.

Janet--

I see your point, except I'd quibble with the scale. As has been frequently noted, the major publishers aren't much interested in contemporary poetry. Instead, it's who gets into a limited set of publications, gets written up in the TLS and the like, etc. We ain't in Grisham territory here.

And I'd also partly disagree about the globalization issue more generally. Being an American writer of poetry in Ireland, I'd have to say it's pretty durn different here. Yes, it's the same language (sort of, unless the poet works in Irish), but I've become rather more aware of how American my own verse is since coming here--in cadence, phraseology, and so on. We still have national literatures. I'd say the main difference is that they interact with the literatures of a larger number of other nations nowadays, but Irish tastes are not English tastes, are not Australian tastes, etc., even if there is a lot of overlap.

(Having both an Amazon.com and an Amazon.co.uk account, I can attest to the recommendation pages looking quite different, even though both sites record the same stuff I own. Sure, some of it is the relative lack of American history books over here, but by no means all.)

Quincy

[Mark Allinson]

I agree, Janet, that contemporary publication is not always an index of the best material of the day.

It all comes down to how we measure "success" in poetry - present day "fame" and book sales, or longevity of the material?

My personal definition of success is: that poetry which can survive for at least one century. (Which means that none of us will ever know if we were successful poets, or not).

So, consider the American poetry scene around 100 years ago. Who were some of the BIG GUNS of the day?


Richard Watson Gilder
James Whitcomb Riley
John Bannister Tabb
Lizette Woodworth Reese
Louise Imogen Guiney
Richard Hovey
Stephen Crane
Edwin Markham
Madison Cawein

(from A History of Modern Poetry, David Perkins, 1976).

Only Crane really jumps out of this list, with most of the others almost faded to invisibility today.

The same situation could be expected one hundred years from now, with most of the present BIG NAMES merely footnotes to the history of poetry.

Now this leads to an interesting question, I think:

If you had to choose (imagining for a moment that they are mutually exclusive - which they are not), which would you take:

[1] Contemporary "success" (sales, fame, etc)

[2] Longevity

[Henry Quince]

I’d take the money frst, the fame second, and the longevity third!

Seriously, Mark, you load the dice somewhat by calling it “success” in scare quotes and putting an emphasis on sales and fame. So present success is likely to be commercially motivated and measured, while longevity is somehow a purer thing, a proof of the work’s intrinsic worth or quality? But in fact longevity could just be an indicator of ongoing sales and fame, couldn’t it?

I suppose it could be argued that present fame is more likely to be related to passing fashions in what’s commercial, and long-lasting fame more likely to reflect enduring core quality. Be careful with that, though. Perhaps Kipling’s IF wouldn’t have been voted Britain’s most popular poem only a few years ago if so many older people (and their parents) hadn’t been taught it at school. And some of us still read William McGonagall, poet and tragedian of Dundee, but not because he was a great poet of the late nineteenth century.

Robert Graves put the anti-posterity case well in "To Evoke Posterity". I know — what an irony to quote him on this after he’s dead! I can’t find it online; I’ll limit myself to typing in a couple of stanzas.


TO EVOKE POSTERITY

To evoke posterity
Is to weep on your own grave,
Ventriloquizing for the unborn:
‘Would you were with us in flesh, hero!
What wreaths and junketings!’

And the punishment is fixed:
To be found fully ancestral,
To be cast in bronze for a city square,
To dribble green in times of rain
And stain the pedestal.

.
.
.

Alive, you have abhorred
The crowds on holiday
Jostling and whistling — yet would you air
Your death-mask, smoothly lidded,
Along the promenade?

(Robert Graves)


Sorry, Quincy, if this is a diversion of your thread. To come back on track, I agree with you that some familiarity with “what’s out there” is a good idea, but to actually keep up with everything would leave no time for any writing. I take issue with those who say that the key to success in this or that field of writing is to “read, read, read” constantly, and with those who say that one’s own creativity is fed mainly by the art of others, rather than by life. That may be true at certain stages, but overall I’d say your own experience and how you process it is paramount. Remember the case of Emily Bronte, author one of the most dramatic and well-loved novels in English, who was said to have read very little except the Bible.





[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited November 12, 2006).]

[Michael Cantor]

Mark -

You picked a particularly weak moment in American poetry for your snapshot on poetry survival. Go back a few years, and we had Whitman and Emily Dickenson. And by the 1920s Stevens, Sandburg, Frost and Eliot and many others were beginning to publish.

[Robert J. Clawson]

Originally posted by Mark Allinson:
[BOnly Crane really jumps out of this list...[/b]

Oh, does he. But I suspect he has more readers today than he had when he was "contemporary." He was WAY ahead of his time.

Also, a surperb writer of fiction that eclipses that of, say, Hemingway, or other supposedly great writers who followed Crane. I rank him with Hawthorne when it comes to spellbinding, and each survives reading as though they could be our contemporaries. Great models, those two.

Bob

[Janet Kenny]

Michael and Quincy,
I wasn't making any claims about poets from an earlier era or even saying that nobody good was published nowadays. That's obviously nonsense. However, I do think that the present structure of publishing, and academic control over who gets noticed, has a negative effect on the range and recognition of poets who fall outside the square. I'm not sure what "posterity" is.

Also to Quincy, Ireland is an old country with a strong culture and a firmly established place in the wider British literary scene. A flourishing nationalism probably helps Irish poets to be published in Ireland.

You wrote:
We still have national literatures. I'd say the main difference is that they interact with the literatures of a larger number of other nations nowadays, but Irish tastes are not English tastes, are not Australian tastes, etc., even if there is a lot of overlap.

I absolutely agree. And if you travel a bit more you might end up like me--a bit of many things but not reconisably part of any national voice. That is a rather frightening place for a poet. I think it's a legitimate human voice but alas its market is diffused.

I have known some "global" publishers of fiction (based in New York but international) and they weren't even reading manuscripts any more. There was a recognised path of agents (a select few of them) who also weren't even reading new writers any more but sent "readers" to taste already published writers and fewer of them were being published. The major houses were all being subsumed into larger groups, some based in Germany or elsewhere.

Poetry is very different but those who lack a certain kind of university education have little hope of being accepted, no matter how talented they may be. Again, of course there are exceptions to that but not too many.

That is not a complaint. Merely an acceptance of reality.

Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited November 13, 2006).]