Though I don't care much for the sound of axes being ground, this letter said much of what I'd like to say:
http://www.poetrymagazine.org/letters/index.html
Wrigley's letter seems motivated at least in part by protectiveness of Wrigley's profession, but I think he gets it right when he calls Barr's essay a "limp toot-toot." It's hard to imagine anyone, let alone the next Whitman, being inspired by an essay as abominably written as Barr's:
Quote:
"{Modernism} is the engine that drives what is written today. And it is a tired engine."
"{D}escribing how a new poetry might differ from what we have today . . . may not give us an exact picture of the elephant, but when we are done we will have the elephant as described by how it differs from the other animals on Noah's ark."
"Poetry, like a prayer book in the wind, should be open to all pages at once."
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Let's hope that Barr is more adept with money than with metaphor.
And it's not just the essay’s style that's so bad. Its argument, such as it is, is a tissue of clichés. Truisms are trotted out at convenience. Generalizations stand in for facts. For the most part Barr keeps up the pretense of argument by following his various pronouncements with sentences which, if one squints at them just right and thinks about them only very quickly or very slowly, look like they might be evidence. But these supports turn out to bear no weight, as seen in that muddle-headed first paragraph, which claims for poetry a venerable history of fin de siècle renewals (witness the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) only to immediately renounce it (witness all other centuries). What Barr offers ultimately is sentiment, as in this zirconian gem: "I think a dead end is the fate that awaits any poetry that is not a record of the human spirit responding." Of what kind of record, whose spirit does the recording, or to what it is responding, he will not speak.
Nine pages of hooey is what it is. I happen to find myself agreeing with Barr on writers’ solemn duty to be entertaining, but I comfort myself with, yes, a truism--the one about stopped clocks.
I would like to have seen Barr leave aside the hackneyed attacks on MFA programs and use his allotted space to develop some of his points more thoroughly. For instance, he claims that “the combined effects of public neglect and careerism . . . are intellectual and spiritual stagnation in the art form.” Well, that sounds fine, but doesn’t he imply elsewhere that this causal relationship is exactly the other way around, that the continuing centrality of Modernism in contemporary practice has resulted in artistic “stagnation,” which has then caused “public neglect,” which has then necessitated the “careerism” associated with the flight of poets into the academy? He seems to forget his own hypotheses and restate them backwards if that’s what sounds like good rhetoric to him at the moment; unfortunately, though, his ear is no better than his analysis. He’s right when he says that “attitude has replaced intellect,” but he’s not right the way he thinks he’s right.
--CS