[Guy Lake]

I have been away from these boards for a little while and I was surprised to see that there was no discussion about John Barr's essay in the Sept. issue of Poetry magazine. He has received a lot of press since becoming president of the Poetry Foundation--and since the Foundation received the $175M donation from Ruth Lilly--and he has used his time at the pulpit to call for a new poetry in America.

In particular he complains about the academic setting in which he sees most poets and poems residing. He also wishes that contemporary poetry were not so devoted to the lyric form. It should come as a small surprise that he published a book of epic verse, Grace, a few years back. And, last, he decries the indebtedness most contemporary poets have to modernists such as Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. He finds this kind of work too obscure and difficult (though perhaps beautiful) to attract the broad audience he desires for poetry. And this seems to be his mission--to increase the readership of poetry among the general public. As it stands now, he sees only poets reading other poets and believes this insularity does the form no good at all.

Enough of my summary. To read the essay in it's entirety, follow the link below. I would love to see what the poets of the Sphere think of the essay.

http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazi...nt_178560.html

[This message has been edited by Guy Lake (edited November 14, 2006).]

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks for posting this link, Guy. I'm glad to have read the essay. It did get more notice on another poetry board, most of it directed toward Barr's negative view of MFA programs.
That's the element of the piece I can most readily agree with: too many people are being encouraged to see poetry as a way to paid employment.

Other than that, I find myself arguing with, or at least questioning, several of Barr's fundamental points. Each of my questions could spawn a GT thread of its own. (Some of those threads already exist, I think.)

How do we know the size of the audience for poetry? If we derive it from book and magazine sales and ignore the Internet, the size we compute is certainly too small.

And the audience we can perceive on the Internet is hungry for lyric poetry. Look at The Writer's Almanac and columns such as "American Life in Poetry." Is Barr really complaining that there is too much of what people seem to want?

And poetry as a form of science writing? Didn't we invent the plain style in the late seventeenth century because it was better for elucidating the sciences? (Yes, I should read "Grace" before I argue, but I do question.)

Rather than go on, I'd like to hope that others will pick up these arguments.

[Daniel Haar]

Guy, thanks for posting this. I can't say I agree with everything in it, but he did bring up some interesting issues. Among those, that we should live interesting lives:

"As Auden wrote:


God may reduce you
on Judgment Day
to tears of shame,
reciting by heart
the poems you would
have written, had
your life been good.

— From Thanksgiving for a Habitat


"When poets come to pay as much attention to how they live as to what they write, that may mark one new beginning for poetry. As a Zen tea master, long before the ceremony of making tea, prepares the garden for his guests, sweeps the walk, cleans and composes the room, so poets should give their first attention to the lives they lead. Indeed, if they do not, on what authority can they claim to be Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators of the world?" Indeed, if they do not, how can poetry be a moral act? How can poets answer for the effects of what they write on how their readers live? Poets should live broadly, then write boldly."

Not a bad idea.

[Daniel Haar]

[Sorry, double post.]

[This message has been edited by Daniel Haar (edited November 14, 2006).]

[Janet Kenny]

Guy,
The article is fascinating and blind at the same time. Poetry's problem is the same as music's problem. There is too much bad poetry and too much bad music and a large proportion of the population are content with both.

Popular music and popular song lyrics satisfy the needs of a majority of people. The people left with "poetry" are the ones whose needs are not met by these readily available Macsperiences.

Muzak and Poesak crowd the air waves and lifts/elevators and TV ads. Senses are blunted. Easy sentimentality gives emotional fulfilment with a guitar accompaniment.

My supermarket used to play Rock Around the Classics and I was the only person who complained.

Poets are lonely and always were.

The idea of changing one's life in order to write better is ludicrous. I constantly meet vapid world travellers who drop exotic place names competitively. I think the excellent Mr Barr is very confused.

Poetry is where you live, which in my case has been a good few places and countries, or in Emily D's case, a quiet room.

Poetry in the sense that most of the people here mean poetry will probably never be popular.
Janet

[Daniel Haar]

Janet, you have a point about world travelers. We cannot all be Hemingways. I've recently been to France, Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon, but haven't really thought about how to write poems about those travels. Maybe sometime, but maybe it won't be important.

Still, I think he was on to something, but didn't quite spell it out as well as the Auden poem did. Our writing is helped if we live good and rich lives. It is not necessarily about exciting and exotic adventures. It is probably more about developing rewarding friendships -- learning about the human condition; appreciating the different characters and experiences of those around you; some can get these experiences from books and imagination (like Emily D.), but if you have a sympathetic and absorbing mind, travel can be very enlightening. It all depends on the person though.

[This message has been edited by Daniel Haar (edited November 15, 2006).]

[Janet Kenny]

Daniel,
I came to the conclusion that travelling for work was the only way to know a place and its people. Tourism separates you. The only countries I feel close to are the places where I had some working reason to visit. That way you meet people on a genuine level.

I believe all of that is available at home.

I guess I am enriched by my memory of looking out the plane window (no disembarking) in Bombay, and seeing an enormous string of coloured flowers (women) with plastic basins of earth on their heads. They were helping to build a new runway. Other things elsewhere I won't enlarge upon here. They all add something its true. Peer Gynt and Till Eulenspiegel found they had had it all at home after their wandering. But doesn't a real writer find inspiration everywhere? John le Carré needed to travel--I'm glad he did. I suppose poets do too but it's more important to read and think and see and feel.

In the end one brings a contemporary intelligence to what one writes, whether one travels or not. I think political journalists must travel.
Vikram Seth is enriched by travel.
Travelogue poetry would be incredibly boring.

One could claim that a poet must have many sexual partners--and a hell of a lot of them do--but I've never found it added more than narcissism. One of the things I love about Rhina Espaillat's poetry is her sense of home and faithfulness.
Janet

[Mark Allinson]

I live in an environment where poetry does not exist.

Not one person of my acquaintance in this district has even the most passing interest in poetry.

The main commercial bookstore in the nearest main town has no poetry section.

When I took a few of my chapbooks up to the local tourist shops to see if they would carry them, I could not find one shop-owner prepared to find space for them.

Not one.

They need all the room they have for things which have a chance of being sold.

And a few of them even glared at me, as if I had asked if I could leave a heap of dead rats in their shop.

I loaned two shopkeepers copies so they could see what it was all about. Both said no, and returned their copies without comment.

I realize that it is not as bad as this elsewhere, but it is still a fact that MOST poetry today is read and bought by other poets, and not by general readers.

Partly this is the fallout (as the essay argues) from the high modernist desire to remove serious poetry from mass consumption, and make it more rarefied and difficult. And coupled with the general movement into FV, this desire has proved all too catastrophically successful.

For most general readers now, the word "poetry" implies a little heap of words you have to work at like a cryptic crossword puzzle, and if you don't "get it" (such poems imply) then the fault is all yours (you pea-brain). So, instead of having their intelligence put on trial, they choose to avoid the impertinent encounter altogether.

But beyond this, there seems to be a general lack of interest in the element of the poetic in society today. People seem to have no need for the poetic - which I find truly frightening.

This spiritual aridity, based on a life dedicated to getting and spending, and almost nothing else, seems to have no need for poetic insight into life. They can get on very well without poetry.

For most people today, life seems to be nothing more than a good business opportunity. And such people have no need for poetry in any shape or form.

Before there can be a new poetry, there will have to be a new world, with a different vision of what life is about.

I don't believe that it is up to the poets to change - all they need is an audience which hungers for the poetic again.



[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited November 14, 2006).]

[Clay Stockton]

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:

"{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."

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

[Mark Allinson]

Clay, I noticed the same problem with the argument about Modernism that you mention.

And consider these two points:

Contemporary poetry's striking absence from the public dialogues of our day, from the high school classroom, from bookstores, and from mainstream media, is evidence of a people in whose mind poetry is missing and unmissed.

A study completed earlier this year, commissioned by the Poetry Foundation and conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, finds that a strong majority of readers in this country think well of poetry and will read it when they see it.

But how does one think well of something unmissed?

The apparent contradictions in the essay, concerning the origin and solution to the current state of affairs, leave me with the sense that the deep message here is:

Well, something the hell is wrong, but what that is, or what to do about it, who knows?