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          Great poetry’s objective is self-revelation — revelation of a particular self, one’s own or another’s (including that butterfly’s), often represented through personae — as means to exploring the meaning of the human self, or soul, within the context of a purposeful existence. Its concern is “deep essence.”
          Great poetry presents the age-old question: What is the meaning of life, of my life, of all life? Its form might be the representation of persuasive argument, like the intellectual epic Paradise Lost, the dramatic enacting of will and conscience with ultimate consequence, like Antigone, or the imparted present moment of a Basho haiku. Even Homer addresses the question ironically through the adventures, really misadventures, of “heroes” responding, often reluctantly, to the absurd impetus of the Trojan War.
          But the meaning of life is not at issue in the high-confessional, constricting, narcissistic wrist-slashing of, say, the worst of Anne Sexton. The self-absorbed exhibitionism of high-confessional poetry is more concerned with one-upping the martyr persona than revelation of deep essence.
          That kind of poetic temper tantrum, though, could be a very real, very profound form of repression. Perhaps even the last century’s persistent whine that life is meaningless is a kind of bravado, a hidden agonized plea for meaning.

          Or perhaps not.
          What, besides pain, is there to reveal in the postmodern age? Truth is childish phantasm, creation mere construct, art simply a high level of craft or the intentional deconstruction of “art” altogether. Poetry is nothing more than a collage of collective gibberish, the poet merely a mad priest of a mythical Babel.
          The audacity of “poetic creation” is the dreaded archenemy of postmodernism, because it exposes the impotence of contemporary imagination at the site of its greatest virility: language.
          True poets today must create in spite of a schizophrenic environment in which the mainstream reveres poets while utterly disregarding them, and postmodern academia both overvalues and devalues them through their obsessive deconstructive critiques.
          And by postmodern academia I mean Departments of Literature, English, Philosophy, Humanities, Liberal Arts — departments that award PhD’s, not Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry.
          And why are literary academics so critical of graduates of Creative Writing departments? Because on the one hand, academics in general are jealous of writers’ creativity, and on the other, they find the average MFA poet’s lack of literary knowledge appalling.
          Postmodern academics might argue that they have lost faith in the true poet due to the absence of living examples. Rare is the poet fusing exquisite craftsmanship with heightened vision, which (in every age before ours) constitutes art.
          Certainly easier to locate are poetasters — those thousands more concerned with exposé than expression, more ambitious toward celebrity status than poetics, more attentive to “public voice” than poetic vision.
          Since the proliferation of MFA programs, our bookshelves have become well stacked with the outpourings of competent poets. But where are the truly great?
          Perhaps the canon of “great” poetry really is just the fallout of a shakedown by arbitrary judges pontificating from their ivory towers, whose elitist opinions perpetuate the academic status quo, a kind of propaganda of literary bigotry.
          Perhaps the myth of the great poet has been irrevocably demystified by the understanding that vision is a form of myopia.
          Perhaps contemplation of the soul is, as many great contemplators contend, an embarrassing escapism from the reality of impending extinction.

          Then again, perhaps life really is meaningful, even purposeful, and perhaps great poetry truly is our most refined expression of an eschatological drive toward self-fulfillment embedded in the very Logos of existence. Maybe the free human spirit is supposed to involve itself in transcendence the way the universe seems preoccupied with its evolution, or creative emergence, or whatever one wants to call the perpetual, infinite revelation of its ultimate self.
          Is revelation the poet or her poetry? The very fact that this question can be seriously posed is for some a persuasive indication that there is an answer. But it takes imaginative logic to grasp, to believe, this.
          Imaginative logic is not the forte of the postmodern mind. Though it has erased truth in favor of “understanding,” it still believes in scientific facts, which are really hypotheses subject to infinite experiments. Or rather, a fair sample that seems to suggest that the fact is in fact truth. Which is a gesture of faith in every sense — in truth, a fact that eludes the skeptical postmodernist.
          How can anyone whose reality is constructed of spongy hypotheses stand on anything as absolute as a canon of visionary poetry?
          This is not to disregard the issue of elitism. It is to regard the perception of quality, meaning, vision, and art — human perfections — or let us say, perfectionings — in a world not fully within the grasp of the human pea brain. Believing in great poetry is another gesture of genuine faith.
          If it is true, as even many poets believe, that great poetry is not being written today by anyone the average poetry reader has heard of, why would that be?
          Perhaps it is because the great poets of the past lived in a context of tremendous faith. Contemporary faith is in antifaith — an intellectual contradiction that has surely led more than a handful of thinkers to their suicide.
          It certainly has left some of us shaking our heads, as it has me — for instance, when a renowned Humanities Professor, a colleague I like and respect very much, demanded, uncharacteristically banging her hand on her desk, “There absolutely are no absolutes!”
          How can poets become great in an age that has no faith in greatness, no belief in the reality of true creativity, no interest in poetry except as text for deconstruction, that pursues its self-righteous crusade of “decentering” without ever critiquing, or even seeing, its own self-contradictions? Why should poets even try when those who will read them most closely, who will take their text most seriously, do not even believe in poet or poetry in the classic sense? Why sweat blood when the critics of the canon ennoble nothing but their own criticism, which any “text” simply occasions?
          Of course there are those “hidden” critics who are interested in more than deconstruction. For instance, literary academics who do honor the poet’s efforts in articles written for academic journals read by no one but some of his colleagues, librarians with time on their hands, and a few grad students. If only that serious criticism could be brought to the fore to help dispel the hot air of deconstruction.
          And there are, of course, all those poets writing reviews for each other — I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine. The problem is that the reader cannot help wondering if that criticism is more self-serving than objective.
          Then there are those writers contributing bite-size reviews to newspapers for maybe a couple hundred dollars per review. At the time of this writing, the San Francisco Chronicle pays about $110 — a pittance by any standard, demonstrating the review’s lack of importance to that paper. Given the time it takes to closely read a book, consider it, then write a decent review, flipping burgers at MacDonalds would be more lucrative. I have a student who recently fired off an email to an editor at the Chronicle complaining about an absurdly narrow review of Kay Ryan’s latest poetry book. The editor answered her letter by inviting her to write reviews. This without bothering to ask her if she had read anyone besides Kay Ryan or had studied or written poetry. During a panel discussion at a Teaching Poetry Conference a couple years ago, the man who had been assigned the position of Poetry Editor at the Chronicle admitted rather sarcastically that he did not read poetry, knew basically nothing about it, and did not really like what little he had read. Of course some papers like the New York Times do take their reviewers’ and editors’ qualifications and attitudes seriously, and their pay, many times that of the Chronicle, reflects that. Even so, their reviews, as insightful as they might sometimes be, are still lightweight tidbits tailored for mainstream consumption. Editors edit to assure that.

          Though “faithlessness” is the “in” stance of postmodern academia, it is not the consensus among academics or reviewers, and certainly not among the mainstream. Poets do write prolifically for a real audience despite being ignored or mis-critiqued by the postmodern tower, despite the low-impact contributions of lit-crits, despite the quickie reviews — all of which do add up to very real attention. A marketing infrastructure truly does exist. Yet money-grubbing publishers ignore this and seem not to have noticed the proliferation of writing programs and working poets. As always, they publish very little poetry and market almost none and then complain that poetry does not sell. Perhaps this is why so many poets are turning to public readings, poem as speech-act, interviews, how-to books, anthologies, workshops, essays (such as this one), and other attempts to reach the average fellow next door. The mainstream, at least, acknowledges that a poet is a poet.