Sherry Chandler

Thanks to Charlie Hughes at the Kentucky Literary Newsletter for the link to this David Orr review of Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times (Penguin 2005). Orr meanders rather amusingly through the acessibility argument — can poetry be both popular and “good.” He pokes a little bit of good-natured fun at Keillor but in the end comes down positive.

According to Keillor: “Poetry is the last preserve of honest speech. . . . All that matters about poetry to me now is directness and clarity and truthfulness. All that is twittery and lit’ry: no thanks, pal.” Well, fair enough, pal. Of course, in the literary world, directness and clarity and truthfulness are themselves matters of artifice, but a man is entitled to his preferences. There’s plenty to admire about this anthology and the spirit in which it was undertaken

The most obvious problem with “Good Poems for Hard Times” is that it proposes that “the meaning of poetry is to give courage.” That is not the meaning of poetry; that is the meaning of Scotch. The meaning of poetry is poetry.

I agree with Orr here: poetry is art. Even poems as plainspoken and direct as Elizabeth Oakes’s The Farmgirl Poems are in fact crafted. And like all art, they are about art, not about truthtelling. (See Alan MacKellar’s comments on Shelby Lee Adams.)

And, as Orr points out, there is some artifice in Keillor the populist:

After all, Keillor may praise the homely world of Wobegon, but he is a sophisticated writer with New Yorker magazine credentials and possesses an angry wit rarely heard on Main Street.

There is some insider stuff in this review about duelling reviews of Keillor’s first anthology in Poetry (April 2004) between Dana Gioia (for populism) and August Kleinzahler (for elitism), but it all boils down to this rather comforting statement:

But great poets often produce mediocre work, bad poets can be surprisingly good, and very good poets are frequently no better than consistently above average - all of which is to say that it’s far more difficult to isolate “great poetry” than Kleinzahler (and most critics) might like to believe. We’re forced to live with a chaos of styles and a muddle of best guesses.

The whole article is worth reading. Meanwhile, I can only continue to write out of the muddle and chaos of my intelligence and let somebody else decide which category I fit in.