Sherry Chandler

As a poet, I am neither experienced nor successful enough to speak much about the politics of poetry in the big world. Nor, since I no longer subscribe, have I read Dana Goodyear’s February article, The Moneyed Muse, pillorying The Poetry Foundation.

So I can’t speak to the accuracy of David Orr’s critique of Goodyear’s critique in Sunday’s New York Times. I was amused by this little passage here, though, which I’ll share with you because I think it’s spot on:

First, The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets. This occurs in part because the magazine has to take Big Names, but many Big Names don’t work in ways that are palatable to The New Yorker’s vast audience (in addition, many well-known poets don’t write what’s known in the poetry world as “the New Yorker poem” — basically an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like “water” and “light”). As a result, you get fine writers trying on a style that doesn’t suit them. The Irish poet Michael Longley writes powerful, earthy yet cerebral lines, but you wouldn’t know it from his New Yorker poem “For My Grandson”: “Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?” Yes, the fluffy chimney.

The New York Times sounds a warning:

“There’s an illusion being created that all the world’s knowledge is on the Web, but we haven’t begun to glimpse what is out there in local archives and libraries,” said Edward L. Ayers, a historian and dean of the college and graduate school of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia. “Material that is not digitized risks being neglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users.”

To be sure, digitization efforts over the last 10 years have been ambitious and far-reaching. For many institutions, putting collections online, for both preservation and accessibility, is a priority. Yet for every letter from Abraham Lincoln to William Seward that can be found online, millions of documents bearing fine-grained witness to the Civil War will never be digitized. And for every CD re-release of Bessie Smith singing “Gimme a Pigfoot,” the work of hundreds of lesser-known musicians from the early 20th century are unlikely to be converted to digital form. Money, technology and copyright complications are huge impediments.

I guess I’m a real Luddite but somehow it has never occurred to me that what does not exist in digital form no longer exists.

I mean, digital research is a fine thing for something like this blog, which is ephemeral in nature and makes no real pretense at scholarship. But if I were a real scholar of history, I would want to look at the real thing. Touch it, too, if I could. Smell it.