Poetry, like God, Dies Many Deaths

Toni Clark, of The Waters Poetry Workshop, draws attention to John Barr’s article American Poetry in the New Century, which appeared in a recent issue of Poetry magazine. (I have resubscribed to Poetry and vow I will keep current.) It is another of those articles mourning the death of poetry cruelly killed by inbreeding (a theme familiar to Kentuckians), careerism, and MFA programs. More accurately, Barr sees poetry as a sort of zombie, lurching along neither alive nor dead:

Lacking a general audience, poets still write for one another. (Witness the growth of writing workshops and the MFA programs.) Because the book-buying public does not buy their work, at least not in commercial quantities, they cannot support themselves as writers. So they teach. But an academic life removes them yet further from a general audience. Each year, MFA programs graduate thousands of students who have been trained to think of poetry as a career, and to think that writing poetry has something to do with credentials. The effect of these programs on the art form is to increase the abundance of poetry, but to limit its variety. The result is a poetry that is neither robust, resonant, nor�and I stress this quality�entertaining; a poetry that both starves and flourishes on academic subsidies.

Barr is not alone in finding poetry moribund. In Who Keeps Killing Poetry?, an answering article in The Writer’s Chronicle, D. W. Fenza lists:

Edmund Wilson in �Is Verse a Dying Technique?� (1928); Nick Greene, the fictive character in Virginia Woolf�s Orlando (1928); Karl Shapiro in �Creative Glut� (1979); Donald Hall in �Poetry and Ambition� (which he gave as a keynote address at the 1980 AWP conference in Boston and published in AWP Newsletter, 1987); Joseph Epstein by �Who Killed Poetry� (1988, published again with commentary in AWP Chronicle, 1989); Thomas Wolfe in �Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast� (1989); Edward Hoagland in �Shhh! Our Writers Are Sleeping!� (1990); David Dooley in �The Contemporary Workshop Aesthetic� (1990); Dana Gioia in �Can Poetry Matter?� (1991); Thomas M. Disch in �Castles of Indolence� (1994); B.R. Myers in �A Reader�s Manifesto� (2001); and William Logan in general (from 1950 to the present)

O. V. De L. Milosz in A Few Words on Poetry, published in the 1930s and quoted by Czelaw Milosz in The Witness of Poetry (Harvard 1983) placed the blame on Edgar Allan Poe:

After Goethe and Lamartine—the great, very great, Lamartine of “The Death of Socrates”—poetry, under the influence of Edgar Poe, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, suffered a kind of impoverishment and narrowing, which oriented it, in the domain of the subconscious, toward an undoubtedly interesting, sometimes even remarkable, search which has been, however, tainted with preoccupations of an aesthetic and nearly always individualistic order. Besides, that little solitary exercise has not resulted, in nine hundred and ninety poets in a thousand, in any more than purely verbal finds constituted by unforeseen associations of words and not expressing any internal, mental or spiritual operation. This unfortunate deviation produced a schism and a misunderstanding between the poet and the great human family, which has continued to the present and will not end until a great, inspired poet appears, a modern Homer, Shakespeare or Dante, initiated, through the renunciation of his paltry ego, his often empty and always cramped ego, into the most profound secret of the laboring masses, more than ever alive, vibrant and tormented.

Milosz, at least, thought that some social cataclysm would raise up this new Homer. Unfortunately, the cataclysm when it came only caused Theodor Adorno to declare “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

Such of these articles as I have read strike me as chivvying. They enumerate everything poets are getting wrong without any remedy except that we all must somehow become bigger and better than we are. Like the sparrows to Peter Rabbit, they implore us to exert ourselves but offer no real help in getting out of the gooseberry net. I except Milosz, who did not blame the poets so much as the times for being out of joint. Great spirits cannot arise out of spiritual poverty.

Barr, conversely, reduces the problem to a sort of collective “bad mood.” “Poetry�s limitations today come not from failures of craft (the MFA programs attend to that) but from afflictions of spirit.” He implores us to “live broadly and write boldly.” He gives us Hemingway as an example, as though the cure for poetry is for all of us to give up our health insurance and poach pigeons in the squares of Paris. After Hemingway, not strictly speaking a poet, his examples fall off a bit: Eliot the banker, Stevens the insurance executive, Williams the pediatrician. To which I suppose we can add Gioia the ad man and Barr the Wall Street trader. High adventurers all.

Oh well, I make fun of my betters.

But, as Fenza points out, even MFA graduates have lives.

These writings give me nothing I can use. The doom and gloom only discourage, make me think that the best thing I could do for poetry is to quit.

And perhaps that is so. But I’ve never quite succeeded in doing it. I try about once a week.

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