~LIPSCOMB PANEL PAPER ON DANA GIOIA
I want to begin by saying there was a time in my life when I hated poetry, loathed it. I should have listened to my preacher, who said that atheists bent on disproving the existence of God often ran straight into Him and became evangelists. Suffice it to say, I once was an atheist about poetry and am now an evangelist, so to speak; and, just as with sharing one’s faith, there are problems in getting out a clear message, especially about poetry. In light of Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?” I want to consider the divide between poetry and its non-audience, a divide that, though it might always be there, needn’t be so vast or pronounced.
Many have written about this divide, trying their darnedest to shore up the ruins but often sounding fatigued, with little confidence that poetry can gain a wide or wider audience. The problem poetry faces is the problem Christianity faces, the same problem scholars face. We live in a culture of distraction where the possibilities for wisdom or insight are dwindling. We are less interested in anything of depth hinting at eternal questions. Most of my own students avoid slowness or concentration, both of which, I believe, are prerequisites to any encounter with meaning, reflection, the still small voice of God, the power of language and, yes, the experience of poetry. Reading anything, Gioia tells us in a more recent essay, “Disappearing Ink,” “has been overwhelmed by other options for information and entertainment.” We might add that, among the markets competing for our minds, poetry, let’s be honest, is often underwhelming.
I might as well get it over with and say that poetry, among the circles I run around in, belongs to the elite, those with time and leisure to sit around thinking about the meaning of life, arguing about nuance, form, iambic substitutions, and “theory” while everyone else just wants to learn enough to keep a job or get a better job if one ever opens up. Part the divide between poetry and its audience looks strangely like—and might be traced back to—the divide between classes. Dangerous ground, I know, in the no man’s land of assumptions differing classes hold, but we don’t do ourselves any favors avoiding them. Not only does class play a central role in how we talk about poetry—defining it, drawing its boundaries, categorizing its types—but also in the success or lack of success of particular poets, between which ones find a wider audience within the subculture and which don’t. It may be issues of class that explain why one writer is labeled as “regional” while another is ushered into the canon or the pages of “important” journals. The insularity of the poetry subculture Gioia speaks of leads to power brokers, career-makers; and the networking so important to get one’s poems noticed requires money. Submissions to magazines, attendance at conferences, book purchases, contest fees—these can cost upwards of two to three thousand dollars a year, most often with no return on investment, a kind of Ponzi scheme benefiting only a few. Poetry is a business, and the cost of getting noticed can be prohibitive.
If it is true that poetry speaks more to the elite than to the other classes; and if it is true that we wish to lessen the divide between poetry and its potential audience, then poetry promoters, the poetry-elite, need to know what they’re up against. Most Americans, it seems, have a profound distrust of poetry, and I sometimes think this dilemma has its roots in how it is often discussed in high schools and colleges. Teachers, like apologists for poetry, are fond of making large claims, holding up poetry as the end-all-be-all of existence. They link poetry with “The Truth,” with “the divine,” with “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.” They tell us that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” “liberating gods,” the “only teller[s] of news,” or that “men die miserably every day for lack of what is found [in poetry].” I don’t want to dispute these claims, only to emphasize what a turn-off they can be to nonreaders we are trying to convert. No one wants to go out with a braggart tooting his own horn, but that’s what poetry advocates sound like too often.
Also, to too many ears, the voice promoting poetry sounds condescending. In my experience as a teacher, I have found that apologists, through hyperbolic claims, send messages they probably don’t intend, in essence saying the following: You are incomplete; poetry is complete. You are wrong; poetry is right. You are ignorant; poetry is intelligent. Trying to convert readers, I doubt we’ll get anywhere insulting the worth of our audience’s lives. As poetry-evangelists, we need to stop making pronouncements and instead get down on the level of the average reader to understand what matters to that reader, that is, if we think poetry can matter, or should matter, to certain people. We need to recognize the validity of their lives, their concerns, hopes, desires, and realms of experience, something a lot of contemporary poetry seemingly ignores.
Additionally, boosterism statements only “preach to the choir.” Poetry promoters, if speaking to potential readers, are still using the language of “believers,” operating under different assumptions, thereby alienating their audience. The insularity to which Gioia has brought attention can be found ad nauseam in discussions and laments about the state of poetry. Pick up any issue of Poetry magazine in the last few years and read the essays in the back, and you’ll get an idea of how narcissistic and whiny we sound to the average reader just stopping in to give poetry a try. I wonder how the divide might improve if poets listened to their non-audience rather than to each other.
~~~
I teach at a community college. My students relate experiences and assumptions about poetry that should worry and/or disturb practicing poets. This past semester, for example, I asked students to write a few comments about their experience with poetry thus far in life. With this ice-breaker, we grope along together, finding ways to discuss poetry. Assumptions become clear; individual schemas open up; catharsis sometimes happens; frustrations and joys and questions emerge. I like to think the “fear factor” they bring begins to give way to the innate craving we all have for meaning in our lives, the deep distrust yet deeper hope we have in the power of language to get us closer to the truth, to the divine, to the richer, fuller life we glimpse now and then but mostly keep to ourselves—too private and holy to share in a crowd.
My students responded as students have responded for almost two decades—negatively. One student said,” My experience so far with poetry has been as far from enjoyable as China is from America!” Another described poetry as “very hard to understand, almost like you have to have a certain brain to read it.” Others described it as “sappy,” “Romantic,” “sweet,” “vomit of the mind,” “boring rhyming sentences,” “confusing,” “dull,” “written with deep meaning,” and finally “insignificant.” Poetry, I’m afraid, has a PR problem, something Gioia has been on the forefront of addressing reasonably and practically.
The sentiment of my students, I fear, isn’t isolated. In fact, the January 2009 issue of Poetry featured a letter to the editor from Alice Pillsbury, a member of the Treemont Retirement Community in Houston, TX. She and fellow retirees were part of a study group reading issues of Poetry. Her letter complained about what passes for current poetry. She wrote,
As it turns out, we cannot make head or tail out of your selected “poems.” We
agree that there is no rhyme and very little reason—only phrases, snatches of
words or thoughts in random order, with very little cohesion. The poems are
neither enjoyable nor enlightening. We feel that we are giving Poetry a fair trial,
but are dismayed to think that this magazine represents the best of modern poetry.
It seems Gioia’s concern about poetry’s ability to “speak to and for the general culture” remains a problem. Nonreaders of poetry—and even those trying to give poetry “a fair trial”—can’t “make head or tail” it. It simply doesn’t speak to their world, nor does it value what they value.
Gioia attributes poetry’s decline partly to, among other things, its proliferation in journal after journal of only poetry—absent reviews and broader-interest articles in a competitive environment healthy for all genres. Competition for space, he tells us, once insured that poems were published because they commanded attention. He says these poetry-only journals have become places where “one can easily miss a radiant poem amid the lackluster ones,” saying that it “takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention.” After two decades of reading literary journals, I will admit that this argument, though true, doesn’t alarm me that much. I suspect poems “easily missed” matter a great deal to poets trying to build reputations and to critics who see themselves as central to steering the canon, but that, too, is a mindset born out of the elite, who often see themselves in administrative roles rather than as team players, tour guides, lackeys or, if I may be allowed to say, servants. I remember, from my childhood, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts singing, “I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation.” Call me naïve, but poetry might find a wider audience if poets, critics, and teachers took those words to heart. Give up reputation, die to self, be filled, and be witnesses. Just as Christianity teaches us, we serve not ourselves but others—not our careers, but those nonreaders who may yet find a poem that shows them their lives more abundantly.
Those journals, by the way, are full of all manner of poems—abysmal, weak, competent, engaging, arresting, stellar, and even radiant. More especially, those journals contain poems that can and do expand the audience for poetry. I encounter them all the time, and I teach them in my classes, radiant poems like Marilyn Nelson’s “Worth” and Bob Hicok’s “So I Know” and Amit Majmudar’s “The Elevator Operator”; and some of my students, by their own admission, never get over them. These students become “new creatures,” so to speak, remade in an image they did not foresee or think possible.
In case I’m not clear, let me say that I am on their side—my students, the nonreader, Alice Pillsbury, the reader frustrated with contemporary poetry. Too often I am fed up with “poetry,” at least the prize-winning poetry leading voices tell me should matter. The role class plays can be found in the assumptions and biases that determine whose voices lead, whose follow. If we think of a journal such as Poetry as a leading or prominent voice, then we might be bothered about its prospects for expanding the audience for poetry. While too many poems make little sense, the reviews are either platforms to advance an agenda, a chance to demonstrate erudition and wit, or little more than marketing masquerading as reviewing. It’s hard to believe anyone reading the reviews can hear a human voice finding and showing what might matter in the work at hand.
The same problem exists online. The website Poetry Daily perhaps carries poetry to a larger audience than, say, Poetry magazine could ever think about doing. As a poet and teacher, its inception excited me. After a while, though, it seemed only marketing for poets, journals, and presses who dominate the poetry world in the first place. Then another website, Verse Daily, cropped up, and a hierarchy settled into place again, with Poetry Daily being “official” and Verse Daily being “second tier.” As a teacher trying to ignite students to read poems, I no longer tend to push Poetry Daily because its selections frustrate students and expand the divide between them and poetry. Verse Daily, on the other hand, seems to have the opposite effect. Students find poems there they simply like, understand, and connect with. Even among the growing audience of poets in my town, some of whom have gone on to publish, Verse Daily matters. As one local writer said, “It looks like they pick good poems instead of names.”
Likewise, Ted Kooser’s website American Life in Poetry, providing free columns to newspapers in America, has a more accessible poetry, appealing to a wider audience. Nevertheless, leading voices look upon his venture condescendingly, as they do upon Kooser’s work. Though he won the Pulitzer prize and served as poet laureate of America, he is still considered mostly a “regional” poet. When Kooser won the Pulitzer prize, I remember one poet saying, “He’s such a lightweight.” Criticism of his work and his website’s selections often use words like “homespun” and “regional,” but are these characterizations based on a desire to expand poetry’s audience or on a desire to narrow the boundaries of what kind of poetry matters? Strangely, his column closely resembles Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz’s anthology A Book of Luminous Things, with its brief commentaries. Milosz, with the clout of the Nobel, is respected and praised while Kooser, homespun Nebraskan, is snickered at and called a lightweight. Though I might prefer Milosz, if I want to convince nonreaders to read poems, to get in on this good thing, I don’t show them Milosz, not at first—I show them Kooser.
Neither Milosz nor Kooser may have chosen the poems we’ll live with for centuries, but one has to wonder about the power and cache a name lends to a project, how a name becomes a lens through which we look and assign value. As I remember, once, a friend of mine roundly disparaged a poem I’d written, calling it a series of nice but random and unrelated lines with no coherent argument. Then, a few years later, the same poem appeared in the New Republic, (accepted by then poetry editor Charles Wright who just happens to have been born in my home county, a fact I was careful to point out in my cover letter, which is probably the only reason he read my submission in the first place). Suddenly, to my friend, this same poem was one of my best. Having forgotten his earlier remarks, he read the poem through the lens of its already mattering, stamped approvingly by The New Republic. In short, assuming the poem “worthy” gave the poem worth.
“Can Poetry Matter?” Gioia asks. The sad answer is that for too many poets, and this goes to the problem of widening poetry’s audience, the answer depends on who says it matters. You’re basically a big deal if the right person says you are, if the right journal or anthology publishes your poem, or if the right press publishes your book. Otherwise, your work “can’t matter,” at least not to the insular world of poets. An editor I know said she was publishing poems by a certain poet even though she didn’t understand or really even like the poems that much. “I see his name everywhere,” she said, “so he must be a big deal.” For the potential reader, though, a poem either makes sense or doesn’t, no matter what credentials or backing the poem has behind it. My students ask a few central questions: does this poem make sense? does it tell me something worthwhile? and can I relate to it? If not, they move on to Ipods, 4G Networks, “Dancing with the Stars,” Fox News, the next Taylor Swift song, and the list goes on and on.
Gioia, to his credit, has stood at this intersection before, calling attention to the divide between “popular” and “literary” poetry. Earlier I mentioned Ted Kooser. Gioia highlighted his work two decades ago, calling his poems “uncommonly entertaining” and “unsurpassed in articulating the subtle and complex sensibility of the common American.” He lamented that the “public whose values and sensibility he celebrates is unaware of his existence” and that he had not received “attention from academic critics.” Gioia points us in the right direction if we are serious about addressing poetry’s marginal status in society, but the fact remains that poets (literary, lauded poets, the elite) will first have to address the kind of poetry that they marginalize, as well as to define who their target market actually is. Do they really want a larger audience, or do they want to broker reputations? Even Gioia’s descriptions of “general readers,” “a potential audience of almost five million” of what he refers to as “our cultural intelligentsia,” is somewhat striking for its exclusivity. Can we not find a poetry that satisfies both audiences—the common reader and the elite—a kind of poetry that appeals to the common American by being entertaining while offering poetry insiders and critics a deeper, more thorough engagement with the same poems?
The answer, if my experience at a community college is any indicator, is yes. Each day I read a poem to my composition classes—something by poets as varied as A. E. Stallings, Tony Hoagland, Bill Brown, Kay Ryan, Gaylord Brewer, Danny Anderson and others. I ask students simply to listen. We don’t discuss the poems, only let them open up a space for language to happen and for us to be attentive. I choose poems, not poets—what works, not reputations. Louis Gluck, Robert Pinsky, out. Linda Pastan, William Stafford, Philip Levine, in. Geoffrey Hill, out. William Logan, not a chance. Wilmer Mills, Jane Kenyon, Andrew Hudgins, in. John Ashbery, no matter what Harold Bloom says, out. My students admit being surprised that they “get” and better yet “enjoy” these poems. One of my former students, who came out of a trailer trying to make a better life, said that I came into class the first day, opened up a book, read a poem, and she suddenly felt “the hinge of her life” turning. She is now a middle school English teacher, an advocate for poetry. Another student, a former truckdriver, can’t get over the fact that he now reads poems. It’s like his whole identity has been swapped for another one he used to make fun of. “I never thought I’d be the kind of person to read a poem,” he said one day.
The problem, though, with discussing class is how not to be dismissed by established poets since the line between what’s popular and literary is so firmly entrenched. A few years ago, Dana Gioia and August Kleinzahler squared off in Poetry magazine, answering whether or not Garrison Keillor’s anthology Good Poems was, in fact, “good” for poetry. While Gioia spoke of the anthology’s “inclusion of neglected writers,” saying that it was “full of discoveries,” Kleinzahler called the anthology “comfort food for the philistines.” Elitist as this comment sounds, later, when he refers to Keillor having “strayed off the reservation,” one has to wonder what his real motive is. Some poets should just stay in their place? Keillor’s anthology has plenty of poems to convert nonreaders, and one gets the sense that Kleinzahler is more troubled by the fact that Keillor has a say in the matter than he is by the poems selected for inclusion.
I’m sure Gioia knows the land mines he’s stepping on when he uses words like “plainspoken” in his description of Keillor’s choices, noting that the poems rely not so much on “verbal music” to be memorable but on “storytelling.” Kleinzahler, on the other hand, says that the “typical Keillor selection tends to be anecdotal, wistful.” Where one sees storytelling, the other sees anecdotes; where one sees poems aimed at “ordinary human purposes,” the other sees poems “offer[ing] the masses reassurance and diversion.” Kleinzahler explicitly widens the gap between poetry and the wider culture when he states,
Are we not yet adult enough as a culture to acknowledge that the arts are not for
everyone, and that bad art is worse than no art at all; and that good or bad, art’s
exclusive function is to entertain, not to improve or nourish or console, simply
entertain.
I’m not sure at what point a poem moves from entertaining to nourishing, anecdote to story, but Kleinzahler does mention appreciating “enlightened selections of the work of well-known contemporaries” such as C. K. Williams, a poet, I might add, who writes anecdotal/story-based poems some would call nourishing, except that he won the Pulitzer prize, which must make his anecdotal/story-based poems “enlightened” and “entertaining”—though, thankfully, not “sentimental” or “philistine.”
~~~
As we move forward—assuming we can—we might be mindful of conditions that have the potential to lessen the divide between poets and their audience. First, in much the same way that Jesus came along and challenged existing power structures, the internet has the potential to redefine whose voice matters. I’m not equating the internet with Jesus, only suggesting that it may redraw the boundaries of whose voices matter; in the future, it’s likely that poets will begin to emerge who could not, and would not, succeed within the current paradigm of publishing. Under the current system, a poet sends poems to journals, hoping to make it out of the slush pile and be recognized, pulling whatever strings he or she can to get noticed. It is easy to imagine “leading” journals and voices being superseded by personal websites featuring audio and video. Isn’t the moniker “regional,” for the most part, a matter of distribution, and can’t the internet make available those poets whose books are not found in Borders or Barnes & Noble?
Second, poets need to get their own house in order before asking visitors in for a visit. Though there have always been questions of integrity concerning contests, prizes, grants, etc., these issues have lately shaken the foundations upon which careers are built. Conversations among poets reveal a lack of faith in the systems of poetry, that is, book contests, conferences, journal publications, anthology representation, awards, prize nominees and recipients. Few seem to believe anymore that success or recognition is based on the merits of the work; instead, the poetry world resembles the “real world,” i.e. backroom deals, nepotism, spin, and politics. To what degree such realities are true or not, pervasive or not, depends upon whom you ask. Nevertheless, the perception of impropriety has caused many poets to lose faith in ever finding an audience. Meanwhile, amid the bickering, the divide widens.
Third, poets can’t ask to be read if they do not read other poets. Gioia may have observed twenty years ago that the primary audience for poetry is other poets, but in the years since his essay, the poets other poets read may have narrowed so much that it’s likely most poets have not even heard of most other poets, much less read them.
I once told a poet that his physical appearance resembled another poet, and he said, “Who?”
“You know, Poet A,” I said, “who wrote x, y, and z.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” he replied.
I was shocked, since the poet I was speaking of taught at a neighboring university less than 45 miles away from where the two of us were standing. He was the author of seven books, two prize winners; his poems appeared regularly everywhere; he was even an editor and several-times contributor to the Pushcart Prize anthology. How could his name go unrecognized by another poet living so close by? If I have an alarmist button to push, it’s this one: how do we expect a wider culture to read us if we don’t even read each other?
~~~
Gioia’s essay, which came out while I was in graduate school in the early 90s, prompted much discussion between my poet friends and me and probably, without our being too aware of it, gave us direction, a mandate. While I agree with most of his essay, I sometimes think that what he describes as a problem—namely “the legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators…the primary audience for contemporary verse”—has the potential to become part of the solution as well. Gioia’s influence has been to prompt MFA-minted teacher-poets, like myself, to grapple with his central question: Can poetry matter? The answer, of course, as William Stafford once said, is yes, no, or maybe. So much depends upon how we position the wheelbarrow, toward whom we point it. “[T]he legions of teachers [and] graduate students,” who may be “a relatively small and isolated group,” as Gioia calls us, can play a vital role in expanding the audience for poetry. Given that so many of us, as inevitably had to happen, found jobs not at elite institutions but at community colleges, encountering almost 12 million students a year, more than twice as many as the “cultural intelligentsia” Gioia mentions, it is likely that we are, completely under the radar, rewriting the ground the poetry-elites walk upon. No matter what poems we are told matter, or can matter, or should matter—by the journals, contests, publishers, critics, and anthologies—each of us makes his or her own anthology. I’m just one person, who remembers Jesus saying “Whatever you do to the least of these…,” one person who has already converted more than twelve, plus all the ones they have converted too, a kind of reverse Ponzi scheme reclaiming poetry for average Americans. Who knows how many of us have wandered off the reservation, ignoring the boundaries that were drawn for us. Who knows how many of us have already abandoned the syllabus.
I want to begin by saying there was a time in my life when I hated poetry, loathed it. I should have listened to my preacher, who said that atheists bent on disproving the existence of God often ran straight into Him and became evangelists. Suffice it to say, I once was an atheist about poetry and am now an evangelist, so to speak; and, just as with sharing one’s faith, there are problems in getting out a clear message, especially about poetry. In light of Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?” I want to consider the divide between poetry and its non-audience, a divide that, though it might always be there, needn’t be so vast or pronounced.
Many have written about this divide, trying their darnedest to shore up the ruins but often sounding fatigued, with little confidence that poetry can gain a wide or wider audience. The problem poetry faces is the problem Christianity faces, the same problem scholars face. We live in a culture of distraction where the possibilities for wisdom or insight are dwindling. We are less interested in anything of depth hinting at eternal questions. Most of my own students avoid slowness or concentration, both of which, I believe, are prerequisites to any encounter with meaning, reflection, the still small voice of God, the power of language and, yes, the experience of poetry. Reading anything, Gioia tells us in a more recent essay, “Disappearing Ink,” “has been overwhelmed by other options for information and entertainment.” We might add that, among the markets competing for our minds, poetry, let’s be honest, is often underwhelming.
I might as well get it over with and say that poetry, among the circles I run around in, belongs to the elite, those with time and leisure to sit around thinking about the meaning of life, arguing about nuance, form, iambic substitutions, and “theory” while everyone else just wants to learn enough to keep a job or get a better job if one ever opens up. Part the divide between poetry and its audience looks strangely like—and might be traced back to—the divide between classes. Dangerous ground, I know, in the no man’s land of assumptions differing classes hold, but we don’t do ourselves any favors avoiding them. Not only does class play a central role in how we talk about poetry—defining it, drawing its boundaries, categorizing its types—but also in the success or lack of success of particular poets, between which ones find a wider audience within the subculture and which don’t. It may be issues of class that explain why one writer is labeled as “regional” while another is ushered into the canon or the pages of “important” journals. The insularity of the poetry subculture Gioia speaks of leads to power brokers, career-makers; and the networking so important to get one’s poems noticed requires money. Submissions to magazines, attendance at conferences, book purchases, contest fees—these can cost upwards of two to three thousand dollars a year, most often with no return on investment, a kind of Ponzi scheme benefiting only a few. Poetry is a business, and the cost of getting noticed can be prohibitive.
If it is true that poetry speaks more to the elite than to the other classes; and if it is true that we wish to lessen the divide between poetry and its potential audience, then poetry promoters, the poetry-elite, need to know what they’re up against. Most Americans, it seems, have a profound distrust of poetry, and I sometimes think this dilemma has its roots in how it is often discussed in high schools and colleges. Teachers, like apologists for poetry, are fond of making large claims, holding up poetry as the end-all-be-all of existence. They link poetry with “The Truth,” with “the divine,” with “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.” They tell us that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” “liberating gods,” the “only teller[s] of news,” or that “men die miserably every day for lack of what is found [in poetry].” I don’t want to dispute these claims, only to emphasize what a turn-off they can be to nonreaders we are trying to convert. No one wants to go out with a braggart tooting his own horn, but that’s what poetry advocates sound like too often.
Also, to too many ears, the voice promoting poetry sounds condescending. In my experience as a teacher, I have found that apologists, through hyperbolic claims, send messages they probably don’t intend, in essence saying the following: You are incomplete; poetry is complete. You are wrong; poetry is right. You are ignorant; poetry is intelligent. Trying to convert readers, I doubt we’ll get anywhere insulting the worth of our audience’s lives. As poetry-evangelists, we need to stop making pronouncements and instead get down on the level of the average reader to understand what matters to that reader, that is, if we think poetry can matter, or should matter, to certain people. We need to recognize the validity of their lives, their concerns, hopes, desires, and realms of experience, something a lot of contemporary poetry seemingly ignores.
Additionally, boosterism statements only “preach to the choir.” Poetry promoters, if speaking to potential readers, are still using the language of “believers,” operating under different assumptions, thereby alienating their audience. The insularity to which Gioia has brought attention can be found ad nauseam in discussions and laments about the state of poetry. Pick up any issue of Poetry magazine in the last few years and read the essays in the back, and you’ll get an idea of how narcissistic and whiny we sound to the average reader just stopping in to give poetry a try. I wonder how the divide might improve if poets listened to their non-audience rather than to each other.
~~~
I teach at a community college. My students relate experiences and assumptions about poetry that should worry and/or disturb practicing poets. This past semester, for example, I asked students to write a few comments about their experience with poetry thus far in life. With this ice-breaker, we grope along together, finding ways to discuss poetry. Assumptions become clear; individual schemas open up; catharsis sometimes happens; frustrations and joys and questions emerge. I like to think the “fear factor” they bring begins to give way to the innate craving we all have for meaning in our lives, the deep distrust yet deeper hope we have in the power of language to get us closer to the truth, to the divine, to the richer, fuller life we glimpse now and then but mostly keep to ourselves—too private and holy to share in a crowd.
My students responded as students have responded for almost two decades—negatively. One student said,” My experience so far with poetry has been as far from enjoyable as China is from America!” Another described poetry as “very hard to understand, almost like you have to have a certain brain to read it.” Others described it as “sappy,” “Romantic,” “sweet,” “vomit of the mind,” “boring rhyming sentences,” “confusing,” “dull,” “written with deep meaning,” and finally “insignificant.” Poetry, I’m afraid, has a PR problem, something Gioia has been on the forefront of addressing reasonably and practically.
The sentiment of my students, I fear, isn’t isolated. In fact, the January 2009 issue of Poetry featured a letter to the editor from Alice Pillsbury, a member of the Treemont Retirement Community in Houston, TX. She and fellow retirees were part of a study group reading issues of Poetry. Her letter complained about what passes for current poetry. She wrote,
As it turns out, we cannot make head or tail out of your selected “poems.” We
agree that there is no rhyme and very little reason—only phrases, snatches of
words or thoughts in random order, with very little cohesion. The poems are
neither enjoyable nor enlightening. We feel that we are giving Poetry a fair trial,
but are dismayed to think that this magazine represents the best of modern poetry.
It seems Gioia’s concern about poetry’s ability to “speak to and for the general culture” remains a problem. Nonreaders of poetry—and even those trying to give poetry “a fair trial”—can’t “make head or tail” it. It simply doesn’t speak to their world, nor does it value what they value.
Gioia attributes poetry’s decline partly to, among other things, its proliferation in journal after journal of only poetry—absent reviews and broader-interest articles in a competitive environment healthy for all genres. Competition for space, he tells us, once insured that poems were published because they commanded attention. He says these poetry-only journals have become places where “one can easily miss a radiant poem amid the lackluster ones,” saying that it “takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention.” After two decades of reading literary journals, I will admit that this argument, though true, doesn’t alarm me that much. I suspect poems “easily missed” matter a great deal to poets trying to build reputations and to critics who see themselves as central to steering the canon, but that, too, is a mindset born out of the elite, who often see themselves in administrative roles rather than as team players, tour guides, lackeys or, if I may be allowed to say, servants. I remember, from my childhood, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts singing, “I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation.” Call me naïve, but poetry might find a wider audience if poets, critics, and teachers took those words to heart. Give up reputation, die to self, be filled, and be witnesses. Just as Christianity teaches us, we serve not ourselves but others—not our careers, but those nonreaders who may yet find a poem that shows them their lives more abundantly.
Those journals, by the way, are full of all manner of poems—abysmal, weak, competent, engaging, arresting, stellar, and even radiant. More especially, those journals contain poems that can and do expand the audience for poetry. I encounter them all the time, and I teach them in my classes, radiant poems like Marilyn Nelson’s “Worth” and Bob Hicok’s “So I Know” and Amit Majmudar’s “The Elevator Operator”; and some of my students, by their own admission, never get over them. These students become “new creatures,” so to speak, remade in an image they did not foresee or think possible.
In case I’m not clear, let me say that I am on their side—my students, the nonreader, Alice Pillsbury, the reader frustrated with contemporary poetry. Too often I am fed up with “poetry,” at least the prize-winning poetry leading voices tell me should matter. The role class plays can be found in the assumptions and biases that determine whose voices lead, whose follow. If we think of a journal such as Poetry as a leading or prominent voice, then we might be bothered about its prospects for expanding the audience for poetry. While too many poems make little sense, the reviews are either platforms to advance an agenda, a chance to demonstrate erudition and wit, or little more than marketing masquerading as reviewing. It’s hard to believe anyone reading the reviews can hear a human voice finding and showing what might matter in the work at hand.
The same problem exists online. The website Poetry Daily perhaps carries poetry to a larger audience than, say, Poetry magazine could ever think about doing. As a poet and teacher, its inception excited me. After a while, though, it seemed only marketing for poets, journals, and presses who dominate the poetry world in the first place. Then another website, Verse Daily, cropped up, and a hierarchy settled into place again, with Poetry Daily being “official” and Verse Daily being “second tier.” As a teacher trying to ignite students to read poems, I no longer tend to push Poetry Daily because its selections frustrate students and expand the divide between them and poetry. Verse Daily, on the other hand, seems to have the opposite effect. Students find poems there they simply like, understand, and connect with. Even among the growing audience of poets in my town, some of whom have gone on to publish, Verse Daily matters. As one local writer said, “It looks like they pick good poems instead of names.”
Likewise, Ted Kooser’s website American Life in Poetry, providing free columns to newspapers in America, has a more accessible poetry, appealing to a wider audience. Nevertheless, leading voices look upon his venture condescendingly, as they do upon Kooser’s work. Though he won the Pulitzer prize and served as poet laureate of America, he is still considered mostly a “regional” poet. When Kooser won the Pulitzer prize, I remember one poet saying, “He’s such a lightweight.” Criticism of his work and his website’s selections often use words like “homespun” and “regional,” but are these characterizations based on a desire to expand poetry’s audience or on a desire to narrow the boundaries of what kind of poetry matters? Strangely, his column closely resembles Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz’s anthology A Book of Luminous Things, with its brief commentaries. Milosz, with the clout of the Nobel, is respected and praised while Kooser, homespun Nebraskan, is snickered at and called a lightweight. Though I might prefer Milosz, if I want to convince nonreaders to read poems, to get in on this good thing, I don’t show them Milosz, not at first—I show them Kooser.
Neither Milosz nor Kooser may have chosen the poems we’ll live with for centuries, but one has to wonder about the power and cache a name lends to a project, how a name becomes a lens through which we look and assign value. As I remember, once, a friend of mine roundly disparaged a poem I’d written, calling it a series of nice but random and unrelated lines with no coherent argument. Then, a few years later, the same poem appeared in the New Republic, (accepted by then poetry editor Charles Wright who just happens to have been born in my home county, a fact I was careful to point out in my cover letter, which is probably the only reason he read my submission in the first place). Suddenly, to my friend, this same poem was one of my best. Having forgotten his earlier remarks, he read the poem through the lens of its already mattering, stamped approvingly by The New Republic. In short, assuming the poem “worthy” gave the poem worth.
“Can Poetry Matter?” Gioia asks. The sad answer is that for too many poets, and this goes to the problem of widening poetry’s audience, the answer depends on who says it matters. You’re basically a big deal if the right person says you are, if the right journal or anthology publishes your poem, or if the right press publishes your book. Otherwise, your work “can’t matter,” at least not to the insular world of poets. An editor I know said she was publishing poems by a certain poet even though she didn’t understand or really even like the poems that much. “I see his name everywhere,” she said, “so he must be a big deal.” For the potential reader, though, a poem either makes sense or doesn’t, no matter what credentials or backing the poem has behind it. My students ask a few central questions: does this poem make sense? does it tell me something worthwhile? and can I relate to it? If not, they move on to Ipods, 4G Networks, “Dancing with the Stars,” Fox News, the next Taylor Swift song, and the list goes on and on.
Gioia, to his credit, has stood at this intersection before, calling attention to the divide between “popular” and “literary” poetry. Earlier I mentioned Ted Kooser. Gioia highlighted his work two decades ago, calling his poems “uncommonly entertaining” and “unsurpassed in articulating the subtle and complex sensibility of the common American.” He lamented that the “public whose values and sensibility he celebrates is unaware of his existence” and that he had not received “attention from academic critics.” Gioia points us in the right direction if we are serious about addressing poetry’s marginal status in society, but the fact remains that poets (literary, lauded poets, the elite) will first have to address the kind of poetry that they marginalize, as well as to define who their target market actually is. Do they really want a larger audience, or do they want to broker reputations? Even Gioia’s descriptions of “general readers,” “a potential audience of almost five million” of what he refers to as “our cultural intelligentsia,” is somewhat striking for its exclusivity. Can we not find a poetry that satisfies both audiences—the common reader and the elite—a kind of poetry that appeals to the common American by being entertaining while offering poetry insiders and critics a deeper, more thorough engagement with the same poems?
The answer, if my experience at a community college is any indicator, is yes. Each day I read a poem to my composition classes—something by poets as varied as A. E. Stallings, Tony Hoagland, Bill Brown, Kay Ryan, Gaylord Brewer, Danny Anderson and others. I ask students simply to listen. We don’t discuss the poems, only let them open up a space for language to happen and for us to be attentive. I choose poems, not poets—what works, not reputations. Louis Gluck, Robert Pinsky, out. Linda Pastan, William Stafford, Philip Levine, in. Geoffrey Hill, out. William Logan, not a chance. Wilmer Mills, Jane Kenyon, Andrew Hudgins, in. John Ashbery, no matter what Harold Bloom says, out. My students admit being surprised that they “get” and better yet “enjoy” these poems. One of my former students, who came out of a trailer trying to make a better life, said that I came into class the first day, opened up a book, read a poem, and she suddenly felt “the hinge of her life” turning. She is now a middle school English teacher, an advocate for poetry. Another student, a former truckdriver, can’t get over the fact that he now reads poems. It’s like his whole identity has been swapped for another one he used to make fun of. “I never thought I’d be the kind of person to read a poem,” he said one day.
The problem, though, with discussing class is how not to be dismissed by established poets since the line between what’s popular and literary is so firmly entrenched. A few years ago, Dana Gioia and August Kleinzahler squared off in Poetry magazine, answering whether or not Garrison Keillor’s anthology Good Poems was, in fact, “good” for poetry. While Gioia spoke of the anthology’s “inclusion of neglected writers,” saying that it was “full of discoveries,” Kleinzahler called the anthology “comfort food for the philistines.” Elitist as this comment sounds, later, when he refers to Keillor having “strayed off the reservation,” one has to wonder what his real motive is. Some poets should just stay in their place? Keillor’s anthology has plenty of poems to convert nonreaders, and one gets the sense that Kleinzahler is more troubled by the fact that Keillor has a say in the matter than he is by the poems selected for inclusion.
I’m sure Gioia knows the land mines he’s stepping on when he uses words like “plainspoken” in his description of Keillor’s choices, noting that the poems rely not so much on “verbal music” to be memorable but on “storytelling.” Kleinzahler, on the other hand, says that the “typical Keillor selection tends to be anecdotal, wistful.” Where one sees storytelling, the other sees anecdotes; where one sees poems aimed at “ordinary human purposes,” the other sees poems “offer[ing] the masses reassurance and diversion.” Kleinzahler explicitly widens the gap between poetry and the wider culture when he states,
Are we not yet adult enough as a culture to acknowledge that the arts are not for
everyone, and that bad art is worse than no art at all; and that good or bad, art’s
exclusive function is to entertain, not to improve or nourish or console, simply
entertain.
I’m not sure at what point a poem moves from entertaining to nourishing, anecdote to story, but Kleinzahler does mention appreciating “enlightened selections of the work of well-known contemporaries” such as C. K. Williams, a poet, I might add, who writes anecdotal/story-based poems some would call nourishing, except that he won the Pulitzer prize, which must make his anecdotal/story-based poems “enlightened” and “entertaining”—though, thankfully, not “sentimental” or “philistine.”
~~~
As we move forward—assuming we can—we might be mindful of conditions that have the potential to lessen the divide between poets and their audience. First, in much the same way that Jesus came along and challenged existing power structures, the internet has the potential to redefine whose voice matters. I’m not equating the internet with Jesus, only suggesting that it may redraw the boundaries of whose voices matter; in the future, it’s likely that poets will begin to emerge who could not, and would not, succeed within the current paradigm of publishing. Under the current system, a poet sends poems to journals, hoping to make it out of the slush pile and be recognized, pulling whatever strings he or she can to get noticed. It is easy to imagine “leading” journals and voices being superseded by personal websites featuring audio and video. Isn’t the moniker “regional,” for the most part, a matter of distribution, and can’t the internet make available those poets whose books are not found in Borders or Barnes & Noble?
Second, poets need to get their own house in order before asking visitors in for a visit. Though there have always been questions of integrity concerning contests, prizes, grants, etc., these issues have lately shaken the foundations upon which careers are built. Conversations among poets reveal a lack of faith in the systems of poetry, that is, book contests, conferences, journal publications, anthology representation, awards, prize nominees and recipients. Few seem to believe anymore that success or recognition is based on the merits of the work; instead, the poetry world resembles the “real world,” i.e. backroom deals, nepotism, spin, and politics. To what degree such realities are true or not, pervasive or not, depends upon whom you ask. Nevertheless, the perception of impropriety has caused many poets to lose faith in ever finding an audience. Meanwhile, amid the bickering, the divide widens.
Third, poets can’t ask to be read if they do not read other poets. Gioia may have observed twenty years ago that the primary audience for poetry is other poets, but in the years since his essay, the poets other poets read may have narrowed so much that it’s likely most poets have not even heard of most other poets, much less read them.
I once told a poet that his physical appearance resembled another poet, and he said, “Who?”
“You know, Poet A,” I said, “who wrote x, y, and z.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” he replied.
I was shocked, since the poet I was speaking of taught at a neighboring university less than 45 miles away from where the two of us were standing. He was the author of seven books, two prize winners; his poems appeared regularly everywhere; he was even an editor and several-times contributor to the Pushcart Prize anthology. How could his name go unrecognized by another poet living so close by? If I have an alarmist button to push, it’s this one: how do we expect a wider culture to read us if we don’t even read each other?
~~~
Gioia’s essay, which came out while I was in graduate school in the early 90s, prompted much discussion between my poet friends and me and probably, without our being too aware of it, gave us direction, a mandate. While I agree with most of his essay, I sometimes think that what he describes as a problem—namely “the legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators…the primary audience for contemporary verse”—has the potential to become part of the solution as well. Gioia’s influence has been to prompt MFA-minted teacher-poets, like myself, to grapple with his central question: Can poetry matter? The answer, of course, as William Stafford once said, is yes, no, or maybe. So much depends upon how we position the wheelbarrow, toward whom we point it. “[T]he legions of teachers [and] graduate students,” who may be “a relatively small and isolated group,” as Gioia calls us, can play a vital role in expanding the audience for poetry. Given that so many of us, as inevitably had to happen, found jobs not at elite institutions but at community colleges, encountering almost 12 million students a year, more than twice as many as the “cultural intelligentsia” Gioia mentions, it is likely that we are, completely under the radar, rewriting the ground the poetry-elites walk upon. No matter what poems we are told matter, or can matter, or should matter—by the journals, contests, publishers, critics, and anthologies—each of us makes his or her own anthology. I’m just one person, who remembers Jesus saying “Whatever you do to the least of these…,” one person who has already converted more than twelve, plus all the ones they have converted too, a kind of reverse Ponzi scheme reclaiming poetry for average Americans. Who knows how many of us have wandered off the reservation, ignoring the boundaries that were drawn for us. Who knows how many of us have already abandoned the syllabus.
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