I was on twitter this evening, doing my usual check of what Steve Martin is saying about his banjo career and came across this link from Jericho Brown, who was blogging for poets.org.
I write this with the caveat that I don’t know the author of this blog, or anything about them.And after reading this post I didn’t read the rest of their blog, because this post includes such stuff as:
“Inaccessible poets are good at pleasing themselves and a few MFA types who have the time to spend hours reading a poem over and over to understand that the poet said green, but meant vomit. I, like most of the world, am too busy to spend that much time deciphering a poem. It is insulting to the reader to assume that they will invest that time before you have even gained their attention and their hearts and minds with your willingness to come to the reader.”
Perhaps it’s unfair of me to single out this post, but I feel like this is a common argument about what poets are doing wrong, so I’m going to try and utilize this post to get to some points (and if the author didn’t want other people to link and comment on their blog post, well, they shouldn’t have put it on the internet.) I’m going to go ahead and respond to this sentence by sentence:
1) “Inaccessible poets are good at pleasing themselves and a few MFA types who have the time to spend hours reading a poem over and over to understand that the poet said green, but meant vomit.”
First, I abhor it when people make generalizations. Tell me what poets you’re talking about. it’s impossible to actually respond to anything you’re saying about “them” without looking at the work. Second, “MFA types” is, again, vague and pejorative. What is an “MFA type”. I got an MFA, and there were all sorts of types in there. We ranged across the spectrum of class, race, and age (if you’re going about the traditional modes of “typing” people). There was intense disagreement in my program about poetics, just as I have encountered outside of school in the “real” world. I’m not a wholehearted believer in the MFA system (I think it’s good for some and poison for others) but this seems reductive in a way that is not beneficial to coherent argument. Third, I’m trying to picture the line where a poet said “green” and meant “vomit”. Was it lazy metaphor or metonymy that led to the confusion? Was it just a bad line? Was it a musical/visual/tactile choice rather than a literal choice? From what I’ve read, there aren’t a lot of “mainstream” contemporary poets who are just trying to make the reader work harder, but hey, I haven’t read everything. Perhaps the author is referring to some Flarf or Oulipo or language poem, but even those (when good) have a system and reasoning behind their choices (even if I, too, sometimes dislike it).
2) “I, like most of the world, am too busy to spend that much time deciphering a poem.” First off, not all poems are riddles to be deciphered. If you want a cypher with a right and wrong answer do the Sudoku. Second off, I read poetry because the act of reading it brings me joy in the process, not because I think there’s going to be some spiritual payoff at the end. I acknowledge that others might read poetry for very different reasons than me, but part of why I think the “general public” might be so turned off by poetry is this notion (often ingrained at a grade-school level) that poetry is something to be understood and thus learned from. Poetry is not information. You shouldn’t look to Warhol if you want to see what a can of Campbell’s soup looks like and you shouldn’t look to poetry if you want a realistic description of vomit.
3) “It is insulting to the reader to assume that they will invest that time before you have even gained their attention and their hearts and minds with your willingness to come to the reader.”
Even if Emily Dickinson had the Master and Walt Whitman had the multitude, I don’t think the poems of either give the impression of giving two shakes about coming to the reader. This strikes me as such an American ideal, that the mark of a successful poem is the one that the most people would text Ryan Seacrest to support. Besides for three (that’s all I can think of: Billy Collins, Maya Angelou, and Mary Oliver) currently “famous” poets I can’t really think of good examples of anybody who even attempts this, and I’m not sure any of those people would say that this sentence defines their poetic practice, since I’m not even sure how such a thing is possible. What does it look like to “gain their attention and their hearts and minds with your willingness to come to the reader”? Honestly, I’d love to see that, because I’m sitting here at a complete loss for how that’s a thing.
Okay, I think I’ve railed enough. I just keep seeing this argument, couched in vague admonishments for unnamed poets to employ seemingly impossible tactics, and it bugs the shit out of me. Music without any words can be just as satisfying (or, to use the blogger’s term, passionate) as music with lyrics. I find the abstract expressionism of Rothko or minimalism of Serra just as, if not more, satisfying (passionate) as realism. Not all poetry is meant to provide information to an end, and I’d posit that most great poetry’s first goal isn’t descriptive but emotive. That is not to say that there’s lots of bad poetry in the world and that most of the poems of even the best poets don’t fail to reach some plateau of greatness, but the sooner we switch the dialogue to discussing poems as poems and not as rhetoric the better off we’ll all be.
Hi, I followed the @poetsorg feed during Jericho Brown’s guest stint, clicked the link, and read the post in question. While you may have an issue with the tone of the post, I tend to agree with it in essence. It’s just my personal opinion, but as a reader and a poet myself, strings of abstractions that are not tied even loosely to something concrete leave me cold. These types of poems may intend to be emotive, but, for example, clever metaphors in isolation about being green, cobblestones, and a parsnip lumped together in verse don’t stir anything in me, personally. Is this an artistic movement? The artistic theory behind it not apparent. By the same token, I don’t have an objection to the existence of such poems, yet I feel as if poems that don’t use this approach are looked down upon, which I think feeds resentment against so-called “MFA types.” For my part, it’s not a matter of pointing fingers at particular poets, it’s just a general trend observed and an interesting discussion.
Hey Adriene,
Thanks for the comment, I do see your point, and to some degree agree with it—I like there to be a center, although I’d say that the center need not always be concrete, it could just as easily be a mood or emotion upon which the “action” of the poem hinges. Something like Levine’s “They Feed They Lion” (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179089) builds by accretion rather than advancement, and Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” begins with the concrete but moves away from it. Both of these poems, I think, have centers, but also contain the incongruous, the moody for moody’s sake, and are, of course, real real good.
I get what you’re saying, though, and I read lots of poetry that leaves me cold for (I’d posit) similar reasons you cite. I guess I’m trying to say I’d like to give those unnamed poets of the original post the benefit of the doubt and say that they are not purposefully trying to make the reader work hard through some diabolical plan to be assholes, but that they wrote an unsuccessful poem (and/or just read some Ashbery, my only piece of advice for poets is to wait a full three days after reading Ashbery before writing). I think in this ongoing discussion, there’s too much ignoring that most poems we all write are ultimately unsuccessful at balancing all that we try to get into them, whether that means they are too clever but lack soul or are too soulful and lack the clever. Somebody told me once that each of us is just writing one poem over and over trying to get it right, and even the most lauded poets in our history are remembered for maybe 1% of their output.
That aside aside, in my estimation, the majority of canonical American poets carried in their work some level of the abstract (for lack of a better word) and abstraction or difficulty is not the enemy. Poets need not fully idolize clarity, because they’d just end up writing reportage cut into lines. This doesn’t give haphazard cobbling together of clever images a pass, but it allows the writer not to worry as much about the reader, and to worry more about what makes writing fun, playing with language, working with imagery, and trying to find the place where the center of the poem actually lives.
PS: And yes, MFA types can be shitheels, but it helps if we remember that we’re all in a very tiny rowboat together and there’s really no use in fighting over the oar when the current is so strong.
Hello,
As the horrific writer of opinions that you disagree with, let me say I have no problem with any type of poem. I do have a problem with one type of poetry. If you like more esoteric poetry, that’s great. I have a problem with one homogenized view of what good poetry is that has been foisted on the poetry world by MFA programs that control the poetry world.
My blog is 3 months old today with over 70 countries and 20,000 views by people around the world. Many of these people see the US MFA view bleeding into poetry everywhere and dislike it. There is a huge disaffected group of Poet’s that don’t like the lack of diversity in poetry. By diversity I mean that the MFA view is what predominates.
Having said that I don’t think any of them want to take away your right to read that view if that is what you prefer. I think what we are all saying is there is room in poetry for more than the MFA
style. As my late father used to say that’s why they make Coke and Dr. Pepper. We would just like a little more choice.
I may be an “unknown poet” as you say but I am a massive subscriber to journals and buyer of poetry books. I think I am entitled to my opinion. I wasn’t aware that I needed to clear my opinions with a better known poet before expressing them. I am beginning to see that free speech is not appreciated in the poetry world.
I hope you continue to find poetry that you love! According to the Poetry Foundation’s study only 6% of Americans buy poetry. Why is that? I personally don’t read poetry for the riddle. I read poetry for it’s beauty, charm and power. Riddles bore and annoy me! Life is riddle enough when practicing law and making a living in a difficult world. Is there a reason why we can’t have both poems with riddles as well as poems that move the human heart?