The Poetry Problem

The other night at Borders I picked up a few books off of the discount rack: the 2007 Writers Market (the dream persists), a (meagerly) annotated edition of T.S. Eliot's major poems, and The Best American Poetry 2004.

The latter I picked up out of curiosity more than passion.  Let me now claim to be enthusiastic about poetry, a devotee, an eternal student, a reader, and a listener.  Though I tend to trust most of my precious available reading time to the classics and the Western Canon (to paraphrase Harold Bloom [fair warning for those of you who detest him], Life is Too Short to Read Bad Literature), I do my best to listen to and read new poetry whenever possible.  I usually 'get' modern poetry, and believe several living poets to be among the best that American writing has cultivated. Having said that, I haven't bought a BAP in half a dozen years, perhaps partly out of disappointment but certainly in part out of laziness and disinterest.

My expectations for BAP 2004 were mixed. On the one hand I've read enough new poetry to know what to expect: A poem launched from a cliche that turns our understanding on it's head.  Poems that vigorously attend to white space.  The poem where the narrator does something by himself, reflecting on relationship, strained or wholesome.  The poem that serves up a dated political lambast.  The poem that accuses a part or the whole of civilization (in quotes) of murder or injustice. And maybe, just maybe, a wholly readable poem with brilliant turns of phrase, unusual but precise application of words, and meaning that both provokes and satisfies.

I also expected, structurally, that BAP would start off with it's strongest poem(s), much like a rock album (Dirty Three and the White Stripes spring to mind for some reason).

But I couldn't get past page 26 of Best American Poetry 2004.  I had begun reading it at Borders in the cafe, and though I was let down with only mild amusement at the predictable haughtiness of the first poem, Kim Addonzio's "Chicken", I continued on, slowly, carefully.  I continued reading at stop lights and even as I sat in the drive-thru of Taco Bell on my way home.  5 or 6 poems in was stupefied.  Not because the poems were so bad (they were neither poor nor great), but because I could not imagine that they would be accessible to Normal Human Beings.  

This point was emphasized by my environment at the time, for I was comfortably by myself, one link in a chain of many cars--a crouching train of idling engines, waiting for our turn to drive off, receive food, pay, order.  We were all hunting our "Fourth Meal", subjects in a scene of benign banality, of innocent, ignorant human appetite, as un-literary and low-brow as one can imagine.  Mixing poetry into the equation seemed both ridiculous and perfectly appropriate, a very modernist posture to take.

And as I struggled to parse through the overstuffed and obscure vocabulary of Will Alexander's "Solea of the Simooms", stuttered over Bruce Andrews's gleefully obtuse and surreal "Dang Me", I caught the scent of exhaust from the car in front of me, and a horrible epiphany hit:

It's no wonder people neglect this, the supposed highest form of art. These poems are so inflated, vulgar, convoluted, or simply inaccessible that they can only be counterproductive to the cause of poetry.

I have always believed that, though there is ample room in the art for experimental poems and even poems laden with difficult, intertextual richness, most poems should be written for Normal Human Beings. Not scholars, not critics, not other poets.  If I who am passionate about poetry and in fact trained (BA in English lit, MA in Language Teaching, and a voluntary drop-out of a highly-ranked English grad school) to read closely become so frustrated with so much new poetry so easily, the question is begged: Who _is_ the audience of modern poetry?

Though I say I am trained, I don't claim to be a definitive expert. Though I do have a Masters, I dropped out of my subsequent grad program in English lit because I found little chance for pleasure-reading from under the strictly academic mantle. Rather than profess literature I chose to worship it.  Yet what more damning evidence could there be than for Devotees/Readers to read poems from BAP and say, "I don't get it" or, worse, "It's boring/What's the point?"

Putting aside the clearly narrative poems, the meaning of many of the pieces in BAP were nearly inextricable on a first reading. To make matters worse, I could find little pleasure in reading them even superficially, the way I might "read" a non-representational painting that I might not "get" at first glance.  A relaxed, pleasure-of-sound reading is hindered when vocabulary is sinfully overwrought, toilsome, excavated from the bottom of the list of entries in thesauri so as to be toothless.  I'm not afraid and think it not naive to suggest that much of what I read was simply adjectives for adjectives' sake. "Big, stuffy words that nobody uses" is one of the most common indictments of poetry from the non-literati (and this is often admitted with some degree of self-consciousness and guilt, for no one wants to appear an ignoramous), and so many ignore or avoid poetry.  How pretentiously this practice scars our noble art!

Hemingway remarked that literature is akin to an iceberg where 7/8th of its mass is under the water, but if we can't even visualize the tip of the iceburg with any reliable degree of clarity, how will we ever desire to discover the whole? Who will this sort of poetrt appeal to? How will this bring any more significance or reflection to normal peoples everyday lives? Who will buy these books? Read these poems? Thirst for more?

Apoplectic with the obviously talented but (what word can I used except) corrupted poets, I tore out a page in the drive-thru of Taco Bell & wrote my own poem about a train, the exhaust of civilization, hunger, and groping for brotherly love. It was not a good poem, but it was a simple poem, one in which I sought to bash out in plain language to contain what the poems I'd just finished had lacked: tangible imagery, and at least one meaning that could be accessed by any member of my immediate or extended family, adolescent or older.

12 hours later I've had a chance to read more of BAP 2004, and even reflect on some of the strong choices in earlier BAPs.  There are a number of good poems in the collection, but no where near a full 75.  I think of the Willesden Herald's short fiction contest, in which no winner was chosen due to lack of quality entrants. One argument against this abandonment of a winner was that the contest was not so much about granting an award to signify quality, but a stimulus for discussion of the short story.  Perhaps BAP is something like that, and the bother to fill up the 75 (which is not a requirement but nonetheless has not been strayed from in 19 years) is more of a provocation than a gift.  For those of us with less time to lose, we might just wait for Harold Bloom to reflect and edit out another Best of BAP.

P.S. Immediately after finishing writing this I leapt into my car, and Robert Bly was reading on the radio. In less than a stanza this great poet reminded what the art is all about, and has not only depressed my general criticisms, but also buoyed my hope for poetry in spite of everything else.  I have not changed the rest of this entry to capture the true frustration and destitution that I'd felt the night before, so that some day I will remember how Important Poetry Was to Me.