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8. 11.

2014

APRIL 1997

Does Poetry Matter? The Culture of Poetry | Bart Baxter

T H E RAVEN C H R O N I C L E S

Does Poetry Matter? The Culture of Poetry


by Bart Baxter

Before I begin my prepared remarks, let me ask for a show of


Forum:
Can Poetry Matter?
John Olson
Bart Baxter

about
Bart Baxter

hands in the audience, a scrupulously honest show of hands?


How many of you here tonight are poets? [Half the audience
raised hands.] How many of you would like to be a poet, have
maybe written some verse, are looking for a publisher? [1/4
raised hands.] And how many here are friends of the moderator
or someone on the panel? [1/4 raised hands.] Now, everyone in
the audience who did not fall into any one of those three
categories, who did not raise your hands before, please raise your
hands now. [One hand was raised.]
I think if Dana Gioia were here tonight, he would simply say:
I rest my case.
Dana Gioia's argument, which first appeared as an essay in
The Atlantic and which later appeared in a collection of essays
published in 1992 called Can Poetry Matter, runs like this:
1. The audience for poetry events usually consists of
poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author (or in
this case, the panel).
2. Poetry has lost the larger audience of educated
intellectuals
the doctors, lawyers, clergymen,

accountants and business people, the literary


intelligentsia made up of non-specialists
who once

took poetry seriously; who are the market for jazz,


foreign films, theater, opera, the symphony and dance;
the broad audience who reads quality fiction and
biographies and who listen to public radio.
3. Poetry now belongs to a sub-culture of
academicians, funded by public subsidy through a
complex network of federal, state and local agencies.
a. There are over 200 graduate creativewriting programs.

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Does Poetry Matter? The Culture of Poetry | Bart Baxter

b. There are several thousand college-level


jobs teaching poetry.
c. This decades long public funding has
created a large professional class for the
production and reception of poetry.
d. The contemporary poet makes a living
not by publishing literary work, but by
educating, usually at a large institution,
most likely state-run, such as a school
district, a college or university, or even
(these days) at a hospital or a prison, i.e.,
teaching other people how to write poetry,
or
at the highest levels

teaching other people

how to teach other people how to write


poetry.
4. Since poetry professionals must publish for job
security and tenure, academic literary journals have
sprung up everywhere so that academicians can now
publish each other's work. Fellowships, grants,
degrees, appointments, and publications are objective
facts, they are quantifiable, i.e., they can be listed on a
resume.
5. Before the turn of the century, few poets were
working in colleges, unless like Mark Van Doren or
Yvor Winters, they taught traditional academic
subjects. Poets were doctors like Williams,
businessmen like Stevens, lawyers like MacLeish,
farmers or bankers like Eliot and Frost. Most often
they wrote in other disciplines like Agee who
reviewed movies for Time, Weldon Kees who wrote
about jazz, Robert Hayden who reviewed music and
theater, or Archibald MacLeish who wrote for and
edited Fortune.
6. In the process of narrowing the artform to conform
to academia, poetry has become increasingly
mediocre, or as Dana Gioia says: "the integrity of the
art has been betrayed."
7. For this reason, few people bother to read poetry,
even the poetry of other poets. As Auden put it:
"Writing gets shut up in a circle of clever people
writing about themselves for themselves."
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Does Poetry Matter? The Culture of Poetry | Bart Baxter

8. And Gioia's pessimistic prognosis is this: A Society


whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape,
appreciate, and understand the power of language,
will become slaves to those who do retain that power,
be they politicians, preachers, newscasters, car
salesmen or confidence-men.
9. Given the decline of literacy, the proliferation of
other media, the crisis in humanities education, the
collapse of critical standards, can poets ever again
succeed in being heard?
Through page after page, example after example, Gioia
illustrates that poetry now belongs to a subsidized subculture,
and that this fact makes for mediocre poetry that no one really
wants to hear. But I would like to carry the argument one step
further. What is it about contemporary poetry, especially postmodern poetry, that makes it so unfriendly to a larger audience,
unfriendly if not downright antagonistic? Why does Twentieth
Century poetry lack the broader appeal of say, song lyrics.
In graphic art, the widespread use of the camera and
photography at the turn of the century was a huge aesthetic
obstacle and challenge to modern painters. Impressionism,
abstract-impressionism, minimalism, Op-Art, Pop-Art, Color
Field, Dada, Neo-Dada, photo-realism and neo-photo-realism,
can all be seen as a reaction to the threat of the photograph as
chronicler of creative reality. A retreat, if you will, before the
onslaught of a technology that not only rendered the world in a
more realistic way, but could be used by the least-trained novice.
Whether Pollock's splatters, Reinhardt's huge black canvases, or
Don Eddy's and Ralph Going's photo-realism (actually projecting
photographs on a canvas and tracing the images, filling in the
colors the way a seven-year-old paints by numbers), Twentieth
Century graphic art must be seen as the final capitulation to the
camera and its exacting draftsmanship. Tom Wolf has said that
100 years from now, art history students will look back on
Twentieth Century painting with "[snickers], laughter, and goodhumored amazement."
How many times have you heard some boorish lout in line at
the museum of modern art mouthing off: My seven year old
daughter could have done this! The question for us should be: Is
he right? And we must ask the same question about Twentieth
Century poetry.
Will students of Twentieth Century poetry be equally amused
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and amazed about open form and free verse? The associated
technical adversary might be the mass availability of popular
music. It may be said, perhaps fairly, that the finest poets of our
age produced their best work for the radio, the television, and the
stage: from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Bob Dylan and Paul
Simon, from Cole Porter and Irving Berlin to Joan Osborne and
Big Head Todd. These lyricists have been able to reach a broad
audience and make fine livings by writing arresting, accessible,
and articulate verse. The academy has chosen to withdraw from
the popular forum of ideas, to retreat toward inaccessibility as
characterized by complicated trope, minimalism, allusion,
ellipses, odd syntax, odd punctuation, and open form, rather than
compete with popular music for the intellectual currency of a
populist audience.
Twentieth Century poetry, for the most part, can be
characterized by:
1. Open form, if not aggressive free verse the
deconstructionist antagonism to forcing the language
into anything other than the most natural voice. Form
in this sense is seen as repression. Free verse is the
moral and aesthetic equivalent to abstract
expressionism in graphic art. It is the minimalist
canvas, the photo-realism, the easy retreat and final
capitulation to popular music and greeting card
doggerel.
2. Figurative language to the exclusion of any other
poetic device. I call it the fascination with
association.. Analogies are a huge part of academia-from the Stanford-Binet, SAT, the GRE to the LSAT,
which all stress the intellectual rigor of seeing and
making associations, of being cognizant of the fact
that one thing is like another thing, often in odd and
interesting ways. Eliot in his 1991 essay "Hamlet and
His Problems" asserted that "a poet can express
emotion only through an objective correlative." The
use of trope is so pervasive that it often overwhelms
most contemporary poetry. Many poets use no other
poetic device than metaphor and simile. In any current
literary journal one can find dozens of poems all
written in virtually the same style, that is to say prose
shaped on the page to resemble poetry, with line
breaks and stanzas to simulate poetic form, but
without any of the traditional poetic devices: rhyme
scheme or rhyme, alliteration, consonance, assonance,
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onomatopoeia, meter or even the barest hint of


rhythm. These poems derive their poetic raison d' etre
by virtue of their figurative language, the poet noting
cleverly, in conversational tone, sometimes five or six
times in a short poem, how one thing is like another.
The fascination with association, a particular
construct of the creative-writing class or poetry
workshop, seems to be the sole literary device of most
contemporary poets.
3. Lyric form rather than Narrative: Twentieth
Century poetry has tended away from story-telling,
tended away from the legacy of Vachel Lindsey and
Langston Hughes, away from the long narratives
about great deeds and larger-than-life events, toward
an introverted, introspective, I, me, we,
autobiographical, confessional, isolated, selfabsorbed, self-centered, self-conscious, self-righteous
poetry that is little concerned about the audience.
4. Limited emotion: Even these confessional poets
would toss out their journals before being thought
sentimental. In the academy, poets are alert to the
Freudian ambivalence of emotion, prone to
intellectual skepticism (deconstruction a perfect
example), so that they seldom speak with fervent
conviction about anything. Charles Reznikoff said:
"Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the
feeling. It should be precise about the thing and
reticent about the feeling." Heaven help the
sentimental.
5. Persistent irony.
6. Meditative quality.
7. Impersonality: William Carlos Williams believed
that with the publication of "The Wasteland" "the
bottom had dropped out of everything" he had cared
about in poetry.
8. Vagueness.
9. Contradiction.
10. Understatement
11. Economy.
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Does Poetry Matter? The Culture of Poetry | Bart Baxter

12. Wit.
13. Fragmentation.
14. Discontinuity.
Dana Gioia wrote "Can Poetry Matter?" long before he realized
what was going on in the urban centers across the country, in the
night clubs and cabarets, at the Greenmill Tavern in Chicago and
the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York, at the open readings and
poetry slams. In a lecture he presented at Poets House in New
York on October 26 [1995], which became an essay published in
Poetry Flash, "Notes Toward a New Bohemia," his greatest fears
about the future of poetry seem to be assuaged.
His argument runs something like this:
1. The primary means of publication of new poetry is
now oral. This applies to older established poets as
well as new unknowns.
2. This represents an enormous paradigm shift away
from print culture, in that:
a. The government is neither involved with
subsidizing events nor appointing
particular poets.
b. The physical audience listening to
poetry greatly outnumbers the people who
read poetry in books. (Do we need one
more professor to tell us that the important
thing is whether the poem will translate
from the "stage to the page"?).
3. This is a populist revolution, a distinct move from
print to oral tradition, largely among groups long alien
to the traditional, dominant, literary, academic
culture:
a. e.g., rap lyrics, in music and poetry.
b. Cowboy poetry.
c. Poetry slams.
4. Surprisingly, most of this new populist poetry is
formal:
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Does Poetry Matter? The Culture of Poetry | Bart Baxter

a. e.g., the four-stress lines in rap.


b. The English ballad form in cowboy
poetry.
c. The merger of poetry and experimental
theater in performance poetry at poetry
slams often uses elaborate rhyme schemes.
5. As for the University, an institution better equipped
to preserve old culture than foster the creation of new
art, it will probably hold on dearly to Modernism, and
will continue to do so until Post-modern poetry's last
gasp.

Bart Baxter's work has appeared in Ergo, Seattle Review,


Red Cedar Review, The Ohio Poetry Review, Raven
Chronicles, among others. He won the 1994 Hart Crane
Award for poetry at Kent State University; the 1994 Charles
Proctor Award (Washington State); the 1995 MTV Poetry
Grand Slam. His second book of poetry is Peace for the
Arsonist (Bacchae Press,1995).

The Raven Chronicles 1997

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