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2014
APRIL 1997
T H E RAVEN C H R O N I C L E S
about
Bart Baxter
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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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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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