I don't have enough to do. Thus, I spend too much time reading the New York Times online -- it's just too damn available. And I am too damn undisciplined, perhaps.
Yesterday I read the "poetry issue" of the Sunday Times Book Review. Wow, "we" get an entire issue! (Actually, I am grateful for it, as I should be.) Then today, we are treated to the "debate" among a handful of poets and critics. Personally, I appreciate Tracy K. Smith's "Wipe That Smirk Off Your Poem," if only because I've been thinking about contemporary poetry in exactly the same way the past few days, while reading back issues of the American Poetry Review. I believe that, for all that review's reputation for iconoclasm and the new-new, one of its editors' two primary criteria for selecting poems to publish is . . . irony. Good old-fashioned irony. That is, stone-cold detachment. Tracy K.'s "smirk." If you have a copy of the May/June 2014 issue, you might look at Hannah Gamble's "I Will Explain Infidelity." You'll see what I mean.
But I digress. Back to the debate in today's NYT. Tracy K. Smith gets an A for insight and speaking truth about the oversize role of irony in contemporary evaluations. Paul Muldoon gets a B+ for . . . being ironic (actually one of his commenters, who questions why he devoted ninety minutes to a bad movie before walking out, gets the grade; Muldoon gets a C for winking too violently). Martin Espada gets a C for an average effort to infuse his subject with purple stuff. William Logan, probably my favorite living skewerer of bombast and laziness in poetic language, gets a D+ for bombast and laziness with statements like "People can live without poetry, just as they can live without bread, or water, or air — at least for a time," and "As for relevance, poetry does not need to be relevant. It needs to be good."
As for the others in the debate, pablum. They trumpet poetry's "humanity" and capacity for surprise and how that saves us from ourselves, asserting its populist nature in one breath, its challenging nobility in the next. They're right, of course. I can't disagree. But have we discounted Aristotle's assessment that it's a making? Doesn't matter whether it's good or relevant; it's somethin' we do because we have this material called language. That's in some ways easier, some ways harder, to work than stone.
One thinig all these poets can agree on, though, that I can agree on as well: they wouldn't have had their day in the RFD blog were they not players, with a trail of publications, awards, and other recognitions. For here is a truth of poetry in the West today: you get the microphone and the podium just as soon as you get the published work. Then you get to define the art, it's role in society, politics and culture. And you get the stipend to boot. And then you get to determine who else gets all this stuff.
Here's an idea. Next time we have a debate about poetry--in person or virtual--let's turn the microphone toward the audience and dispense with the podium. Just a bunch of makers talkiing about making.
Yesterday I read the "poetry issue" of the Sunday Times Book Review. Wow, "we" get an entire issue! (Actually, I am grateful for it, as I should be.) Then today, we are treated to the "debate" among a handful of poets and critics. Personally, I appreciate Tracy K. Smith's "Wipe That Smirk Off Your Poem," if only because I've been thinking about contemporary poetry in exactly the same way the past few days, while reading back issues of the American Poetry Review. I believe that, for all that review's reputation for iconoclasm and the new-new, one of its editors' two primary criteria for selecting poems to publish is . . . irony. Good old-fashioned irony. That is, stone-cold detachment. Tracy K.'s "smirk." If you have a copy of the May/June 2014 issue, you might look at Hannah Gamble's "I Will Explain Infidelity." You'll see what I mean.
But I digress. Back to the debate in today's NYT. Tracy K. Smith gets an A for insight and speaking truth about the oversize role of irony in contemporary evaluations. Paul Muldoon gets a B+ for . . . being ironic (actually one of his commenters, who questions why he devoted ninety minutes to a bad movie before walking out, gets the grade; Muldoon gets a C for winking too violently). Martin Espada gets a C for an average effort to infuse his subject with purple stuff. William Logan, probably my favorite living skewerer of bombast and laziness in poetic language, gets a D+ for bombast and laziness with statements like "People can live without poetry, just as they can live without bread, or water, or air — at least for a time," and "As for relevance, poetry does not need to be relevant. It needs to be good."
As for the others in the debate, pablum. They trumpet poetry's "humanity" and capacity for surprise and how that saves us from ourselves, asserting its populist nature in one breath, its challenging nobility in the next. They're right, of course. I can't disagree. But have we discounted Aristotle's assessment that it's a making? Doesn't matter whether it's good or relevant; it's somethin' we do because we have this material called language. That's in some ways easier, some ways harder, to work than stone.
One thinig all these poets can agree on, though, that I can agree on as well: they wouldn't have had their day in the RFD blog were they not players, with a trail of publications, awards, and other recognitions. For here is a truth of poetry in the West today: you get the microphone and the podium just as soon as you get the published work. Then you get to define the art, it's role in society, politics and culture. And you get the stipend to boot. And then you get to determine who else gets all this stuff.
Here's an idea. Next time we have a debate about poetry--in person or virtual--let's turn the microphone toward the audience and dispense with the podium. Just a bunch of makers talkiing about making.
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