Pushcart Prize Nomination

I'm honored to be nominated for a Pushcart Prize for my poem "Correspondence With Walt Whitman." (There's a link on my "Poems" page.)  Thanks to John Murphy of The Lake for the nomination, and thanks also for The Lake itself, an online poetry journal of consistently high quality.

"The Function of the Arts"

Until quite recently, I wasn’t convinced that there were any useful generalizations to be made about “the function of the arts.” I changed my mind when I found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with the following remarks by W. H. Auden:

“The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient: I hope not.

“I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive, which is why, perhaps, all the totalitarian theories of the State, from Plato downwards, have deeply mistrusted the arts. They notice and say too much, and the neighbors start talking.”  [“Introduction to Poems of Freedom” (1938), reprinted in Edward Mendelson, ed., The English Auden, pp. 371-2.]

The most intriguing part of that statement, to me, is “I hope not.” It may be useful to recall the context. In 1938, Auden lived in an England bound up in a strict and prying moralism, of the sort that has been the norm throughout human history. Conventional moralists rained down contempt upon homosexuals such as Auden; only forty years earlier, Oscar Wilde had been prosecuted and jailed for his homosexuality.

There is another and even more important context. By 1938 Auden was already sensing (as he would express in his well-known poem “September 1, 1939”) that totalitarian extremists of the left and right were about to wreak destruction upon Europe—though neither Auden nor anyone else could have guessed just how devastating the consequences of Nazism, Fascism, and Soviet Communism would be. The 1930’s had been a decade of political commitment in the arts, but the mass killings of the the 1930’s and 1940’s—the wars, the purges, the holocaust—would permanently sour many artists on political activism. Auden expressed his disillusionment in a poem in memory of Louis MacNeice, “The Cave of Making”:

                     . . . any faith, if we had it, in immanent

     virtue died. More than ever

life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, lovable,

     but we shan’t, not since Stalin and Hitler,

trust ourselves ever again: we know that, subjectively,

     all is possible.

It is in this context that Auden, as early as 1938, hoped that art will not make us more moral. He already anticipated the havoc that absolutists, angrily proclaiming their own moral superiority to others and demanding absolute loyalty, would unleash. 

We have forgotten the lessons of the 1940’s and 1950’s. The current decade more closely resembles the 1930’s: a lingering economic depression; a widespread disillusionment at government’s inability to address human problems; the waning of any desire for compromise in the interests of the common good; extremism on the left and right; an intemperate desire to shout rather than to reason; a chilling effect on political dialogue.  (It may be that one great man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, saved the United States from the catastrophes that decimated Europe.)

America's intolerance has intensified in the arts as well as in the political realm. Politically, we are subjected to the petty belligerence of Donald Trump, the most defiantly unreasonable man in American politics. In the arts, the tasteless works of conceptualist pranksters like Kenny Goldsmith are denounced with a fervor normally reserved for mass-murderers. Gangs of internet terrorists on the left and right systematically destroy the reputations of anyone who accidentally offends them. As a result, it is impossible to have a conversation about the important political and artistic issues of the moment. Discussions on controversial issues become dreary and predictable, and any hint of heresy is ruthlessly stamped out.

Artists, to do good work, have to keep their eyes wide open. Political movements almost always want their followers to have their eyes wide shut. (The “Occupy” movements may have provided a brief exception, but their example of letting everyone speak and their message of hope-in-unity seem far behind us.) When political rhetoric outlaws honest dissent and reasoned debate, art necessarily suffers. Dreary, predictable art proliferates. Artistic surprises become too dangerous, and artists decide not to risk them.

In the 1930’s, left-wing writers who raised questions about Stalinism were condemned as heretics. But by 1938, when Auden wrote his introduction to a volume called Poems of Freedom, he was feeling uneasy about having been caught up in the revolutionary fervor and having written statements that, on careful consideration, he realized he didn’t believe. For example, he eventually refused to republish the powerful but incendiary poem “Spain,” which had advocated “the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder”—that is, murder as a necessary byproduct of revolution. As a result of his rethinking, he gave a definition of “the function of poetry” that would displease true believers “from Plato downwards.”

One of the best things that could happen to contemporary poetry would be a renewed respect for poems of freedom: a respect for the full range of poets who try to “make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us.” The urge to write poems of freedom is incompatible with the need to “watch what you say,” to avoid the slightest phrase that might be interpreted as heresy. We need to strive not to be more moral, but to be more human, more tolerant, more open-minded, and more difficult to deceive.

On Poets, Categories, and Originality

A recent online discussion in a poetry forum led me to think about poetic originality, a quality that cuts across all the categories we typically use to box up our poets for public consumption.

The online topic was the recent appointment of Juan Felipe Herrera as poet laureate. Discussion focused on the merits of Herrera’s poetry and on whether the “real purpose” of a poet laureate was to be an ambassador for poetry, rather than to represent the best of American poetry. Many people felt that Herrera was a good choice because he was an “outsider” and because his readings showed that he had an ability to reach broad audiences.

I was not one of Herrera’s harshest critics, believing his poetry to be no better or worse than that of hundreds of other well-regarded poets regularly published in prestigious publications. However, I thought that his derivative, fuzzy and unadventurous surrealism in poems like “Blood on the Wheel” (available online at the Poetry Foundation) made him not the best choice, and that there were better poets with similar techniques and thematic concerns, such as Martin Espada. (For a defense of Herrera and “Blood on the Wheel,” see Stephen Burt’s commentary on the poem, also online at the Poetry Foundation.)

One poster commented that Herrera was “for damn sure” a better choice than Ted Kooser, Kay Ryan, or Billy Collins, poets who were “middle of the road and boring.” It was at that point that I felt the strangeness and inadequacy of the categories into which we normally sort our poets.

It seems to me that of Herrera, Kooser, Ryan, and Collins, Ryan is the only one who is significantly, deeply original. No one else sounds anything like her, not even Marianne Moore, her nearest poetic ancestor. That's why it's so remarkable that she became poet laureate. She's one of the best living poets, but she doesn't fit into any school, and unlike Collins or Herrera, she’s not a poetic extravert with a strong public persona. Before Ryan became a cause celebre in her 50's, she was virtually unknown and would have been about as likely a candidate for poet laureate as Emily Dickinson. I like many of Kooser's poems very much, and I'm often amused by Collins, but their poems work in familiar ways, as do Herrera's.

On the other hand, if being an ambassador for poetry makes you a good choice for poet laureate, then Kooser and Collins were two of the best choices. Collins worked to get poems into high schools and his Poetry 180 anthologies are still selling; Kooser's "American Life in Poetry" blog is ongoing and widely read. Herrera will probably be a good ambassador too, with his appealing persona and ability to connect with audiences in live readings.

Choosing Herrera as laureate was seen as choosing an “outsider.” But out of the four laureates I’m discussing, Herrera and Collins are in many ways the "insiders" in the "mainstream." Herrera has taught and held prominent positions in universities since 1990 or so. And if the "mainstream" of American poetry is not in universities, I can't imagine where it would be. Kooser, by contrast, is an outsider, who, like Wallace Stevens, has spent most of his life as an insurance executive, at a distance from the literary mainstream. Ryan spent most of her teaching career in obscurity at a California junior college. It was clear from our online discussion that many people didn't feel comfortable criticizing the supposed “outsider” Herrera. On the other hand, the contempt of many “mainstream” poets for Kooser and Collins is bold and explicit.

My point is simply that the categories we usually use to classify poets are porous and inadequate to the complexities of actual writing. Who is "middle of the road" is a matter of point-of-view. Herrera, supposedly an outsider, is arguably no more or less conventional in his poetic techniques than Collins or Kooser. A truly original poet like Ryan may be under-appreciated because she doesn’t fit into the ready-made categories we use to evaluate who is in or out of the “mainstream.”

Fools for Love

The internet, or more precisely that very tiny portion of the internet devoted to poetry, has lately been abuzz about the value of poetry and of poetry magazines.  Jessica Piazza, on her blog Poetry Has Value, discuses her year-long experiment in sending her poetry only to markets that pay.  (Her total as of May: $226.50, not bad at all for poetry.)

My view is that poetry has value, but not economic value.  (And I don't think Piazza would necessarily disagree, despite her understandable wish to profit by her labor.)  Lovers find their beloved valuable.  That's the kind of value poetry has.

Let me compare poetry to another activity I was briefly obsessed with: tournament scrabble.  (I've given up scrabble because I only have time for one profitless obsession.)  Like poetry, tournament scrabble is a tiny niche--even tinier than poetry, with a few thousand devotees, but more tightly organized into a community.  Like poetry, tournament scrabble has a few big prizes ($25,000 to the National Scrabble Champion, the last time I checked), dozens of tiny prizes for less important tournaments, and no monetary prospects for most players.  Like poetry, tournament scrabble is of interest only to the participants.  Occasionally the outside world enjoys laughing at the peculiar freaks who take tournament scrabble seriously--most notably after sportswriter Stefan Fatsis wrote an amusing book about the subculture called (naturally) Word Freak. 

Nobody complains about not getting paid to play scrabble.  Nobody complains about paying substantial fees to play in tournaments.  Yes, they get the pleasure of playing the game, and obviously there's not much pleasure for a poet in receiving form rejection slips, even if they're balanced by occasional acceptances.  But the biggest difference between scrabblers and poets is that scrabblers know their activity has no economic value.  Poets aren't sure, and wish things were different, and wonder if things will change, and get nostalgic about the good old days of Byron, Tennyson and the Brownings, when a handful of poets made the kind of money that 100 million businessmen in the English-speaking world make today.

Piazza has suggested that if poets would all buy more magazines and periodicals, poetry could support itself.  ("Poetry Has Value, But Do We Value It?")  Well, it certainly wouldn't hurt if poets bought more poetry.  But I wonder . . .  How many poetry collections were published in the last decade?  Tens of thousands, I'm guessing?  I try to be aware of "what's going on" in poetry, but I'm astonished at the number of published poets I've never heard of.  And while I think Theodore Sturgeon's rule applies here--"ninety percent of anything is crap"--there's an astonishing amount of fairly competent poetry appearing every year, poetry that would, in a poetry-loving world, get a fair look.  And for every volume of poetry published, isn't there at least one issue of a literary magazine that publishes poetry?  With so much product, and close to a one-to-one ratio between consumers and producers of poetry, how many books and magazines would every poet have to buy to keep the system afloat?  Hundreds a year?  More than one could ever read?  Piazza feels guilty that she doesn't find time to buy and read more poetry, while admitting that her five part-time jobs don't leave her much time.  I feel guilty too, I suppose, but I have to wonder:  if I read poetry every waking minute, could it possibly be enough to do my share of keeping the poetry world afloat?

A couple of decades ago, a mid-level worker at MacMillan tried to put the Collected Poems of Yeats out of print because it was selling less than 500 copies a year.  His error was corrected by his bosses, but contemporary poets need not expect any such sentimentality.  Shortly after the death of the fairly-popular poet William Stafford, his son Kim approached Stafford's publisher, Harcourt Brace, with a proposal for a collected volume.  Harcourt informed Kim that, now that Stafford was dead, Harcourt had no interest in keeping any of his works in print, aside from a tiny selection made by Robert Bly.  (Eventually Graywolf Press did publish a larger Selected Poems of Stafford.  I wonder how many copies it sells per year.  50?  Perhaps fewer?)

Poetry has no economic value, or so little as to make no difference.  The only way to make money from poetry is tangential--by taking a job in one of the large-scale capitalist enterprises called universities.  If you do, your job will be to help the university make money by convincing aspiring  writers to pay many thousands of dollars in tuition to your university: that, and that alone, is the economic value of poetry.

There is no reason to think that poetry will suddenly become popular in the United States.  Even the simplest written poetry requires a level of literary education that is rare in our semi-literate society.
Perhaps it's different in Europe, where cultural standards remain higher (for now).  France, for example, still requires students to study several volumes of difficult contemporary poetry (Paul Eluard, Phillippe Jaccottet, Yves Bonnefoy) for their French Language baccalaureat exam.  In the United States, if we were to show an equivalent interest in our culture, students would probably be tested on their knowledge of American Idol.

Having realized that literature sells no widgets, our government has progressively eliminated literary study from our national education standards.  A century ago, Ezra Pound called the United States "a half-savage country, out of date."  In 2015, it seems hard to question that America is the world's vanguard, up to date if anyone is. "Half-savage," however, still applies.

Poetry is valuable to me.  It may be valuable to you.  It has no value except through the love we give to it.  There is simply no reason to bother with poetry unless you're hopelessly in love with it--so in love that all the social and economic logic in the world can't keep you away from it.