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.”