Sorry to have been so long in replying. Life has been ... interesting.

On Sunday, July 8, 2001, at 05:26 PM, david.bircumshaw wrote:

> Michael,
>
> I have nothing against those 'abandoned metrical and narrative
> resources'
> (and I don't think they are, btw, except by plain bad poets) but to
> start
> talking about increasing audience is also to start talking marketing,

Well, yes, but there's marketing and there's Marketing. Dana Gioia is
doing about the same thing for the poetry he likes that Pound and Eliot
(especially Pound) did for the poetry they liked, and all three did a
kind of marketing. None of them held focus groups or did statistical
analysis in support of targeted advertising.

> the
> truth of the matter is that the only prescription for poets is an
> allefiance
> to the art itself, a very un-businesslike attitude, but poetry isn't a
> 'business', seem like it though some may make it seem.

Again, yes but. Though not a business, I think there's an implicit
contract between readers and writers of poetry. It's loose; it's
details change frequently and whole whereases are added or deleted from
time to time; but it's main clause is pretty stable: poetry must delight
the reader or the reader won't buy it and won't read it. That doesn't
mean poetry must make the reader feel good (though there's nothing wrong
with that). Sometimes delight is found in a new understanding, or a new
skill, or in hard thinking. But readers are more willing to undertake
these more difficult tasks only with a little help along the way, some
familiarity, some music, some ground on which to stand.

I think the relentless drive of the last century to make things new,
along with a mistaken identification of progressive politics with
"progressive" poetics, has broken that contract.

An aside: I put scare-quotes around that second "progressive" because I
don't think there's such a thing as progress in the arts. We learn
techniques from each other and our predecessors, of course, but the
predecessor any one of us learns most from might have died a thousand
years ago. Change in the arts is more like change in fashion than it is
like change in science. That doesn't mean art is exactly like fashion,
or that we need a Poetry Council to determine what metaphors we'll
present next season. But can Beethoven really be said to be an
"advance" over Mozart? Is the rise and fall (and rise and fall and
rise...) of the popularity of opera explainable in terms other than
those of fashion? And metaphors like "experimental poetry" have done a
lot of damage. What hypothesis does an experimental poem test? What
variables are being controlled? About the only question an experimental
poem can pose is "will readers buy this?" -- in every sense of buy, and,
for the most part, they haven't.

> It's not a romantic
> attitude, it's a hard and unpalatable fact, which for most bug-bitten
> devotees might mean a lifetime of struggle, but if we just accepted this
> fact instead of trying re-cast things in terms of a non-existent
> large-scale
> market perhaps a lot of wasted breath might be saved.

No large-scale market. But I make my living, about half the time, as a
framing carpenter, or roofer (then my wife gets nervous and it's back to
programming). I play jug-band music and spend a lot of time in biker
bars and similar places. It's amazing how often another carpenter, on
learning I write poems, will recite one or pull one out to read. It's
usually Kipling or Service; sometimes it's Frost or Millay; occasionally
it's Wordsworth or Christina Rossetti or even Pope. My unreconstructed
redneck brother once told me "Mike, I don't see how you stand that
literature shit. I never liked any of it but Shakespeare."

I'll bet not one of them owns a single volume of John Ashberry or Anne
Carson, and they get bored real quick if I show them some. But more
than one has bought Sam Gwynn's No Word of Farewell after hearing "At
Rose's Range," and I think I've sold a few copies of Kim Addonizio's
books, too.

Just to contradict myself, I think that's a kind of evidence that the
century-long experiment in the varieties of free verse as the /dominant/
form of poetry has failed.

<snip>


> Not that I'm a pessimist, you can do things to increase the audience, by
> perpetuating the infuriating undefinable art, in all its polymorphous
> forms,
>

Of course. I desperately love nearly everything Denise Levertov wrote.
(I may even have sold some of her books!) I'd be sad to see Jorie
Graham unpublished, though I find her mostly unreadable -- I hope to
learn better. But Lind seems correct about poetry publishing in the US
at least to the extent that first, and even second, books, are almost
impossible to get published except as winners of contests judged by
people who, however they got there, are now part of the MFA/Creative
Writing business, (and that IS a business -- I was part of it once)
promoting their own prestige by promoting each other and each other's
students.

That's not really very different from what Dana Gioia does with West
Chester, or what happens with the Richard Wilbur prize, and I have no
objection to it in principle.

But poets learn their craft from other poets. In another thread, Alison
(sorry, I don't know her last name -- I haven't been a good lurker)
says she writes free verse because it's harder than metrical verse. I
think she's right -- it IS harder, and I think it's even harder when a
young poet doesn't have some facility (not just familiarity) with
metrical verse. I think the CW industry does a real disservice to young
writers by not insisting on hundreds of set pieces of the sort once
routinely demanded of those lucky enough to get an education at all in
the bad old days (and they were bad old days). Not necessarily
translations of Horace -- but how about translations of Lorca's late
sonnets that respect their formal intentions? Or of Akhmatova? Of
course, many CW directors couldn't do that themselves.

> rather than issuing prescriptions for how it should be done. I know it
> seems
> that there was a mythical past in which poetry had an instant route to
> the
> commonality, perhaps even there was, but it's gone now, the linguistic
> truth
> of our world is that the lowest common denominators of speech now
> succeed,
> the commonalities of speech, like those of community, in the 'developed
> world', have been ripped apart, appropriated by factions of
> self-interest. I
> suspect all we have left is a desperate hope in one another.
>

I think the world both less utopian then and less desperate now than you
describe , David. But yes.

All I have is a voice.
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the state
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizens or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Auden, of course.

Best to you,

Michael