Good, Bad, and  Mediocre Poetry
      No subject can get college students so immediately riled as this one.
In an egalitarian society where moral relativism reigns, how dare anyone to
presume he can make the distinction? The student reaction is, "If I like it,
it is good and that is enough."  It is hard to batter down such self-
defensive walls, but  I expect time and education and more varied reading
will do the job for me. Teaching the difference is part of the educational
process and since I have the podium, I refuse to remain silent, although I
try not to be obnoxious (and that is not always easy). I also try not to take
away the students' pleasure of discovery.  I give the map, but the student
has to find the gold. And despite the tone of this article, I am humble at
heart.  Honestly.
     Let me start with an example from my own life, one concerning a
painting.  Now I am not an artist and find it hard to draw anything much
above the faces I put on my dishwasher to show if the dishes are clean or
dirty.  A relative gave me a painting she had done. She had in the past done
some pretty good pictures under the guidance of a teacher.  I took it with
the love and affection she intended, but I knew it was not very good.  It was
a copy of a postcard and none of the colors were "right." In fact it was
difficult to tell the sky from the land from the water.  When my plumber came
to fix water pipes and saw it, he raved about how good it was, literally
raved.  I thanked him, but I knew better.  When a friend who was actively
involved in painting, and who was trained saw it, she said, "Oh, Sue, that is
awful." I would tend to trust the one who had the training.  It bothers me
today that so much poetry that is not poetry at all is being passed off as
such.  Not only that, but because of the politics of poetry and the
networking that exists much of this bad poetry is being published.  If it is
obscure enough that is very good for the critics because obscure poetry keeps
them in business. But this is a digression.
     I used to say that one way one can tell a good poem from a bad or even
mediocre poem is that a good poem will stay in the mind long afterward.  That
is not true, however.  Some of the worst poems around are not forgotten and
in fact are easily memorized and often quoted. We remember the bad just as
easily as the good.  A more valuable distinction would be to say that a good
poem resonates, and another distinction would be to say that a good poem taps
into human experience. It is universal. Good poems are carefully crafted, but
they are far more than the product of craftsmanship. They say old things (The
number of themes in literature is limited) but they say them so convincingly
that the old themes take on a new luster.  It may be the language, its
richness or even its simplicity.  It may be the images.  Emily Dickinson said
she could recognize a poem when it made her shiver.  Some of what I see today
though makes me shudder. Public taste has brought us some of the worst music,
and frequently public taste picks the pop poem of the day or even of the
century.  But the fact remains that a pop poem remains just that, a pop poem.
Mediocre poetry is like mediocre music.  It is imitative and finally just
dull.
       Okay, so what does my diatribe mean to you?  Only this: poems have
meanings; they won't deconstruct.  They are the sum of their parts: sound,
image, figurative language. And in a final analysis good poetry will last far
longer than the shudderingly bad or the lukewarm mediocre. I found a book not
long ago featuring the best known poets of the 1920s. There were not over six
of two hundred or more whose work still survives. Time does win on this one.
Wish I could be around to see if I am right.

Sue Scalf