Michael,
 
only a short provisional word here, the issues your considered reply evokes are complex, and, like you, I'm going to have to find time to address them, but one point, an uncontentious one, I would make is that you must remember perspectives might be different here in Britain. There has never been the kind of othrodoxy of free verse here that you perceive in the States, despite the adoption of Eliot, and most definitely social conservatism and traditional form have been an employed equated metaphor here.
 
Tradition is a very loaded word in in Her Brittanic Majesty's realms.
 
And I wasn't suggesting at any point a notion of progress in the arts, but what does exist is refiniement, certainly, of techniques, and breaking loose from assumed boundaries. It is all a natural part of process, of flux.
 
But free verse is nothing new to the twentieth century, even the Bach cantatas include many passages that set free verse. I like your picture of your carpenter's world, here I'm afraid I find things more Franz Capra than Frank Capra, like those guys you talk to, I'm just a poor bugger, no tertiary education, no academic job, a man in the street me, and if I'm not bloody careful one of these days I'll end up living on them too, and I really resent it when people pontificate about the tastes of the 'common man', and what a load of assumptions that carries, that only the 'better sort' know poetry, it makes me feel as if I have no right to like what I like, I've many times before now been accused by well-off people of being an 'elitist' of all things. Here the modus operandi is to suppress questioning, suppress intelligence, as the maintenance of social norms and the world's most stable class system depend on the smothering of analysis.
 
More, and more argued, anon.
 
All the best
 
Dave
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

----- Original Message -----

From: Michael Snider

To: [log in to unmask]

Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 12:55 AM

Subject: Re: Poetry in PROSPECT

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.

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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