I am rather proud of this piece that I wrote, a column for my university newspaper, about the modern state of poetry. It doesn’t really relate to the election, but it is related to American society, and I think that it deserves an audience — certainly moreso than some of the pieces I produce here — so I’ll ask you to entertain me here.
I’ve left the thesis up; you can click ‘More’ to read the entire thing.
—
Poetry is dead.
It’s hardly a contested point anymore: the most casual of observers can discern that poetry is that odd, rare art practiced by more people than observe it. It is not dead, of course, because there is nothing more to be contributed to the art form. It’s dead, rather, due to a cultural decline into a society that worships self-expression and instant gratification above excellence and merit.
Wordsmiths such as Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson — poets who wrote truly classic works adhering to careful rules of meter, cadence, and theme — are now an extinct breed. The majority of today’s “poets” worship at the Church of Expression, finding poetry’s highest mission to be nothing more than to serve as a vessel for the poet to express his own transient, seemingly apocryphal feelings. The poetry written by such people does nothing to illuminate the reasons behind such feelings; merely expressing them is enough for the artist (left to ponder is why anyone should bother to read them).
The worst of them don’t even go that far. The worst of them, in fact, do nothing more than take a sentence and arbitrarily chop it up into bits. Elizabeth Alexander, who read a poem at Barack Obama’s inauguration, has published several such pieces, one of which is entitled “I Believe.” An excerpt: “Poetry, I tell my students/is idiosyncratic. Poetry/is where we are ourselves/(though Sterling Brown said/“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)/digging in the clam flats/for the shell that snaps/emptying the proverbial pocketbook./Poetry is what you find/in the dirt in the corner…” This alleged poem is the sort of work that earns people a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship nowadays.
As such, every dumb teenager with a pen and a journal can observe such “art” and think himself a budding poet. No special study, skill, vocabulary, or even rhyme or theme is required: just let your emotions flow and you’ve got yourself a legitimate poem. Rules? There are no rules. And without any rules, the aim certainly cannot be to produce anything in particular. The process, thus, is the result, and no one thinks twice.
But of course, when everything is art, nothing is art. And those who refuse to play along with the new rules of poetry have bolted for artistic professions in which skillful distinction is rewarded, and where one’s art can be witnessed by larger audiences. The same audiences, in fact, who have spoken with their actions, no longer paying any attention to the world of poetry.
Legitimate poetry lives on today mainly in the world of songwriting. The finest, most evocative poems exist in songs found in forms as diverse as Broadway librettos and gothic heavy metal albums. Some digging must be done, but classical poetry still exists, if one can bother to search for it — and make no mistake: modern professional poets are doing everything in their power not to deliver it, lest a person not be able to “express himself.” That may very well have its place. But please, let’s not call it art.
—
I really enjoyed writing that. I may want to dabble in cultural criticism in the future.
January 31st, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Yes, the same goes for what is called modern art. My grandfather was a fine artist. He mostly oil painted, but did a multitude of other things also such as sculptoring. Because he was from Kentucky, and lived in a very small town in Illinois, he knew nothing about marketing his wares. He sold hundreds of oil paiting; I think maybe the nighest around 2K, but many for around a hundred bucks. He was very talented and won ‘first of show’ at many art shows, including a nice one in LaPorte, Indiana. TODAY, we see people paying umpteen thousands for a bunch of worms crawling around in paint for a while.
Its much the same with poetry. The one read at Obama’s inaugaration was one many of us could have done, but somehow, some way this lady has become famous for doing the kind of thing a bunch of worms could have done in oil paint.
January 31st, 2009 at 2:48 pm
The market influences art forms as it influences all other factors. The most talented artists move to the forms where they receive the best payback (in money or attention, or both).
Poetry and (to a lesser extent) fiction have declined as video entertainment rose (and as you note, songwriting has taken a toll on poetry). The best writers went into movies and TV or even advertising, instead of writing novels or poetry (leaving the poetry field to the likes of Elizabeth Alexander).
Today, I’m struck by the number of young people who talk about going into video game design (far more, I’m sure, than will ever have a chance at success in the field). Hit video games, though, bring in more money than hit movies, and so we see people who in my generation might have been attracted to Hollywood instead wanting to go to work at Electronic Arts.
January 31st, 2009 at 3:02 pm
“Its much the same with poetry. The one read at Obama’s inaugaration was one many of us could have done, but somehow, some way this lady has become famous for doing the kind of thing a bunch of worms could have done in oil paint.”
Heck, I could could have written something in fifteen minutes and gotten just as much praise. The poem was only trying to appeal to modern sensibilities as to lack of form somehow denoting inner meaning, not to produce anything inherently rousing or insightful. I’ve heard plenty of serious poetry by classmates far more inspiring than that.
Nice column Alex.
January 31st, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Required reading on the overall decline of Art and Criticism is Roger Kimball’s “The Rape of the Masters“.
Alex, I have a copy of this that I am going to mail to you. You will absolutely love it.
January 31st, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Alex, good piece, and so true – “when everything is art, nothing is art.”
I have a BA from BYU. I was an art student, specifically painting and drawing. I don’t have much time for it anymore. (In fact, I’ve recently been thinking that it would be more productive and enjoyable than coming here so often.)
I want art to inspire me. I enjoy the artists who seek to elevate rather than just make some kind of social statement, even though I know there’s a place for that. It’s a pity that there is not more fine art instruction at the college level that teaches the basics. It’s taught, but to my mind, not emphasized enough. It’s all just a little too random and anything goes for me.
January 31st, 2009 at 4:09 pm
I really don’t understand your point Alex.
Are you under some illusion that “classical poets” were not motivated primarily by a desire to express themselves?
That they used certain standard rhyming schemes and meters that were the fashion of their times gave a certain form to their work – it did not make it existentially different from today’s poets.
All I see here is a reactionary mind expressing your own preference for the fashions of the past.
I am not claiming that there is a lot of good poetry out there. Like any creative enterprise, there is always an enormous amount of bad or mediocre work, and a few occasional glimpses of greatness. Draw up a list sometime of all the great poems that you can think of that were written in the nineteenth century. Then divide that number by 100, and see how many great poems per year were produced. If you run across a good poem at that rate now, then this will be as fruitful a time as the past. But since you are alive and exploring today’s culture, you will necessarily run into all the crap as well. The crap of the nineteenth century has all been forgotten, and thus is out of your view.
Arguments such as yours are the most trite and boring of all. They have been written every year since the invention of pen and paper. There are always lots of people like you who claim that everything good, be it in art or any other field, is going extinct. Fortunatly, people like you are always wrong.
January 31st, 2009 at 4:13 pm
There’s a brilliant essay by John Derbyshire on the state of modern poetry that I used extensively for my undergraduate thesis on Longfellow’s poetry. He draws essentially the same conclusion that you do. I’ll dig up my thesis when I’m at home and give you the link; you’ll get a kick out of it.
January 31st, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Also, I’d love to see more of this type of thing here. Arts criticism, when done well, is a wonderful thing, and I’d hazard a guess many R412 readers would enjoy it.
January 31st, 2009 at 5:30 pm
8 – It’s not the focus of this blog, though. I’d definitely be interested in blogging about cultural criticism, arts criticism, etc., but this isn’t the proper venue.
January 31st, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Tano, I’m a little groggy right now — just got interrupted from a nap — but I’ll address your points later. They’re legitimate points and are worth addressing.
January 31st, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Look out Virginia, New Jersey, and NY’s 20th district here comes the Steeleman!
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/01/31/steele-focused-critical-races-rebuilding-gop/
January 31st, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Nice change of pace, Alex. I’d say the problem has spread across most of the fine arts, though at least literature outside of poetry is still recognizable.
January 31st, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Alex, this is one of your best, and it speaks to the core of politics without even trying.
more later
January 31st, 2009 at 8:42 pm
“Arguments such as yours are the most trite and boring of all.”
Just because you’re from the opposite side of the aisle doesn’t mean you HAVE to be snide and dismissive, Tano.
January 31st, 2009 at 9:10 pm
I actually am a published poet. I got paid $1.19 for the poem that was published. Most poets have made far less. This is in a nutshell is the problem: It’s undercapitalized and underappreciated. As such, low standards are set.
I think it’s a self-perpetuating problem. The more garbage out there, the less appreciation there is. The less appreciation there is, the less serious people take time to do it.
January 31st, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Interesting article Alex. My first thought at the title was that poetry is dead because of the pace of our culture. Everything has gone into super-drive in this day and age. There is no time for the patience it take to produce a fine painting, a great poem or an opera. Masterpieces in any art form seem to be rare.
Then I read your article and thought that maybe these mediocre paintings, poems and music were always there but in our culture anyone can put their inferior product out for mass viewing\hearing so we are seeing too much of these inferior products. In ages past those inferior products would have collected dust in their ancestor’s attic or been burned to start a fire with on a cold morning.
Most masterpieces take time and patience in whatever age they are created in.
I’m certainly glad that my mother in law has that patience. Her chosen art form is batik landscapes or still life and she takes months to produce one piece. It does not look like a batik when she is finished, it looks like a watercolor or an oil painting because she puts that much detail into the art work. I want to say painting because that is what she does with dye and wax over and over again for months till it is finished. Most of the batiks I have seen look like a tie-dyed tee shirt, all abstract, no detail, no patience and no time to produce it.
January 31st, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Here’s a link to the article I referenced in post #8. It’s long, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Derbyshire’s hysterical when he goes off on a tear about modern (non)poetry.
I laughed especially hard at this excerpt:
“Here are some lines from a collection titled The George Washington Poems, by Diane Wakoski, published 1967.
George Washington, your name is on my lips.
You had a lot of slaves.
I don’t like the idea of slaves. I know I am
a slave to
too many masters, already
If this is poetry, what is not poetry?”
January 31st, 2009 at 11:13 pm
17
Sure it is poetry. Bad poetry.
Whats wrong with that? If I point out a bad business, one that goes under, does that prove that there are no good businesses anymore? If I relate to you a really dumb scientific hypothesis – does that prove that science is dead?
As I mentioned in comment above – when we look at the poetry of the past, we see only the ones that survived the selection process. When we look at today’s poetry, we see all the output, before the selection process, or while in the midst of being selected or rejected. The selection process ends up throwing 99.99% of all art, all science, all businesses, all creative endeavors into the garbage bin.
People like Derbyshire and Kimball et.al. try to proclaim themselves champions of high art, and the best of our culture – but they actually are the enemies of culture. Because they overlook the obvious points that I raise above, and thus end up trashing the artistic environment – which is the same type of environment that always existed – and is something which needs nurturing, not trashing. Beethoven was surrounded by a cacophony of incompetents – and anyone viewing the music scene of that day would have lamented the death of all good music. Hell – lots of critics at the time thought Beethoven himself was an utter incompetent, making brutal noise that assaulted their ears.
New artistic fashions are rarely appreciated in the lifetime of the artist – the old starving artist, recognized only after his death is a almost a stereotype. So many people are overly wedded to the sounds or visions that give them a certain comfort – things that they grew up seeing, things they can be nostalgic about. (see Alex’s “poem” in an earlier post)
But great art is art that expresses the spirit of the times, not necessarily the art that most people appreciate at the time it is made.
In American poetry the best example is Whitman – recognized now as perhaps the greatest American poet, whose work sings with the spirit of the late nineteenth century America. He broke all the rules – he was denounced as vigorously as any of your favorite curmudgeons trash today’s poets. Most people just did not get it, not for a long time.
So yeah, there is an endless supply of dreck out there – just as there has always been. Most of it will be soon forgotten, just like the dreck of the past was forgotten. And there will be some pearls that remain.
Instead of trashing the dreck, mocking the artists, and proposing that art itself is dead, why not tip your hat to all those who make the effort, and try to open your mind a bit to the innovative stuff – some of it may be of value.
January 31st, 2009 at 11:28 pm
#18 Tano, this is rare but I agree with what you have said.
February 1st, 2009 at 12:08 am
Opinions on what constitutes good art, we should keep in mind, can change over time. I recall a funny scene in Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper in which he awakens far in the future and is shocked to learn that people consider Rod McKuen to be the greatest poet of the 20th century.
February 1st, 2009 at 8:44 pm
I certainly don’t appreciate much of modern poetry (although there are a few decent poets still around). Being a subjective act, I suppose you can do no more than describe poetry and give an opinion about it.
Modern ‘art’ includes putting crucifixes in jars of urine. I don’t care for anyone’s artistic opinion who appreciates the current crap written by most poets.
I sincerely doubt our era will produce any poets to rival Wordsworth or Coleridge.
February 2nd, 2009 at 9:51 am
[...] new sparring partners (hah!). But, in this post I’ll be mostly agreeing with an old one. Alex writes that poetry is dead. So it is, but it is not the only casualty. Art, writ large, has been on the [...]