It is a testament to the apparent truth of poetryâs funeral that I should find myself excited to see poetry mentioned even in a derisive and unfair article in The Stranger. While I agree with some of the points made in the article, there are two things clearly wrong with the argument it presents. The first is that it admits the existence of only North American poetry (and from the United States in particular) and proceeds to condemn contemporary poets in general.
With a few exceptions, nearly all of the work of all of the poets whose names are dropped in the article worked, published, or were widely read predominantly in the United States. Itâs one thing to declare a state of emergency in the collective American expression of an art form and another thing entirely to proclaim that art form deceased. (Are Yugoslavian, Polish, or Japanese -- to say nothing of South American -- poets fairly represented by the portrait of the brooding twenty-something (sub)urban American poet?) It would do the authors well to keep the rest of the world in consideration while pontificating on artistic endeavors in general (as their seemingly favorite poets would, and did, do).
The point that is routinely missed in the tired argument the article resubmits to a yawning public is that the would-be poets the authors are addressing typically do not read much poetry. The authors claim that poetry needs two things: an operating space and a body of work, but neither of these do any good if poets donât read poems. The boring, exhausted tirade against the self-importance of simple and amateur poets is nonsense that wouldnât be tolerated in most other art forms, but is exalted when used for poetry because the taboo of poetic technique divides ridiculous poetry ridiculously.
My suggestion? Tell aspiring poets whose work you despise to read more poetry. Since the authors are so good at dropping names from the very top of the Borders best-selling poetry book heap, I fully trust they can help nudge aspiring poets in the right direction.
J.R. Tipton
Thanks to Charles Mudede and James Latteier for saying the obvious about the bankruptcy of the Confessional mode in poetry, which (despite the few admirable exceptions) needs to be said until it is considered as gauche as wearing fur. I tell my students who mistake their reader for a therapist to bring it to my college friend (pseudonyms here) Will Bernsteinâs dad. Ma and Pa Bernstein met as teenagers while they were internees at Auschwitz, the last survivors of each of their families when the camp was liberated. They came to America and grew prosperous in California and had two twin sons. When the boys were seven years old, they were horribly burned in a boating accident, losing fingers, toes, and both of them were in comas for months and were permanently and significantly disfigured. They grew up normal anyway, Will a popular athlete and his brother a scholastic star, the youngest person ever to graduate from UCLA Medical School. When Willâs brother finished his internship he was offered a dazzling job as Chief Surgeon (or something like that) at a top hospital and went out and got a loan and bought a big house. When the call came saying the job offer had been pulled, he hanged himself in his new living room, sending his twin into a mental institution where he was living again when I last spoke to his father. Will Bernsteinâs father Harry: thatâs your reader, poets. My childhood was wretched, honestly, but yours might well have been worse, and Iâll be damned if a complaint about either is a fit subject for a poem. If you have the balls to versify to Harry Bernstein about your minority (or misunderstood majority) status, childhood abuse, bad marriage, poverty, disappointingly hollow wealth or the deaths of your parents, he wonât have it. And neither should the rest of us. This doesnât forbid a personalized poetry about real events. But if the work relies on the horror-show gravity of those subjects for its impact, then it is fraudulent and silly and begging to be shot out of the sky.
Grant Cogswell
MUDEDE AND LATTEIER: Youâve proclaimed, for yourself perhaps, that bad confessional poetry is bad poetry. Well, no shit. But so is the artless deconstruction and half-ass intellectual trickery Subtext passes off as experimental art (but thanks for reminding us of the cronyism--everybodyâs poetry sucks but me and my friends--that drove the genre to irrelevance). Thereâs a lot of great poetry with the self as a primary subject (which, for clarity, defines confessional). For starters, how about all of Pablo Nerudaâs love poetry (the best in any language), with its continuous âIâ narratives of anguish and longing? Or, in case weâve forgotten that Robert Lowell didnât invent confessional poetry but just gave it a bad and inaccurate name, there are two thousand years of Japanese and Chinese bad-asses who fall into the same category. Hereâs the baseline: bad poetry is written for the writer, good poetry for the reader.
The real issue here is two-fold. First, papers like The Strangerâand The New York Times, The LA Times, The New Yorker, and with rare but ass-kissy exceptions The New York Times Review of Booksâdonât review poetry anymore (unless you count Grant Cogswellâs manic but misguided acclaim for Howard W. Robertson last year, which I donât). Thereâs a lot of mediocre poetry published these days, which is nothing new, but gone is the mechanism of criticism to pull out gems. Thereâs good poetry being written, itâs just lost in the goulash. The Stranger has no business taking pot shots at an art theyâve abandoned.
Second, and hereâs my itch: What do you want instead? You can articulate that a lot of contemporary poetry is bad, which I mostly agree with, but then what? You copped out with a pseudo-profundity about intertextuality, which a healthy body of criticism would address but thatâs only a sliver of the issue. Ilya Kaminsky, whose book Dancing in Odessa is ambitious and brilliant, should have been reviewed by this paper on any of his four visits to Seattle last year. Kaminskyâs poetics address the future you guys went flaccid in the face of. Itâs a tiny step, spreading glacially between the ronins (to steal your word) who still give a shit about any of this. But what we really need is a forum for pulling the Kaminskys out of the heap, and right now all weâve got are American Poetry Review, which wonât give a bad review to a famous writer even if itâs unreadable shite, and Poetry magazine, which is sharper-tongued these days but too insular to build a movement around.
Confessional poetry isnât the problem; the lack of criticism and direction is the problem. The only relevant question is this: will you continue to blow righteous smoke up your own ass, or will you address the problem?
Bryan Miller
I, too, regret bad poetry. But having just read the mini-polemic against contemporary poetry presented by Charles Mudede and James Latteier, I am curious to see the article begins by preemptively defending itself against the likely outrage that an anti-poetry rant will surely inspire in the hearts of the few Seattle poets the authors choose to name-drop at the beginning of their piece. Surely they donât think that by excusing these few while simultaneously excoriating their contemporaries, that they have protected themselves from criticism on the obvious point that Mudede and Latteier fail to convince the reader of anything except that they donât know anything about contemporary poetry in general or the Seattle âpoetry scene,â more specifically. By weakly listing off the few Seattle poets they have heard about, bizarrely tossing in the name of Ron Silliman to round out the list, the authors reveal themselves from the beginning as being in over their heads and incapable of supporting the claims they are about to make. They even go so far as to try to enlist their support with âsympatheticâ claims that they know what it is like to be a poet: âdoomed to work alone, like roninsâ etc. Are you kidding me? Do they honestly believe that the likes of Olson and McHugh, individuals who actively work, teach, and are engaged in local and national poetry communities will buy in to this misguided suck-up move? Are Mudede and Latteier arguing that they support Silliman but not the hundreds of poets he supports and discusses on his website? And in their pardon to Subtext, are we to assume that the dozens of poets who have read and hundreds of audience members who support this organization are also not included as targets in this rant? These legions alone are enough to prove the authorsâ argument unstable.
A cursory overview of seemingly randomly selected late 20th century poetic schools-- an overview, I might add, that any journalist desirous of sounding knowledgeable could reproduce after a ten minute visit to Wikipedia-- seems positioned to convince readers that the authors are in possession of enough authority to make statements such as: âWe regret the contemporary poetry spewing out of this city, this region, this nation.â We are supposed to be impressed with phrases like âthe failure of the Black Mountain poets to carry on the work of Ezra Poundâs Cantos,â so as not to notice that the authors are getting it all wrong when they try to backhandedly dismiss the New York School by calling it âfeyâ (read: âgayâ) and âdeeply imbued with camp and ironyâ and just plain incorrectly claim that it âbarely survived the end of the century.â (I suppose that the authors would argue that abstract expressionist painting suffered a similar fate.) Never mind the point that the camp and irony that the New York School employed was meant as an antidote to the very same gross sincerity in poetry that Mudede and Latteier decry.
I regret that poetry fights an uphill battle in its efforts to be heard in the midst of pro-Bush, anti-Bush, pro-Brad, anti-Angelina din which roars in our contemporary ears. I am a poet, and I am not under the impression that mine is âan age of milk and honey.â But it is not the bad poetry that concerns me, confessional, tenured, or otherwise. It is the failure of readers, teachers, and critics in America to be up to the challenge that contemporary poetry, our most experimental, aggressive, and diverse of literatures, presents. If poetry is to succeed in America, it is a more open, adventurous readership that we need. Not fewer poets. I regret that the one time I see The Stranger giving any sustained attention to contemporary poetry, it is to pathetically try to dismiss the entire genre, presumably as an excuse for not knowing or saying enough about it in the form of actual critical reviews and discussions.
Monica Fambrough
It is interesting that you should focus so much on poetry, on its lack, the sadness of this lack, and the potentiality for greatness revealed or betrayed by this sadness for the lack, for a great idea done wrong, since poetry is, for writing, quite possibly the last frontier. For it appears that fiction has been mastered (Kafka), deconstruction has been mastered (Derrida), and so has psychoanalysis (Freud). There is but one region of writing that has not found an obvious master and only one capable of defining history as
something crawling towards
the future
something winding its way
into a canyon
But I agree that the poetry of our day is dismal. In the past we had Ovid, Goethe, even Celan. Now the best we can read is maybe an Ashbery, or an occasional Jorie Graham. It is true that poetry nowadays is nonsense, but this is not to be despaired of. For why else would such a flood of bad poetry be spat out of culture if it were not attempting very heavily to repress what it is purportedly making, which is poetry.
Justin Dobbs
