What's
Really Wrong with Poetry in America 2.0
by Lael Ewy
The real problem with poetry, of course, is that we value money much,
much more. Reading and understanding poetry takes time and effort--time
and effort we would much rather spend making money. Poetry itself bakes
no bread; it produces nothing saleable, and its study cannot, in itself,
make one wealthy.
The lack of respect for poetry has nothing to do with our educational
system, nothing to do with morals, especially, nothing to do with "saving"
our "culture." The disrespect and misunderstanding of poetry
in our culture comes simply from the fact that we do not value it. There
is nothing in our Pantheon of quintessential American values that includes
poetry. Poetry is scary because it smacks of Continentalism; it smells
of those deep European roots we are proud of in name only. To become
American we have traded that European history for material gain. We
have turned away from a system oppressive but culturally rich to one
ostensibly free but culturally barren. America is about making money,
and only about making money, and poetry, traditionally a pursuit of
a leisure class, doesn't enter into that equation.
That is why universities have taken up its cause. Poetry has of late
become every bit the museum piece that 19th century art is, that prehistoric
tools are, that paleontological digs unearth. They are vital only in
what scholars can learn from them: they have no direct bearing on the
marketplace ("Sue" the T. Rex notwithstanding, being
probably the exception that proves the rule), which is America's core
culture. Universities, since their funding is not directly from the
marketplace, take up these causes.
More important to the universities, however, is the fact that taking
up the cause of poetry gives the university faculty another outlet for
their snobbishness. This is important simply because of the academic's
alienation from the marketplace. Without a direct connection to the
core culture, the academic feels a lack of importance or power within
her society. She is forced to invent an importance, so she creates for
her position a sense of being the keeper of a necessary cultural component
(art or literature), a sense of delving into the purer realms of human
knowledge (research in the sciences), or an idea of being a nerve-cell
in the collective memory (history or archeology). This invented sense
of importance is shaky, however: every academic is still always at least
subconsciously aware of her own marginality. This leads to over-compensation:
her field becomes the important field, her work the most important work.
Her sense of propriety is heightened as well: there is but one way to
succeed in the field and it is her way. All else is sub-par at best,
a dangerous degradation of serious scholarship, a harbinger of the End
of Art, the End of Science at worst. This coincides with and reinforces
the natural recalcitrance of all institutions, and a subject of study,
once it becomes part of the academic system--and only part of an academic
system--fails to grow, and perhaps even reverts to a primordial--more
"pure" as one doing the studying would put it--state.
The saving graces of the sciences are discovery and application: technology
affords a viable (and usually marketable) outlet for discovery, and
discovery itself being an end, science has an incentive to march on,
to change, to grow. History is saved by its constant creation: things
happen and history must be there to record it. Literature and poetry
also continue to happen, but, being as they are already part of the
institution as they are created, having been taught there and supported
almost exclusively by institutionalized journals, they have absolutely
no incentive to grow. Formulae that worked for an author's first poem
will work just as well for his last: he has no public to demand originality,
only an institution whose rules have failed to change in the intervening
span. Furthermore, the writer, if he wishes to keep his place within
the institution, because of the paradigm of "publish or perish,"
has no incentive to jeopardize his plumb position by doing something
experimental. Since the editors of the institutionalized journals are
at least partly responsible for keeping the rules of what makes good
literature in place, they have no incentive to change either lest their
journal lose respectability. An author's experiment could very well
mean his downfall, both artistically and monetarily.
We have created a system that is very good at employing poets. Unfortunately,
we have also created a system that is anathema to poetry. I am not contending
that poetry should be beholden to the marketplace: that would be disastrous
in a nation that thinks only with its wallet. I am contending, rather,
that poetry should not be beholden to the institution. This is the only
way it will be allowed to grow, even if it is appreciated only by a
tiny number of literati. Instead of producing it exclusively to appear
in literary journals, we should produce it in our homes, amongst our
friends, in our actual lives. We should share our work for the sake
of sharing it, not for critique or refinement (since good poets will
do that anyway).
A shared poetry, valued by those who produce it as something more than
a means to an academic position and a method of retaining that position,
might even begin to become popular. It might even begin to fulfill a
need for poetry that exists in our society, a need William Carlos Williams
was aware of--a need that goes beyond the cold walls of the ivory tower.
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