Does poetry’s arrogance matter?

Irreplaceable has been the Internet as much for instant communication as the unexpected jewels we find in our electronic mailboxes.

From a compilation of text jokes on l’affaire Jose Pidal to alarums on the re-use of mineral water bottles (patently dubious, else manufacturers would have their plastic bottles carry warnings), the often unsolicited mail also teaches us lessons in intuition and selection. Intuition, as in quick discrimination, because time constraints tell us to delete automatically once we sense a spam, a redux or a bore. More importantly, discernment on a casual browse: which to file or which to let go without benefit of a full read.

The past week has been generous, offering a couple of major essays on poetry which I just had to download, forward to friends’ own treasure boxes, and actually print out for hardcopy pass-along to students and cronies without e-mail service.

The first was sent by premier bilingual poet, screenwriter and journalist Pete Lacaba, via the Plaridel list serve he initiated and assiduously maintains. It originally came from Epifanio San Juan Jr. who’s likely still in the US. So thanks, too, Sonny.

The longish essay – breezy, trenchant, informative – is titled "Does Poetry Matter?" It’s written by William Waltz, editor in chief of Conduit, billed as "the only magazine that risks annihilation" —- where it appeared in the August 2003 issue. Copyrighted by Rake Publishing Inc., the full text may be sourced at www.rakemag.com

The article claims to have the answers to these two questions: "Why does most poetry stink? And why are there more poets than readers of poetry?" While Waltz addresses the American market in his occasionally acerbic take, and employs all-American idiom and examples, what he has to say appeals across the global board.

Being a poet in America makes as much sense as a butt full of pennies. That’s one of the pleasures of being a poet in America. There’s something wonderful, something perversely subversive about being disconnected from the world of goods and services and John Maynard Keynes, if only for an hour or two every now and again. It’s freedom. Poetry is an uncharted wilderness along whose margins capitalism wilts like arugula in the Wedge parking lot on the Fourth of July. Inside its borders, the mind blooms and the imagination yields a bumper crop, yet the marketplace rejects poetry. One given to daydreaming might wonder why, and the answer might be found in the dump of discarded possibilities. This is the predicament American Poetry finds itself in: stranded in the closeout bin of our cultural supermarket because of poor management – management that has chosen to make poetry an unwanted specialty item rather than a staple.

"There is an economics to poetry, of course, and even a poetry to economics, yet the numbers don’t add up. (The poetic colossus Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive of Hartford, wrote, ‘Money is a kind of poetry,’ but it’s not a kind of poetry most poets are familiar with.) The nonsensicality of a career in poetry can be explained by the laws of economics. To paraphrase Adam Smith, the founder of classical economics, a livable wage shall be retained if a good or service is provided in a supply that does not exceed demand. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, might say the demand for poetry is soft, while the supply is robust. If home ownership, retirement, a cabin by the lake, prestige, and self-esteem mean anything to you, or if you’re practical, pragmatic, cautious, or otherwise uncourageous, please be advised to follow your muse elsewhere. Poetry and economics make a profoundly odd couple, sort of like Sylvia Plath and Milton Friedman.

"Poetry registers barely a blip on the national radar, and when it does make the news, there’s often a certain wackiness quotient factored in. During the past 18 months, poetry has experienced a relative media bonanza – which might indicate either a spark in interest or a surge in wackiness…"

I hope that Waltz and Conduit won’t mind the lengthy quote, and others to follow. There’s something to be said too of the sharing quotient going as generously high as Keynesian principles when the commodity proves valuable, or at least delightful.

Waltz cites a new Robert Lowell collection that "sent pop-culture commentators scurrying to their keyboards, suddenly writing about poets and poetry…" He scores Amiri Baraka, the New Jersey poet laureate who went for his 15 minutes of Internet fame by launching a call for protest poetry, led off by a rant passing itself as his poem for the anti-war cause. Unmercifully does Waltz assess it as "a god-awful poem that made itself worse by suggesting the Israelis had foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks."

Baraka’s antics occasioned a cancellation of a literary symposium at the White House sponsored by First Lady Laura Bush, "for fear some poets might take advantage of the occasion and spout anti-war, anti-George rhetoric. Poets cried foul, claiming this was yet another example of the Bush administration’s hostility toward dissenting voices. (Ironically, many poets are intolerant of dissenting opinions among their own ranks.)" Touché.

Citing "nutty heiress" Ruth Lilly’s unprecedented donation of $100 million to Poetry magazine, Waltz joins the rest of the incredulous. "To put Lilly’s donation into perspective: According to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, 261 magazines belong to the association and 175 of those have budgets under $10,000. As I say, money is a rare kind of poetry."

Then there’s an extended appraisal of the pros and cons of poetry’s "accessibility." "When one calls a poet’s work accessible, one is usually committing an act of calumny. Billy Collins is the poster child of accessible poetry. His crystal-clear lyrics have burned the ass of more than a few poet-critics; to be precise, it is his enormous success that smolders under their seats. Collins shrugs off such criticism as sour grapes from the same gentlefolk who cry, over snifters of Sangiovese and wheels of Brie, about poetry’s diminutive stature. Despite being dismissed by a large portion of poetry’s advance guard, Collins is racking up the sales, accolades, prizes, and fans in drop-dead numbers, unlike any other American poet today."

Waltz then relates how he attended a Collins reading in Minnesota, where the "rapt audience of nearly 900 (didn’t consist of) your come-as-you-are word nerds but fine, upstanding people in business suits and wool skirts who are probably very reasonable most of the time but who paid between $25 and $42 to see Billy Collins read poetry."

The national poet laureate delivered. "Nearly every poem elicited laughter and a good number of guffaws… His humor is inviting to listeners and readers; it forges a camaraderie between them. The language and imagery he uses are fresh enough not to be trite, but familiar enough to be recognized quickly and without much head scratching. I can’t help thinking that the appeal of accessible poetry, especially when it incorporates humor, might be that reasonable, intelligent people get to feel as if they’re in on the joke, in on the meaning. Unlike the experience of reading the tortured verse of some genius caught in the vicious realization that language is complicated and life is uncertain. We know that already. Billy Collins is a rare breed: He makes a living as a poet. We didn’t know that was possible."

Hooray for Billy Collins. I must add here that I very much like his kind of poetry, which always provides great good examples for aspiring young poets.

Waltz precedes his closure, which highlights a funny poem by Gabriel Gudding, with a sober throwback to how "T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock and the rest of the Modernist oeuvre might be to blame for the course of American poetry that has led to our current situation." But he waxes optimistic over the applause provided by what he calls connoisseurship, and then some.

"Despite the messy state of affairs today, the poetry world is primed for (and maybe on the verge of) a roaring comeback. And, although many poets seem content to write poems that only connoisseurs and mothers could love, a growing populist movement seems bent on dragging poetry back into the mainstream… Spoken-word and slam poetry have developed a whole new audience for poetry. Their practitioners may produce an uneven brand of verse, but they do, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti recently said, ‘bring people to poetry’ by the barful, and that’s surely worth applauding…."

Forwarding Waltz’s essay earned myself pogi points from friends, as well as a reward by way of another, longer essay that’s also valuable for its stance and brilliant passages cum readings. This one came from Angela Narciso Torres in San Francisco, a young poet who revisited her hometown of San Juan last month.

Here are excerpts from this wonderful piece, "The Arrogance of Poetry" written by Mark Halliday for The Georgia Review. To bolster his contention, Halliday seriously assesses five poems: Wallace Stevens’ "The American Sublime," Mary Ruefle’s "Perfect Reader" from her book Post Meridian (Carnegie Mellon, 2000); Thomas Hardy’s "The Change"; Seamus Heaney’s "At Toomebridge" from Electric Light (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001); and Sarah Lindsay’s "From Luristan to Thule" from Primate Behavior (Grove Press, 1997). Those who may want a full transcript can ask me at kripbam@email.com.ph

It’s not a put-down of poetry, but an astute and often funny, canny reckoning of the curious ways of a poem, to which Halliday seems impatient to say, "Oh, come off it!" the way he believes someone should have snorted a long time ago to the "fabulously arrogant" Emily Dickinson.

Jimmy Abad’s response upon receiving these two pieces had us sharing a wish to have more of the same anthologized, as, say, "On Poetry: Essays for the New Millennium." Why, if it weren’t a crime against intellectual property, or too much of a hassle to get permission from everyone, we’d love to do it ourselves. So why can’t we run something like the erstwhile Napster, and now Kazaa, which democratizes music? Ah, the arrogance of copyright. Here’s Halliday:

"Sometimes fatigue or a journal stuffed with bad poems throws us into poetry-dismay, even poetry-disgust, but poetry soon wins us back. A good poem comes along that is damned appealing; it has charisma, it has a peculiar panache, it cuts a new path through experience, it expresses – or it is – a new truth, or new edge of truth. Life is suddenly undreary.

"And this poem is so strangely sure of itself! Where did it get such nerve? It has a quality I will call arrogance.

"A poem, just by being a poem, says ‘I am more significant than all your chatter, all your information, all your reports and articles, more significant even than all your stories, more important than any page of Crime and Punishment or Women in Love or Middlemarch – even, in a mysterious way, more important than each of these novels as a whole. You must gaze down into the well of me. You may never see to the bottom.’

"The essential sign of poetry’s arrogance is white space. Poetry takes unto itself the luxurious, ostentatiously high-class option of not reaching the righthand margin… Prose must pack itself into the common area, the second-class accommodations, filling the page all the way to the margin regardless of whether it’s referring to the principles of Baroque architecture or the Meaning of Meaning or what some Hollywood star wore to a premiere. The unfilled part of a poem’s page is the ornamental garden surrounding the castle of superior meaning. A poem says, ‘I can drape myself in white space like a mink coat. I stand apart from the mundane tide of utilitarian utterance. I create and require a respectful silence around me.’

"The arrogance of poetry is titanically oppressive in the silence immediately after a poem’s last line. That silence stares at you. It says, ‘Do you or do you not get it?’ It says, ‘Do you love me? You should. If you don’t, you’ve missed something. The problem is yours – some blindness, some crudeness, some insensitivity to nuance.’

"If a person said that to you, or if a person’s way of falling silent implied that, you would respond energetically – you would walk out of the room, or laugh in the person’s arrogant face, or ask intense questions, or express remorse. Like such a person, a poem refuses to be taken casually… If you do take a poem casually, you feel slothful, shallow, flippant – a feeling that is very different from thinking hard about a poem and deciding it is itself slothful, shallow, flippant. Fortunately, persons don’t often have the gall to say, ‘If you don’t love me, the problem is yours.’ Poems say this every time.

"Poems keep stroking their own hair.

A poem is like the person at the table who won’t speak unless everyone else hushes to listen. A poem is like the person whose tone announces: Enough of your jabber. Now I shall speak words worth remembering. You should want to chisel these words in marble.

"Poetry’s demand for special attention is one aspect of its essential arrogance. Another is its pride in implication. A poem always knows – or carries – something it doesn’t spell out… A poem is like someone who conveys crucial meanings with subtle changes of gaze and gesture, with eyebrows rather than words; a poem suddenly stares at you to see if you can meet its challenge. This gaze is charismatic – when it is not absurdly portentous. We are beguiled and enthralled by the poem’s sublime implicitness – when we are not irritated and repulsed.

"…Confronting a poem, we often have to work hard to decide whether its oddity or difficulty comes from a wonderfully forgivable, or from a repulsive arrogance. The arrogance of all poetry is tiring – like both good sex and bad sex. "

"… Poems are mostly read by people already hooked on poetry. How does a novelist feel, reading a book of poems? The novelist may feel a puzzled respect for someone who doggedly writes a kind of literature unlikely to bring wealth or fame. At the same time, the novelist may feel annoyed when the poet offers such small things – coy, anemic perceptions and teasing metaphorical connections – as if each one were terrifically unusual – a day’s work! – enshrined by costly whiteness on all sides, commanding a hushed and riveted attention. The novelist has produced countless equally sharp images and insightful connections and richly evoked moments – hundreds in each novel! And the novelist has given these gifts to the reader without poetry’s preening insistence that each morsel is a sublime Godiva truffle. The novelist may think the poetry is ‘good’ but that her own work by comparison is admirably unpompous and generous.

"But Thomas Hardy, one of the few writers great as both poet and novelist, felt that greatness in poetry mattered more than greatness in prose. Isn’t this an unreasonable bias?

"…To be calmly sensitive and thoughtful each time a poem is in front of your eyes, but to turn away for rest and refreshment before either exhaustion or cynicism sets in. This nearly angelic response is humanly possible, but it is amazingly hard to sustain.

"Poems crowd toward you like the shades of the underworld when Odysseus visits; they crave the hot blood of attention.

"Or they crowd toward you like refugees mobbing a United Nations worker who dispenses far too few bags of grain from the back of a truck.

"Notice the inconsistency of that simile with the analogy of a poem’s being like a proud high-chinned person requiring a respectful hush around his or her augustness. On the level of self-presentation, each poem is that dignitary; meanwhile, on the practical level, seen from outside, each poem is more like a famine victim in danger of being trampled beneath the feet of its fellow poems, all famished for the reader’s ration of attention.

"The poem seems not to have noticed its actual social situation. Picture a crowded, deafening cocktail party; in the middle of the room stands the poem, addressing itself to anyone and everyone, not even shouting, regardless of whether anyone listens. In real life this is a kind of madness. In art, it is the arrogance of art..."