Much as what passes for poetry today is not what I could call poetry. Here is a fictitious example of the contemporary, post-modern poem:
The jar lay on the floorIt looked good to me,
So I kicked it across the hardwood and listened to it
Clink and clank like a train on worn out tracks.
Um, actually, that's not half bad. I just spit that out. Let me try again at post-modern emptiness:
Cindy lay on the bed, naked.We had just made love.
I smoked a cigarette and thought about a show
I had seen on TV the night before.
This is some life, I thought.
And it was.
Okay, that's more like it - vacuous. Devoid of subtly and almost totally lacking in meaning.
Most of what I read from contemporary poets lacks rhythm, lacks music, lacks the layers of onion skin that make delving into a truly well-worked poem so satisfy.
I read Bukowski not because he is a poet to study the way I once studied Eliot or Crane; I read Bukowski because I love his voice. I breeze through his poems enjoying the milieu of his life, picking up bits of observed detail and insight into human behavior. But, with a few exceptions, Bukowski lacks the compressed punch of a Keats or a Donne.
Poet and reviewer Edward Hirsch touches on the snobbery many current poetry critics have about what constitutes good poetry in his review of Richard Howard's new volume, "Talking Cures."
Howard is the most unabashedly literary -- the most Wildean -- of contemporary American poets. His massive learning, a full cultural arsenal, has often made him seem suspect to poetry readers who distrust great fanciness and mistakenly equate a plain style and a supposedly unmediated personal voice with "sincerity," which is a little like saying that vanilla ice cream is more "sincere" than peach gelato. But if it's true, as Ezra Pound said, that technique is the test of a poet's sincerity, then Howard certainly qualifies as one of our sincerest makers, since he has been elaborating his structures -- deliberately making something of himself -- for more than 40 years now. (emphasis added)
To me, a plain style is perfectly suited to prose, but not to poetry. The point of poetry is to escape the drabness of our plain and ponderous lives; poetry should compact our experiences and excite our senses, not numb us with a sense of sameness and predictability. From poetry, we should gain a new way of seeing old things, not the same old way of seeing everything.
The samples of Howard's poetry in Hirsch's review make me think that he is my kind of poet.
... Everyone knows my history,
complete with goddesses, islands, all those hoary lies!
I have no tales to tell, I have only
echoes. The real Ulysses puts in his appearance
between other men's lines, the true Odysseus
shows up in unspeakable pauses, the gaps and blanks
where life hasn't already been turned into
"my" wanderings, "my" homecoming, even "my" dog!
This from a poem about Ulysses taking a post-modern view of his legend, but it is written with a modern cadence that lifts it above post-modern boredom.
I think I'll buy this book.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Jacob Lalonde
two clicks, scan for appetite again
review the dish, no verse so far
look, in Toronto for a start
ugh...I should stick to limericks for now, thanks for the poetry scoop Howard.
2 - Mike Finley
Poetry has never been the same thing, so it would be odd if it were the same thing today.
I.e., the Gawain poet wasn't trying to do what Wordsworth was trying to do, or Poe what Whitman was.
It isn't baseball, were stats of one era sit comfortably beside the modern era.
The big problem is that the current era is a mass era, so there are hundreds of thousands of poets writing, many of them "credentialed" academically or by publication.
The Romantic era did not have a million poets. We do. So the range of quality is necessarily all over the place -- as is the range of defintions of quality.
I think a blog is a good model for a poem -- individualm yet shared; unique, but in community; a faint yawp amid all the noise, but, hey, every so often someone hears you.
I guess "criticism" (the utterance of public opinion about stuff) is a good thing. But most poets live a lifetime and never hear a peep of it. So it is even less relevant than the poetry establishment, which only exists because a few anthologies suggest so.
So how do we get good? Privately, and infrequently, and in the darkness of mystery, where the dew forms on the petal.
3 - Joseph Duemer
Uh, why do you have to invent a hypothetical "straw poem" to make your point? Aren't there plenty of crappy poems out there that you could have used? I'm a poetry editor for The Wallace Stevens Journal & a "contemporary poet" I can tell you that there are indeed millions of bad poems. But there are good ones too. I find them & I publish them. Sometimes I even write them. Your review is a piece of intellectual dishonesty from beginning to end--& Hirsch would say as much. It's one of those "positive" reviews an author is ashamed of.
4 - Howard Owens
Why? Because it's fun.
Try it. it's the new parlor game.
5 - Dan Tessitore
Glad to find another public poetry discussion. I'd like to know what readers in this forum think of Billy Collins, who strikes me as one of those special cases (much like Robert Bly) whose readership extends well beyond the academy.
Being a poet myself, I'm hard pressed to begrudge another poet his/her success. It's hard to come by. But with the exception of a sense of humor and a facility for the image, he reads often enough like Rod McKuen.
I would probably not give Collins a second thought were it not for his near omniscient presence in some of the most respected poetry journals and his role in academia, which help send the message that an easy-going, plain style and a high level of accessibility are the preferred goals of the art.
Thoughts?
Dan
6 - Howard Owens
Frankly, I don't follow contemporary poetry closely because so much of it SUCKS, so I hadn't heard of Collins. So I just did a google on him, found some of his stuff. And yes he is the very sort of contempoary poet I'm referrering to.
"I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna /
or on any river for that matter /
to be perfectly honest."
Is how one of his poems begins, and it never gets better. Even were it attempts to be intelligent, it achives nothing more than a pastiche of profundity. Though, he doesn't seem to be the total sap that McKuen is. Even if he isn't to my taste, I have no objection to people who think this sort of crap is poetry taking him seriously. He fits in well with that crowd.
7 - Joseph Duemer
S, Howard, you don't follow contemporary poetry but you feel qualified to criticize it? And you feel qualified to write a fake poem to illustrate your argument? A poem that reveals you know about contemporary poetry what someone who "doesn't follow" it would know. Not much. And you feel confident about reviewing a book by contemporary poet Edward Hirsch? Aren't you embarassed?
As for Collins, he is a technically proficient lightweight. But I've read quite a few of his poems before making that judgement--you've "googled" him. I can tell you're a serious scholar.
8 - Howard Owens
Joseph, I can see that you are more interested in picking an argument than discussing issues.
How many bad contemporary poems do I have to read before I conclude that the trends of post-modern poetry are all downhill? Hundreds, which I've done, or thousands, which I haven't?
You obviously don't read too closely, because I didn't write a review of Hirsh's book. I don't even know if Hirsh has a book out, but I assume he does, since he's a poet of enough note to write a review for the L.A. Times Review of Books. What I blogged was a response to Hirsh's review in the LAT of a new book of poems by Richard Howard. And my response was entirely positive, because it sounds like Howard bucks the trend of po-mo poetry by writing in a style that has some substance. Now that I've explained how you've thoroughly gotten the facts of my blog post wrong (not, I should note, a scholarly essay in a Lit Crit journal, but a friggin' blog post), aren't you embarrassed?
9 - Joseph Duemer
Howard, I'm certainly interested in picking a fight with the sort of dishonesty you're peddling. I did mis-write, confusing Hirsch's review with Howard's book. It was late & both begin with H & etc. You're probably going to be disappointed by Howard, by the way, he's pretty po-mo.
The American poet Winfield Townley Scot wrot in his journal many years ago that he was amused by people who rejected contemporary poetry, the implication being that they spent every eveing reading Shakespeare & Milton. He's skewering the same sort of b.s. you're peddling in your little review of a review.
As for having read hundreds of bad contemporary poems, so have I--thousands, in fact, since I'm a poetry editor. But I also continue to find poems that repay my attentions as a reader. I'd guess you haven't looked very hard for good contemporary poems, or that you've looked in the wrong places, or that you have just defined the category of contemporary as bad & so dismissed it through an act of definition rather than as the result of acts of reading.
And I'm not embarrassed by the central point I've been trying to make here: that there are fine contemporary poets who write good poems that will repay a reader's honest attention.
10 - Dan Tessitore
Joe:
If you mean by "technically proficient" that Collins' music (or lack of it) does not offend the ear, then I would agree. However, in nearly every poem of his that I've read (at least a couple books' worth), he avoids the risk by refusing enjambment, non-grammatical line breaks, or anything that smacks of conscious formal innovation. I said as much in the review of "Picnic, Lightning" I wrote for Poetry International a few years ago.
Admittedly, shortcomings glare in direct proportion to success, and Collins has plenty of success, which makes him an easy mark. Still, his popularity is disturbing not so much for the quality of the work itself but for what it says about reading habits among Americans generally and certain aspects of our poetry culture specifically. I'm working up some of these ideas into an essay, but I'll share a few points here.
It is interesting, and somewhat confounding, to note that there has not been a great deal of negative criticism leveled at Collins’ work. Wars have been fought over less visible contributions to the art, specifically the experimental poetries that have arisen during the past three decades, and more specifically, Charles Olsen, Allen Ginsberg, and John Ashbery " to name but a few of our more adventurous poets. Even Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?,” not poetry at all but commentary, ignited a storm of debate over contemporary poetry since its publication in 1992 that has still not subsided. Yet Collins, despite a suspicion of seriousness in poetry that borders on condescension and a painfully clear lack of formal skill or innovation, has seemed to dodge the critical bullet.
There are two different but related possible reasons for this. The first is simple economics. Billy Collins is a poet who sells books and fills auditoriums with people who buy them. That fact alone might cause the reviewers in the wider-circulation periodicals (if and when they review poetry at all) to forego condemnation in favor of mercy, much the same way people muster an appreciation for endangered animals " even ugly ones. The second is careerism. Many of those who write reviews are themselves poets, and most of them with nothing like the reputation of Collins. Why risk offending the editors of magazines one aspires to publish in by skewering a poet regularly featured there? That may seem a paltry reason to withhold judgment, but artists and academics since time immemorial have been ostracized for less than an unpopular opinion.
In my “googling” of reviews on Collins, I found only two less-than-glowing critiques, neither of which was from a national publication. I had to go to Amazon.com and bn.com, not exactly strongholds of literary criticism, to find but two negative blurbs (of the vitriolic type). What was more telling was the general tenor of the “5-star” reviews, which were more damning than the overtly negative ones. One blurb was titled “Wonderful poetry for people who are ambivalent about poetry.” Another contained this: “…this is a new breed, a style more like that of paragraphs broken up into stanzas.” And another: “I am not a huge fan of poetry and I seldom take the time to analyze it deeply, but Collins is the finest and most interesting contemporary poet I know of and would highly recommend his poetry to anyone who likes a good laugh…[sic]” In other words, if you do not like poetry, you’ll love Billy Collins.
The sentiments expressed in these web-posts are echoed in the “serious” literary reviews offered up by reviewers who are paid to write about poetry, which goes a long way to demonstrating they don’t know much about it. But what these assertions (most poetry is difficult, we want easier poetry) really show is that it’s not poetry most readers are looking for, its easy reading.
All best,
Dan
11 - Joseph Duemer
Hey Dan! Sorry not to have answered your email yet. Busy round here. I aqgree with you about Collins--no risk, little payoff. A poet for people who don't like poetry.
12 - Joseph Duemer
Hey Dan! Sorry not to have answered your email yet. Busy round here. I agree with you about Collins--no risk, little payoff. A poet for people who don't like poetry.
13 - Dan Tessitore
Joe:
No problem. Have a good holiday and end-of-semester crunch. Write when you can.
Dan
14 - Howard Owens
Joseph -- name a poet or two (or better, a poem or two) that's worth reading. Make it something that is accessible on the Web and I'll let you know what I think.
As for peddling dishonesty -- who's peddling dishonesty? I would say it's the guy who has had nothing better to do than post ad hominem attacks on me. You haven't posted any critique of my post that has any substance to it whatsoever. So who's being dishonest? Rather than defend po-mo poetry with examples, you expect us to just take your word for it because you're an "editor" of a poetry magazine, as if being an editor of a poetry magazine in this day and age is anything to brag about.
As for mixing up the authors, It's bullshit to claim "it's late and I'm tired" because you made the same friggin' mistake in two different posts on two different days.
Go ahead and continue to try and squirrel out of the totally embarrassing corner you've painted yourself into by attacking me, if you like, but the truth is pretty obvious. You can't defend po-mo poetry, so you would rather attack its critics.
15 - mark
i like poems that rhyme
dat is wot i like
billy collins is just a slime
he can get on his bike
16 - Mac Diva
Should I even wade into this controversy? Well, y'all know the Diva dares do such things.
Howard, what struck me in reading your entry is that there is a strong nostalgia for the good old days, even fictional good old days. (Come to think of it, all good old days may be fictional.) I believe your politics is influencing your take on contemporary poetry. Much of it focuses on the the complexities and contradictions of living in a modern technological society. People on the Right often don't like complexity and contradiction. So, they harken back to some golden age when they think it did not exist. Your preference for poetry may be influenced by that. As for your mockery of angst and alienation in poetry, we live in times of great angst and alienation. I'm not sure that writing about it should be derided.
Billy Collins? Have read some, but not a whole lot of his poems. Encountered him at a writers' conference so I got to hear him recite some. Wasn't impressed. His poems strike me as audience directed, a bad thing for poetry. Still prefer Philip Larkin.
What Dan said about Collins is true of any writer who sells -- they are needed as icebreakers. Those of us who are pigeonholed 'literary,' piggyback on the more commercial poets and writers. (I've been at readings with Terry McMillan and had to fight grimacing when she read. But, one of us is a millionaire and the other can't afford a new laptop.) The masses read people they find accessible. Accessibility and the best quality rarely go together. There's more to this that I suspect Dan will reach in his piece.
17 - Shark
re: Billy Collins
(As always, writers on Blogcritics should pratice the caveat:
you have the right to an INFORMED opinion.)
If anyone writes a poem as good as the following, you will have been extremely lucky.
On Turning Ten
by Billy Collins
The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headache I get from reading in bad light---
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a pirate.
But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned agatinst the garage as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
== by billy collins ==
from "Sailing Alone Around the Room"
18 - Mac Diva
Actually, I think that poem is representative of what Joseph, Dan and I are wary of. (Well, I shouldn't speak for others. So, just me.) It is an easy sell -- looking back on childhood from an adult viewpoint. (What's next, a poem about his grandfather's gnarly hands?) It is too heavy-handed. And, audience directed. Everyone can go, 'Yes, I used to be 10.' There is no challenge in it. Or complexity. Of course it would appeal to someone stuck in the 1950s.
19 - Shark
Poetry analysis from the Tin Woman from Oz.
Why do I even try?
20 - Howard Owens
Love it when people resurrect very ancient threads ... just wanted to say, though, for the BC poem above ... loved it until the last couplet. It all fell apart there. Too obvious.
If conservatives are so closed off to nuance, Mac, how come they love Ronald Reagan, while liberals hate him? Reagan was probably the most nuanced politician in memory ... espoused conservativism, but legalized abortion in California, raised taxes while governor, approved MLK day, pushed a recession to erase inflation, proposed the first treaty to cut back nuclear weapon stockpiles, proposed meeting Grobachev half way ... all policies and actions that conservatives at the time abhorred, yet forgave in Reagan while liberals spewed (and still do) venom.
Just a point to contradict the thesis "liberals all good; conservatives all idiots."