Ideal Poetry

The ideal end of poetry is the composition of beautiful and beneficial texts that also accomplish one or more of the following objectives:

• revelation of the universal in the local and personal;
• registration of placement within a timestream;
• denotation of the impermanence of appearances;
• suggestion of the ephemeral nature of the status quo.

During a period as fraught as the second MAGArian administration is, a poem that doesn’t betray the time of its composition, even obliquely, will instead tend to betray a poet at too far a remove for useful participation in the public conversation.

(While antisemitism and fascism were in their heyday last century, the brilliant poet and treasonous politician, Ezra Pound, coind the excellent motto: “Literature is news that stays news.”)

Unless we deny that the recognition of the beautiful and beneficial texts of poetry is within reach of the people, unless we insist that a priesthood of professors and association of publishers is required for its discernment and dissemination, then it follows that both poetry and poets are the responsibility of the people who own the language, and the culture that gathers around it.

As a cultural artifact, poetry is a cumulative thing – each generation of poems is a tributary that feeds into the river of culture. On the banks of that river gather not only poets, but painters, musicians, dancers, and sculptors. (Food trucks and pickpockets, too!)

That natural flow is interrupted when the mainstream of poetry is dammed and diverted into pools, or schools of poetry, as it is by such artificial and unpoetical enterprises as the commercial book business, or the Creative Writing Industry, which can’t be purified by academic aegis.

So far as I know, the coinage, Creative Writing Industry, is attributable to Donald Hall (1928-2018, US Poet Laureate 2006-07), whose own career in poetry is substantial enough to carry the nineteenth century into the twenty-first. Although they bloomed in the first half of the 20th century, Robert Frost (1874-1963), Ezra Pound (1885-1972), and T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) were products of the 19th, and Hall had more than incidental relationships with each of them.

He also had as thorough training in poetry under the auspices of the Academy as anyone else, which is why his rebuke of the Creative Writing Industry is valuable to all but the tiny cohort who make their livings there. Before enrolling at Harvard, Hall went to Exeter and Bread Loaf; his college classmates included John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and Adrienne Rich. Then he spent two years at Oxford, one year with Yvor Winters at Stanford, three years as a Harvard fellow and ten years at Michigan, before abandoning tenure there and commencing life as a freelance writer in rural New Hampshire.

In a 1991 interview in the Paris Review (where he was poetry editor 40 years earlier), Hall was asked, Do you think the institution of the creative writing program has helped the cause of poetry?

“Well, not really, no. I’ve said some nasty things about these programs. The Creative Writing Industry invites us to use poetry to achieve other ends—a job, a promotion, a bibliography, money, notoriety.

I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it.

Workshops make workshop-poems. Also, workshops encourage a kind of local competition, being better than the poet who sits next to you—in place of the useful competition of trying to be better than Dante. Also, they encourage a groupishness, an old-boy and -girl network that often endures for decades.”

‘Nuff said.