World Class Poetry Blog

Modern Poetry Is Sick
14 March 2008, the poet @ 4:15 pm

The premise stood out like a stubbed toe. I couldn’t help but read the rest of the declaration. Bloggers do not typically write so well. And long. I thought I was nearly the only one.

Strong Verse at Blogspot is the literary blog of G.M. Palmer, the editor of an online journal by the same name. The journal can be found at http://www.strongverse.org. This is just the type of literary journal we need.

I am impressed with Strong Verse, both the blog and the journal, because the poetry is accessible. But it isn’t accessible hack. It’s actually well written, mostly narrative, accessible, and poetic. It is the type of verse that I would put squarely into the Millennial School of Poetics.

In Palmer’s view, poetry is sick because the poets producing it do not make it accessible to the audience. I think he is partly right. I believe there is a dichotomy in modern poetics. There is the type of poetry that Palmer describes, which is largely academic lyrical pabulum, as accessible to the man on the street as the Pentagon’s Top Secret security clearance. On the other hand, there is the quite accessible, sometimes profane, always hackneyed poetry of the lazy-bodies who want to be poets but do not have the ear for poetry. You’ll find these poets at your local open mic poetry readings overstaying their reading limit and heaping praise upon praise of others in hopes of attaining a return sentiment. On the one hand is the ivory tower and in the other is the oily garage. Strong Verse falls in the middle.

Palmer says poetry must rescue itself from the arcane by doing three things:

• Shift production from lyrical to narrative verse
• Change its distribution model
• Working toward canonization

I certainly appreciate where he is coming from. I am fully on board with point No. 2, which breaks the distribution of poetry down into five models:

• Emails
• YouTube
• Blogs
• Forums
• Websites

While I certainly appreciate the effort, the list is incomplete. He left out social networks and social bookmarks as well as audio distribution by podcast. MiPOradio is very popular, though I believe it can be improved upon.

Curing Poetry’s Ills: My Two-Fold Response
The issue I take with Palmer’s essay is two-fold: First, poetry must be accessible as he says, but it need not tell a story. I love narrative verse and I certainly think there should be more of it, but I would not dispense with the lyrical. In fact, I’m perfectly OK with the mixture of the two in some form and fashion. The second issue that I have with Palmer’s thesis is the bit about canonization. I see no need to desire it. In my mind, the public canonizes what it likes. The academy spurned Robert Service, but he made millions on his poetry and today is loved. The academy still won’t let him in.

It’s not that I don’t think we should offer analysis and literary criticism. I do. We should publish. Widely. We should have intelligent things to say about poetry and those who produce and publish it. Yes, we should give it new forms. We should distribute it through new media - YouTube, HTML, RSS, and future technologies.

I for one am totally in agreement that poetry videos hold a lot of potential for new developments in poetic presentation. I’m looking forward to those developments. But poets who are worth reading, listening to, and watching on video will be canonized in due time. Maybe not by the academy, but they will be appreciated by the audience that they attract.

I’m all for marketing poetry. The academy doesn’t do that. Not only do academics not produce accessible poetry, but they do not even work to make poetry accessible to an audience. That’s why it has no audience. If poetry is in need of any change, that is where it needs to go. We need to divorce ourselves from the acceptance of meaningless grants by meaningless institutions. They are killing us, and we are killing them. Instead, poetry should be offered on a barter and sponsorship policy. Poets must learn to market their products - individual poems, chapbooks, audio recordings, videos, multimedia presentations, etc. We have a powerful new medium at our disposal, a new kind of Gutenberg’s Press; the question is, what will we do with it?

Charles Dickens rose to fame largely because he was able to market himself. Whitman marketed himself. Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti promoted themselves. Those who learn to market their products survive. Those who don’t live in poverty by taking hand outs for verse that no one reads. If poetry is to have a future then poets must pick up new skills. We should learn to craft our poetry out of knowledge, experience, and pure grit and understand who our audience is then work to bring our product to the audience in a form that they will understand. That is the challenge. But are we up to it?

I believe Palmer is on the right path. We are largely in agreement and we have something in common. There is a longing in poetic circles today. A longing to be heard, to be understood, to be loved. But those things cannot be begged for with dignity. They must be earned. And it is we, the poets, who must cast aside our egos, our stolen jewels of superiority, and don the mask of humility as we speak to our audiences from the heart and not from the sleeve.

2 Comments a “Modern Poetry Is Sick”

1. Jim Murdoch — March 15, 2008 @ 7:29 am
   

   I like the sound of this magazine. The next time I’m sending out a batch I’ll run a few by him.

2. Deborah Ager + 32 Poems Poetry Magazine | Poetry Distribution — March 18, 2008 @ 1:30 am
   

   [...] new here and want to keep up on poetry and 32 Poems, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Allen Taylor’s post “Modern Poetry is Sick” discusses whether poetry is sick when it’s not [...]

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