Stubbing Our Collective Toes in the Name of Hope

Ta-Nehisi Coates and his commenters are whining that nobody likes the inaugural poem enough and he argues that if you don’t read a lot of poetry you should just shut up and sit down. I left a comment which seemed sufficiently mean-spirited to repost here:

To my ongoing sorrow, I have read a lot of contemporary poetry over the years. Elizabth Alexander isn’t horrible by those standards…which means, yeah, she’s pretty bad. I mean:

“I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.”

First line, big cliche; second line lax waffling vague imagery bordering on cliche; third line — what, did she bash her nose in the dark? This is lazy, uninteresting crap; vague inspirational jeremiad. Blech.

I think it’s an extremely good sign that people are willing to come out and say that this stuff is dreck. One of contemporary poetry’s most serious problems is the fact that people feel so alienated from it that they don’t even bother to dislike it. A little (or a lot) more healthy disdain would go a long way towards making poetry more viable, both aesthetically and (dare I say it) commercially.

0 thoughts on “Stubbing Our Collective Toes in the Name of Hope

  1. This reminds me of that famous quote by Erwin Panofsky, “If all the poets put down their pens and all the artists laid down their easels only a small fraction of the general public would notice and even fewer would care.”

    Poetry and the fine arts seem so culturally irrelevant to me, probably the result of years of catering to a select audience with particular tastes.

    Not all that different from American comics in fact. But at least a comic might one day be translated into a movie seen by more than 1,000 people.

  2. I have a vague memory that Philip Larkin accepted office as city poet of wherever he lived; Hull, I guess. As part of his duties he wrote a poem that involved praising the city’s harbor facilities or the like.

    Anyway, just change a few words around and our official poetry problems are solved.

  3. I think it’s actually hard for people who don’t pay attention to it (that is, just about everybody) to understand how utterly, utterly insular and pointless contemporary poetry is. Your comics analogy, for example: there’s just no comparison. Comics have a much, much broader appeal than poetry. People buy comics. People review comics. Nobody bothers to review poetry, except for friends of the poet, who then appear on the cover blurbs.

    Visual art too; people care about visual art. They buy it. They go to galleries; they write about it in alternative weeklies. Sure, it doesn’t have a mass audience, but it has an audience of some kind. It can at least offend people, and does so on occasion.

    Academic poetry really is the most irrelevant of the irrelevant. Nobody reads it, nobody reviews it, nobody gets offended by it, nobody even thinks about it. It’s divorced from the market, form popular opinion — from everything except grant committees and other poets, most of whom just write the stuff and don’t even read each other.

  4. You seem to have pretty strong opinions on this. Were you ever involved in contemporary poetry, or is this just a casual observation on your part?

  5. Noah, I read a contemporary poem every night before I lull to sleep. But I agree that the poem read was terrible. Kind of like the cable feed got mixed up.

    I just wish she– and about every other poet I’ve heard speak– would read their poetry so they don’t sound like, oh, an Atari 2600 with text-to-speech.

  6. Jeez, Bill, say it ain’t so.

    I kind of like some new york schooley folks, like Ron Padgett and Tom Raworth. After that though…urk.

    Tell me you don’t like Carolyn Forche, at least.

    Richard, there’s a lot of poetry I like that’s older, and so I tried to be a poet for a while. Wrote a lot of it and read a bunch of contemporary poetry before eventually giving up in disgust. I didn’t like it and it didn’t like me. So there you go.

    I’ve posted a couple of my poems here recently; you can read more here if you’d like.

    Miriam, that post is hysterical.

  7. Will Agam Zagajewski get me fired? I mostly read poets in translation, though I enjoyed Gary Sullivan’s How to Proceed in Arts recently.

    But Force and most of academic poets I’ve read are running on fumes. Except for my pal James, in case he reads this. He sent me a journal with his stuff in it and about three of the poems weren’t awful.

    For yours, I liked this one a lot. I think I’ll send the Hobbit limmericks to my LotR-fan brother…

    Looks like Tom Raworth does comics, too.

  8. I haven’t read Zagjewski, so you’re safe. Those Raworth comics look pretty darn mediocre, though…

    Glad you like the limericks!