Poetry and.... Change

By now you've of course read Washington Post writer Alexandra Petri's column "Is Poetry Dead?" There has already been sufficient vitriolic response to that column (as there always is when the question is asked - which I find is just about biennially, timed perfectly out of phase with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival). David Bespiel's response was the best I've read, other than Petri's own excellent follow-up column.  I trust (hope?*) the flap is behind us, but now that our adrenaline has subsided and our patella tendons returned to their rest state, we have an an opportunity to look again at what Ms. Petri was saying. And as is usually the case when someone raises this prickly question, she makes some excellent observations. Fellow poetry practitioners, let's take a look at what she had to say.

Petri posits that "You can tell that a medium is still vital by posing the question: Can it change anything?" That seems pretty reasonable to me. She acknowledges her own medium - print journalism - has a suspect future, saying that "(if) poetry is dead, we are in the next ward over, wheezing noisily, with our family gathered around looking concerned and asking about our stereos." In the past few months, we've seen Newsweek give up its print edition, and here in NJ the largest daily newspaper just announced another prince increase/content decrease combination. If print journalism is losing out to online journalism, it's not unreasonable to speculate poetry should be feeling the same pain.

But there is a key flaw in the comparison: Newsweek lost its traditional audience to other sources of similar content. People who had been turning to the magazine for news commentary were turning other places, and Newsweek decided, sensibly, to focus its energy on competing more directly with those other places. But has poetry been losing its audience? Actually, technology has done just the opposite for poetry: online publication has created more opportunity to read poetry and enabled innovations like the Motion Poem. Additionally, the performance poetry scene continues to thrive and attract investment from nontraditional places (for example, the New York Knicks Poetry Slam Program).

Now, I'm not saying all these poetry interactions are necessarily good poetry, but I think it proves the audience is there, even growing into places it wasn't reaching (or didn't exist) 30 years ago, so the analogy to print media doesn't work. Petri continues, proposing that a plethora of bad poetry (or a low percentage of meaningful poetry) might also suggest the death of the form. She says "I think what we mean by poetry is a limp and fangless thing. Poetry has gone from being something that you did in order to Write Your Name Large Across the Sky and sound your barbaric yawp and generally Shake Things Up to a very carefully gated medium that requires years of study and apprenticeship in order to produce meticulous, perfect, golden lines that up to ten people will ever voluntarily read."

Well, yes. I think she has a good point here, one that has been debated for at least as long as I've been writing and collecting my poems. Much of what people pass off as poetry is weakly constructed, confessional fluff, and most credible poets agree on that. And there is a fairly well known divide between those who think an academic credential is necessary to poetry and those who think that same credential is a creativity-killing assimilation process. Both are right. In poetry (or biology, or economics), extra years of study and vetting by those skilled in the art provides peer review, practica, and understanding you could not get on your own. And that is likely to homogenize the field, exposing more poets to more "recognized" poets, creating more poems which call upon similar theory history - in a completely self-aware way, if the process has worked. But the alternative is more poets continuing to explore the same space that other poets have explored before; you risk eliminating the infrequent outlier genius but raise the overall quality of output. My analogy is this: If we didn't teach physics in college, at least one scientist a day would attempt to publish Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. People would work hard and to great personal satisfaction and the flow of the science would dry up. Teaching the science to all who practice means we're free to explore other spaces within it - if we are creative enough to do so.

One of the arguments made against Petri (and whenever this topic is debated) is that with so many people writing poetry, how can it be dead? During the aftermath of the column, she quite rationally tweeted "Look, I love poetry, I've inhaled, I was an English major, the works. And I know Is It Dead Yet? essays are, er, not un-hack, shall we say./But I do want to hear a better case for poetry than "I do it! And mine's great!"." Again, she's right, and credible poets don't disagree. I think it's wonderful that so many people write poetry and want to share it. But those who write it without reading it are only stoking "poetry is obsolete" fire. Listen: Twitter will begin to die the day people stop retweeting, because it means people have stopped reading other people's tweets. Until then, it may be overused and largely vacuous, but it's still contributing something that cannot be found anywhere else.

Of course, Petri comes to all these conclusions herself, and one realizes she must have started with them in mind. She adds

"And whenever people say this about journalism, they note that people have an insatiable hunger for news. Journalism in its present form may not continue, but journalism will. It will have to. Otherwise where will the news come from?

And this might be the silver lining for poets. The kind of news you get from poems, as William Carlos Williams has it, must come from somewhere. And there is a similar hunger for poetry that persists. We get it in diluted doses in song lyrics. Song lyrics are incomplete poems, as Sondheim notes in the book of his own. If it is complete on the page, it makes a shoddy lyric. But there is still wonderful music to be found in those words. We get it in rap. If we really want to read it, it is everywhere. Poetry, taken back to its roots, is just the process of making — and making you listen."

Which is the rub. The "process of making" requires craft (taken as a knowledge of what works and what doesn't, who you're trying to reach, and knowing what you want to say... which can be acquired through either education or practice as long as either is applied with the diligent and sincere collection of feedback) and content (whether narrative or lyric, topical or ethereal, formal or conversational, personal or persona). If the poem - or the poet - has nothing interesting to say, there is no art. And where there is neither art not interest, no one can be reached... or changed.

Back, then, to the original question: "Can it change anything?" Ask this about the poems you love. Have they affected the way you think in some way? Are you more aware of something now than before you first read them? When you share them, do they raise a response in people who are reading them for the first time? When you discuss them, do they provide something meaningful to talk about, leading you in directions that sometimes surprise you? When you write them, do they end in places that challenge you to find your way back to where you started? Good poems will do these things. And it is these poems that will (continue to) keep poetry alive.





* - Petri herself tweeted: "remind me the next time I criticize a thing that it should be a thing whose practitioners are not noted for their wordcraft." People who pride themselves on their speaking are not wont to shut up.