Very wise post about writing by Kenneth Samson

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https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/1018466/posts/2628020068

 

“As much as we might admire what is fresh and innovative, we all learn by imitating patterns,” writes Irina Dumitrescu in The Times Literary Supplement. “To be called ‘formulaic’ is no compliment, but whenever people express themselves or take action in the world, they rely on familiar formulas.” It’s true. For her review-essay, Dumitrescu reads 5 books about writing and explores how writing advice is caught in a paradox: to get people to communicate clearly, logically, and find their own voices, instruction must first teach them rules and provide enough room to learn by copying. This is why most of us writers begin by imitating established writers. We find someone whose style or subject reflects our own – someone in whom we hear our ideal selves, someone who sounds like we want to sound one day – and we mimic them. This could start with a parent, move to a cool friend, then end with a famous novelist or memoirst, before we emerge from the pupae of literary infancy. In other words, to facilitate originality, we must teach formula, encourage imitation, and push for eventual independence. She explores the value of craft, structure, exploration, and formula, and the way sticking to rules erodes a writer’s style, their character, even the essence of the art. She contrasts John Warner’s book Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities with the book Writing to Persuade, by The New York Times‘ previous op-ed editor, Trish Hall.

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What Made Michel de Montaigne the First Modern Man? | The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/me-myself-and-i

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Literary Lives

Me, Myself, And I

What made Michel de Montaigne the first modern man?

August 31, 2009Save this story

Montaignes essays chart the course of twenty years of selfinvestigation.

Every French schoolchild learns the date: February 28, 1571, the day a well-regarded and uncommonly educated nobleman named Michel de Montaigne retired from “the slavery of the court and of public duties,” moved a chair, a table, and a thousand books into the tower of his family castle, near Bordeaux, shut the door, and began to write. It was his thirty-eighth birthday, and, by way of commemoration, he had the first two sentences he wrote that morning painted on the wall of a study opening onto his new library—announcing, if mainly to himself, that having been “long weary” of those public duties (and, presumably, of his wife, at home in the castle, a few steps across the courtyard) Michel de Montaigne had taken up residence in “the bosom of the learned Virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, already more than half expired.” His plan, he said, was to use the second half looking at himself, or, as he put it, drawing his portrait with a pen. He had his books for company, his Muses for inspiration, his past for seasoning, and, to support it all, the income from a large estate, not to mention a fortune built on the salt-herring and wine trades, which, in the last century, had turned his family into landed gentry. (His full name, as most oenophiles can tell you, was Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.)

Montaigne’s pursuit of the character he called Myself—“bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal”—lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation and revision that he called “essais,” taking that ordinary word and turning it into a literary occupation. When he died, at fifty-nine, he was still …m….

Stan is mildly tempted by Annie’s toes

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  • Stan was  feeling a l ittle annoyed as since the days were getting brighter and longer the dust on the furniture was becoming more evident..Not that Mary was a tyrant  in any way but she was out at work ,whereas he was free  from his purgatory working with gamblers and homeless drug users.

    Of course he had been pleased to be working to improve society but enough was enough.He already was helping two people on a voluntary basis at his  local church.Still Mary was labouring in the lecture hall explaing how linear algebra might help folk to lead better and more virtuous lives especially if they were going into Parliament or the higher reaches of the Civil Service which aided government ministers dealing with strange confusions in th Economy and the entire world
    He picked up his microfibre dusting rag cut from an old towel and started to dust the TV set.After that he sprayed Dettox onto the keyboards of all their laptops ,ipads, phones and remote controls.Then  he dried them with an old tea towel made of cotton and linen.
    Suddenly he heard the back door opening.In ran his beauteous mistress Annie wearing a green and red tracksuit and purple trainers with pink spots on.
    Shall I make some lovely coffee,she asked impertinently.
    I have not done much housework yet,Stan cried tearfully, with a smile
    Let me see,she responded with the genuine  interest of the retired and bored,
    My, this remote control is very,very clean,I am stunned
    She put it in front of her eyes and glared myopically at it.
    All her mindpower was concentrated on this one object which was now her whole world.
    You have done brilliantly with this but you do need a break from this tedious and arduous work,she enthused to her aged lover.
    Oh, OK then,Stan answered laconically.
    She poured coffee and  Jersey milk into two Portmeirion pottery mugs and took them into the conservatory where she admired his potted plants and his herbs.
    What ‘s this  funny plant here, she called.It wasn’t here last week,
    It’s cannabis,he informed her wilfully.
    Are you a user now she enquired tactlessly.
    No,I am keeping it for a friend.. he is a scientist,Stan claimed
    That’s what they all say,she riposted jocosely.
    Well,I don’t know how to use it.I believe you smoke it so does it have to be dried?
    I guess so , she said like a cowboy from Alabama on a diet of coke and french fries.
    Well,I am not going test it,he said pensively.I don’t even smoke a pipe any more.I suck my thumb instead.It’s free.

    Would you like to suck my toes ,she asked him lovingly. After all, the Duchess of York had hers sucked and I am her equal in some ways she told him truthfully

    Sucking women’s toes has so far not been part of my repertoire and neither
    has whipping and smacking them either.I prefer to suck their lips and caress their cheeks. Stan informed her politely as if they had never met before.
    Which cheeks? she asked suspiciously yet humorously
    Sorry, dear,I am happy to caress any part of your warm voluptuous flesh later  but I need to get on with the housework.
    Just ignore it, she ordered him.I’ll help you after we have been to bed
    I didn’t know we were going to bed, he said in a puzzled tone
    Well,you do now, she giggled deliciously.
    And so does Emil e who is already on the landing from where he can see the mirror opposite the bed.What a naughty boy he is, but what would you do in his position?
    I thought so.

    Midwinter

Does poetry matter outside of an elite group?

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https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/gioia/gioia.htm

Atlantic Monthly Sidebar
As originally published in
The Atlantic Monthly
May 1991Can Poetry Matter?Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America.
If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work
to make it essential once more

by Dana Gioia
AMERICAN POETRY now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels. Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate, as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex network of public subvention for poets, funded by federal, state, and local agencies, augmented by private support in the form of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized retreats. There has also never before been so much published criticism about contemporary poetry; it fills dozens of literary newsletters and scholarly journals.

The proliferation of new poetry and poetry programs is astounding by any historical measure. Just under a thousand new collections of verse are published each year, in addition to a myriad of new poems printed in magazines both small and large. No one knows how many poetry readings take place each year, but surely the total must run into the tens of thousands. And there are now about 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the United States, and more than a thousand undergraduate ones. With an average of ten poetry students in each graduate section, these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited professional poets over the next decade. From such statistics an observer might easily conclude that we live in the golden age of American poetry.But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby’s definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a “famous” poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, “only poets read poetry” was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.

The situation has become a paradox, a Zen riddle of cultural sociology. Over the past half century, as American poetry’s specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined. Moreover, the engines that have driven poetry’s institutional success–the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses, the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the migration of American literary culture to the university–have unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view.

Its Own World

TO the average reader, the proposition that poetry’s audience has declined may seem self-evident. It is symptomatic of the art’s current isolation that within the subculture such notions are often rejected. Like chamber-of-commerce representatives from Parnassus, poetry boosters offer impressive recitations of the numerical growth of publications, programs, and professorships. Given the bullish statistics on poetry’s material expansion, how does one demonstrate that its intellectual and spiritual influence has eroded? One cannot easily marshal numbers, but to any candid observer the evidence throughout the world of ideas and letters seems inescapable.

Daily newspapers no longer review poetry. There is, in fact, little coverage of poetry or poets in the general press. From 1984 until this year the National Book Awards dropped poetry as a category. Leading critics rarely review it. In fact, virtually no one reviews it except other poets. Almost no popular collections of contemporary poetry are available except those, like the Norton Anthology, targeting an academic audience. It seems, in short, as if the large audience that still exists for quality fiction hardly notices poetry. A reader familiar with the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, or John Barth may not even recognize the names of Gwendolyn Brooks, Gary Snyder, and W. D. Snodgrass.

One can see a microcosm of poetry’s current position by studying its coverage in The New York Times. Virtually never reviewed in the daily edition, new poetry is intermittently discussed in the Sunday Book Review, but almost always in group reviews where three books are briefly considered together. Whereas a new novel or biography is reviewed on or around its publication date, a new collection by an important poet like Donald Hall or David Ignatow might wait up to a year for a notice. Or it might never be reviewed at all. Henry Taylor’s The Flying Change was reviewed only after it had won the Pulitzer Prize. Rodney Jones’s Transparent Gestures was reviewed months after it had won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Rita Dove’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah was not reviewed by the Times at all.

Poetry reviewing is no better anywhere else, and generally it is much worse. The New York Times only reflects the opinion that although there is a great deal of poetry around, none of it matters very much to readers, publishers, or advertisers–to anyone, that is, except other poets. For most newspapers and magazines, poetry has become a literary commodity intended less to be read than to be noted with approval. Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around–not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition’s sake.

How Poetry Diminished

ARGUMENTS about the decline of poetry’s cultural importance are not new. In American letters they date back to the nineteenth century. But the modern debate might be said to have begun in 1934 when Edmund Wilson published the first version of his controversial essay “Is Verse a Dying Technique?” Surveying literary history, Wilson noted that verse’s role had grown increasingly narrow since the eighteenth century. In particular, Romanticism’s emphasis on intensity made poetry seem so “fleeting and quintessential” that eventually it dwindled into a mainly lyric medium. As verse–which had previously been a popular medium for narrative, satire, drama, even history and scientific speculation–retreated into lyric, prose usurped much of its cultural territory. Truly ambitious writers eventually had no choice but to write in prose. The future of great literature, Wilson speculated, belonged almost entirely to prose.

Wilson was a capable analyst of literary trends. His skeptical assessment of poetry’s place in modern letters has been frequently attacked and qualified over the past half century, but it has never been convincingly dismissed. His argument set the ground rules for all subsequent defenders of contemporary poetry. It also provided the starting point for later iconoclasts, from Delmore Schwartz to Christopher Clausen. The most recent and celebrated of these revisionists is Joseph Epstein, whose mordant 1988 critique “Who Killed Poetry?” first appeared in Commentary and was reprinted in an extravagantly acrimonious symposium in AWP Chronicle (the journal of the Associated Writing Programs). Not coincidentally, Epstein’s title pays a double homage to Wilson’s essay–first by mimicking the interrogative form of the original title, second by employing its metaphor of death.

Epstein essentially updated Wilson’s argument, but with important differences. Whereas Wilson looked on the decline of poetry’s cultural position as a gradual process spanning three centuries, Epstein focused on the past few decades. He contrasted the major achievements of the modernists–the generation of Eliot and Stevens, which led poetry from moribund Romanticism into the twentieth century–with what he felt were the minor accomplishments of the present practitioners. The modernists, Epstein maintained, were artists who worked from a broad cultural vision. Contemporary writers were “poetry professionals,” who operated within the closed world of the university. Wilson blamed poetry’s plight on historical forces; Epstein indicted the poets themselves and the institutions they had helped create, especially creative-writing programs. A brilliant polemicist, Epstein intended his essay to be incendiary, and it did ignite an explosion of criticism. No recent essay on American poetry has generated so many immediate responses in literary journals. And certainly none has drawn so much violently negative criticism from poets themselves. To date at least thirty writers have responded in print. The poet Henry Taylor published two rebuttals.

Poets are justifiably sensitive to arguments that poetry has declined in cultural importance, because journalists and reviewers have used such arguments simplistically to declare all contemporary verse irrelevant. Usually the less a critic knows about verse the more readily he or she dismisses it. It is no coincidence, I think, that the two most persuasive essays on poetry’s presumed demise were written by outstanding critics of fiction, neither of whom has written extensively about contemporary poetry. It is too soon to judge the accuracy of Epstein’s essay, but a literary historian would find Wilson’s timing ironic. As Wilson finished his famous essay, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Robinson Jeffers, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Robert Graves, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Basil Bunting, and others were writing some of their finest poems, which, encompassing history, politics, economics, religion, and philosophy, are among the most culturally inclusive in the history of the language. At the same time, a new generation, which would include Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Randall Jarrell, Dylan Thomas, A. D. Hope, and others, was just breaking into print. Wilson himself later admitted that the emergence of a versatile and ambitious poet like Auden contradicted several points of his argument. But if Wilson’s prophecies were sometimes inaccurate, his sense of poetry’s overall situation was depressingly astute. Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.

Inside the Subculture

ONE sees evidence of poetry’s diminished stature even within the thriving subculture. The established rituals of the poetry world–the readings, small magazines, workshops, and conferences–exhibit a surprising number of self-imposed limitations. Why, for example, does poetry mix so seldom with music, dance, or theater? At most readings the program consists of verse only–and usually only verse by that night’s author. Forty years ago, when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting other poets’ work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author’s ego. No wonder the audience for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author.

Several dozen journals now exist that print only verse. They don’t publish literary reviews, just page after page of freshly minted poems. The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage. One can easily miss a radiant poem amid the many lackluster ones. It takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention. Few people bother, generally not even the magazines’ contributors. The indifference to poetry in the mass media has created a monster of the opposite kind–journals that love poetry not wisely but too well.

Until about thirty years ago most poetry appeared in magazines that addressed a nonspecialist audience on a range of subjects. Poetry vied for the reader’s interest along with politics, humor, fiction, and reviews–a competition that proved healthy for all the genres. A poem that didn’t command the reader’s attention wasn’t considered much of a poem. Editors chose verse that they felt would appeal to their particular audiences, and the diversity of magazines assured that a variety of poetry appeared. The early Kenyon Review published Robert Lowell’s poems next to critical essays and literary reviews. The old New Yorker celebrated Ogden Nash between cartoons and short stories.

A few general-interest magazines, such as The New Republic andThe New Yorker, still publish poetry in every issue, but, significantly, none except The Nation still reviews it regularly. Some poetry appears in the handful of small magazines and quarterlies that consistently discuss a broad cultural agenda with nonspecialist readers, such as The Threepenny Review, The New Criterion, and The Hudson Review. But most poetry is published in journals that address an insular audience of literary professionals, mainly teachers of creative writing and their students. A few of these, such as American Poetry Review and AWP Chronicle, have moderately large circulations. Many more have negligible readerships. But size is not the problem. The problem is their complacency or resignation about existing only in and for a subculture.

What are the characteristics of a poetry-subculture publication? First, the one subject it addresses is current American literature (supplemented perhaps by a few translations of poets who have already been widely translated). Second, if it prints anything other than poetry, that is usually short fiction. Third, if it runs discursive prose, the essays and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. If it publishes an interview, the tone will be unabashedly reverent toward the author. For these journals critical prose exists not to provide a disinterested perspective on new books but to publicize them. Quite often there are manifest personal connections between the reviewers and the authors they discuss. If occasionally a negative review is published, it will be openly sectarian, rejecting an aesthetic that the magazine has already condemned. The unspoken editorial rule seems to be, Never surprise or annoy the readers; they are, after all, mainly our friends and colleagues.

By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its own art. Since there are too many new poetry collections appearing each year for anyone to evaluate, the reader must rely on the candor and discernment of reviewers to recommend the best books. But the general press has largely abandoned this task, and the specialized press has grown so overprotective of poetry that it is reluctant to make harsh judgments. In his new book, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, Robert Bly has accurately described the corrosive effect of this critical boosterism:

We have an odd situation: although more bad poetry is being published now than ever before in American history, most of the reviews are positive. Critics say, “I never attack what is bad, all that will take care of itself,” . . . but the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and who end up doubting their own critical perceptions.

A clubby feeling also typifies most recent anthologies of contemporary poetry. Although these collections represent themselves as trustworthy guides to the best new poetry, they are not compiled for readers outside the academy. More than one editor has discovered that the best way to get an anthology assigned is to include work by the poets who teach the courses. Compiled in the spirit of congenial opportunism, many of these anthologies give the impression that literary quality is a concept that neither an editor nor a reader should take too seriously.The 1985 Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, for example, is not so much a selective literary collection as a comprehensive directory of creative-writing teachers (it even offers a photo of each author). Running nearly 800 pages, the volume presents no fewer than 104 important young poets, virtually all of whom teach creative writing. The editorial principle governing selection seems to have been the fear of leaving out some influential colleague. The book does contain a few strong and original poems, but they are surrounded by so many undistinguished exercises that one wonders if the good work got there by design or simply by random sampling. In the drearier patches one suspects that perhaps the book was never truly meant to be read, only assigned.

And that is the real issue. The poetry subculture no longer assumes that all published poems will be read. Like their colleagues in other academic departments, poetry professionals must publish, for purposes of both job security and career advancement. The more they publish, the faster they progress. If they do not publish, or wait too long, their economic futures are in grave jeopardy.

In art, of course, everyone agrees that quality and not quantity matters. Some authors survive on the basis of a single unforgettable poem–Edmund Waller’s “Go, Lovely Rose,” for example, or Edwin Markham’s “The Man With the Hoe,” which was made famous by being reprinted in hundreds of newspapers–an unthinkable occurrence today. But bureaucracies, by their very nature, have difficulty measuring something as intangible as literary quality. When institutions evaluate creative artists for employment or promotion, they still must find some seemingly objective means to do so. As the critic Bruce Bawer has observed,

A poem is, after all, a fragile thing, and its intrinsic worth or lack thereof, is a frighteningly subjective consideration; but fellowship grants, degrees, appointments, and publications are objective facts. They are quantifiable; they can be listed on a resume.

Poets serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They must publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable.The proliferation of literary journals and presses over the past thirty years has been a response less to an increased appetite for poetry among the public than to the desperate need of writing teachers for professional validation. Like subsidized farming that grows food no one wants, a poetry industry has been created to serve the interests of the producers and not the consumers. And in the process the integrity of the art has been betrayed. Of course, no poet is allowed to admit this in public. The cultural credibility of the professional poetry establishment depends on maintaining a polite hypocrisy. Millions of dollars in public and private funding are at stake. Luckily, no one outside the subculture cares enough to press the point very far. No Woodward and Bernstein will ever investigate a cover-up by members of the Associated Writing Programs.

The new poet makes a living not by publishing literary work but by providing specialized educational services. Most likely he or she either works for or aspires to work for a large institution–usually a state-run enterprise, such as a school district, a college, or a university (or lately even a hospital or prison)–teaching others how to write poetry or, on the highest levels, how to teach others how to write poetry.

To look at the issue in strictly economic terms, most contemporary poets have been alienated from their original cultural function. As Marx maintained and few economists have disputed, changes in a class’s economic function eventually transform its values and behavior. In poetry’s case, the socioeconomic changes have led to a divided literary culture: the superabundance of poetry within a small class and the impoverishment outside it. One might even say that outside the classroom–where society demands that the two groups interact–poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms.

The divorce of poetry from the educated reader has had another, more pernicious result. Seeing so much mediocre verse not only published but praised, slogging through so many dull anthologies and small magazines, most readers–even sophisticated ones like Joseph Epstein–now assume that no significant new poetry is being written. This public skepticism represents the final isolation of verse as an art form in contemporary society.

The irony is that this skepticism comes in a period of genuine achievement. Gresham’s Law, that bad coinage drives out good, only half applies to current poetry. The sheer mass of mediocrity may have frightened away most readers, but it has not yet driven talented writers from the field. Anyone patient enough to weed through the tangle of contemporary work finds an impressive and diverse range of new poetry. Adrienne Rich, for example, despite her often overbearing polemics, is a major poet by any standard. The best work of Donald Justice, Anthony Hecht, Donald Hall, James Merrill, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, and Richard Wilbur–to mention only writers of the older generation–can hold its own against anything in the national literature. One might also add Sylvia Plath and James Wright, two strong poets of the same generation who died early. America is also a country rich in emigre poetry, as major writers like Czeslaw Milosz, Nina Cassian, Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, and Thom Gunn demonstrate.

Without a role in the broader culture, however, talented poets lack the confidence to create public speech. Occasionally a writer links up rewardingly to a social or political movement. Rich, for example, has used feminism to expand the vision of her work. Robert Bly wrote his finest poetry to protest the Vietnam War. His sense of addressing a large and diverse audience added humor, breadth, and humanity to his previously minimal verse. But it is a difficult task to marry the Muse happily to politics. Consequently, most contemporary poets, knowing that they are virtually invisible in the larger culture, focus on the more intimate forms of lyric and meditative verse. (And a few loners, like X. J. Kennedy and John Updike, turn their genius to the critically disreputable demimonde of light verse and children’s poetry.) Therefore, although current American poetry has not often excelled in public forms like political or satiric verse, it has nonetheless produced personal poems of unsurpassed beauty and power. Despite its manifest excellence, this new work has not found a public beyond the poetry subculture, because the traditional machinery of transmission–the reliable reviewing, honest criticism, and selective anthologies–has broken down. The audience that once made Frost and Eliot, Cummings and Millay, part of its cultural vision remains out of reach. Today Walt Whitman’s challenge “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too” reads like an indictment.

From Bohemia to Bureaucracy

TO maintain their activities, subcultures usually require institutions, since the general society does not share their interests. Nudists flock to “nature camps” to express their unfettered life-style. Monks remain in monasteries to protect their austere ideals. As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where they maintained a distrustful independence from institutions. Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia.

At first they existed on the fringes of English departments, which was probably healthy. Without advanced degrees or formal career paths, poets were recognized as special creatures. They were allowed–like aboriginal chieftains visiting an anthropologist’s campsite–to behave according to their own laws. But as the demand for creative writing grew, the poet’s job expanded from merely literary to administrative duties. At the university’s urging, these self-trained writers designed history’s first institutional curricula for young poets. Creative writing evolved from occasional courses taught within the English department into its own undergraduate major or graduate-degree program. Writers fashioned their academic specialty in the image of other university studies. As the new writing departments multiplied, the new professionals patterned their infrastructure–job titles, journals, annual conventions, organizations–according to the standards not of urban bohemia but of educational institutions. Out of the professional networks this educational expansion created, the subculture of poetry was born.

Initially, the multiplication of creative-writing programs must have been a dizzyingly happy affair. Poets who had scraped by in bohemia or had spent their early adulthood fighting the Second World War suddenly secured stable, well-paying jobs. Writers who had never earned much public attention found themselves surrounded by eager students. Poets who had been too poor to travel flew from campus to campus and from conference to conference, to speak before audiences of their peers. As Wilfrid Sheed once described a moment in John Berryman’s career, “Through the burgeoning university network, it was suddenly possible to think of oneself as a national poet, even if the nation turned out to consist entirely of English Departments.” The bright postwar world promised a renaissance for American poetry.

In material terms that promise has been fulfilled beyond the dreams of anyone in Berryman’s Depression-scarred generation. Poets now occupy niches at every level of academia, from a few sumptuously endowed chairs with six-figure salaries to the more numerous part-time stints that pay roughly the same as Burger King. But even at minimum wage, teaching poetry earns more than writing it ever did. Before the creative-writing boom, being a poet usually meant living in genteel poverty or worse. While the sacrifices poetry demanded caused much individual suffering, the rigors of serving Milton’s “thankless Muse” also delivered the collective cultural benefit of frightening away all but committed artists.

Today poetry is a modestly upwardly mobile, middle-class profession–not as lucrative as waste management or dermatology but several big steps above the squalor of bohemia. Only a philistine would romanticize the blissfully banished artistic poverty of yesteryear. But a clear-eyed observer must also recognize that by opening the poet’s trade to all applicants and by employing writers to do something other than write, institutions have changed the social and economic identity of the poet from artist to educator. In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is “Where do you teach?” The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It’s just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.

Even within the university contemporary poetry now exists as a subculture. The teaching poet finds that he or she has little in common with academic colleagues. The academic study of literature over the past twenty-five years has veered off in a theoretical direction with which most imaginative writers have little sympathy or familiarity. Thirty years ago detractors of creative-writing programs predicted that poets in universities would become enmeshed in literary criticism and scholarship. This prophecy has proved spectacularly wrong. Poets have created enclaves in the academy almost entirely separate from their critical colleagues. They write less criticism than they did before entering the academy. Pressed to keep up with the plethora of new poetry, small magazines, professional journals, and anthologies, they are frequently also less well read in the literature of the past. Their peers in the English department generally read less contemporary poetry and more literary theory. In many departments writers and literary theorists are openly at war. Bringing the two groups under one roof has paradoxically made each more territorial. Isolated even within the university, the poet, whose true subject is the whole of human existence, has reluctantly become an educational specialist.

When People Paid Attention

TO understand how radically the situation of the American poet has changed, one need only compare today with fifty years ago. In 1940, with the notable exception of Robert Frost, few poets were working in colleges unless, like Mark Van Doren and Yvor Winters, they taught traditional academic subjects. The only creative-writing program was an experiment begun a few years earlier at the University of Iowa. The modernists exemplified the options that poets had for making a living. They could enter middle-class professions, as had T. S. Eliot (a banker turned publisher), Wallace Stevens (a corporate insurance lawyer) and William Carlos Williams (a pediatrician). Or they could live in bohemia supporting themselves as artists, as, in different ways, did Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore. If the city proved unattractive, they could, like Robinson Jeffers, scrape by in a rural arts colony like Carmel, California. Or they might become farmers, like the young Robert Frost.

Most often poets supported themselves as editors or reviewers, actively taking part in the artistic and intellectual life of their time. Archibald MacLeish was an editor and writer at Fortune. James Agee reviewed movies for Time and The Nation, and eventually wrote screenplays for Hollywood. Randall Jarrell reviewed books. Weldon Kees wrote about jazz and modern art. Delmore Schwartz reviewed everything. Even poets who eventually took up academic careers spent intellectually broadening apprenticeships in literary journalism. The young Robert Hayden covered music and theater for Michigan’s black press. R. P. Blackmur, who never completed high school, reviewed books for Hound & Horn before teaching at Princeton. Occasionally a poet might supplement his or her income by giving a reading or lecture, but these occasions were rare. Robinson Jeffers, for example, was fifty-four when he gave his first public reading. For most poets, the sustaining medium was not the classroom or the podium but the written word.

If poets supported themselves by writing, it was mainly by writing prose. Paying outlets for poetry were limited. Beyond a few national magazines, which generally preferred light verse or political satire, there were at any one time only a few dozen journals that published a significant amount of poetry. The emergence of a serious new quarterly like Partisan Review or Furioso was an event of real importance, and a small but dedicated audience eagerly looked forward to each issue. If people could not afford to buy copies, they borrowed them or visited public libraries. As for books of poetry if one excludes vanity-press editions, fewer than a hundred new titles were published each year. But the books that did appear were reviewed in daily newspapers as well as magazines and quarterlies. A focused monthly like Poetry could cover virtually the entire field.

Reviewers fifty years ago were by today’s standards extraordinarily tough. They said exactly what they thought, even about their most influential contemporaries. Listen, for example, to Randall Jarrell’s description of a book by the famous anthologist Oscar Williams: it “gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter.” That remark kept Jarrell out of subsequent Williams anthologies, but he did not hesitate to publish it. Or consider Jarrell’s assessment of Archibald MacLeish’s public poem America Was Promises: it “might have been devised by a YMCA secretary at a home for the mentally deficient.” Or read Weldon Kees’s one-sentence review of Muriel Rukeyser’s Wake Island–“There’s one thing you can say about Muriel: she’s not lazy.” But these same reviewers could write generously about poets they admired, as Jarrell did about Elizabeth Bishop, and Kees about Wallace Stevens. Their praise mattered, because readers knew it did not come lightly.

The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.

Ill-paid, overworked, and underappreciated, this argumentative group of “practical” critics, all of them poets, accomplished remarkable things. They defined the canon of modernist poetry, established methods to analyze verse of extraordinary difficulty, and identified the new mid-century generation of American poets (Lowell, Roethke, Bishop, Berryman, and others) that still dominates our literary consciousness. Whatever one thinks of their literary canon or critical principles, one must admire the intellectual energy and sheer determination of these critics, who developed as writers without grants or permanent faculty positions, often while working precariously on free-lance assignments. They represent a high point in American intellectual life. Even fifty years later their names still command more authority than those of all but a few contemporary critics. A short roll call would include John Berryman, R. P. Blackmur, Louise Bogan, John Ciardi, Horace Gregory, Langston Hughes, Randall Jarrell, Weldon Kees, Kenneth Rexroth, Delmore Schwartz, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, and Yvor Winters. Although contemporary poetry has its boosters and publicists, it has no group of comparable dedication and talent able to address the general literary community.

Like all genuine intellectuals, these critics were visionary. They believed that if modern poets did not have an audience, they could create one. And gradually they did. It was not a mass audience; few American poets of any period have enjoyed a direct relationship with the general public. It was a cross-section of artists and intellectuals, including scientists, clergymen, educators, lawyers, and, of course, writers. This group constituted a literary intelligentsia, made up mainly of nonspecialists, who took poetry as seriously as fiction and drama. Recently Donald Hall and other critics have questioned the size of this audience by citing the low average sales of a volume of new verse by an established poet during the period (usually under a thousand copies). But these skeptics do not understand how poetry was read then.

America was a smaller, less affluent country in 1940, with about half its current population and one sixth its current real GNP. In those pre-paperback days of the late Depression neither readers nor libraries could afford to buy as many books as they do today. Nor was there a large captive audience of creative-writing students who bought books of contemporary poetry for classroom use. Readers usually bought poetry in two forms–in an occasional Collected Poems by a leading author, or in anthologies. The comprehensive collections of writers like Frost, Eliot, Auden, Jeffers, Wylie, and Millay sold very well, were frequently reprinted, and stayed perpetually in print. (Today mostCollected Poems disappear after one printing.) Occasionally a book of new poems would capture the public’s fancy. Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Tristram (1927) became a Literary Guild selection. Frost’s A Further Range sold 50,000 copies as a 1936 Book-of-the-Month Club selection. But people knew poetry mainly from anthologies, which they not only bought but also read, with curiosity and attention.

Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry, first published in 1919, was frequently revised to keep it up to date and was a perennial best seller. My 1942 edition, for example, had been reprinted five times by 1945. My edition of Oscar Williams’s A Pocket Book of Modern Poetry had been reprinted nineteen times in fourteen years. Untermeyer and Williams prided themselves on keeping their anthologies broad-based and timely. They tried to represent the best of what was being published. Each edition added new poems and poets and dropped older ones. The public appreciated their efforts. Poetry anthologies were an indispensable part of any serious reader’s library. Random House’s popular Modern Library series, for example, included not one but two anthologies–Selden Rodman’s A New Anthology of Modern Poetry and Conrad Aiken’s Twentieth Century American Poetry. All these collections were read and reread by a diverse public. Favorite poems were memorized. Difficult authors like Eliot and Thomas were actively discussed and debated. Poetry mattered outside the classroom.

Today these general readers constitute the audience that poetry has lost. Limited by intelligence and curiosity this heterogeneous group cuts across lines of race, class, age, and occupation. Representing our cultural intelligentsia, they are the people who support the arts–who buy classical and jazz records; who attend foreign films and serious theater, opera, symphony, and dance; who read quality fiction and biographies; who listen to public radio and subscribe to the best journals. (They are also often the parents who read poetry to their children and remember, once upon a time in college or high school or kindergarten, liking it themselves.) No one knows the size of this community, but even if one accepts the conservative estimate that it accounts for only two percent of the U.S. population, it still represents a potential audience of almost five million readers. However healthy poetry may appear within its professional subculture, it has lost this larger audience, who represent poetry’s bridge to the general culture.

The Need for Poetry

BUT why should anyone but a poet care about the problems of American poetry? What possible relevance does this archaic art form have to contemporary society? In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer splendor of its own existence. As Wallace Stevens once observed, “The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man’s happiness.” Children know this essential truth when they ask to hear their favorite nursery rhymes again and again. Aesthetic pleasure needs no justification, because a life without such pleasure is one not worth living.

But the rest of society has mostly forgotten the value of poetry. To the general reader, discussions about the state of poetry sound like the debating of foreign politics by emigres in a seedy cafe. Or, as Cyril Connolly more bitterly described it, “Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.” Anyone who hopes to broaden poetry’s audience–critic, teacher, librarian, poet, or lonely literary amateur–faces a daunting challenge. How does one persuade justly skeptical readers, in terms they can understand and appreciate, that poetry still matters?

A passage in William Carlos Williams’s “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” provides a possible starting point. Written toward the end of the author’s life, after he had been partly paralyzed by a stroke, the lines sum up the hard lessons about poetry and audience that Williams had learned over years of dedication to both poetry and medicine. He wrote,

     
             My heart rouses
                    thinking to bring you news
                             of something 

             that concerns you 
                    and concerns many men. Look at 
                            what passes for the new. 
             You will not find it there but in 
                    despised poems. 
                            It is difficult 
             to get the news from poems 
                    yet men die miserably every day 
                            for lack
             of what is found there.

Williams understood poetry’s human value but had no illusions about the difficulties his contemporaries faced in trying to engage the audience that needed the art most desperately. To regain poetry’s readership one must begin by meeting Williams’s challenge to find what “concerns many men,” not simply what concerns poets.There are at least two reasons why the situation of poetry matters to the entire intellectual community. The first involves the role of language in a free society. Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it–be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters. The public responsibility of poetry has been pointed out repeatedly by modern writers. Even the archsymbolist Stephane Mallarme praised the poet’s central mission to “purify the words of the tribe.” And Ezra Pound warned that

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clean. It doesn’t matter whether a good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm. . . .If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

Or, as George Orwell wrote after the Second World War, “One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language. . . .” Poetry is not the entire solution to keeping the nation’s language clear and honest, but one is hard pressed to imagine a country’s citizens improving the health of its language while abandoning poetry.The second reason why the situation of poetry matters to all intellectuals is that poetry is not alone among the arts in its marginal position. If the audience for poetry has declined into a subculture of specialists, so too have the audiences for most contemporary art forms, from serious drama to jazz. The unprecedented fragmentation of American high culture during the past half century has left most arts in isolation from one another as well as from the general audience. Contemporary classical music scarcely exists as a living art outside university departments and conservatories. Jazz, which once commanded a broad popular audience, has become the semi-private domain of aficionados and musicians. (Today even influential jazz innovators cannot find places to perform in many metropolitan centers–and for an improvisatory art the inability to perform is a crippling liability.) Much serious drama is now confined to the margins of American theater, where it is seen only by actors, aspiring actors, playwrights, and a few diehard fans. Only the visual arts, perhaps because of their financial glamour and upper-class support, have largely escaped the decline in public attention.

How Poets Can Be Heard

THE most serious question for the future of American culture is whether the arts will continue to exist in isolation and decline into subsidized academic specialties or whether some possibility of rapprochement with the educated public remains. Each of the arts must face the challenge separately, and no art faces more towering obstacles than poetry. Given the decline of literacy, the proliferation of other media, the crisis in humanities education, the collapse of critical standards, and the sheer weight of past failures, how can poets possibly succeed in being heard? Wouldn’t it take a miracle?

Toward the end of her life Marianne Moore wrote a short poem called “O To Be a Dragon.” This poem recalled the biblical dream in which the Lord appeared to King Solomon and said, “Ask what I shall give thee.” Solomon wished for a wise and understanding heart. Moore’s wish is harder to summarize. Her poem reads,

If I, like Solomon, . . .
could have my wish--
my wish . . . O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven–of silkworm
size or immense; at times invisible.
Felicitous phenomenon!

Moore got her wish. She became, as all genuine poets do, “a symbol of the power of Heaven.” She succeeded in what Robert Frost called “the utmost of ambition”–namely “to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of.” She is permanently part of the “felicitous phenomenon” of American literature.So wishes can come true–even extravagant ones. If I, like Marianne Moore, could have my wish, and I, like Solomon, could have the self-control not to wish for myself, I would wish that poetry could again become a part of American public culture. I don’t think this is impossible. All it would require is that poets and poetry teachers take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public. I will close with six modest proposals for how this dream might come true.

1. When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people’s work–preferably poems they admire by writers they do not know personally. Readings should be celebrations of poetry in general, not merely of the featured author’s work.

2. When arts administrators plan public readings, they should avoid the standard subculture format of poetry only. Mix poetry with the other arts, especially music. Plan evenings honoring dead or foreign writers. Combine short critical lectures with poetry performances. Such combinations would attract an audience from beyond the poetry world without compromising quality.

3. Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively. Poets must recapture the attention of the broader intellectual community by writing for nonspecialist publications. They must also avoid the jargon of contemporary academic criticism and write in a public idiom. Finally, poets must regain the reader’s trust by candidly admitting what they don’t like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.

4. Poets who compile anthologies–or even reading lists–should be scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely admire. Anthologies are poetry’s gateway to the general culture. They should not be used as pork barrels for the creative-writing trade. An art expands its audience by presenting masterpieces, not mediocrity. Anthologies should be compiled to move, delight, and instruct readers, not to flatter the writing teachers who assign books. Poet-anthologists must never trade the Muse’s property for professional favors.

5. Poetry teachers especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry’s future.

6. Finally poets and arts administrators should use radio to expand the art’s audience. Poetry is an aural medium, and thus ideally suited to radio. A little imaginative programming at the hundreds of college and public-supported radio stations could bring poetry to millions of listeners. Some programming exists, but it is stuck mostly in the standard subculture format of living poets’ reading their own work. Mixing poetry with music on classical and jazz stations or creating innovative talk-radio formats could re-establish a direct relationship between poetry and the general audience.

The history of art tells the same story over and over. As art forms develop, they establish conventions that guide creation, performance, instruction, even analysis. But eventually these conventions grow stale. They begin to stand between the art and its audience. Although much wonderful poetry is being written, the American poetry establishment is locked into a series of exhausted conventions–outmoded ways of presenting, discussing, editing, and teaching poetry. Educational institutions have codified them into a stifling bureaucratic etiquette that enervates the art. These conventions may once have made sense, but today they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto.

See “Hearing From Poetry’s Audience”(1992), in which Dana Gioia discusses the response to this article.Return to the Poetry Pages contents It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let’s build a funeral pyre out of the dessicated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.


Dana Gioia’s essays and criticism have appeared in many periodicals, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and The New Yorker. He is a translator and anthologist of Italian poetry, including the Mottetti of Eugenio Montale (Graywolf, 1990). Mr. Gioia is also the author of two books of poetry, Daily Horoscope (Graywolf, 1986) and The Gods of Winter (Graywolf, 1991). His May 1991 article in The Atlantic Monthly became the title essay of his book Can Poetry Matter? (Graywolf, 1992).


Copyright © 1991 by Dana Gioia. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; May, 1991; “Can Poetry Matter?”; Volume 267, No. 5; pages 94-106.

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Does poetry matter outside of an elite group?

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https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/gioia/gioia.htm

Atlantic Monthly Sidebar
As originally published in
The Atlantic Monthly
May 1991Can Poetry Matter?Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America.
If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work
to make it essential once more

by Dana Gioia
AMERICAN POETRY now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels. Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate, as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex network of public subvention for poets, funded by federal, state, and local agencies, augmented by private support in the form of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized retreats. There has also never before been so much published criticism about contemporary poetry; it fills dozens of literary newsletters and scholarly journals.

The proliferation of new poetry and poetry programs is astounding by any historical measure. Just under a thousand new collections of verse are published each year, in addition to a myriad of new poems printed in magazines both small and large. No one knows how many poetry readings take place each year, but surely the total must run into the tens of thousands. And there are now about 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the United States, and more than a thousand undergraduate ones. With an average of ten poetry students in each graduate section, these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited professional poets over the next decade. From such statistics an observer might easily conclude that we live in the golden age of American poetry.But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby’s definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a “famous” poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, “only poets read poetry” was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.

The situation has become a paradox, a Zen riddle of cultural sociology. Over the past half century, as American poetry’s specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined. Moreover, the engines that have driven poetry’s institutional success–the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses, the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the migration of American literary culture to the university–have unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view.

Its Own World

TO the average reader, the proposition that poetry’s audience has declined may seem self-evident. It is symptomatic of the art’s current isolation that within the subculture such notions are often rejected. Like chamber-of-commerce representatives from Parnassus, poetry boosters offer impressive recitations of the numerical growth of publications, programs, and professorships. Given the bullish statistics on poetry’s material expansion, how does one demonstrate that its intellectual and spiritual influence has eroded? One cannot easily marshal numbers, but to any candid observer the evidence throughout the world of ideas and letters seems inescapable.

Daily newspapers no longer review poetry. There is, in fact, little coverage of poetry or poets in the general press. From 1984 until this year the National Book Awards dropped poetry as a category. Leading critics rarely review it. In fact, virtually no one reviews it except other poets. Almost no popular collections of contemporary poetry are available except those, like the Norton Anthology, targeting an academic audience. It seems, in short, as if the large audience that still exists for quality fiction hardly notices poetry. A reader familiar with the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, or John Barth may not even recognize the names of Gwendolyn Brooks, Gary Snyder, and W. D. Snodgrass.

One can see a microcosm of poetry’s current position by studying its coverage in The New York Times. Virtually never reviewed in the daily edition, new poetry is intermittently discussed in the Sunday Book Review, but almost always in group reviews where three books are briefly considered together. Whereas a new novel or biography is reviewed on or around its publication date, a new collection by an important poet like Donald Hall or David Ignatow might wait up to a year for a notice. Or it might never be reviewed at all. Henry Taylor’s The Flying Change was reviewed only after it had won the Pulitzer Prize. Rodney Jones’s Transparent Gestures was reviewed months after it had won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Rita Dove’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah was not reviewed by the Times at all.

Poetry reviewing is no better anywhere else, and generally it is much worse. The New York Times only reflects the opinion that although there is a great deal of poetry around, none of it matters very much to readers, publishers, or advertisers–to anyone, that is, except other poets. For most newspapers and magazines, poetry has become a literary commodity intended less to be read than to be noted with approval. Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around–not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition’s sake.

How Poetry Diminished

ARGUMENTS about the decline of poetry’s cultural importance are not new. In American letters they date back to the nineteenth century. But the modern debate might be said to have begun in 1934 when Edmund Wilson published the first version of his controversial essay “Is Verse a Dying Technique?” Surveying literary history, Wilson noted that verse’s role had grown increasingly narrow since the eighteenth century. In particular, Romanticism’s emphasis on intensity made poetry seem so “fleeting and quintessential” that eventually it dwindled into a mainly lyric medium. As verse–which had previously been a popular medium for narrative, satire, drama, even history and scientific speculation–retreated into lyric, prose usurped much of its cultural territory. Truly ambitious writers eventually had no choice but to write in prose. The future of great literature, Wilson speculated, belonged almost entirely to prose.

Wilson was a capable analyst of literary trends. His skeptical assessment of poetry’s place in modern letters has been frequently attacked and qualified over the past half century, but it has never been convincingly dismissed. His argument set the ground rules for all subsequent defenders of contemporary poetry. It also provided the starting point for later iconoclasts, from Delmore Schwartz to Christopher Clausen. The most recent and celebrated of these revisionists is Joseph Epstein, whose mordant 1988 critique “Who Killed Poetry?” first appeared in Commentary and was reprinted in an extravagantly acrimonious symposium in AWP Chronicle (the journal of the Associated Writing Programs). Not coincidentally, Epstein’s title pays a double homage to Wilson’s essay–first by mimicking the interrogative form of the original title, second by employing its metaphor of death.

Epstein essentially updated Wilson’s argument, but with important differences. Whereas Wilson looked on the decline of poetry’s cultural position as a gradual process spanning three centuries, Epstein focused on the past few decades. He contrasted the major achievements of the modernists–the generation of Eliot and Stevens, which led poetry from moribund Romanticism into the twentieth century–with what he felt were the minor accomplishments of the present practitioners. The modernists, Epstein maintained, were artists who worked from a broad cultural vision. Contemporary writers were “poetry professionals,” who operated within the closed world of the university. Wilson blamed poetry’s plight on historical forces; Epstein indicted the poets themselves and the institutions they had helped create, especially creative-writing programs. A brilliant polemicist, Epstein intended his essay to be incendiary, and it did ignite an explosion of criticism. No recent essay on American poetry has generated so many immediate responses in literary journals. And certainly none has drawn so much violently negative criticism from poets themselves. To date at least thirty writers have responded in print. The poet Henry Taylor published two rebuttals.

Poets are justifiably sensitive to arguments that poetry has declined in cultural importance, because journalists and reviewers have used such arguments simplistically to declare all contemporary verse irrelevant. Usually the less a critic knows about verse the more readily he or she dismisses it. It is no coincidence, I think, that the two most persuasive essays on poetry’s presumed demise were written by outstanding critics of fiction, neither of whom has written extensively about contemporary poetry. It is too soon to judge the accuracy of Epstein’s essay, but a literary historian would find Wilson’s timing ironic. As Wilson finished his famous essay, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Robinson Jeffers, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Robert Graves, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Basil Bunting, and others were writing some of their finest poems, which, encompassing history, politics, economics, religion, and philosophy, are among the most culturally inclusive in the history of the language. At the same time, a new generation, which would include Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Randall Jarrell, Dylan Thomas, A. D. Hope, and others, was just breaking into print. Wilson himself later admitted that the emergence of a versatile and ambitious poet like Auden contradicted several points of his argument. But if Wilson’s prophecies were sometimes inaccurate, his sense of poetry’s overall situation was depressingly astute. Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.

Inside the Subculture

ONE sees evidence of poetry’s diminished stature even within the thriving subculture. The established rituals of the poetry world–the readings, small magazines, workshops, and conferences–exhibit a surprising number of self-imposed limitations. Why, for example, does poetry mix so seldom with music, dance, or theater? At most readings the program consists of verse only–and usually only verse by that night’s author. Forty years ago, when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting other poets’ work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author’s ego. No wonder the audience for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author.

Several dozen journals now exist that print only verse. They don’t publish literary reviews, just page after page of freshly minted poems. The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage. One can easily miss a radiant poem amid the many lackluster ones. It takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention. Few people bother, generally not even the magazines’ contributors. The indifference to poetry in the mass media has created a monster of the opposite kind–journals that love poetry not wisely but too well.

Until about thirty years ago most poetry appeared in magazines that addressed a nonspecialist audience on a range of subjects. Poetry vied for the reader’s interest along with politics, humor, fiction, and reviews–a competition that proved healthy for all the genres. A poem that didn’t command the reader’s attention wasn’t considered much of a poem. Editors chose verse that they felt would appeal to their particular audiences, and the diversity of magazines assured that a variety of poetry appeared. The early Kenyon Review published Robert Lowell’s poems next to critical essays and literary reviews. The old New Yorker celebrated Ogden Nash between cartoons and short stories.

A few general-interest magazines, such as The New Republic andThe New Yorker, still publish poetry in every issue, but, significantly, none except The Nation still reviews it regularly. Some poetry appears in the handful of small magazines and quarterlies that consistently discuss a broad cultural agenda with nonspecialist readers, such as The Threepenny Review, The New Criterion, and The Hudson Review. But most poetry is published in journals that address an insular audience of literary professionals, mainly teachers of creative writing and their students. A few of these, such as American Poetry Review and AWP Chronicle, have moderately large circulations. Many more have negligible readerships. But size is not the problem. The problem is their complacency or resignation about existing only in and for a subculture.

What are the characteristics of a poetry-subculture publication? First, the one subject it addresses is current American literature (supplemented perhaps by a few translations of poets who have already been widely translated). Second, if it prints anything other than poetry, that is usually short fiction. Third, if it runs discursive prose, the essays and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. If it publishes an interview, the tone will be unabashedly reverent toward the author. For these journals critical prose exists not to provide a disinterested perspective on new books but to publicize them. Quite often there are manifest personal connections between the reviewers and the authors they discuss. If occasionally a negative review is published, it will be openly sectarian, rejecting an aesthetic that the magazine has already condemned. The unspoken editorial rule seems to be, Never surprise or annoy the readers; they are, after all, mainly our friends and colleagues.

By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its own art. Since there are too many new poetry collections appearing each year for anyone to evaluate, the reader must rely on the candor and discernment of reviewers to recommend the best books. But the general press has largely abandoned this task, and the specialized press has grown so overprotective of poetry that it is reluctant to make harsh judgments. In his new book, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, Robert Bly has accurately described the corrosive effect of this critical boosterism:

We have an odd situation: although more bad poetry is being published now than ever before in American history, most of the reviews are positive. Critics say, “I never attack what is bad, all that will take care of itself,” . . . but the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and who end up doubting their own critical perceptions.

A clubby feeling also typifies most recent anthologies of contemporary poetry. Although these collections represent themselves as trustworthy guides to the best new poetry, they are not compiled for readers outside the academy. More than one editor has discovered that the best way to get an anthology assigned is to include work by the poets who teach the courses. Compiled in the spirit of congenial opportunism, many of these anthologies give the impression that literary quality is a concept that neither an editor nor a reader should take too seriously.The 1985 Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, for example, is not so much a selective literary collection as a comprehensive directory of creative-writing teachers (it even offers a photo of each author). Running nearly 800 pages, the volume presents no fewer than 104 important young poets, virtually all of whom teach creative writing. The editorial principle governing selection seems to have been the fear of leaving out some influential colleague. The book does contain a few strong and original poems, but they are surrounded by so many undistinguished exercises that one wonders if the good work got there by design or simply by random sampling. In the drearier patches one suspects that perhaps the book was never truly meant to be read, only assigned.

And that is the real issue. The poetry subculture no longer assumes that all published poems will be read. Like their colleagues in other academic departments, poetry professionals must publish, for purposes of both job security and career advancement. The more they publish, the faster they progress. If they do not publish, or wait too long, their economic futures are in grave jeopardy.

In art, of course, everyone agrees that quality and not quantity matters. Some authors survive on the basis of a single unforgettable poem–Edmund Waller’s “Go, Lovely Rose,” for example, or Edwin Markham’s “The Man With the Hoe,” which was made famous by being reprinted in hundreds of newspapers–an unthinkable occurrence today. But bureaucracies, by their very nature, have difficulty measuring something as intangible as literary quality. When institutions evaluate creative artists for employment or promotion, they still must find some seemingly objective means to do so. As the critic Bruce Bawer has observed,

A poem is, after all, a fragile thing, and its intrinsic worth or lack thereof, is a frighteningly subjective consideration; but fellowship grants, degrees, appointments, and publications are objective facts. They are quantifiable; they can be listed on a resume.

Poets serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They must publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable.The proliferation of literary journals and presses over the past thirty years has been a response less to an increased appetite for poetry among the public than to the desperate need of writing teachers for professional validation. Like subsidized farming that grows food no one wants, a poetry industry has been created to serve the interests of the producers and not the consumers. And in the process the integrity of the art has been betrayed. Of course, no poet is allowed to admit this in public. The cultural credibility of the professional poetry establishment depends on maintaining a polite hypocrisy. Millions of dollars in public and private funding are at stake. Luckily, no one outside the subculture cares enough to press the point very far. No Woodward and Bernstein will ever investigate a cover-up by members of the Associated Writing Programs.

The new poet makes a living not by publishing literary work but by providing specialized educational services. Most likely he or she either works for or aspires to work for a large institution–usually a state-run enterprise, such as a school district, a college, or a university (or lately even a hospital or prison)–teaching others how to write poetry or, on the highest levels, how to teach others how to write poetry.

To look at the issue in strictly economic terms, most contemporary poets have been alienated from their original cultural function. As Marx maintained and few economists have disputed, changes in a class’s economic function eventually transform its values and behavior. In poetry’s case, the socioeconomic changes have led to a divided literary culture: the superabundance of poetry within a small class and the impoverishment outside it. One might even say that outside the classroom–where society demands that the two groups interact–poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms.

The divorce of poetry from the educated reader has had another, more pernicious result. Seeing so much mediocre verse not only published but praised, slogging through so many dull anthologies and small magazines, most readers–even sophisticated ones like Joseph Epstein–now assume that no significant new poetry is being written. This public skepticism represents the final isolation of verse as an art form in contemporary society.

The irony is that this skepticism comes in a period of genuine achievement. Gresham’s Law, that bad coinage drives out good, only half applies to current poetry. The sheer mass of mediocrity may have frightened away most readers, but it has not yet driven talented writers from the field. Anyone patient enough to weed through the tangle of contemporary work finds an impressive and diverse range of new poetry. Adrienne Rich, for example, despite her often overbearing polemics, is a major poet by any standard. The best work of Donald Justice, Anthony Hecht, Donald Hall, James Merrill, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, and Richard Wilbur–to mention only writers of the older generation–can hold its own against anything in the national literature. One might also add Sylvia Plath and James Wright, two strong poets of the same generation who died early. America is also a country rich in emigre poetry, as major writers like Czeslaw Milosz, Nina Cassian, Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, and Thom Gunn demonstrate.

Without a role in the broader culture, however, talented poets lack the confidence to create public speech. Occasionally a writer links up rewardingly to a social or political movement. Rich, for example, has used feminism to expand the vision of her work. Robert Bly wrote his finest poetry to protest the Vietnam War. His sense of addressing a large and diverse audience added humor, breadth, and humanity to his previously minimal verse. But it is a difficult task to marry the Muse happily to politics. Consequently, most contemporary poets, knowing that they are virtually invisible in the larger culture, focus on the more intimate forms of lyric and meditative verse. (And a few loners, like X. J. Kennedy and John Updike, turn their genius to the critically disreputable demimonde of light verse and children’s poetry.) Therefore, although current American poetry has not often excelled in public forms like political or satiric verse, it has nonetheless produced personal poems of unsurpassed beauty and power. Despite its manifest excellence, this new work has not found a public beyond the poetry subculture, because the traditional machinery of transmission–the reliable reviewing, honest criticism, and selective anthologies–has broken down. The audience that once made Frost and Eliot, Cummings and Millay, part of its cultural vision remains out of reach. Today Walt Whitman’s challenge “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too” reads like an indictment.

From Bohemia to Bureaucracy

TO maintain their activities, subcultures usually require institutions, since the general society does not share their interests. Nudists flock to “nature camps” to express their unfettered life-style. Monks remain in monasteries to protect their austere ideals. As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where they maintained a distrustful independence from institutions. Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia.

At first they existed on the fringes of English departments, which was probably healthy. Without advanced degrees or formal career paths, poets were recognized as special creatures. They were allowed–like aboriginal chieftains visiting an anthropologist’s campsite–to behave according to their own laws. But as the demand for creative writing grew, the poet’s job expanded from merely literary to administrative duties. At the university’s urging, these self-trained writers designed history’s first institutional curricula for young poets. Creative writing evolved from occasional courses taught within the English department into its own undergraduate major or graduate-degree program. Writers fashioned their academic specialty in the image of other university studies. As the new writing departments multiplied, the new professionals patterned their infrastructure–job titles, journals, annual conventions, organizations–according to the standards not of urban bohemia but of educational institutions. Out of the professional networks this educational expansion created, the subculture of poetry was born.

Initially, the multiplication of creative-writing programs must have been a dizzyingly happy affair. Poets who had scraped by in bohemia or had spent their early adulthood fighting the Second World War suddenly secured stable, well-paying jobs. Writers who had never earned much public attention found themselves surrounded by eager students. Poets who had been too poor to travel flew from campus to campus and from conference to conference, to speak before audiences of their peers. As Wilfrid Sheed once described a moment in John Berryman’s career, “Through the burgeoning university network, it was suddenly possible to think of oneself as a national poet, even if the nation turned out to consist entirely of English Departments.” The bright postwar world promised a renaissance for American poetry.

In material terms that promise has been fulfilled beyond the dreams of anyone in Berryman’s Depression-scarred generation. Poets now occupy niches at every level of academia, from a few sumptuously endowed chairs with six-figure salaries to the more numerous part-time stints that pay roughly the same as Burger King. But even at minimum wage, teaching poetry earns more than writing it ever did. Before the creative-writing boom, being a poet usually meant living in genteel poverty or worse. While the sacrifices poetry demanded caused much individual suffering, the rigors of serving Milton’s “thankless Muse” also delivered the collective cultural benefit of frightening away all but committed artists.

Today poetry is a modestly upwardly mobile, middle-class profession–not as lucrative as waste management or dermatology but several big steps above the squalor of bohemia. Only a philistine would romanticize the blissfully banished artistic poverty of yesteryear. But a clear-eyed observer must also recognize that by opening the poet’s trade to all applicants and by employing writers to do something other than write, institutions have changed the social and economic identity of the poet from artist to educator. In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is “Where do you teach?” The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It’s just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.

Even within the university contemporary poetry now exists as a subculture. The teaching poet finds that he or she has little in common with academic colleagues. The academic study of literature over the past twenty-five years has veered off in a theoretical direction with which most imaginative writers have little sympathy or familiarity. Thirty years ago detractors of creative-writing programs predicted that poets in universities would become enmeshed in literary criticism and scholarship. This prophecy has proved spectacularly wrong. Poets have created enclaves in the academy almost entirely separate from their critical colleagues. They write less criticism than they did before entering the academy. Pressed to keep up with the plethora of new poetry, small magazines, professional journals, and anthologies, they are frequently also less well read in the literature of the past. Their peers in the English department generally read less contemporary poetry and more literary theory. In many departments writers and literary theorists are openly at war. Bringing the two groups under one roof has paradoxically made each more territorial. Isolated even within the university, the poet, whose true subject is the whole of human existence, has reluctantly become an educational specialist.

When People Paid Attention

TO understand how radically the situation of the American poet has changed, one need only compare today with fifty years ago. In 1940, with the notable exception of Robert Frost, few poets were working in colleges unless, like Mark Van Doren and Yvor Winters, they taught traditional academic subjects. The only creative-writing program was an experiment begun a few years earlier at the University of Iowa. The modernists exemplified the options that poets had for making a living. They could enter middle-class professions, as had T. S. Eliot (a banker turned publisher), Wallace Stevens (a corporate insurance lawyer) and William Carlos Williams (a pediatrician). Or they could live in bohemia supporting themselves as artists, as, in different ways, did Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore. If the city proved unattractive, they could, like Robinson Jeffers, scrape by in a rural arts colony like Carmel, California. Or they might become farmers, like the young Robert Frost.

Most often poets supported themselves as editors or reviewers, actively taking part in the artistic and intellectual life of their time. Archibald MacLeish was an editor and writer at Fortune. James Agee reviewed movies for Time and The Nation, and eventually wrote screenplays for Hollywood. Randall Jarrell reviewed books. Weldon Kees wrote about jazz and modern art. Delmore Schwartz reviewed everything. Even poets who eventually took up academic careers spent intellectually broadening apprenticeships in literary journalism. The young Robert Hayden covered music and theater for Michigan’s black press. R. P. Blackmur, who never completed high school, reviewed books for Hound & Horn before teaching at Princeton. Occasionally a poet might supplement his or her income by giving a reading or lecture, but these occasions were rare. Robinson Jeffers, for example, was fifty-four when he gave his first public reading. For most poets, the sustaining medium was not the classroom or the podium but the written word.

If poets supported themselves by writing, it was mainly by writing prose. Paying outlets for poetry were limited. Beyond a few national magazines, which generally preferred light verse or political satire, there were at any one time only a few dozen journals that published a significant amount of poetry. The emergence of a serious new quarterly like Partisan Review or Furioso was an event of real importance, and a small but dedicated audience eagerly looked forward to each issue. If people could not afford to buy copies, they borrowed them or visited public libraries. As for books of poetry if one excludes vanity-press editions, fewer than a hundred new titles were published each year. But the books that did appear were reviewed in daily newspapers as well as magazines and quarterlies. A focused monthly like Poetry could cover virtually the entire field.

Reviewers fifty years ago were by today’s standards extraordinarily tough. They said exactly what they thought, even about their most influential contemporaries. Listen, for example, to Randall Jarrell’s description of a book by the famous anthologist Oscar Williams: it “gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter.” That remark kept Jarrell out of subsequent Williams anthologies, but he did not hesitate to publish it. Or consider Jarrell’s assessment of Archibald MacLeish’s public poem America Was Promises: it “might have been devised by a YMCA secretary at a home for the mentally deficient.” Or read Weldon Kees’s one-sentence review of Muriel Rukeyser’s Wake Island–“There’s one thing you can say about Muriel: she’s not lazy.” But these same reviewers could write generously about poets they admired, as Jarrell did about Elizabeth Bishop, and Kees about Wallace Stevens. Their praise mattered, because readers knew it did not come lightly.

The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.

Ill-paid, overworked, and underappreciated, this argumentative group of “practical” critics, all of them poets, accomplished remarkable things. They defined the canon of modernist poetry, established methods to analyze verse of extraordinary difficulty, and identified the new mid-century generation of American poets (Lowell, Roethke, Bishop, Berryman, and others) that still dominates our literary consciousness. Whatever one thinks of their literary canon or critical principles, one must admire the intellectual energy and sheer determination of these critics, who developed as writers without grants or permanent faculty positions, often while working precariously on free-lance assignments. They represent a high point in American intellectual life. Even fifty years later their names still command more authority than those of all but a few contemporary critics. A short roll call would include John Berryman, R. P. Blackmur, Louise Bogan, John Ciardi, Horace Gregory, Langston Hughes, Randall Jarrell, Weldon Kees, Kenneth Rexroth, Delmore Schwartz, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, and Yvor Winters. Although contemporary poetry has its boosters and publicists, it has no group of comparable dedication and talent able to address the general literary community.

Like all genuine intellectuals, these critics were visionary. They believed that if modern poets did not have an audience, they could create one. And gradually they did. It was not a mass audience; few American poets of any period have enjoyed a direct relationship with the general public. It was a cross-section of artists and intellectuals, including scientists, clergymen, educators, lawyers, and, of course, writers. This group constituted a literary intelligentsia, made up mainly of nonspecialists, who took poetry as seriously as fiction and drama. Recently Donald Hall and other critics have questioned the size of this audience by citing the low average sales of a volume of new verse by an established poet during the period (usually under a thousand copies). But these skeptics do not understand how poetry was read then.

America was a smaller, less affluent country in 1940, with about half its current population and one sixth its current real GNP. In those pre-paperback days of the late Depression neither readers nor libraries could afford to buy as many books as they do today. Nor was there a large captive audience of creative-writing students who bought books of contemporary poetry for classroom use. Readers usually bought poetry in two forms–in an occasional Collected Poems by a leading author, or in anthologies. The comprehensive collections of writers like Frost, Eliot, Auden, Jeffers, Wylie, and Millay sold very well, were frequently reprinted, and stayed perpetually in print. (Today mostCollected Poems disappear after one printing.) Occasionally a book of new poems would capture the public’s fancy. Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Tristram (1927) became a Literary Guild selection. Frost’s A Further Range sold 50,000 copies as a 1936 Book-of-the-Month Club selection. But people knew poetry mainly from anthologies, which they not only bought but also read, with curiosity and attention.

Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry, first published in 1919, was frequently revised to keep it up to date and was a perennial best seller. My 1942 edition, for example, had been reprinted five times by 1945. My edition of Oscar Williams’s A Pocket Book of Modern Poetry had been reprinted nineteen times in fourteen years. Untermeyer and Williams prided themselves on keeping their anthologies broad-based and timely. They tried to represent the best of what was being published. Each edition added new poems and poets and dropped older ones. The public appreciated their efforts. Poetry anthologies were an indispensable part of any serious reader’s library. Random House’s popular Modern Library series, for example, included not one but two anthologies–Selden Rodman’s A New Anthology of Modern Poetry and Conrad Aiken’s Twentieth Century American Poetry. All these collections were read and reread by a diverse public. Favorite poems were memorized. Difficult authors like Eliot and Thomas were actively discussed and debated. Poetry mattered outside the classroom.

Today these general readers constitute the audience that poetry has lost. Limited by intelligence and curiosity this heterogeneous group cuts across lines of race, class, age, and occupation. Representing our cultural intelligentsia, they are the people who support the arts–who buy classical and jazz records; who attend foreign films and serious theater, opera, symphony, and dance; who read quality fiction and biographies; who listen to public radio and subscribe to the best journals. (They are also often the parents who read poetry to their children and remember, once upon a time in college or high school or kindergarten, liking it themselves.) No one knows the size of this community, but even if one accepts the conservative estimate that it accounts for only two percent of the U.S. population, it still represents a potential audience of almost five million readers. However healthy poetry may appear within its professional subculture, it has lost this larger audience, who represent poetry’s bridge to the general culture.

The Need for Poetry

BUT why should anyone but a poet care about the problems of American poetry? What possible relevance does this archaic art form have to contemporary society? In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer splendor of its own existence. As Wallace Stevens once observed, “The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man’s happiness.” Children know this essential truth when they ask to hear their favorite nursery rhymes again and again. Aesthetic pleasure needs no justification, because a life without such pleasure is one not worth living.

But the rest of society has mostly forgotten the value of poetry. To the general reader, discussions about the state of poetry sound like the debating of foreign politics by emigres in a seedy cafe. Or, as Cyril Connolly more bitterly described it, “Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.” Anyone who hopes to broaden poetry’s audience–critic, teacher, librarian, poet, or lonely literary amateur–faces a daunting challenge. How does one persuade justly skeptical readers, in terms they can understand and appreciate, that poetry still matters?

A passage in William Carlos Williams’s “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” provides a possible starting point. Written toward the end of the author’s life, after he had been partly paralyzed by a stroke, the lines sum up the hard lessons about poetry and audience that Williams had learned over years of dedication to both poetry and medicine. He wrote,

     
             My heart rouses
                    thinking to bring you news
                             of something 

             that concerns you 
                    and concerns many men. Look at 
                            what passes for the new. 
             You will not find it there but in 
                    despised poems. 
                            It is difficult 
             to get the news from poems 
                    yet men die miserably every day 
                            for lack
             of what is found there.

Williams understood poetry’s human value but had no illusions about the difficulties his contemporaries faced in trying to engage the audience that needed the art most desperately. To regain poetry’s readership one must begin by meeting Williams’s challenge to find what “concerns many men,” not simply what concerns poets.There are at least two reasons why the situation of poetry matters to the entire intellectual community. The first involves the role of language in a free society. Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it–be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters. The public responsibility of poetry has been pointed out repeatedly by modern writers. Even the archsymbolist Stephane Mallarme praised the poet’s central mission to “purify the words of the tribe.” And Ezra Pound warned that

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clean. It doesn’t matter whether a good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm. . . .If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

Or, as George Orwell wrote after the Second World War, “One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language. . . .” Poetry is not the entire solution to keeping the nation’s language clear and honest, but one is hard pressed to imagine a country’s citizens improving the health of its language while abandoning poetry.The second reason why the situation of poetry matters to all intellectuals is that poetry is not alone among the arts in its marginal position. If the audience for poetry has declined into a subculture of specialists, so too have the audiences for most contemporary art forms, from serious drama to jazz. The unprecedented fragmentation of American high culture during the past half century has left most arts in isolation from one another as well as from the general audience. Contemporary classical music scarcely exists as a living art outside university departments and conservatories. Jazz, which once commanded a broad popular audience, has become the semi-private domain of aficionados and musicians. (Today even influential jazz innovators cannot find places to perform in many metropolitan centers–and for an improvisatory art the inability to perform is a crippling liability.) Much serious drama is now confined to the margins of American theater, where it is seen only by actors, aspiring actors, playwrights, and a few diehard fans. Only the visual arts, perhaps because of their financial glamour and upper-class support, have largely escaped the decline in public attention.

How Poets Can Be Heard

THE most serious question for the future of American culture is whether the arts will continue to exist in isolation and decline into subsidized academic specialties or whether some possibility of rapprochement with the educated public remains. Each of the arts must face the challenge separately, and no art faces more towering obstacles than poetry. Given the decline of literacy, the proliferation of other media, the crisis in humanities education, the collapse of critical standards, and the sheer weight of past failures, how can poets possibly succeed in being heard? Wouldn’t it take a miracle?

Toward the end of her life Marianne Moore wrote a short poem called “O To Be a Dragon.” This poem recalled the biblical dream in which the Lord appeared to King Solomon and said, “Ask what I shall give thee.” Solomon wished for a wise and understanding heart. Moore’s wish is harder to summarize. Her poem reads,

If I, like Solomon, . . .
could have my wish--
my wish . . . O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven–of silkworm
size or immense; at times invisible.
Felicitous phenomenon!

Moore got her wish. She became, as all genuine poets do, “a symbol of the power of Heaven.” She succeeded in what Robert Frost called “the utmost of ambition”–namely “to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of.” She is permanently part of the “felicitous phenomenon” of American literature.So wishes can come true–even extravagant ones. If I, like Marianne Moore, could have my wish, and I, like Solomon, could have the self-control not to wish for myself, I would wish that poetry could again become a part of American public culture. I don’t think this is impossible. All it would require is that poets and poetry teachers take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public. I will close with six modest proposals for how this dream might come true.

1. When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people’s work–preferably poems they admire by writers they do not know personally. Readings should be celebrations of poetry in general, not merely of the featured author’s work.

2. When arts administrators plan public readings, they should avoid the standard subculture format of poetry only. Mix poetry with the other arts, especially music. Plan evenings honoring dead or foreign writers. Combine short critical lectures with poetry performances. Such combinations would attract an audience from beyond the poetry world without compromising quality.

3. Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively. Poets must recapture the attention of the broader intellectual community by writing for nonspecialist publications. They must also avoid the jargon of contemporary academic criticism and write in a public idiom. Finally, poets must regain the reader’s trust by candidly admitting what they don’t like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.

4. Poets who compile anthologies–or even reading lists–should be scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely admire. Anthologies are poetry’s gateway to the general culture. They should not be used as pork barrels for the creative-writing trade. An art expands its audience by presenting masterpieces, not mediocrity. Anthologies should be compiled to move, delight, and instruct readers, not to flatter the writing teachers who assign books. Poet-anthologists must never trade the Muse’s property for professional favors.

5. Poetry teachers especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry’s future.

6. Finally poets and arts administrators should use radio to expand the art’s audience. Poetry is an aural medium, and thus ideally suited to radio. A little imaginative programming at the hundreds of college and public-supported radio stations could bring poetry to millions of listeners. Some programming exists, but it is stuck mostly in the standard subculture format of living poets’ reading their own work. Mixing poetry with music on classical and jazz stations or creating innovative talk-radio formats could re-establish a direct relationship between poetry and the general audience.

The history of art tells the same story over and over. As art forms develop, they establish conventions that guide creation, performance, instruction, even analysis. But eventually these conventions grow stale. They begin to stand between the art and its audience. Although much wonderful poetry is being written, the American poetry establishment is locked into a series of exhausted conventions–outmoded ways of presenting, discussing, editing, and teaching poetry. Educational institutions have codified them into a stifling bureaucratic etiquette that enervates the art. These conventions may once have made sense, but today they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto.

See “Hearing From Poetry’s Audience”(1992), in which Dana Gioia discusses the response to this article.Return to the Poetry Pages contents It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let’s build a funeral pyre out of the dessicated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.


Dana Gioia’s essays and criticism have appeared in many periodicals, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and The New Yorker. He is a translator and anthologist of Italian poetry, including the Mottetti of Eugenio Montale (Graywolf, 1990). Mr. Gioia is also the author of two books of poetry, Daily Horoscope (Graywolf, 1986) and The Gods of Winter (Graywolf, 1991). His May 1991 article in The Atlantic Monthly became the title essay of his book Can Poetry Matter? (Graywolf, 1992).


Copyright © 1991 by Dana Gioia. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; May, 1991; “Can Poetry Matter?”; Volume 267, No. 5; pages 94-106.

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I see cathedrals

On the far horizon stands a church

A small cathedral where the birds will  perch

It brings to mind the marshes of the Blythe

Facing Eastward where the sun would rise 

Yet this is mere illusion, trick of mind

I see  cathedrals no one else can find

The figure and the ground have been reversed

Heaven or hell I don’t know which is worse.

I saw the sunrise   I was on the beach

The fishing boats went east till out of reach

There was Britten gazing  out to sea

After that  was you and there was me 

The last time that we went we walked all round. 

We never spoke or said what we had found

Yet in my mind I see your holy place

How I wish that I could see your face.

On snails

I envy  snails their shining shells sublime.

For mortgages are  large, a  human crime

.Alas the shell’s a fragile little house

On second thoughts I’d rather be a mouse.

I’d sleep inside your slipper by the bed

I’d go into the kitchen, look for bread.

If I became a cat,would Oscar mind?

I’ll check with him to find out his designs.

Yet going back to snails I do declare.

Evolution might lead to despair

Snails would be quite safe were they alone.

Human beings treat them like they’re stones

Into the void, the sightless foot can step

Bringing instant death, Christ Jesus wept.

Statistics and Stan

I started writing stories about Stan Mary and Annie and Emile the cat because I had become aware that peoplm were ringing 999 and demanding that and

ambulances should go round for the wrong reasons such as they can’t find a plaster to put on their finger.

Unfortunately it’s also became common for people to go to accident and emergency for trivial reasons and a lot more strain was put on the NHS I don’t think my stories how did anything to solve that problem but they’re developed a life of their own and my husband when he was ill at the end became very fond of them so I had to read them and to write more of them. I became quite fond of myself so I did not have the same impetus to write them after he died.

I think this is the first one that I wrote in 2010

Stan and the standard deviation

Stan was teaching social statistics to a group of elderly neighbours.Since he was 91 it gave much hope to them to see him demonstrating his prowess with various techniques on the overhead projector,.He was planning to do some logic and some philosophy too.Annie was sitting by the door so she could answer the bell if any paramedics turned up for tea or supper…
I’m not going to calculate the standard deviation he murmured.”I just want you to grasp the general purpose.”
“Deviations,they’re not normal are they?” enquired his neighbour Henry,an ex-English teacher.”So how can they be standard.It’s utterly confusing..”
“Are you thinking of deviants?” Stan enquired calmly yet nervously
”Certainly not,at my age I’m long past that!”
” Still it adds a bit of excitement to the class.” he thought silently
How do words in ordinary language relate to those in Statistics?”asked Henry kindly.
“They are just more precisely defined in statistics.To say someone is a deviant is a rather vague term.”
“No,it’s not!My neighbour is a deviant.He always dresses entirely in yellow.”
“Well,that must be hard to do.Certainly unusual.” Stan agreed boldly.
“But in another country that might be the norm.So it’s a matter of context.In statistics it’s more prosaic..There’s a formula.It’s totally independent of context.Have you ever wondered why so many mathematicians have a touch of Asperger’s syndrome?”
“No,it’s not something that meanders through my mind much”replied Henry wittily.
A shudder passed through the audience on hearing the word “formula“,which perhaps they considered something of a deviant word. Anything with letters and numbers mixed together is certainly not welcome in many people’s minds, along with their more unusual sexual tastes, desires and inclinations which were kept secret even from themselves in many cases.So Lacan appeared to think.As I am unable to understand his writing myself,I cannot be sure if he was right or even half right.
“Time for tea,” called Annie,hoping to divert their attention to the everyday realm of food and drink.She carried in a platter of mouse [mice?] sandwiches kindly donated by the local ambulance service and some iced Victoria sponges she and Stan had made the day before in her new naga oven.
“Just a quick word about next week.We’ll take a look at ratios and proportions and maybe see how that relates to the concept of rationality.”
“That sounds fun!” Annie called encouragingly
.Henry decided to act on a deviant desire and fell onto her lap
”Oh,dear!” she gasped loudly as the chair collapsed under her.
”Why can’t you be deviant at home?”
“My wife won’t let me!” He kindly answered.And it’s impossible truly.
“And look,” Stan continued,”we’ll have to ring 999.This chair is in fragments.I thought for one day we’d be able to avoid calling them out!”
“Well,life is not controllable.” said a quiet but fierce looking lady with sharp green eyes.”That’s what makes it tolerable“
She then greedily consumed a large piece of iced sponge cake .
“I can stand the thinking if the cake is good” she whispered to her shy friend Amy.
”That’s rather a feeble argument,”Amy retorted.”You can’t really compare cake and statistics.”
“I’ll compare anything I like!” the green-eyed woman snarled loudly.
“You do what you like but you must keep a sense of proportion!”As we all know….
“Now then,have you rung 999?” Stan queried of Annie.”Yes,here they are,and they’ ve got a stretcher for the chair!”
“Well,that’s certainly unusual,even deviant“,Stan thought anxiously to himself.
”Where do they get their funding? Is there a fund for distributing money to help chairs which are not normal?

Silverdale

I wish we were in Silverdale again

The meadow full of flowers,the nettle’s sting

The boarding house,the hedges rich with song..

The sketch pad and the ink, the birthday pen

My brother’s humour and his wacky games

I miss his buoyant face, his eyes untamed

At least he’s not in prison doing time.

I liked the way he misprounced my name.

I wish we were on Windermere today

The bouncing sun,the blossoms rich display

Come back now I love you anyway

My heart was stabbed with death,you went away

I saw your shadow cycling in black rain.

May we help each other with the pain?

Such gentle words can break our sullen bonds

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A word that’s spoken by a friend can reach
Can touch, can move, can embrace in its sounds
The inner soul where its vibrations teach.

When cut off, silent,after sad defeat
Such gentle words can break our sullen bonds
A word that’s spoken by a friend can reach.

We must not torture nor torment in speech
Our heart, the centre of our morbid wounds
The inner soul with its vibrations speaks..

From our eye, a tear springs with relief
From imprisoned sulking, jump with a great bound!
A word that’s spoken by a friend can reach.

Muscles weaken,but the mind stays fleet
Humour and its cousins are our clowns
The inner soul by its athletics speaks.

I smile and smile yet rarely do I frown
For I will rise up, even when low down
A word that by a friend can reach,provoke
In our souls ,deep memories will evo

The wronged kindness of  nonsense 

In the haunted pub
We ate hot food and wondered
What is common sense?

In the sky ,snow hung
The  park was  icy and black
The farm was quiet

What is common? Sense?
What have we lost since that time?
Now we live nonsense.

Where is the humour?
The wronged kindness of  nonsense
The futility

Who says what is true?
Who speaks what is  silent , lost?
Who is the channel?

What is true has left.
“Maybe” hangs from black branches
Like dead fruit or  leaf

The autumn  orange
The senselessness of speeches
The withering   glance

The edge  of our  land
Borders are  more anguished
Cannot connect us

New laws and rules
Trial  by separation
The barbed rust   pierces

There is no heartland
There is no inside at all
Nowhere to  live well

 

 

 

Against sadness

Against sadness:no-one here can weep
Nor lounge about in melancholy deep.
Was Van Gogh senseless to permit his muse.
For his masterpieces ,was the price too steep?
We see the yellow chair but not his views
Nor his mind where technique made such leaps.
Nor was his journey broadcast on the news.
Against sadness.

Happiness or joy is hard to find
When we rest, the News preys on our minds
Yet some are cold towards the slaughtered priest
His nose a beak of bone in old face lined
Now Muslims go to Mass and join Christ’s feast
Against sadness.

What rages in the mind make men kill thus?
In many wars the innocents fare worse.
But these are our near neighbours so we weep
And wonder how to end the frightening curse
The sins we once committed hold us deep
We hold our hands out wanting to be nursed
Against sadness

An interview with Wendy Cope

Photo0316.jpghttps://www.poetryarchive.org/interview/wendy-cope-interview

 

“What do you see as the role of humour in poetry?

I don’t set out to write humorous poems it’s just sometimes my sense of humour gets into them – well quite often. As a reader I suppose I laugh when I recognise something – I think laughter often is when you recognise something is true but you’d never actually allowed yourself to think that or you’d never heard it put quite so well. I think it’s possible for a poem to be funny and serious at the same time and I get very annoyed with the assumption that if a poem is funny then it can’t be saying anything important and deeply felt. Some of my poems are just playful and could accurately be described as ‘light verse’ but I think in a lot of my poems, although there’s humour in them, they are saying something that matters and something that’s deeply felt and I don’t think…I think those things can co-exist in the same poem.”

Samsung and Delilah

Samsung and Delilah .. was the hair real?

If only Eve had not bought an Apple  iPhone

Yahoo punished Adam severely

Was Asus the son of God too?

God said, why are you here, you liar?

Elijah invented Intel,computers and chips. but not pizza and not fish.

I’ll be judge and I’ll be jury,said cunning old Fury

I have seen the Light on Google Drive

The Cloud of Unknowing is not a good place to save your poetry

He filed me under “wonder” on One Drive

One Drive,One G-d, One World

Where is Ogle Drive?

Yeshua did many lyricals.He was Leonard Cohen,we have found to our surprise

The still small choice. It makes the world of difference in

Don’t worry I’ll Motorola tomorrow.

I’ll bring my tablet.

Waxy flowers in the snow

Waxy flowers poking through
Snow so white
Flowers bright.
Made me think of you.

I see once more your just washed hair,
Soft as snow,
On pillow.
Now my bed is bleak and bare

,
Face alight,flower to sun,
I loved you.
Love so true.
Fear by love,overcome.

Cyclamen in the snow,
Pink and red,
Now frozen,dead.
Love was,oh,so long ago.

But never gone from in my mind.
Thoughts so deep,
Upwards seep.
Love was gentle,love was kind,

Always in my mind

Fish dancing with their lucid frills

I flandered lonely as the Ouse
That starts on high o’er biles and thrills,
When at a seance I saw a cowl
The ghost, of hilden waffotills;
Detide the blke, Coweath the fleas,
Pluttering and muttering in the frieze

Compenfed as the phores flat pint
And swondleon the mockiray,
They briched in never-blunding stone
Along the gargins wove a ray:
Ten thousand jaw I after flounce,
Wessing their shads in golightly spance.

The daves deside them planced; but loy
Out-said the parkling raves in schlee
A paite could not clutter glay
In juce a fecund timpanee:
I glazed- and glazed- but little ploat
What nealthy wasps shrew plea had clight:

For poft, when on my louch I wight
In racant or in extensive flood,
They flash upon drat innard plie
Stitch up the blass of molotude;
And then my girt with leisured gills,
Fish dancing with the daffofrills.

The little words invented as we loved

The chosen words invented as we loved
Now have no other speaker but myself.
Lost, unique, the husband, once beloved
And words called forth by long-lived care and love
In my speech , these words no longer live
I cannot use those words, our former wealth.
The chosen words invented as we loved
Now have no other listener but myself

Fire

September 25, 2018

The wordless feelings of the soul catch light
Like fire,like diamonds, like the dust of stars
With their fire they penetrate the night

To expression, they the mind incite
To where the words may open and be clear
The wordless feelings of the soul catch light

Expression by its methods brings delight
We see the molten universe desire
With great fires , with wonder, what work’s wrought?

Like a flock of geese in happy flight
The heart of unknown worlds is not a liar
The sense of feeling souls will bring us light

Of the thunder and the lion we note
The natural world with its own might conspires
With its being it permeates the night

So our hearts and souls does love devour
Never cornered never shall love cower
The wordless feelings of the soul catch light
With such brilliance, can we feel the night?

How the Conservatives proved the existence of original sin

Mary sat looking out of the window watching a large ginger cat  who was sitting quietly on the tall fence.

As she was wearing her reading glasses, she had first thought it was a fox

But the foxes were all thin and starving, unlike this fat round yet beautiful cat.

She wanted to send an email to her friend Amy.

She started but there was no onscreen keyboard on her ne tablet.

How can I write an email with no  keyboard, she wondered.

Her mind was completely blank after a late night with her friend Annie trying to pick up men in the public library. Unfortunately there were no men in the public library late at night possibly because it was shut. It sounds more like a dream than a memory she thought to herself.

Accidentally her finger tapped the space where the email began and there suddenly was the on screen keyboard.

This is a very important discovery because it means that nothing will happen until you start. You have to start without any knowledge that you will discover what you need. This is called Faith.

Possibly also Hope

Musing on this, she completely forgot to write the email

Suddenly the door opened and  in ran her neighbour Annie holding the big ginger cat in her arms.

Help we need some first aid she cried. Ginger has trodden on some broken glass.

Do you think she needs a tetanus injection?

I don’t really know said Mary.

Maybe they’re not considered important enough to have such treatment said alAnnie thoughtfully. Should I start a petition?

Well I’ll get a bowl of warm water and wash her foot with some pure soap.what colour is cat’s blood by the way?

Well I think all blood is red isn’t it because we’re all mammals just like the cats of dogs I don’t know whether I’ve ever seen a cat bleeding.

Maybe Ginger is not bleeding maybe her paw is just wet

Between them the two women managed to wash all of Ginger’s feet and dry them on a small old towel before they lay her down in front of the fire to dry.

She won’t be taking mini  aspirin so we don’t need to worry that she will bleed too much and it won’t clot

It’s such a worry being Human because we have been given mini aspirin. But then our blood is thin and when we get cut we bleed more profusely.

And why do doctors have the right to impose things on us like when you’re in hospital they can change your medication for some reason they changed mine..

What did they change?

They give me soluble aspirin instead of enteric coated ones

Well that’s not such a big change. What if they put you on something you’ve never had before?

If they made a mistake they can put you on largactil .. I wonder how it will feel to someone who was not psychotic or come to that how does it feel to someone who is psychotic? Do they feel better or just completely zonked out?

Don’t ask me I’ve never taken it but if I went to A and E I was anxious about the fact that the washer machine won’t work do you think they might give me some ?

Not unless you thought the washing machine was actually an alien from Mars who had come up to take over your life.

That sounds really interesting.

Well this is but it doesn’t fit you for living in the real world of the United Kingdom 2024

But what would prepare you for living in such a place with a general election coming up my dentist’s son getting married in July?

And the fact that I don’t like Waitrose’s sausage rolls?

How do we know what’s important and what is not important?

I suppose it’s what they call trial and horror…

That sounds like wearing some new makeup..

I put some Foundation on before I went to the doctors and they thought I was very ill but it was just at the foundation cream was rather pale so it wiped out my beautiful pink cheeks made them turn white so beware especially if you’re going to A and E do not put any foundation cream on before you go especially if you’ve got  poor eyesight and you can’t choose the correct shade.

But what is the correct shade?

I suppose it’s subjective but most people don’t want to look too pale nor did they want to look as if they’ve been outside all day in hot sunshine.

Well we just have to keep trying until we succeed. A space for thought is often useful because we can’t do everything ourselves and the other part of our mind likes to help us but only if we give it space and time.

This sounds like a talk on radio 4 not like two nervous neighbours  having a chat but where do you find neighbours like Mary and Annie ?

Well said Emile I am going to put the kettle on in the sense that it’s already full of water so all that needs doing is pushing down that little switch under the handle to the red light comes on and then after a couple of minutes we will hear the water boiling. I’m very grateful to water because it didn’t make a noise when it was boiling we wouldn’t know,!

Why you’re turning into Stan that is just a sort of thing that he would have said.

Don’t worry about that because he is transmitting his thoughts via me, said that cheeky cat with a smile

So there is an afterlife then?

Yes if you don’t mind transmitting your thoughts via an animal.

The problem is that not for all animals speak English but with a translator a) wi) be well

I think the government needs a translator but it’s far too late for that we should just boot them out and tell them never to come back again for any reason at all

They’ve caused a lot of poverty and suffering and they are blind to their own faults

So it is for this reason that Mary &:Annie now believe in original si.n.

So do all of us

The image of the refugee disdained

Bewildered by our contradicting aims

Hurt by lawless, lasting grief and pain

The image of the refugee disdained

Shows again the face within his face.

And yet he too is human in embrace.

Bewildered by our contradicting aims.

Obey our Christ or keep our wealth to arm

We too are nervous when we read

The lies of men whom we have picked to lead 

Who has got the courage of true gaze

To see the truth and like the Christ be flayed? 

Who will risk rejection by the mass? 

Far better to avert our eyes and pass. 

No one is an island, John Donne says 

The bell that tolls informs and shows our way.

The importance of presence which is now undervalued in our modern lives

I’m learned from my experiences in the nursing home especially those I had with two very old ladies with dementia but also with a lot of personality as well. one of them said to me if only I could have visitors who didn’t keep talking I would just like to have someone there like my son in the room but not constantly talking. I was glad that I was able to be with her for an hour and a half on her last day of life. she was conscious but in severe pain and I sat by her until the nurse asked me to to leave because they had to wash her. When I got to the door she said say goodnight everyone. It was only 3:30 in the afternoon but I did what she wanted as I said on her behalf goodnight everyone good night it was a great privilege to know this Welsh school teacher who was a mother of three children the other woman was more severely affected by dementia I learnt from observation and experience that I could communicate with her much better if I was present snd fully aware of my own body. You could say when I was indwelling in my body. then she would respond even when she seemed mentally disturbed. through this being present I became fond of her I would say that in the end I loved her; she was very different from the angry person who swore at me when she finally said: you are so gentle, I love you K

Mary wants a corset

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I am going shopping today,Mary informed Stan.I have decided to buy a corset.I am too fat.
I hope it’s not a whalebone corset,Stan teased her. gently
Are they still allowed to use the bones of whales? she asked.One whale  must have massive bones.Why not use dog’s bones?
Well,Stan said,you may be plump but don’t torture yourself for beauty.I love you as you are,sweetheart.
Mary got onto her bicycle and rode into town  passing some lovely magnolias and forsythia.She locked her bike to the church gate as sinners cannot be trusted especially just after Confession.

IMG_0101
Hello,I’m looking for a whalebone corset,she informed the  lady in the lingerie department.
What!We don’t have them any more.They ran out of baleen which is horny material in a whale’s mouth.
Was it their teeth ,asked Mary tremulously.
Eeh,I don’t know said the  assistant.Anyway,now we have shapewear.It looks like underwear but it’s elasticated.So it keeps your curves in like those minimiser bras
Mary burst out laughing as she imagined wearing an elasticated vest which would push all her fat up round her neck or down onto her bum .Or an elasticated pair of knickers which push the fat upwards. onto her abdomen.And furthermore,how easy would it be to get them down in the bathroom? Worse still,if Stan took her to a restaurant and she could not pull them down for a wee…should she take some scissors?
Mary stopped laughing when she saw all the staff staring at her,
Are you alright,madam? one asked rather ferociously.
Yes, it’s my  dwindling hormones.They make me laugh hysterically from time to time.It’s better than getting those hot flushes,in my view.
Why not have HRT? the lady replied.
Excuse me,said Mary,but I do not wish to discuss my health matters in public but thank you for your concern.She was rather pleased with that having just read
“A woman’s guide to compassionate self assertion.”

Although she did wonder why it was addressed only to women.Emile agreed when she discussed over milk and cat niblets which Mary had to eat when she ran out of food.
As Mary stood in the Shapewear department she remembered the time she tried on some  denim jeggings as they seemed  to be in fashion.They looked very nice but she had such a hard time getting them off she thought she would have to buy them and cut them off at home.
So all of a sudden she picked up her Mondrian pvc shopping bag and her  green handbag and ran out of the door into the button  and wool department.
My,you look hot, her friend Gail said.I am buying some  merino wool for neckwarmers.Do you ever knit nowadays,Mary?
Only with whales bones,she murmured.And it’s  so hard to find them now.
Well, whales must still have bones,dear,otherwise they would collapse.
Surely you don’t expect me to catch my own whale.Mary cried in fear having seena  film on this topic.
And how about Jonah?Suppose I find a prophet inside the whale?
That could be just who we need,Gail said.Someone who can tell us what God wants us to do.
Would people listen,Mary asked Gail tremulously
Only if he went on Twitter I suppose.
Could Donald Crump be a prophet? Mary muttered
No,he’s too big for a whale to swallow even if the common people swallow his  nonsense.He sounds as if he’d like to treat women the way they do in some countries like Saudi Arabia.40 lashes for taking the morning after pill.
It could be hard to have,”the night before” in a place like that.
The two  women gazed blankly in front of them trying to remember their youth and their mad love affairs.
Let’s go into the Cricketer’s  Arms and have a drink Gail said.
I’d  rather have coffee,Mary replied.So off they went arm in arm humming
“I believe in angels “very loudly to frighten off any evil spirits from the lingerie department.We know the Devil loves  bras and suspender belts with lace trimmings as he is ,in fact ,the god Pan who was a goatherd with a horn on which he played his music to tempt the weak;some  even say he was half goat half human but we never did that in the maths department.
We only studied shapes and forms and symmetry.Well,I know it sounds suggestive but we only dealt with it in an abstracted manner.That’s why you see mathematicians with  all sorts of undies hanging off them as it’s the geometry they need to learn and how better than on a field trip to a department store. Anthropologists go to Samoa and mathematicians go to Sex and Undie shops.They have no choice.They need to see those conical bras.Conic sections!My eye!

He is alive

In my dream, I gave birth to a child
The doctor said that he would die quite soon
My feelings overwhelming made me wild

The Nazi doctor threw him on a pile
I lay nearby unmoving as I keened
In my dream,I gave birth to a child

A week passed by,I knew that death beguiled
Frozen lips made no sound, song or tune
My feelings overwhelming made me wild

I had to rise and say my black goodbye.
My baby with the others;horror loomed
In my dream I gave birth to a child

I picked him up , when suddenly he smiled
I held him to my breast, my songs I crooned
My feelings overwhelming drove me wild

I had to carry him, the landscape gloom
A desert grey aand rocky like some moon
In my dream I gave birth to a child

In terror I had walked yet love consoled

Anxiety is necessary

Maybe we only think of anxiety as bad because we only realize we’re anxious when it becomes quite Powerful.

Sometimes we can be in danger and not even feel the slightest tinge of anger

When I was 22 I was riding my bicycle through the middle of a medium-sized town along the very broad Street there was no traffic it was eight o’clock in the evening and I was on my way to sing in a choir.

I noticed a car was coming very very fast out of a side road and it was coming straight at me .

There was absolutely nothing I could do it was almost on me as soon as I noticed it.

I remember thinking, is this it question mark time seem to go very slowly as the car approached me struck me on the right I flew up into the air it seemed very slow to me and then I fell down and landed on my head.

I saw stars and I thought oh so it’s true you do see stars

It’s possible that the problems I’ve had with my vision maybe related to this accident but at the time I did not even have concussion mysteriously

Anxiety is useful when you can do something about what you fear is going to happen as crossing the road you see the cars moving faster than you thought and you can run. Maybe anxiety is only bad when it lasts for a long time

I feel very anxious once when I cut my hands or rather I pricked my hand on a thorn

I know I was not well and I felt very nervous but I decided to investigate and it appears now that we don’t have tested this boost as every 10 years because the world Health organisation has a decided that if you have the three  injections as an infant

That is you are vaccinated as an infant or later in life that is sufficient to last you throughout your life unless you have a deep dirty cut or a wound from a very dusty rusty object.

Now one of my neighbours was trying to reassum me that you can’t  catch tetanus in your own garden

She has a strong defense of what is called denial in fraudian terms which I don’t have and I wish sometimes I did have it but on the other hand maybe it is better to face reality. Reality might be unpleasant but it is reality and that’s what we have to live in, the real world

But it’s very hard and we all have our defences the mine might be different from yours or hers

Anxiety or even fear can be very useful as long as we are not afraid of it.

If you’re already un well or exhausted then your anxiety might be stronger and you may need to rest or take some protective action

Stan takes in a parcel

Stan was leaning over, cleaning the new bath.When the doorbell rang,he rushed downstairs and opened the double front door.
“Will you take this parcel in for the lady next door?” The postman asked wearily.
“Oh,fine Stan stuttered.He was trying to avoid Annie but here she was,coming down the road of superior semi detached houses suitable for ex-headmasters ,small businessmen,econometricians,surgeons,pie salesmen and theologians.
She was wearing perfume, and green sandals from TK Maxx,light khaki tencel cropped combat trousers with a purple silky over-blouse, not to mention her matching raspberry and cream underwear .Round her neck hung a miniature grandfather clock on a solid gold chain,and she had three imitation gold and silver watches on each of her three wrists making a total of 333 watches according to Carnap’s theory of logic and Russell’s terrible handwriting. Stanley didn’t know that she had a mobile phone stuffed into her bra—one advantage for the larger sized woman.In fact she had 4 down there in her raspberry coloured glamour bra,as she had a phobia about their batteries running down all at once
The more she had the lower the probability of her being without a phone whilst out and about the town and countryside.So she reasoned in her womanly way. Just then one phone rang.She rummaged around to the consternation and turmoil-uation of Stanley and the postman.She plucked out a pale blue phone.
“Hi,it’s Annie” she murmured.
“Hi Annie it’s Dave the paramedic with carpentry skills. You’ve not rung 999 lately so we were wondering if all was well!”
“Oh,I’m terribly sorry.I’ll try to phone later on.Thanks,Petal.That was Dave,our ex-transvestite converted paramedic”,she informed the men.The postman galloped off on his donkey, his bags full of undelivered males.It’s a tough but interesting life in Knittingham. Would you like a male delivery?Contact Parcel Force without delay.
Annie went into Stan’s house and demanded a cup of coffee.
“Won’t it make you put weight on” Stan quipped ironically.
“Do you think I’m too plump?” she responded anxiously..
“Too plump for what?” he quipped amiably.
“To attract men,of course!”
“No,my angel,you are just perfect”he quacked definitively.”Nor are you an angel,strictly speaking,as I have good reason to know.Thank you,my beloved for services rendered so generously and freely.”
“Oh,my goodness I must get home to render the fat from the beef and to make some gooseberry jam.” Stanley looked uneasy.
“I wonder why babies are left under gooseberry bushes?
The thorns are so big it’s quite dangerous getting them out,or so Mary told me when Lyra was born. She was covered in scratches and wouldn’t come near me for months.”
“Why don’t you come upstairs to look at our new purple bathroom suite.Since the Royal Wedding it’s the in colour.The gold taps were expensive but they do go well.”
“My God,let me out.” she bawled,”It reminds me of the Vatican and that’s no place for a lady”,
“Not even a gay lady?” Stan muttered parsimoniously, as he licked her eyelashes gently.
“Stop that.I’ve got my Yves St Laurent mascara on.”
“I prefer the taste of the Chanel,”he disclosed privately in an internal secret memo.[available in 50 years]
“Why not lick my neck instead?” she enquired curiously as she tripped over Emile the cat, who had slipped into the bathroom as usual to see what they were up to,you know what I mean, you catch my drift?
She fell floppily into the bath and banged her head on the taps.
“Oh,gosh,better ring 999” Stan said to Emile.
“Have you got your catphone warehouse mobile on you?”
“Yes ,it’s in my y-fronts”, the cat amiably miaowed.
“Hi Dave,this is Emile.Can you come quick.Annie is unconscious and what is worse,she has scratched the new bath.”
In fact it was Emile who had scratched the bath that morning but since Stan had not noticed he hoped to, callously, pass the blame onto poor Annie.How cruel can a cat be? Ask any mouse! Still in the end God made all of us and what a terrifying and beautiful world it is.