I planned on watching Ol' Tailhook George's V-I speech, but I was too busy untangling my maypole. I'm sure I missed a dazzling bit of rhetoric, but I've never been able to stomach victory speeches be they given in sports locker rooms, on entertainment award shows, or aboard aircraft carriers. Forgive my cynicism this time, but I'll just have to read the pundits’ commentaries on this one tomorrow.
I'm in a rather bad mood today. After all, how can one walk around with a smile on one's face after reading that poetry is dead. It's true. If I'd read it in Ploughshares or The Paris Review I would simply dismiss it as the ramblings of some literature professor bemoaning the misplaced energy of writers. But the fact that it appeared in a commentary by Bruce Wexler in that impressive literary organ known as Newsweek made me want to curl up in the fetal position while clutching my dog-eared copy of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry and howl at the unfairness of this cruel, cruel world.
Then I came to my senses. After all, haven't we heard this before? "I don't read it; my friend's don't read it; George W. doesn't read it...must be dead." Allow me to quickly direct your attention to something poet Donald Hall* wrote nearly fifteen years ago when he was considering this same, tired notion. In answering a similar proclamation, Hall wrote that poetry is,
1. a vacuous synonym for excellence or unconsciousness. What else is common to the public perception of poetry?
2. It is universally agreed that no one reads it.
3. It is universally agreed that the nonreading of poetry is (a) contemporary and (b) progressive. From (a) it follows that
sometime back (a wandering date, like "olden times" for a six-year-old) our ancestors read poems, and poets were rich
and famous. From (b) it follows that every year fewer people read poems (or buy books or go to poetry readings) than the
year before.
Other pieces of common knowledge:
4. Only poets read poetry.
5. Poets themselves are to blame because "poetry has lost its audience."
6. Everybody today knows that poetry is "useless and completely out of date"--as Flaubert put it in Bouvard and Pécuchet a
century ago.
I agree with Wexler when he says that "poetry is the only art form where the number of people creating it is far greater than the number of people appreciating it." But if we are to judge poetry's vitality by the hordes of 18 year olds trying to get laid or be Sylvia Plath then mustn't we do the same for anything in which participants outnumber the witnesses? I wonder if he even considered photography.
Poetry does demand a certain level of education and a great amount of patience at times. With the way the educational system is going in this Prozac nation writers like Waxman better hope that they have a good severance package lined up for when Newsweek is simply pictures and blurbs.
So if you're worried, don't be. The fact that poetry doesn’t often turn a profit for publishers isn’t exactly the fault of poets. Poetry may not be marketable to the major corporate publishing houses and agents aren't exactly foaming at the mouth to find poets, but check out the zines in your independent bookstores—just one of the many places (including the Internet) where poetry is flourishing. Every week I scan the listing of readings at coffee houses and can usually find no less than a dozen here in San Diego. Take a quick look at HBO and BET where they each have a show dedicated to spoken word—yep, that's poetry.
In the end, Donald Hall puts it best: "While most readers and poets agree that ‘nobody reads poetry’--and we warm ourselves by the gregarious fires of our solitary art--maybe a multitude of nobodies assembles the great audience Whitman looked for."
*Donald Hall, Death to the Death of Poetry,Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
