Are there American Poets?

From Jeannine Gailey's blog:

My new hairstylist had recently visited Chile with friends, one of whom offered to take her on a tour of Pablo Neruda's homes. We talked about how important poetry was to the culture there. Then she said, "ARE there any American poets?" And I said, "Yes, but they're all in hiding at universities."

This conversation led me to think that maybe all those studies showing people just aren't aware of contemporary poetry are right on. Perhaps poets should join an American Idol tour or something. Or we should create a show called "So You Think You Can Write..." My dream judging panel would be Louise Gluck or Margaret Atwood (for the strict one) Denise Duhamel (the bubbly one) and maybe Bob Hicok (the one who has the feel-good factor but says things that make very little sense.)

Would you watch that show?

__________________

This reminded me of something I heard yesterday while I was listening to one of the Academy of American Poets' "poetcast" (podcast) on my iPod. I know, I am so unhip in the world. But nonetheless, I'm well read.

Anyway, this poetcast was Sharon Olds talking about Muriel Rukeyser. Sharon said that Muriel told her when she was a student that no one *wanted* to read poetry--Sharon said that Muriel said it to enthusiastically that it sounded optimistic! Muriel continued, saying that what poets need to do is to write the poem that the reader *can't* put down, write something that won't allow someone to shut the book.

Are we writing poems that are compelling to read? What makes a poem one that you can't put down?

For me, I find myself putting down poems where the poet is too self-conscious or poems that I feel are too calculating. As much as I love Tony Hoagland, there are a few poems where I feel as a reader I'm just being manipulated--he knows his talent and his skill and I am the girl in the bar he is trying to work his magic on. I don't want the clever pick-up line, I want the gaze in crowd that makes me feel as if I'm the only one in the room.

Hoagland's early work in Sweet Ruin does this. He was a younger poet at the time. He didn't have the following, the fans, the groupies, now in certain ways, he's become a caricature of himself. Even the photo on his newest book, the one where he looks like the nutty professor, suggests this self-conscious image, this I'm-the-whole-package idea.

And know that I say with a little hesitation because Hoagland is one of my favorites and I think he's one of the poets that can reach out to a wider audience.
And mostly, his poems are ones that I can't put down, but occasionally there's a poem that becomes the creepy stranger who feels he knows me well enough to tell me about his eczema, who occasionally comes up with the cheesy line: If I could rearrange the alphabet, I would put U and I together.

From The Virginia Quarterly Review Online

Read the full article on the link above...

Shoot the Messenger: Dana Goodyear, David Orr, and the Stewards of Poetry
John Casteen

When Dana Goodyear’s New Yorker piece on Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation appeared in March, many poets and readers felt a profound sense of gratitude to her. It came as a tremendous relief to find a writer as articulate and credible as Goodyear leveling the criticisms many of us have been developing privately for several years: that Ruth Lilly’s gift to the magazine is being squandered by managers with little imagination and no apparent sense of purpose or history; that the current editorial regime has lessened the magazine by making uninspired choices for the front of the magazine (poems) and vindictive ones for the back (reviews); and that many talented writers, whether new to publishing or well established, may smell decay between Poetry’s pages and choose as a result to send their best work elsewhere.

. . .
Poetry forgot the critic’s role along about the time its editors fell in love with the sound of William Logan’s voice, and in recent years most readers have found greater interest—albeit a tabloid, rubbernecking-after-a-car-crash interest—in its predictable prose than in its predictable verse. It has become the place for those who’d want to see Jeff Clark (the poet) compared to Kim Jong Il (the demagogue), who’d enjoy a public evisceration of Franz Wright in the Letters section, who’d find value in a review of Derek Walcott that condemns his body of work without discussing his poems, and so on.

. . .

Wiman’s stable of writers—Orr, Dan Chiasson, and Peter Campion chief among them—generally are brilliant and intense prose stylists—thoughtful, erudite and well-read thinkers, and passionate writers of clear rhetoric. That is to say, they resemble Logan. Also, like Logan, with some commendable exceptions, their work tends toward the arrogant, masturbatory, spiteful, bombastic, and mean-spirited hatchet job.

. . .

The pain a critic causes must be slight and illuminating. Hugh Kenner was a critic; Harold Bloom is a critic, and Helen Vendler, and probably James Longenbach. The writers in the back of Poetry are mere reviewers of books, mistaking their own pyrotechnically phrased opinions for the kind of enlightened utterance that reveals poetry to its readers and earns their good faith.


. . .

It saddens even those of us who’ve long since lost confidence in Orr and his colleagues to see him stoop to the kind of ad hominem tactics that bring Goodyear personally into an argument that was supposed to be about the best stewardship of poetry. Orr’s need to point out that Goodyear is thirty years old doesn’t tell us she’s not gifted enough to have appeared in The New Yorker; it tells us that his apparent bias against comparatively young poets might well keep him from bringing his readers the next John Keats, who died at 25.


. . .

Furthermore, some talented writers and readers will arrive at the conclusion that Poetry can no longer be considered English-language poetry’s gold standard, that its scope and reputation will be diminished for the imaginable future by a doctrinaire and wrong-headed editorial stance, and that their energies probably are best directed elsewhere. Those of us whose affections for the magazine predate the Lilly gift are deeply saddened by that prospect.



# # #