Been following all the goodly debate on poetry's popularity, audience, coteries, & etc., provided by the forthright Mike Snider.

Seems like if you want to address an educated general public, as Mike suggests, on a par with scientists, novelists, journalists, through poetry - well, you have your work cut out for you.

My view is this gets back to the notion of Tradition in poetry as something bigger & wider than any one literary movement or language. Almost as if there is an ethical aspect to the literary vocation : if you want to achieve such relevance, you have to labor to transcend your own craft. It's not only a craft issue. There is of course an ethics & an ethos of craft, but I don't think you can simply say, as Pound apparently did, that a poet's craft is the ethics (lessen' I'm quotin' him all wrong).

If we have an idea of the poetic vocation as a journey beyond one's immediate training-ground, into an engagement with the great Tradition - then, if this Tradition is still relevant & worth anything, that journey will also be a labor of ethical engagement. (I'm glad, by the way, that Jordan is reading Brothers Karamazov. There's an example of a poetics (in this case, prose fiction) of vast & magnanimous engagement with the "human predicament", as they used to call it.)

As I see it, this vocational journey can embark from any one of the modes of contemporary poetics & style. They are all preliminaries, they are all training-grounds. Moreover, there is no designated correct path. Somebody in this discussion argued that John Donne didn't labor for fame as a poet, he wrote for a coterie. We don't really know what he thought about fame, though. The literary situation was different then. Donne may have (correctly) assumed that he was not part of a coterie, but rather part of the Mandelshtamian, trans-historical community of "philology". His poems glowed with it, irregardless of who read them & when. This is not "coterie" writing in the sense of a private, coded dialect.

But achieving general "relevance" as a poet has less to do with verbal effects and meter & so on, & more to do, I think, with the communicative effects of imaginative constructs, be they poems, plays, stories, films. What moves an audience is what engages them - logically, emotionally, ethically. & I also think that the line of inquiry I've pointed toward recently (the Chicago Critics) offers a perspective on what poetic form might be, which lends itself to noting such "constructs" & their effects.

& poets are not going to move anyone or engage anyone unless they themselves have been emotionally moved & intellectually engaged with the great crises & debates which face human beings & the world. So part of the vocational journey, as I said, may involve getting beyond oneself & one's craft.

Mike's theory is that poetry is not popular today because it's not being written correctly.

Poetry World is pretty big, diverse, complex. There are many many different audiences, kinds of publication, methods of teaching & popularizing. There's a strong stream(s) of hermeticism and art pour l'art, the ends & means of which have, apparently, little to do with those of more accessible styles. But that's only one facet of a very large & globby crystal.

I will explain more about Poetry and World later. Must go for coffee immediately.

Following interesting chit-chat among Josh, Jordan & Mike.

I have some trouble with both Josh's & Mike's formulations. Josh makes "difficulty" sound easy. Just another of those sophisticated pleasures we arty intellectuals share, part of the general joie de vivre. It's a sunny perspective.

Mike faults poets for not recognizing the coterie problem, the extent of the challenge involved in finding a way for poetry to "break in" to the awareness of the ordinary reader of fiction & non-fiction.

I guess my reservation about both arguments hinges on the nature of difficulty. Basically I think it's kind of a "boundary problem", a question of the framework. That is, the kind of difficulty we think we have in mind - the sort of problematic that grips the reader in an unshakeable wrestling hold, from which they will never get free - this level of difficulty is, fundamentally, not a literary question. That is, it is not something that can be finessed by aesthetics or rhetoric. In fact, it stems from the core of a difficulty with words & word-mongering itself: that words & deeds are not always the same thing; that life & literature are incommensurate; that promises and vows can be emptied of content, become vehicles of illusion, vanity, hypocrisy & deceit.

From this perspective, literary relevance, impact &/or difficulty is more of an ethical rather than a technical-aesthetic issue; it remains difficult even for the most sophisticated & talented writer, since it reaches into human commitments rooted beyond the literary "making" itself.

The art which most compels a readership seems often to emerge from a seemingly insoluble impasse or crisis or dilemma - a dilemma which, through the talent of the poet, results in a representation which has meaning for both the poet and for "society". It may stimulate a radical re-working of literary style & subject-matter. We are talking about a phenomenon which does not follow either from exhortations to the literary community to "work harder at it" (ala Mike), or from mere literary sophistication (ala Josh), which takes pleasure in arcane works, but shuns the ethical implications or demands that words sometimes entail.

Kent's take on the effect of WCW/Rakosi-style prosody (in his essay linked here yesterday)  is the opposite of Mike's & New Formalist theory.  Kent says that the unpredictability of same creates the possibility of clearer poetic perception, less mediated by ego or tradition.   NF theory, as Mike has described it, holds that the metrical patterns & their variations help create the conditions for meaning to emerge.
 
These are basic 20th-cent. positions on the difference between free verse & metrical form.  Pound sought to "break the pentameter", pushed for ideograms/imagism.  Stevens, I think, used rhythm - with both free & metrical bases - as one facet of his own musicality (which also employs phonic values, repetition, fantastic vocabulary, and other means toward this end).
 
The idea that poetry fulfills its function by reflecting natural & divine order by means of measure & harmony is very olde.  It hasn't gone away, either - witness the various theories promoting iambic pentameter as based on biology and natural form  (cf. - for fun - Sir Thomas Browne's Garden of Cyrus for the prevalence of the number "5" in nature). 
 
The general critical take on Modernism, though - reflected in Kent's analysis of Stevens - has been that this intellectual/artistic era had no faith in overarching order or natural harmony : rather, art imposed its autonomous orders as a guard or protest against the violence & chaos "outside".
 
So the free-verse/postmodern/(Taoist, Kent?) position faults metrical formalism on two counts: its idealism and its traditionalism. The idealism layers over nature with an imposed order; the traditionalism blocks innovation & new perception.
 
How to get beyond these (rather worn-out) dichotomies?
 
Rather than arguing that "there is no such thing as free verse", say : all verse is free.
 
How so?  Verse is free in the sense that the poetic word can function as both music and anti-music, as order and disruption.  Poetry can be song, but it is not only or necessarily song.  Poetry can be the closest thing to a curse, or to silence itself.
 
I would say that the activity of the poet is essentially an orientation toward harmony.  But harmony operates on more than one level : there is an intellectual as well as a sensible harmony, and sometimes the former counters, opposes, negates the latter; sometimes sensible harmony is configured ironically to veil a very different intellectual substance.  Intellectual harmony is logical, reasonable, ethical : it may have formal or mathematical or aesthetic aspects - but these elements may be at work to break superficial or oppressive "harmonies" of "nature".  It may be subversive in this sense.
 
Order, pattern, harmony - the interwoven wheels and forms and numbers of time & nature are irreducible facts.  We take physical pleasure - perhaps even physical health - in the octave and the circle of fifths and the pythagorean triangle & the shapes and colors of leaves & sky & fresh air.  But when Stevens, say, writes that "poetry is the sanction of life," I don't think he's granting poetry such prestige simply because of its ability to mimic or model the physical harmonies of nature.  The freedom of the poet to find and articulate intellectual harmony - another name for it might be justice - functions at the active, living center of the purely aesthetic or natural harmonies.
 
So these general notions of the poet's role have some implications for prosody, perhaps.  The sovereign freedom of the poetic word moves toward musical harmony or against it, at will.
 
The general ground I'm trying to sketch out here, though, doesn't support the arguments of the free verse wing any more than it does the New Formalist.  I repeat my comment posted yesterday:  the argument that WCW/Rakosi style imagism or impressionism allows nature or reality access to the poem, in a way that a more rhythmically-patterned prosody (such as some of Stevens') does not, avoids the whole issue of pattern and regularity and form in nature.  The coherences of formal repetition in poetry can represent the fantastically interwoven coherences of natural ecology:  the subsuming of line to stanza to poem can mirror the overlay of forces and powers which move through time and space, and also the overlay of themes and meanings which the poet wants to emphasize or interlace.  These patterns have at least as much reality as the contingent perceptions of the romantic imagist.

My two half-beats toward the prosody discussion:
 
read an interesting book once by David Keppel-Jones, The Strict Metrical Tradition.   Focusing only on iambic pentameter, he describes very specific innovations, starting with Spenser, through Matthew Arnold, which made it the powerful mode it was.
 
But every era in language & poetry develops its own approaches to rhythm.  I don't think the special pleading for form or freedom really helps much.  The formalists have done a service by keeping the issue alive at all; but it seems like there may be a fundamental misprision in taking prosodic analysis (which is always belated) and applying it prescriptively to the craft itself.  Even the particular innovations outlined by Keppel-Jones grew out of a specific literary milieu, which is not our milieu today. 
 
I have no problem with Mike's promotion of accentual-syllabic practice; if he can help bring it back into circulation, all power to him.  But the claims that it is better than free verse, that free verse can't express meaning as well (because it doesn't have a pattern against which to project variations) - this seems needlessly categorical.  A milieu that supports both approaches is the one most able to generate new rhythmic discoveries and capabilities.
 
In my own poetry, I've counted beats and not counted beats; I've worked within set patterns (both given forms & ones I've invented), and not.  Everyone has their own distinctive feel for rhythm.  When I think of how I work, it seems to me that I revise a poem intuitively until it has a requisite smoothness or "elegance" according to my own standards; I focus on sound values per se and on the symbolic (mathematical) values of line-count and stanza forms, while at the same time aiming for a rhythm which is not clumsy, jarring, perfunctory or seemingly random.  What I dislike more than almost anything in the poetry I read, is the sort of casual lineation - line-breaks which simply chop up the sentence any old way.  This lazy practice makes for very dull reading.  Rhyme, for me, adds interest and tension to line-breaks.
 
 

School of Phlogiston. I like it!

There should be as many schools of poetry as there are schools of thought.

School of Aptitude Testing
School of Bismarck, ND
School of Schadenfreude
School of Cassandra-Like Madness & Insight
School of Tired
School of Insincerity
School of Total Guilt (Anti-Confessional School)
School of Former Athletic Program Directors
School of Admiration for Kipling & the Canadian Mounties
School of Angry Web Nerd Po-Ethics
School of Ill-Defined Lust, Vanity, etc.
School of Dress-Up
School of Amateur Poets Who Have Admirable Vocations In Other Areas of Social Amelioration
School of Lovers of Folk Music and Howard Dean Who Are Not Bald Or Gray (3 people maximum)
School of Arts Management Professionals
School of I Wish I Had a Better Apartment Poetics
School of School

Mike Snider defends against the charge that new formalists confuse versifying with poetry. At least some of the examples he provides are more interesting than the prosaic sonnet which triggered that debate. Charles Martin's poem on Modernism neatly encapsulates the polemic situation.

I think formalism in these terms could become the new boilerplate poetry, as free verse was for about 12-15 yrs in the 70s and 80s. There's a facile, glib, bum-te-tum quality about it - why is that?

Well, I ALMOST agree with Ron Silliman that, deep down, we're talking about a divide between the US and English tradition. The problem with Ron's pigeonholes is that both sides of the (US/England or Avant/Quietude) divide are symbiotic, depend upon each other. In my view, this is a good thing: I can see a future for formalist-traditional experimentalism and experimental avant-garde neo-traditional formalism. What I don't really like are the thin poetries on either side of the divide, which don't see or can't hear the other. That there is the really un-historical position, because the experiments of the Americans exist, and have always existed, in dialectical symbiosis with their dance partners over the water.

Modernism (per Charles Martin, it seems, at least) is now part of the dustbin of history. But underlying US modernism is something older. I would call it an inherent, characteristic Americanness, going back to Whitman, and earlier - back to Edward Taylor & Emerson (and to their cultural sources, to a very large extent - the Hebrew prophets & the King James Bible). There is an essential graininess there - gnarled, idiosyncratic, contrary, eccentric - which I associate with Hesiod as opposed to Homer or the Alexandrians. It runs through Whitman & Dickinson & Melville & even Robinson, it adds salt to Frost, it reappears with a vengeance (& dialectically, impurely) in Eliot & Pound; even in Stevens' smooth pentameters there's a very curious designedly-amateur, originary quality, which is hard to pin down (not to mention Niedecker, Zukofsky, and...), but which will never be absorbed or equalled by the Audenesque jingles of neo-formalism (unless formalism itself learns to reckon with the great prophetic Oddballs of American poetry).

There's a stone in my shoe, she said, limping down the road.

Mike & Jonathan continue good dialogue on fiction/poetry and the relative merits of Yeats & Milton.

Seems to me that Mike's demurrals might apply more aptly to the whole late Romantic/Symbolist poetic ethos, of which Yeats is probably the best exemplar. That is, the supposed weaknesses he sees in Yeats are representative of a larger phenomenon.

The advent of fiction signalled a split between poetry & prose. It's no accident that "Romanticism" referred originally to a return to medieval poetic romances which were analyzed, parodied, mourned & mocked in the greatest "modern" novel, Don Quixote.

Cervantes inaugurated the role of novel as analytical instrument, and with the progress of the social novel, marginalized poets began to see a parallel between the disenchantment of life brought on by science & industrialization and the dominance of "prosaic" values in literature. In a manner somewhat comparable to the development of abstraction in painting, poets began to emphasize their social role as avatars of pure imagination. The fact that, as Mike mentions, Milton had finally to choose between scriptural revelation and the book of nature for a "true" poetic representation of cosmic reality anticipates the Romantic attitude.

The core of the Romantic argument was, that prosaic, analytical description, whether in literature or science, actually fails as mimesis, is somehow untrue to the Real, because dull prose could never represent the ecstatic, mystical wholeness & beauty of Creation : only the inspired imagination could foster the images of innocence, sympathy, synthesis & unity, worthy of that ultimate reality.

Yeats' fascination with George Berkeley (the Irish idealist philosopher), and with the effect of imaginative symbols, are attributes of the "classic" Romantic stance. The Romantic poet registers a protest against the falsity of objective description : "we murder to dissect". This is fundamentally a religious attitude, which asserts the sacredness of reality against the profanation of (a scientific-Faustian) detached objectivity. & in my view this confrontation between poetic imagination and "objectivity", between prose & poetry, is not yet completely played out. Some of Wallace Stevens' gnomic aphorisms (about the "poetry of reality") still speak very tellingly to this issue.

I


 
LOCKE sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
Out of his side.


 
II


 
Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium’s mouth.
Out of nothing it came,
Out of the forest loam,
Out of dark night where lay
The crowns of Nineveh.

& another one (I like the way this transmits the original typesetting, thanks Mike Snider):

         29    An Icon

             woke up this mornin' with my mind
             set  on  freedom. . .


  

         I wanted to make you happy with another poem,
 & as the star of a nation    droops low
 in the great NW sky    I wanted to flood you
 with fishbaskets    from Rome, Byzantium

  
         & as the voice of Marian Anderson
 ricochets off the Memorial (& over the
 heads of the D.A.R.)  I wanted the star
 (with its consort    of muffled organ)
 to surface – and plumb     the mansions of heaven

  
         & these desires of mine
 hung there    pendulous    like fireworks,
 or    all the other & Various    Works of Man –
 waiting, waiting    (like sheepdogs – wandering barks)
 for the miracle of your    ink-black    inspiration