Reginald Shepherd, in his emails to Josh Corey, made a forceful statement, judging from its effects : lots of bloggers commented - & even John Latta arose to defend Ron Silliman!

Are we all complete idiots, to be so fixated for so long on "poetry & politics"? Or has this been a real unresolved problem in contemporary poetry?

It would be hypocritical to stand for some kind of ivory-tower aesthetic purism. Everybody knows that style is suffused with, & motivated by, politics, at least in the broad "cultural" sense of the term (as in, "identity politics").

Underlying the American style & theory wars of the 20th century stands a deeper, Janus-like trend : the popularization of literature (poetry). Janus-like because it involves both the expansion and thinning-out of aesthetic literacy. Everyone writes poetry but nobody knows much about its history. It's not longer produced by the few and it's no longer read by the many!

Perhaps, then, the character of one's approach to tradition is the main catalyst for producing the affiliations with particular styles or literary groups. (This is an attempt at a literary, rather than political, interpretation of such phenomena.)

I'm with Shepherd, by the way. Ideology tends to shortcut literary criticism.

Daniel Green criticizes one of my posts here. I'll have to think a little more about this, but off-the-cuff it seems to me he's confusing the descriptive with the prescriptive.

I don't mean to say that poets have to be popular or "ethical" in the sense described. The point was that, as I see it, the grand highway to an expanded readership - whatever mode of art or communication one starts with - involves an engagement with people's actual problems - be they practical or intellectual/philosophical. And that engagement is an ethical act, an act of empathy - above and beyond the technical matters of literary craft.

There can be and have been great literary artists whose work is not easily accessible - Celan, for example. But why are they considered great? Not simply because they employ an arcane or original style, but because by means of (and sometimes in spite of) their unusual or difficult style, they address profound human problems. Celan himself underlined this many times, emphasizing his special concern with the truth, insisting that he was not "hermetic", that his aim was to communicate, etc.

Daniel's comments about the (poetically) uneducated masses strike me as slightly supercilious or complacent. Moreover I don't think he's considered carefully the meaning of the distinction I tried to make (in various posts re the Chicago critics) between the craft of the verbal texture per se, and the craft of making empathetic imaginative constructs.

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.