Fuck the Poetry Glut

There is an article in The Boston Review discussing the notion that there is too much poetry being written by the scores of MFAs who graduate from American universities each year. It addresses the complaint that it is too much to read, too much to master. The counter-argument is that the person making this complaint wishes to canonize, to reduce the incredible variety and mass of contemporary poetry to an academic exercise in evaluation, making the judge in the process a poetic kingmaker. Sigh. I have often felt and expressed the feeling that there are too many poets producing too much poetry. But it is not because I feel overwhelmed or unable to formulate a standard by which to understand and evaluate poetry. I do evaluate poetry and I do have standards, but my standards accommodate a wide range of styles and intents. But I do recognize and value intents. I also believe there is good and bad writing on a simple level, that elementary judgements are possible and necessary and do not depend in any way on the quantity of verse being produced.

We live in a time when the idea that there is great art produced by great artists who emerge from a small field is not only in question but irrelevant. In this we resemble other times and places more than our most recent past. After all, in Elizabethan England no self-respecting gentleman or woman could not produce a decent sonnet. Sonnets and poetry were the currency of thought and love. Shakespeare, aside from penning the most glorious sequence of sonnets in the language, makes fun of the sonnet’s role in seduction. Seduction was the formal purpose of the sonneteer, even if the seduction was allegorical. Or not. Or both. That was the fun of it. In more remote times and places I read of a people in island Southeast Asia who learned to read and write as young adolescents only to write love poetry, as it was an integral part of informal courtship and seduction. Informal because there was no organization by adults; it was the activity of young people, sending seductive love poetry back and forth between the boys’ and girls’ longhouses. This is poetry with a purpose.

My complaint about the mass of poetry written today is that it seems to be purposeless. People write poems as a project, as something to do. They are, despite the total lack of money, professional poets in the sense that Spenser was. I won’t say they have no purpose, and ‘they’ is too nebulous a term. The avant-garde poets are full of purpose. Their project goes back over a century, and it is to break down the formal structures of meaning in language, to use poetry as a tool for dismantling hegemonic discourses. It is a revolutionary project. Yet I don’t feel that the patriarchal, capitalist, alienating or Eurocentric discourses programming my brain are ever broken down by reading an avant-garde poem. I mostly feel boredom. The only text that I have ever felt truly restructured my consciousness in some tangible way is Finnegans Wake. Finnegans Wake, with a tip to Harold Bloom, is the black hole of our literary firmament, warping all of the space around it. I suppose you could say it is the quasar of postmodernism, spewing out all of its tics and forms, impulses and energies, and that all of our light streams from it, but I’m not that optimistic. However, the Wake being the Wake it will support either theory. It will support any theory at all. That’s why it is both black hole and quasar.

Is there too much poetry being written? Sure. Too much pointless, fine, professional, perfect poetry that never seduced more than a committee or group of editors. But that was true in Shakespeare’s day too. Open an anthology of Elizabethan poetry and be prepared to snooze through piles of bloodless 14 line poems about cruel mistresses. Our abundance simply means that poetry is a discourse with value among intellectuals with nothing else to do. Prince Sihanouk used development dollars to educate large numbers of Cambodians, who came to the capital to learn to read, to become educated, and then joined a bureaucracy that soon was a self-perpetuating machine of graft. When it all fell apart a group of romantic revolutionaries with dreams of The Terror emptied Phnom Penh of parasites and sent them out to the countryside to starve and die and be murdered by teenagers with shovels. Will that happen to us? No. We will just produce a mountain of bad poetry as we produce mountains of bad movies, television, novels, garbage, carbon dioxide, what have you. We produce more than we need. We eat too much. We create too much waste. We are a society drowning in wealth, with massive poverty and no idea of what to do with either. We are a society in love with its own shit. Poetry is no exception.

As a poet, the glut makes me feel publication is pointless. I don’t subscribe to journals or read them. I don’t submit to them. I consider competitions to be corrupt and useless. I have no idea if I’m a good, bad or indifferent poet. I love poetry and now regard it as mostly a local affair, as it was in Shakespeare’s day. I haven’t fallen in love with a woman without producing a stack of love poetry. No one I have loved has died without an elegy. When I dream the world will end I write a poem. When I feel a god I don’t believe in calling me, I stand up and argue with that god in a poem. I believe they are divinely inspired, and that all of reality is connected  by a thread, or a web, rather, of language. I think it matters what we feel and think about reality and the universe, but ultimately whether America at this time produces a good or lousy body of poetic works means nothing. A poem is between two friends first, as Frank O’Hara said. Only later does its place in the world become important, or not.

Articles like the one I refer to are written because after all  literary people must write something, and it will hardly do to say what I have said, which is that it is all for nothing. But that’s no reason not to write, any more than death is a reason not to love.