busy
janetmiles directed my attention to "The New Math of Poetry" which is a fine article, but read it now because it will only be publically visible for a week.It observes that a vast flood of poetry is being presented to the public in literary journals and blogs, which may cause the few truly great poems to be lost. To some extent this is true. However, I think that an emerging fluency with the Internet will help solve this problem, as people learn how to use word-of-mouth to find the good stuff. Talented creators of any stripe on the Internet can attract a fan base. The visibility of poetry is going up; that may be useful.
Another aspect is academic poetry and the frequent lack of quality therein, as academic poetry is often promoted based on the writer's contacts rather than skills. I agree that the academic field has some bad habits regarding poetry; not all academic poetry is bad, but the parameters do not necessarily encourage or require it to be good. However, I take strong exception to one thing that I've seen repeated here and elsewhere: the poetry teacher represented as a professional poet. Teaching poetry at a school does not make you a professional poet. It makes you a professional teacher. Many of the academic journals, even some of the publishers, don't pay anything; their prestige is all in the name. Your poetry doesn't have to be particularly good to land a teaching slot; in fact today's fashion is for obscurist poetry in the academic field. What has to be good is your ability to leverage academic contacts to produce a job, like teaching in general. Your topical skill is far less important; it can range from awful to excellent without necessarily affecting your teaching career. (Sadly this is true of most subject areas for most schools, although some schools hire a disproportionate number of excellent teachers.) So don't be fooled by the inflated numbers of "professional poets" if you see them -- most of those are teachers of poetry, which is an okay thing to be but not the same. Although I will say, tracking down your college poetry teacher's obscurely published collection and dissecting its poetic flaws in poetry class may improve the class's understanding of poetry, but is unlikely to improve one's grade.
Professional poet? Writing and publishing poetry regularly, making money from it, doing it at a high level of skill, and having a responsible professional bearing. There is very little paying work in poetry these days because a majority of venues are "4theluv," which is sad, but a skilled and determined poet can still make a noticable amount of money doing it. Usually it's a part-time job, not a full-time job. I would like to see more opportunity for people to make part or all of a living writing poetry, because the result of constant practice tends to be improvement of skill, and more excellent poetry would be a fine thing to have in the world.
Outside of academic context, poetry actually fares better. I know at least two fields where poetry is ahead of the game. Speculative poetry has a following, and quite a bit of the material is good to excellent in quality. I think if more speculative poets promoted it, the following would be even bigger. And it's not hard to pick out the poets who are both good and active. Pagan poetry is also growing, probably because Pagans like poetry for ritual use. It's harder to get recognized now, but we can still spot some folks who have added a bunch of good material to our canon.
You want to hook people on poetry? Make it poetry good enough that looking at it makes them want to read it aloud, and make the topic something that interests them. That's what makes the classic poetry great and lasting. You know a good poem? Share it with your friends, because a lot of them have probably never seen one.
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Yes...
February 22 2010, 22:19:30 UTC 11 years ago
I think what I like best about this article is that it pinned down some of the things that everybody knows but are hard to specify in detail, such as examples of nepotism in the academic poetry scene.
February 23 2010, 13:10:25 UTC 11 years ago
February 23 2010, 13:33:35 UTC 11 years ago
Um, possibly because it's a dick move? Why would anybody do this, except out of overweening ego and smartassitude?
I still don't know what you mean by "obscurist," a charge you've leveled frequently, nor what the author of the article means by Really Truly Good Poetry (tm). He seems to take exception to "lineated prose," in which case I'm wondering why he singles Ginsberg's "Howl" out for praise -- unless he calls it "genuinely loved" just because a lot of people genuinely bought copies of it, which is a weird measure of love.
February 23 2010, 18:57:05 UTC 11 years ago
To find out whether the teacher actually knows how to perform the tasks they are purporting to teach. If a teacher has written a book on their own topic, it is always worth tracking down and analyzing for competence. This is a good measure of whether to absorb everything they say because they're brilliant, or sort for the good stuff because they're average, or ignore them because they're ignorant and destructive. Very helpful information, and worth sharing with classmates before the bell rings.