Poetry is hard!

[sabotabby]

The best thing to read on LJ today is an ongoing discussion between springheel_jack (if you're not reading his LJ, you're missing out), spimby, fengi, and others about U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser and his latest hilarious interview. (Relevant links: this one, this one, this one, and this one.)

I have very little to add to the discussion. I haven't heard of the guy before, which is at least in part because he doesn't write the sort of poetry that I tend to read. Not that I read that much poetry, but when I do, it's the kind of poetry he criticizes. Out of curiosity, I read some of Kooser's poetry and I was not impressed. The only thing worse than bad poetry is boring poetry. I may not entirely get T.S. Eliot (and really, I've never studied poetry as an academic), but I've lost count of the number of times I've read The Wasteland, in part because of its complexity. It's not that there's anything wrong with light reading, of course. There's something wrong with anti-intellectualism and with encouraging readers not to read work that includes words that they might have to look up in the dictionary. This kind of populism reinforces cultural elitism and the idea that "the masses" can't understand anything that uses polysyllabic vocabulary.

Anyway, I was all ready to be smug about Canada's Poet Laureate, but then I found out that it wasn't George Bowering anymore. I think ours might actually be worse than Kooser.

(To go off on a tangent for a moment, the one time I ever agreed with Objectivists is when they called the TTC's poetry campaign "Poetry in the Way." We have differing reasons, of course == they thought ads should go there, I think that poems should not be complete crap -- but that's another story.)

Really, public cultural initiatives shouldn't encourage mediocrity. I'm inclined to agree with springheel_jack that it's probably intentional in Kooser's case. Sigh.

By the way, what's with this "modern poetry is so hard to understand" meme? Was John Donne very simple and straightforward and I'm just missing something?

Comments

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Real poetry has always been simplified in order for the masses to grasp it, like that enduring snoozer, that Hallmark-cardish blurb, the Illiad.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

I should add I don't know if it's intentional or not. But it's sure symbolic.

[sabotabby]

Ack, I misquoted (er...mis-paraphrased) you. My defense is that it's early in the morning.

This idea that the average person in 2006 is significantly stupider than in any other era is the nastiest of self-fulfilling prophecies. I'm told that schoolchildren in Soviet Russia used to read Dostoevsky in grade school. When I marked grade 10 literacy tests a few years back, I was thrilled when I came across a student able to construct a sentence in English.

All of this leads to: "Well, they obviously can't think for themselves, so we must think for them."

[frippy.livejournal.com]

I wonder if Kooser rhymes with snoozer.

[sabotabby]

Boozer!

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's....quite a head of hair on her. I thought former poet laureate Rita Dove's husband had funny hair, but that's even funnier.

[sabotabby]

Now, there's a woman who should never straighten her hair. Ever.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Look at her husband! That flaxen-haired dude - he should be wearing tights and shoes that curl up in the toes, looking like that.

[frippy.livejournal.com]

Those lousy snotty poets with their big words! Real poetry is from the Midwest from people born here in Saint Louis like... oh... T.S. Eliot. (Okay, I know, Eliot and Saint Louis would like to pretend that his birth here never actually happened. Still, people who come from the part of the country praised as being so down-to-earth and refreshingly anti-intellectual can still grow up to become the bane of anti-intellectualism.)

Kooser loves William Carlos Williams but maybe he'd change his mind if he heard people in my community college literature class yelling about how his "Red Wheelbarrow" poem was deliberately obscure. These were usually the same people who, when asked to bring in a poem to share, brought in that "Footprints in the Sand" poem they have on a plaque in their home. Why does Kooser support such an obscurist smartypants like Williams, huh? What's that about white chickens and a red wheelbarrow?

As for having to look up words, whatever happened to reading to learn things and enrich your brain? I love having to look up a new word when I read something because, hey, new word! And I didn't even gradumatate from collij.

[sabotabby]

Maybe he just liked that one Williams poem because it had wheelbarrows and chickens in it. I mean, Williams was a modernist.

My favourite English-class moment happened when I was in tenth grade. Moe, our rather gruff and intimidating teacher, asked us to each bring in a poem to share. (I think I brought something from Susan Musgrave's A Man to Marry, a Man to Bury, which was typical of little Gothic me at the time.) One girl brought in Footprints and read it.

After an uncomfortable pause, Moe said, "That's not poetry."

She replied, "What is it, then?"

He said, "Crap."

[ironed_orchid]

I don't know who this Moe fellow is, but I think I love him.

[seaya.livejournal.com]

I prefer simple, like Ogden Nash ;).

[sabotabby]

Yes, but that's simple and clever.

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

"I'll venture that 99 per cent of the people who read The New Yorker prefer the cartoons to the poems,"

I'd venture that he's right there, because cartoons rock and poetry sucks. Although, given the notorious obscurity of many New Yorker cartoons, it's a poor example for accessibility. Mind you, the only poetry I read, besides lyrics, is Dr. Seus and Dorthy Parker.

"Nintendo is as good as poetry." - Jeremy Bentham

[sabotabby]

I think the only The New Yorker cartoons I like are the ones with cats in them, and I only like those because they have cats in them. My sense of humour is not that sophisticated.

Anyway, doesn't reading The New Yorker automatically mark one as an elitist snob, thus rendering the argument moot?

[(Anonymous)]

Anyway, doesn't reading The New Yorker automatically mark one as an elitist snob, thus rendering the argument moot?

An excellent point!

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

Crap. That was me: I thought I was logged in.

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

I read an interesting article in the New Yorker on Phillip Pullman last night.

Oh, wait, I'm working on a Ph.D. I guess I must be an elitist snob. Though I have to admit first reading the New Yorker when I was five or six in the basement of my grandparents' row house in Washington, D.C., along with my grandfather's collection of the first dozen or so issues of Mad.

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

Sorry. My anti-poetry streak was recently piqued by insipid lyrics.