Poetry is hard!
Jan. 12th, 2006 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyThe best thing to read on LJ today is an ongoing discussion between ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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 withspringheel_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?
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?
no subject
Date: 2006-01-12 03:51 pm (UTC)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."