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

[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.