AFTER BARACK OBAMA was sworn in, Elizabeth Alexander read her
“Praise Song for the Day.” I hesitate to call it a poem because it
had so little connection to poetry as that art has been understood
for centuries, indeed millennia. It was so dismal that the New
York Times, in its 30-page special section the next day (“Full
coverage of the inauguration of the 44th president”), failed to
mention Alexander or print her poem. It had all the fizz of a
week-old soda. No mention of it in the Washington
Post either. What a decline there has been since Robert
Frost’s performance at Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961.
Alexander’s turn at the podium reminded me of those dull
recitations that Garrison Keillor sometimes allows on his radio
program. His designated poets speak their lines in a deliberately
unemphatic voice, as devoid of energy and enthusiasm as the lines
themselves are of poetry. But the audience always delivers its
dutiful round of applause. We have been brainwashed into thinking
that it is our civic responsibility to admire anyone who comes
before us as a poet.
Maybe the time has come for us to form our own judgments, and
blow a raspberry or two when absolutely necessary?
I’m surprised that Keillor clutters up his program in this way.
He has good taste in so many respects. He can hold your interest
with any story he tells, and mockery of intellectual pretension is
his stock in trade. Perhaps it has something to do with his running
gag about English majors. Many modern poets are employed by EngLit
departments so maybe they’re all listening in to “A Prairie Home
Companion” on Saturday night, waiting to see who gets Keillor’s
nod.
How did Ms. Alexander become Barack’s pet poet? Political
connections helped; political correctness was a given. Let’s call
her QuotaPoet and drop all mention of laureates from now on.
Congress created a “poet laureate” position in 1986, but the whole
notion of laurels is at cross-purposes with modern poetry.
Not that Alexander is the laureate, yet. She is the daughter of
Clifford Alexander, Secretary of the Army under President Carter.
Her mother teaches African American women’s history at
George Washington University. (Do they have men teaching men’s
history?) Alexander herself met Barack Obama at the University of
Chicago. No surprise, she is a professor of African American
Studies at Yale.
Ms. Alexander and her ilk dwell in the sheltered world of Poetry
Corner, a subset of the Academy. It is awash in more fellowships,
honors, awards, grants, subsidies, and prizes than you can imagine.
And don’t ask about the workshops. Joseph Epstein, in his great
essay “Who Killed Poetry?” (Commentary, 1988), quotes
Kingsley Amis as saying that everything that has gone wrong with
the world since World War II can be summed up in the word
“workshop.” In London, years ago, I heard Bernard Levin say much
the same thing.
Alexander’s poem was criticized for not rising to the occasion,
and of course it did not. Adam Kirsch in the New
Republic called it “a perfect kind of bureaucratic verse.”
But he meant that as a back-handed compliment. The “praetorian
pomp” of Obama’s inauguration seemed “more redolent of Caesar than
George Washington.” So she brought everything down to earth.
Nonetheless, Kirsch added, “it was just the kind of event that
might inspire genuine poetry.” But didn’t, obviously. The
Times reported before the inauguration that Alexander was
wondering how to start a piece that will “mark an occasion as
historic, has a worldwide audience and will have an immediate
impact.”
Well, here is how she started it—her opening lines:
Each day we go about our business, walking past each other,
catching each other’s eyes or not, about to speak or
speaking.
That could hardly be more wooden. A critic with the L.A
Times further commented: “Each day we go about our business”
was “a strange sentiment for an occasion that on so many levels was
not about business as usual.”
Spot on. But the more basic point is that today’s academic
poetry is not about celebrating occasions or celebrating anything.
It has a different agenda. It wages an undeclared war against the
whole idea of poetry as it has traditionally been understood. It’s
a lightweight steamroller that would like to flatten the monuments
of the past. We can ignore it, but it’s not up to any good.
ALEXANDER HAS SAID that “music is the point” of poetry, and “the
way I dive in is through music and language itself.” OK, but the
problem is that her lines showed her ear to be in thrall to the
anti-music of the modern. Consider this line. She is eulogizing the
dead, who, among other things,
built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then
keep clean and work inside of.
work inside of. Imagine ending a line that way and
daring to call it poetry. Imagine being so culturally secure and
cushioned by privilege that you can present that as inaugural
poetry without fear of embarrassment. The artistic career of
Elizabeth Alexander suggests that the self-esteem campaign has gone
on for long enough.
In the past, some of those inside the poetry citadel have
responded to criticism by saying: “Oh, you just don’t like modern
poetry.” Joseph Epstein had a good riposte, and he also identified
the underlying problem, or one of them.
Lots of modern poets have been well appreciated and honored,
even those considered “difficult.” He mentioned T. S. Eliot,
Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams. Auden, Yeats, Pound,
Frost and others. The point is that they were amateurs—in the best
sense of the word. They wrote poetry for love whether or not they
were paid. They had day jobs: banker (Eliot), doctor (Williams),
insurance executive (Wallace Stevens), librarian (Philip Larkin).
As they say: subsidize something and you get more of it. And boy,
we have whole anthills of poets today. As Epstein summarized the
field, poetry “flourishes in a vacuum.” More than 250 universities
had creative writing programs when he wrote, all with a poetry
component. Dana Gioia, in an excellent Atlantic Monthly
article in 1991, put the figure at 200. With 10 students in each
section, he wrote, unreassuringly, “these programs alone will
produce about 20,000 accredited professional poets over the next
decade.”
More recently Gioia became chairman of the National Endowment
for the Arts. I believe he has done what he can to rein in grants
for individual poets.
The Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers
listed over 6,300 poets and other writers. Donald Hall, who was
Poet Laureate of New Hampshire and more recently of the U.S.—his
aggrieved response to Epstein was published in
Harper’s—said that 1,000 books of poetry are published
every year. About 7,000 volumes of poetry were published from 1990
to 2001.
By comparison, in 1941 there were said to have been 151 American
poets.
The market for the poetry tsunami is not strong, consisting
mostly of other poets. It’s wise for a publisher to anthologize 100
poets in one volume; that way it will at least sell 100 copies.
Dana Gioia memorably noted his own reaction to the “several dozen
journals” that print nothing but verse.
The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly
together, like downcast immigrants in steerage. One can easily miss
a radiant poem amid the many lackluster ones. It takes tremendous
effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention.
Few people bother, generally not even the magazines’ contributors.
The indifference to poetry in the mass media has created a monster
of the opposite kind—journals that love poetry not wisely but too
well.
CREATIVITY UNACCOUNTABLY waxes and wanes at different times and
places. Our own time has every appearance of being bad for poetry.
I personally would advise a creatively inclined youth to stay away
the fine arts altogether. Standards have collapsed so
completely—perhaps I should say deliberately undermined by what
Philip Larkin called “the aberration of modernism that blighted all
the arts”—that only political criteria now seem valid when it comes
to deciding what’s good or not. Malcolm Muggeridge once said that
real creativity in our time shifted from those fields where you are
encouraged to do your own thing and innovate without regard to
tradition or “rules”—poetry, painting, academic music—into fields
such as technology and engineering where the created machine
imposes its own discipline. Compare, for example, the abstract
paintings of a Mark Rothko or a Barnett Newman with the Golden Gate
Bridge or a Boeing 747. Where do you think the aesthetic impulse of
our time found its true outlet?
“The crowds in London once stood on their toes to see Tennyson
pass,” Joseph Epstein wrote. Today, however,
a figure like Tennyson probably would not write poetry and might
not even read it. Poetry has been shifted—has shifted itself?—off
center stage. Literarily, poetry no longer seems in any way where
the action is.
But might there not be some good and serious poets out there,
amidst the careerists? Poetry’s appeal to its creators and to its
audience is potentially so strong that there will always be those
who will try to achieve something great in verse, difficult though
it is. Some are surely trying now, and one or two may even be
succeeding. But how would we know?
There is little coverage of poetry in the general press. Leading
critics rarely review it. “In fact, virtually no one reviews it
except other poets,” Dana Gioia wrote. Most editors run poetry “the
way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo
around—not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for
tradition’s sake.”
The subsidized poets themselves have complained about the
critical void, because they well know that as long as all their
efforts are received with an equal and democratic deference, the
whole notion of distinction (in both senses—distinguished
and differentiated) will be lost. When modern criticism is
occasionally found, Gioia said, it is uniformly obsequious, whereas
until a few decades ago it was often sharp and even embarrassing to
the poet at the receiving end.
Today, in consequence, everything is undistinguished. How can
anyone plow through those thousand volumes a year? The good will be
buried beneath the ever-rising snowdrifts from the grant- and
tenure-seekers. (Academic philosophy is subject to the same adverse
forces, I believe. If there is good philosophy coming out of the
academy, as is quite possible, we will be hard pressed to discover
it.)
THERE IS ONE SOLUTION: Cut off all the subsidies. Let poetry be
restored to the marketplace. Maybe 150 poets would survive, as in
1941. No such cuts will happen, of course, if only because there
are so many generous-hearted and wealthy people around who cannot
imagine that more money for something good in
itself (poetry) will not produce more of the good; and may
actually stifle it.
Meanwhile the best of luck to Elizabeth Alexander. Her website
assures us that she is “one of the most vital poets of her
generation,” and, what’s more, “a pivotal figure in American
poetry.” So she will not be needing my blessing. Her pivotal
performance showed that she moves with great self-assurance in the
mainstream of today’s academic poetry. But I wonder how many of her
rivals envy her credentials, and the accidents of birth, which
conferred upon her this rare distinction.
