Coachella and Vachel Lindsay

Most people know Vachel Lindsay even though he's comparatively obscure. Or rather, they know two lines of his: "Then I saw the Congo creeping through the black,/Cutting through the forest with a golden track." You remember the scene: the prep school kids sneaking out at night to read poetry and sip a few swigs of liquor in "Dead Poets Society." Theres's something irrepressible in the pounding beats, sort of like a hippy drum circle or an Ace of Base cassette through your parents' minivan speakers.


I knew Lindsay mostly for that poem "The Congo" and just kind of assumed he's a one-trick pony doing the rhythms and poems meant to be spoken aloud. I didn't expect to find something that spoke directly to my poetry lust in the era of the Internet in the Year of Our Lord 2010.

In Praise of Songs That Die

Vachel Lindsay

AFTER HAVING READ A GREAT DEAL OF GOOD CURRENT 
POETRY  IN THE MAGAZINES AND NEWSPAPERS

Ah, they are passing, passing by,
Wonderful songs, but born to die!
Cries from the infinite human seas,
Waves thrice-winged with harmonies.
Here I stand on a pier in the foam
Seeing the songs to the beach go home,
Dying in sand while the tide flows back,
As it flowed of old in its fated track.
Oh, hurrying tide that will not hear
Your own foam children dying near
Is there no refuge-house of song,
No home, no haven where songs belong?
Oh, precious hymns that come and go!
You perish, and I love you so! 




Okay, first... newspapers! Bah hah haha! Awesome - way to be old-school, Vachel. And second... poetry in the magazines and newspapers? It seems like a mythical thing, like a unicorn mating with a prairie dog. (For the record, I've heard the unicorndog is delicious with mustard and relish.)


But I get where he's coming from so deeply. "Wonderful songs, but born to die!" How many masterpieces did da Vinci paint? And we know the "Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper" if you think for a minute or two. Alfred Hitchcock made some incredible, surrealist reconstructions that completely appropriated Hollywood conventions but all we remember is, "The 'Psycho' dude with the chocolate syrup in the shower."


Artists and critics have no real control over what pieces of art live on in the culture at large. It's not something artists and critics do. All you can do is make good work, find good work, appreciate good work and respond to good work.


I know plenty of writers and critics who find it bothersome that there's more poetry being written, published and posted today than at any other time in history. I listened to a podcast a few weeks ago where Joseph S. Salemi railed at the state of contemporary verse because, among other things, there's too much of it and therefore it's "moribund." (I remember it's moribund because he repeated that word about every six minutes.) Don't ask me why having too much of a thing means it's dying.

Yes, this is actually that guy's picture. I know, a beret, right?!

An argument he made was that there's too much to wade through, editors of poetry magazines can't get through it all. If you've got 50 pages to fill but only 25 pages of genuinely good stuff, do you publish the mediocre stuff or reduce the size of your magazine or what? And that strikes me as an argument both lazy and stupid.


It's lazy because in any era, any age in all of English letters you're going to have some real shit sandwiches, a lot of middling stuff that tastes vaguely of turd and then a few gems of true genius and artistry that will last far beyond anyone's lifetime. It's a classic bell curve. 

What we have with our fancy technological gadgets and doodads and instant connectivity and Google searches and the Gutenberg Project and a zillion MFA programs and all these other developments... all that does is increase the amplitude on the bell curve. Let's do a little math game together using completely made-up numbers, which happen to be the finest kind.

Think of the bell curve as a percentage. Let's imagine for the sake of argument that 20% of the poetry written in any given decade is completely worthless tripe that's good for little but greeting cards and cautionary tales; 60% is varying shades of middling, some anthologized and most forgotten; and 20% is really excellent, worthy of devoted time and study, models for good writing, some of which will continue to be read, discussed, studied and emulated for decades to come.

If one million poems were written a year in 1980 and now two million poems a year are being written in 2010, how many more works of genius are created per year?

Someone else in my reading said that a William Blake or Emily Dickinson may very well not be read now because there's so many other writers crowding the field, obscuring the hidden treasures. And that's just ridiculous. How much easier would it be for Blake if he could have used Blogger instead of his home printing press? Emily could have taught lectures from her bedroom in Amherst. We're saying that the democratization and multiplicity of voices is something we need to curtail or control?!

Next thing you know, these jokers will be talking about instituting a Poet's Licensing Board that's got entrance exams, membership dues and professional certifications in Poetic Raditude. Oh, wait, they did.

So to beat that old drum one more time... Poetry is like a massive multi-day music festival. There's a huge main stage where a few mega-famous acts play for thousands. There are side stages where up-and-comers ply their craft. There are local stages that are the proving grounds. And about a jillion buskers, partiers, amateurs, retirees and mentally unbalanced drifters lounging around doing their thing. You don't get to shut them down just because you don't like the tunes. 

Stop whinging about how much you dislike the bad stuff. If you can't find a glut of amazing art, the problem isn't the bands, it's you. If it's too loud, grandpa, either get some earplugs or go home.