The Gift
Sean Lause
The day my mother dropped a net
of oranges on the kitchen table
and the net broke and oranges
rolled and we snatched them,
my brother and I,
peeled back the skin and bit deep
to make the juice explode with our laughter,
and my father spun one orange in his palm
and said quietly, "This was Christmas, 1938,"
said it without bitterness or anger,
just observing his life from
far away, this tiny world
cupped in one palm,
I learned I had no way
to comprehend an orange.
I read this article today which made me both pensive and infuriated.
Pensive because it has some good points about the way publishing has changed, as well as how "professional poets" have taken over poetry.
It made me infuriated because it's completely contradictory, mentions few facts and mostly unsubstantiated opinions, seems to have a dozen complaints but no solutions or aims except whinging.
To wit: David Alpaugh says things like,
"The notion that writing and performing 'poetry' is the easiest way to satisfy the American itch for 15 minutes of fame has spilled out of our campuses and into the wider culture. You can't pick up a violin or oboe for the first time on Monday morning and expect to play at Lincoln Center that weekend, but you can write your first poem in May and appear at an open mike in June waving a 'chapbook' for sale. The new math of poetry is driven not by reader demand for great or even good poetry but by the demand of myriads of aspiring poets to experience the thrill of 'publication.'"
A few of my issues just with this paragraph: is he using AIR QUOTES?! Or just liberally misapplying quotation marks unnecessarily? If he's intending to mock those words, why choose "poetry," "chapbook" and "publication" to be held up for derision?
And who the frak thinks POETRY is going to make ANYBODY famous?!?! Quick, name our poet laureate. Or the last one. Or the one before that... that's right, you can't. Okay, now name all the family members from The Brady Bunch.
That's what I thought.
Then his Lincoln Center analogy is about as specious a species as speech can be. He's likening learning a classical instrument and playing a command performance at prestigious concert halls... to reciting words in a language you already speak at a free local venue and spending twenty bucks at Kinko's to print out a Word document. It's more accurate to claim poetry open mics are more like picking up a violin for the first time, then heading out to the common area of your dorm to play for a couple of friends. ("I think this is a C....")
He also seems to be just flabbergasted by the amount of poetry being written and published. Horror of horrors! People composing verse they always think is good! You mean people can be... pretentious and over-generous in evaluating their own work?! And take to the information superhighway to declaim their verse on the streets of our precious Internets?!
He seems to just hate everything: "professional" journals publishing traditional verse by "professional" poets employed at "professional" writing institutions; amateur poets expecting to be the Next Big Thing and participating in or starting grass-roots venues or opportunities for their work; narrowing verse down to specific categories by ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, subject matter, hobby; poets nominating each other for prizes and publication; "like golf, poetry is becoming a sport that multitudes pursue and enjoy."
Dude, chill out. It's a big, complicated world out there and one of the things out there in that world is poetry. There's good and bad verse, big and small publishers, a variety of venues and settings and possibilities for it to thrive in, there seems to be more people writing all the time - which is SHOCKING considering how many articles and poems lamenting the "sad state of poetry today" flit through literary journals.
I rejoice in the confusion, disarray, chaos and fecund growth. Just like MP3s and GarageBand software, just like YouTube and a Flip camera, just like a word processor and Blogger, everything is open to everybody now. There are tools, information, classes, markets, buyers, audiences for whatever you've got. We're all artists now, we're all the audience. The democratization of art is gonna kick everything in the ass.
So to the cry that there's too much of a good thing, no way to wade through it all, too many poets backslapping each other, too many MFA programs, too many open mics and readings, too many small presses and poetry blogs, I'd like to say the following:
Tough luck, Chuck. The world's moved on and you can't spin it back the way it was Superman style. This joker would have whined that Gutenburg was destroying the art of calligraphy and driving lapis lazuli vendors out of business.
Here's the last thing that pisses me off, the thrust of his article at the very conclusion.
"I do have an uneasy feeling that a Blake and a Dickinson may be buried in the overgrowth, and I fear that neither current nor future readers may get to enjoy their art."
Man, it's a miracle we get to read Blake and Dickinson at all! Or G.M. Hopkins, or Kafka, or Melville or any of the myriad writers who today are Great Names, the CANON. Any of a billion factors could have prevented us from reading, studying and teaching them. Melville was thought to be a no-talent pulp fiction hack until the early 20th century. Kafka asked that his manuscripts be destroyed after his death. Blake was a self-published weirdo, Dickinson was a shut-in who published only a tiny trickle in her lifetime.
And for every one of those cherished and respected authors, there may be a dozen even greater writers who didn't catch the right opportunities, didn't have things break their way, lost the crucial pages, didn't include proper postage, addressed it to an editor having a bad case of dyspepsia... The list goes on. You're never going to catch every little glimmer of promise or genius in this or any century.
I for one am intensely gratified that there are so many writers, so many ways of finding them, so many schools of thought, so many poetics... I'm all for scrapping Harold Bloom's much-vaunted Canon and saying there's no accepted orthodoxy. Everybody's got their own Canon because there's just so much to love and appreciate and find worthwhile. And if your Canon thinks my Canon is stupid, well...
Alpaugh seems to think of this as having too many competitors in the race for Eternal Literary Glory, like a NYC Marathon where the runners just keep on coming, the whole world alternately jogging and cheering the other runners.
I think of it as having an infinity of Pandora stations where you can hear Lady Gaga and Cat Power and Gillian Welch and Kei$ha and Aretha Franklin and Barbra Streisand and Nina Simone and Janis Joplin and Suzanne Vega and Rihanna and Patsy Cline and Whitney Houston and Selina and Maria Callas and Mary J. Blige and Anne Murray and Big Mama Thornton, all any time you want.
I think we have too few poetry stations. Let's mash it up, open-source it, make it freeware, release it virally, make a meme out of it and get something really kinky.
Maybe when the geeks inherit the earth the whiners will finally shut up.
Pensive because it has some good points about the way publishing has changed, as well as how "professional poets" have taken over poetry.
It made me infuriated because it's completely contradictory, mentions few facts and mostly unsubstantiated opinions, seems to have a dozen complaints but no solutions or aims except whinging.
To wit: David Alpaugh says things like,
"The notion that writing and performing 'poetry' is the easiest way to satisfy the American itch for 15 minutes of fame has spilled out of our campuses and into the wider culture. You can't pick up a violin or oboe for the first time on Monday morning and expect to play at Lincoln Center that weekend, but you can write your first poem in May and appear at an open mike in June waving a 'chapbook' for sale. The new math of poetry is driven not by reader demand for great or even good poetry but by the demand of myriads of aspiring poets to experience the thrill of 'publication.'"
A few of my issues just with this paragraph: is he using AIR QUOTES?! Or just liberally misapplying quotation marks unnecessarily? If he's intending to mock those words, why choose "poetry," "chapbook" and "publication" to be held up for derision?
And who the frak thinks POETRY is going to make ANYBODY famous?!?! Quick, name our poet laureate. Or the last one. Or the one before that... that's right, you can't. Okay, now name all the family members from The Brady Bunch.
That's what I thought.
Then his Lincoln Center analogy is about as specious a species as speech can be. He's likening learning a classical instrument and playing a command performance at prestigious concert halls... to reciting words in a language you already speak at a free local venue and spending twenty bucks at Kinko's to print out a Word document. It's more accurate to claim poetry open mics are more like picking up a violin for the first time, then heading out to the common area of your dorm to play for a couple of friends. ("I think this is a C....")
He also seems to be just flabbergasted by the amount of poetry being written and published. Horror of horrors! People composing verse they always think is good! You mean people can be... pretentious and over-generous in evaluating their own work?! And take to the information superhighway to declaim their verse on the streets of our precious Internets?!
He seems to just hate everything: "professional" journals publishing traditional verse by "professional" poets employed at "professional" writing institutions; amateur poets expecting to be the Next Big Thing and participating in or starting grass-roots venues or opportunities for their work; narrowing verse down to specific categories by ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, subject matter, hobby; poets nominating each other for prizes and publication; "like golf, poetry is becoming a sport that multitudes pursue and enjoy."
Dude, chill out. It's a big, complicated world out there and one of the things out there in that world is poetry. There's good and bad verse, big and small publishers, a variety of venues and settings and possibilities for it to thrive in, there seems to be more people writing all the time - which is SHOCKING considering how many articles and poems lamenting the "sad state of poetry today" flit through literary journals.
I rejoice in the confusion, disarray, chaos and fecund growth. Just like MP3s and GarageBand software, just like YouTube and a Flip camera, just like a word processor and Blogger, everything is open to everybody now. There are tools, information, classes, markets, buyers, audiences for whatever you've got. We're all artists now, we're all the audience. The democratization of art is gonna kick everything in the ass.
So to the cry that there's too much of a good thing, no way to wade through it all, too many poets backslapping each other, too many MFA programs, too many open mics and readings, too many small presses and poetry blogs, I'd like to say the following:
Tough luck, Chuck. The world's moved on and you can't spin it back the way it was Superman style. This joker would have whined that Gutenburg was destroying the art of calligraphy and driving lapis lazuli vendors out of business.
Here's the last thing that pisses me off, the thrust of his article at the very conclusion.
"I do have an uneasy feeling that a Blake and a Dickinson may be buried in the overgrowth, and I fear that neither current nor future readers may get to enjoy their art."
Man, it's a miracle we get to read Blake and Dickinson at all! Or G.M. Hopkins, or Kafka, or Melville or any of the myriad writers who today are Great Names, the CANON. Any of a billion factors could have prevented us from reading, studying and teaching them. Melville was thought to be a no-talent pulp fiction hack until the early 20th century. Kafka asked that his manuscripts be destroyed after his death. Blake was a self-published weirdo, Dickinson was a shut-in who published only a tiny trickle in her lifetime.
And for every one of those cherished and respected authors, there may be a dozen even greater writers who didn't catch the right opportunities, didn't have things break their way, lost the crucial pages, didn't include proper postage, addressed it to an editor having a bad case of dyspepsia... The list goes on. You're never going to catch every little glimmer of promise or genius in this or any century.
I for one am intensely gratified that there are so many writers, so many ways of finding them, so many schools of thought, so many poetics... I'm all for scrapping Harold Bloom's much-vaunted Canon and saying there's no accepted orthodoxy. Everybody's got their own Canon because there's just so much to love and appreciate and find worthwhile. And if your Canon thinks my Canon is stupid, well...
Alpaugh seems to think of this as having too many competitors in the race for Eternal Literary Glory, like a NYC Marathon where the runners just keep on coming, the whole world alternately jogging and cheering the other runners.
I think of it as having an infinity of Pandora stations where you can hear Lady Gaga and Cat Power and Gillian Welch and Kei$ha and Aretha Franklin and Barbra Streisand and Nina Simone and Janis Joplin and Suzanne Vega and Rihanna and Patsy Cline and Whitney Houston and Selina and Maria Callas and Mary J. Blige and Anne Murray and Big Mama Thornton, all any time you want.
I think we have too few poetry stations. Let's mash it up, open-source it, make it freeware, release it virally, make a meme out of it and get something really kinky.
Maybe when the geeks inherit the earth the whiners will finally shut up.
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