[New-Poetry] Verse-slinging

[Christopher Kelly]

Verse-slinging

Poets have always been a touchy bunch. But the latest wrangle in the US reflects a wider problem in deciding what's good poetry and what's not, explains John Freeman

Thursday October 4, 2007

Guardian Unlimited

Are literary spats ennobled by time? Stopping by a Greenwich Village bookstore recently, near where Stanley Crouch slapped the critic Dale Peck in 2004, this question came to mind again. On the store's front table was a handsome batik-print covered paperback that caught my eye: Contemporary American Poetry, selected and introduced by Donald Hall. Here, I thought, was a dignified little book. Then the bookseller interjected. "Oh, the old poetry anthology wars," he said, as if I were picking up a bullet casing. "Now that was fun to watch from the sidelines."

I hadn't stumbled on an old gunslinger, or a man drenched in nostalgia - just a bookseller with a long memory. During the 1950s and early 60s, what the Beats didn't accomplish in coffee houses and on City Lights Press, anthologists hammered home in the pages of pocket-sized books that sold for a dollar. They feel today like field manuals, complete with marshalling introductions. "For 30 years an old orthodoxy ruled American poetry," Hall wrote in Contemporary American Poetry. "It derived from the orthodoxy of TS Eliot and the new critics ... it asked for a poetry of symmetry, intellect, irony, and wit. The last few years have broken the control of this orthodoxy."

It's hard to imagine this sentence being written today. It's not that there isn't any orthodoxy - rather that there are too many of them. There are lyric poets and language poets, slam poets and funny poets. There are poets who identify by ethnicity, gender, and sex; many who could claim the mantle of such identity politics and refuse. But mostly, it should be said, there's simply a lot of poetry. As a judge of a poetry prize I can attest - it piles in like cordwood in the winter.

I don't begrudge this because among the stacks I've come across poets - DA Powell, Matthea Harvey, Lawrence Joseph, Miltos Sacthouris, Troy Jollimore, James Richardson, Michael O'Brien, Venus Khoury-Ghata and James Lasdun to name a few - who are as different as they are amazing. No longer do Americans have to read a prevailing kind of poetry, or even within their own borders. It's a big old buffet.

But in this mishmash something has gotten lost. What is a poem anymore? Let alone a good one, or even a beautiful one? Who sets this taste? These are not idle questions. As Brian Phillips wrote a few years ago in Poetry magazine: "Taste's instability, its internal jostle of meaning, is of enormous interest to poetry, because it reveals how, at the level of everyday language, we cope with the uncertainty that pervades our aesthetic experience." But can a culture actually turn this internal jostle into a conversation?

I think this question lies at the heart of the series of dust-ups which have rippled through the American poetry world of late over what the US's Poetry Foundation should do with the $150m bequeathed to it by heiress Ruth Lilly over. Should the newly wealthy regime be conservative and elitist? Popular and populist? Carefully diverse or devoted to a single variety of excellence? The ding-dong spilled into the pages of the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review as well as generating a fair bit of heat in the blogosphere.

This is not the poetry world's inability to play nice with itself - to hear about that, one need only buy an American poet a beer. This is the poetry world attempting, in an environment where poetry is as marginalised as it's ever been - despite the volume of the stuff being produced - to figure what is good, and why it should matter, and then make those judgments heard.

That's bound to be a problematic question when a single organisation has so much money, and there are more poets than readers. Sadly, though, the old anthology solution won't work anymore. In 1962, poetry was more central to American life. Robert Frost had read at Kennedy's inauguration; paperback publishing was taking off; the Beats had made poetry cool. Cheap anthologies were the perfect way to have a debate about taste: what better than just to put the work out there and let the readers decide? In the past decade, there have been attempts to resurrect this model in fine anthologies edited by Eliot Weinberger and JD McClatchy, but the environment has changed.

Today the taste-making power of anthologies has been replaced by MFA programs, a staggering proliferation of prizes, and, yes, the clarifying fires of scandal. As tempting as it is to proclaim each new scandal a new low, the hubbub and hullabaloo routes to discussion have been there all along, waiting for us. The same year Hall's anthology was published Frederick Seidel's debut volume, Final Solutions, was picked by Robert Lowell, Louise Bogan, and Stanley Kunitz to win a poetry award in New York. Seidel was asked to revise some poems, which the sponsoring organisation felt had libeled Mamie Eisenhower; he refused, and the judges resigned. The dust-up was covered in the 'Times.

It is perhaps not a representative response to such circumstances, but sobering nonetheless that Seidel survived this early bump and, after a 17-year gap, began publishing again. Since 1979 he has put out some of the smartest, strangest, loveliest, and angriest American poetry around. His Selected Poems was just issued by Faber, and I heartily recommend it. Even though he is the last American dandy, I can't say his work is scandalous now. Nor will you find the poems within in many anthologies. But it's as startling as a slap in the face, and a whole lot more interesting.