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Monday, June 06, 2005
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James Lileks, Minneapolis Star Tribune The governor has declined to name a state poet laureate. A wise idea, I think. Shelley once wrote that poets "are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," and frankly we have enough trouble with the acknowledged ones. If the state poet doesn't demand a special session to finish his epic poem "Stassen Unbound" he will be tiresomely political: "I think that I shall never see / a tax not called a user fee." People will still be free to make poems as they desire, but I don't think the state will suffer because custom doggerel does not spring from a standardized source. Besides, it opens up the contentious issue of what poetry should be. There are two schools. Old style: A poem must have a discernible meter. Iambic, trochaic -- metrical feet are A critical aspect of poems throughout time. Why, you might as well say that they don't need to rhyme. Now that's what most people call poetry. It makes sense and you can pound it out with your fist on the table. Then there's the New School, which just drifts like cottonwood: I think a poem Should hang On the page like an apple Waiting To fall into your Lap Just like Isaac Newton's revelation But with arbitrary Line breaks and an absence of Punctuation; Except for emphasis. Most people suspect that an Official State Poet would be an adherent of the latter school. Most people regard that sort of poetry as extra-snooty stuff whose pretension is equaled only by its narcissism -- and has little use in the daily life of the state. No one ever turns the car around halfway to the picnic because you forgot to pack the sliced sonnets in sauce. Doesn't mean poetry is useless or lacks intrinsic merit -- but people no longer pretend to laud the poet or his craft. The Poet was once the man who wrestled with the Olympian concepts and brought them down to Earth mortal-sized morsels for the Saturday Evening Post. Poetry was the expression of truth and/or beauty professed through the rigors of language and form. When poetry meant Kipling, it had a certain valor and heft in the public mind. Now, that was a poem. By God it rhymed and you could march to it. Then came the new poets who shed the old styles as a useless encrustation of the old dead past, and they lost their claim on the popular mind. Now poetry was seen as a way to detail the author's tormented, neurotic, indecisive inner life -- by means of gassy exhalations devoid of form or discipline. I should know; I wrote miles of that stuff in college. But even when the concept of The Poet had respect, there were only a few who were permitted to be public poets without ridicule. Sandburg and Frost, that's about it. Whose woods are these? I think I know. They go to Chicago, where big shoulders come in on cat's feet. Otherwise, poets were generally regarded with condescending tolerance. It wasn't something a grown-up did. It was the work of girlie men who looked like Leslie Howard and appeared in women's movies making those sad smiles that bespoke a Tragic Past. A bout with tuberculosis. Love lost in Paris. A critical drubbing of his first volume, "Broken Dove Wings." James Lileks is absolutely right that the governor made the right call, but he’s wrong about the sort of poet that turns up as laureate. Recall UD’s recent post on the Kooserization of American poetry. Of our national laureate the New Criterion’s astute poetry critic has written that Ted Kooser “stands for a foursquare, hidebound American provincialism that, by gum, has every right to write poems and, by golly, means to write them, too. His poems tend to be short, dying for air, afraid to do more than tell you what happened on the porch, or right out the window, or maybe, just once, down the block. …There’s nothing awful about a poem that ends in mystic nothingness (at times you feel Kooser practices a kind of prairie zen), slathered with sentiment like corn on the cob with butter, but, to outdo it, the next poet off the farm will have to write in grunts.” |