By now, I have heard many poets complain about accessibility in poetry, and how it waters down the art. In fact, I have always firmly believed that poetry is about communicating an experience through art. The reader necessarily has to bring their faculties to bear, and maybe do some work. But beyond some pretty basic requisites, I’ve always felt that poems should be accessible.
Writing poetry has likewise become evermore accessible. The abundance of open mic readings, the explosion of small presses, self-publication, chapbooks, online journals, and MFA programs tells it. People write poetry, perhaps now more than ever, and naturally want to share their work. I don’t claim to fully understand why, exactly. But I have some thoughts on how we got here and what this means.
Poets who complain they “can’t write prose” irk me no end. I’ll start by just getting this off my chest. Such statements immediately betray the misunderstanding that poetry is about expression rather than precision. Learning to compose words into grammatically correct sentences, sentences into cohesive paragraphs, paragraphs into coherent essays–should absolutely be a prerequisite to sitting down to write a poem. Why would anyone think otherwise?
The beats did for poetry what punk rock did for popular music. Armed with a few power chords, a fast if unoriginal drum beat, and some angst (as well as sometimes peanut butter), anyone with a garage and a few friends could start to play music. Likewise, the intense focus on sensation and alienation (the mind alienated from society, mostly) brought on a kind of poetry that, on the surface, looked easy to write.
So, now poetry is perceived as an accessible art form, for better or worse. Technically speaking, it is. Unlike classical music, by the time most people reach, say, twelve years of age in a developed country, they have been fully equipped with the requisite skill required to create poems: they can write. No need to specialize on an instrument, or build skills through scales for a decade or two before you can really start expressing yourself. Just about everyone has the option by the age of twelve to start writing and calling it poetry.
Furthermore, the de-formalization of poetry has made it ever more accessible. You don’t even have to know what an iamb is anymore. In fact, for the most part, meter and rhyme are passé. This might have a lot to do with the sense of legitimacy some poets must feel in reviving and tackling formal structures like the sestina and villanelle: not everyone can pull it off. Yet these days, just about everyone can pull of something that resembles poetry at least as much as strumming power chords emphatically resembles studied musicianship.
Collin Kelly has been arguing the notion that there is no such thing as bad poetry. Obviously, he’s never sat in on a creative writing course for non-majors, or spent too long in a Hallmark store. There are definitely those attempts at self-expression that fall short of art in our world. Sometimes, it doesn’t even take the passage of time or pronouncement of critics to recognize it. And when great art hits, likewise, it can be known.
All art must be considered in context with its time. Anyone since Jackson Pollock spattering paint on a canvas is just making a paint-spattered canvas; not art. So here we are in modern poetry–as far afield from sonneteers as it gets, with forms like the prose poem stripping away even techniques like the line break from the poet’s palette. In a sense, to some people, it must look like flinging paint.
A lot of what gets published these days, especially in respectable magazines whose main focus is not poetry, actually reminds me of modernist art–a square, say, blue, on a canvas. With a red triangle. That’s all. The kid in the museum looks up at his dad and says, “I could have done that.” And the father smiles down and says, “But you didn’t, son–that’s the point.”
Yet so much of what I see is the same blue square, the same red triangle, the same sense in which people seem to be saying with their work, “I could have done that.” And then, unfortunately, do. Ultimately, innovation only counts for so much. There are principles at the heart of poetry that make a work perennial. But the proliference of work that is churned out from the neck up, and by contrast the proliference, too, of work also slopped out from the heart to the sleeve to the pen–makes poetry seem accessible in the way that anyone can draw a square, or a triangle, or spatter paint.
The best art comes from heart and mind fully engaged. It strives to communicate (not spoon feed) an artistic experience to the reader. It is therefore accessible, yet hard to reproduce. In this way, it furthers the progression of art as a legitimate challenge to future artists, because we do not immediately shrug and say, “I could have done that.” Instead we are left asking, “Where did that come from? How did that work? Why does it affect me this way time and time again? How can I bring my own version forth of something so strong and lasting?”
The mark of great art is neither, “huh?” or “eh.” It is, “wow.” And the experience of “wow” is always accessible–always human.
Possibly Related Posts:
9 Comments
I’m a dork. I never intended to disable comments — must have just fat-fingered some setting late last night when posting this. Apologies to anyone who got the “talk to the hand” message earlier.
Au contraire, mon frere…I have indeed sat in (and taught) workshops with beginngers. As I’m preparing to guest edit an online zine, I’ve received some submissions thare are amateurish to the point of illiteracy. Of course, that’s my opinion.
As I’ve said on my blog (and others) as this discussion continues, lately I’ve been grading poetry on whether is moves me or not, rather than good or bad. Does it stick with me, elicit a response, make me want to read it again? However, a number of fellow poets have said this is basically the same thing as “good” or “bad,” although I disagree. I think saying the poem moved me is a more honest expression of personal taste. I really don’t think we’ve created a yardstick or the language to really classify good and bad poetry.
As for accessible poetry, I blame Jorie Graham and her ilk for making “accessible” a dirty word. I’d rather read Collins or Kooser any day than some of hre new mumbo jumbo. Kooser, in particular, is a brilliant poet. His work moves me to genuflecting and when I saw him here in Atlanta, one of his poems made me cry.
Thanks, Collin. I recently made my way through _Shadows_And_Delights_ and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve also enjoyed many of the poems in Collins’ _The_Art_Of_Drowning_. I agree that the most honest and accurate things we can say about a poem must necessarily stem from our experience of the poem, and how it affected us. That certainly seems to engender the most effective approach to workshops. But I think we can go beyond this — if not as artists, as literary critics — to extrapolate from our own experience into what the poem might do generally to a reader, and why. It’s risky territory — as far too many critics seem to want to write poems about the poems, rather than falling back on what is said, and what effect it has, and why. Still, I think we can gauge the impact of a poem on its reader in a relatively objective way. In fact, even without detailed critical analysis, we very often know intuitively if a poem works or does not work. The highest praise I think we can ever expect for a poem is to read it once, and have the listener say something as prosaic as, “Wow. That was good.”
A thoughtful rebuttal from Michael Wells is here:
http://stickpoetsuperhero.blogspot.com/2006/09/problem-of-accessibility.html
Every twelve-year old cannot write prose. Have you had any contact with college students recently? You never really define what you mean by “accessible” or “communicate” or any of the main terms you use here.
I wasn’t sure whether your remarks about meter being passé were sarcastic or in your own voice. Also, I didn’t know whether you were talking about “modern” poetry or “contemporary” poetry, not at all the same thing. Every good poet I know certainly knows meter backwards and forwards, even if *they* don’t use it. At the very least they are familiar with the poetic tradition in the language going back to Chaucer.
Poetry is the most traditional art form, that is, the art form most steeped in its own tradition. This is certainly true of “modern poetry” if you think of Pound, for example.
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for stopping by.
Sorry if I stepped on your scholarly toes by using modern and contemporary interchangeably. I know they are not the same from the standpoint of classifying periods in literature.
I also know meter backwards and forwards (having done my junior seminar at Berkeley on the Sonnets) — as do the poets I keep around me. Nor do I think all twelve year olds can write well — but they can, in fact, string words into sentences, paragraphs, and pages.
My point is, from the outside, writing poetry seems more accessible than ever — in much the same way that modern art consisting of geometric shapes or dribbles of paint also seems accessible. By accessible in relation to writing I mean, “able to be done.” By accessible in the act of reading, by contrast, I mean “able to be understood (not in a literal sense, as in “I understand your argument” — but able to convey its message in such a way that the intent of the message can be realized in the reader’s experience without the need for a PhD in the subject or a secret decoder ring). By communicate I mean, “impart the intended experience.” Thanks for pointing out the opportunity to clarify.
Given my understanding of classical music, borrowed largely through my wife who spent two decades as a professional pianist, it seems to me classical music may have trumped poetry as a tradition well steeped in itself. In fact, partly for that reason, I often see many parallels.
It’s not my “academic toes” you stepped on, but your own stated concern for “precision.” When you complained that poets said that they couldn’t write prose, you implied precision in language was a prerequisite. Yet you mangle the language yourself with “proliferance,” and can’t distinguish between “canvas” and “canvass.” By your own logic you should first learn precision in prose before you attempt poetry. Do you even realize you wrote defending “accesbiility” and then offered reasons why accesssibility is undesirable?
Yes, John. That was the point. See the title: it is not “a defense of accessibility.” Sorry if my typos pissed you off. I get a bit fast, loose, and lenient in the blogosphere.
p.s. Typos corrected. I guess next time I could reenlist my wife, the proofreading ninja.