On Our Contemptuous Poets

A couple of years ago my friend local physician Hal Conwell had a column in which he reacted to a book of poems I sent him: Michael Lieberman’s History of the Sweetness of the World, winner of our Poetry Breakthrough Series at Texas Review Press. Since Mike is the Chair of Pathology at Baylor College of Medicine and writes a lot about medical matters in his poetry, I thought Hal would like the collection.

Now, Howling Hal didn’t like some of Mike’s poems, and he did a bit of poetry bashing in that column, and some outright lying: I never did tell him not to take one of my poetry courses. As a matter of fact, he probably needs one of them, if for no other reason than to learn that poetry can be both sophisticated and accessible.

Hal did touch on a serious issue—much of the poetry published these days is “ethereal and arcane.” And I’ll admit that some of the material I use in The Texas Review and publish through the press I do not fully understand. (I don’t understand my wife completely, but that doesn’t mean I’m not profoundly in love with her.)

What I try to publish is poetry that demonstrates a balance between sophistication (of language and imagery and theme) and accessibility, something along the lines of what Robert Frost or Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote: poetry of wisdom and visual delight that may appeal at once to the scholar and the general reader. Hence, general readers, though they may not understand the poetry fully, nonetheless enjoy the experience of reading it instead of shaking their heads and saying, “I didn’t understand this, and I didn’t enjoy not understanding it.”

The contemporary poet has, for the most part, completely alienated the general reader, preferring to appeal to fellow poets, editors, and professors, who really are the ones who determine his/her ultimate fate in this game—they sit on the grant panels, they judge the poetry contests and edit the journals, they pay him/her to come to campus to read and conduct workshops, they nominate him/her for prizes, they put him/her in textbooks, they write articles and books about him/her when his/her reputation finally justifies it. (Yeah, I hate that him/her business, but Lord knows you have to use a wide net these days.) Why should our poets concern themselves with people who don’t care whether they live or die? (See, pluralize as poets, put the male and female together, and the sex problem goes away—now, ain’t that a hoot?) They’d just as soon he (or sheeee, as the case may beeee) leave the country tomorrow and die of lung cancer or melanoma on some beach in Southern France or wither away in a Moroccan prison on a drug charge, guilty or not.

The real irony here, though, is that these throngs of contemporary poets—or, put more accurately, contemptuous poets—are supported by the very people they scorn: the average American reader, who is the average American taxpayer (and I’m talking here about people across the spectrum, people like Hal Conwell, not just people struggling through Reader’s Digest). Where do you think the money comes from to publish those journals and anthologies in which his/her work appears, to finance those readings and workshops he/she is paid well for conducting, to provide him/her grant assistance so that he/she may take off time from his job to write, to reward those professors who write articles and books about him/her? You don’t have to guess: you know. But he/she knows, too, that he/she doesn’t have to go directly to the taxpayer to ask for anything. He/she has a host of people running interference for him/her. (See, the more you sprinkle ‘round he/she, his/her, the more absurd it becomes.)

So he/she writes for whomever he/she damned well pleases, and that means the people directly in charge of his/her fate. And he/she knows that chief among his/her poetic attributes must be intrigue. He/she must intrigue and beguile and perplex with his/her poetry. He/she takes the old Emersonian maxim “To be great is to be misunderstood” and contorts it to read, “To be misunderstood is to be great.” (The fact is, my eleven-year-old son can write poetry I don’t understand.) He/she must make just enough sense, but not too much, for in that direction lies commonality and certain ruin. An obscurantist, he/she doesn’t want to be a Carl Sandburg or Edgar Lee Masters or Vachel Lindsay or even Frost or Robinson; he/she wants to be an Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens. He/she wants to belong to the Oh Wow/Far Out/Check-them-Footnotes! School of Poetry. Intrigue them, beguile them, perplex them, impress them with your learning: this is the combination that catapults the poet to stardom.

Too many of our poets are doing to American poetry what a lot of half-baked scholars are doing to American literary scholarship. The picture is not pretty, and the result of their murky magic is continued alienation of the poetic artist from the mainstream American reading public (whoever they are).

When I sent Hal a copy of my newest book of poetry, Circling, last year, he called and said there must be something wrong with the poems because he understood them. I just apologized and told him I’d try harder next time to confuse him.