Horizon

As a practical consideration, would you rather your daughter marry a poet or a novelist?

I think you are right about the drifting away from oral performance. For many of us poetry is an aural experience; and I’d say the best prose sounds poetic, whatever that means. I immediately think of the beginning of Hemingway’s In Another Country and the obvious last paragraph of Joyce’s The Dead.

Speaking of oral performance: a cousin – now in his eighties – will annually regale the family reunion with flawless recitations of Robert Service’s The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee.

I'd always gathered that prose overtook poetry when widespread literacy came about. Meter and rhyme were no longer needed for performers to memorize tales.

That doesn't explain poetry's persistence during the last five hundred years, though, or its disappearance in the last few decades. Your comment about recording technology puts me in the mind of the theory that the decline of classical music is due to the disappearance of singing or instrument-playing among the public.

As I understand it, the theory goes that back before recordings, you had to perform your own music or attend the performances of others. Listening to yourself or your neighbor screeching away meant that there was an appreciation for virtuosity, which fueled demand for classical music. Recording and broadcasting brought the best performances in the country into competition with local performances, which killed off the local performances. After a generation, this killed off recorded/broadcast classical music as well -- since nobody played anymore, nobody listened.

I'm not sure how much I buy this, but there are interesting parallels in poetry and drama. My great aunts reminisce that the favorite book at the farm they grew up in was something called The American Standard Speaker and Entertainer -- see the ad in the second paragraph at this UPenn library exhibit. I have read diaries entries that mention attending plays regularly in a rural schoolhouse. None of this survived movies, radio, or TV.

Is there such a thing as low-brow or middle-brow poetry anymore? I don't think so, and gather that there once was. Kipling probably fit into one of those categories, if I remember my Orwell.

But competition from TV still doesn't explain all of the state of poetry. It may explain why my neighbor doesn't read any, but it doesn't explain why I don't. My taste in reading matches that of most people who post here, and I don't have any competition from TV. Sara and I even read aloud to each other, so it's not oral performance either.

The printing press, increased literacy, the Reformation, the rise of the novel. Must be something to all of that. Art forms come and go or at least fade in eminence. A strong case can be made that cinema is replacing the novel. The ascent of prose did not kill the poet but can’t we say it raised (or reduced?) him to a sort of cloistered priesthood? That’s not fair, really, because the poet held his place of honor almost to the end of the 20th century. But it seems that when the gods began speaking directly to each man, the poet was in trouble.

People still listen to “poetry” that is spoken well and entertains. There are still professional storytellers and cowboy poets, the office poet lives on and even the hunting camp poet. Granted, we might call it a knack for rhyming rather than poetry, but the average slob will say it is poetry. And the average slob enjoys it.

You may say reading aloud to your partner/spouse is not oral performance, but it must be to a degree. You would not read her something you thought she wouldn’t want to hear, and you would read it as well as you are able.

We may not read poetry or have much of an appreciation of it as a modern art form, but its spirit lives.

Shouldn't leave out the hiphop nation. From her book, Get Off the Titty: Poetry That Bites, Robbyne Kaamil...

as the $4.25 an hour brother from the hood
stands guard at the exit

in the midst
they fail to see

the dresses under the mink
of that Park Avenue hag

BUT

they opt to watch me
because

I’m a nigger with a shopping bag

I'm not saying it's great (careful, middle-aged white guy talking), but it's got a certain power.

As Bobby's just suggested, we do have popular poetry for all tastes and all levels of brow, in the form of song lyrics.

I heard "Just Another Day In Paradise" on the radio in Phoenix a few years ago. It's heartbreaking if you think about it a certain way.

As a practical consideration, would you rather your daughter marry a poet or a novelist?

As someone now working, slowly and painfully, on The First Novel, I think I'd have to say poet.

I'd always gathered that prose overtook poetry when widespread literacy came about. Meter and rhyme were no longer needed for performers to memorize tales.

Right. I forgot to mention literacy, but printing is a necessary condition for it. With both, many poetic devices lost their practical use and became purely aesthetic, eventually making them seem rarified and affected. At least more so than before.

After a generation, this killed off recorded/broadcast classical music as well -- since nobody played anymore, nobody listened.

Seems to me there's some truth to this. Playing an instrument on some level is not only necessary to really appreciate virtuosity, but also few people now have the "theoretical", I guess you'd say, background to appreciate a lot of classical music.

I suppose you could see the fall of classical music as a similar process. There used to be a lot more rather silly, crowd pleasing classical music composed whereas now, leaving out film scores, it's mostly heady and artsy stuff. (Which is not to say that some of it isn't fantastic.)

Is there such a thing as low-brow or middle-brow poetry anymore? I don't think so, and gather that there once was. Kipling probably fit into one of those categories, if I remember my Orwell.

Newspapers used to publish, not so long ago, original poems which were generally pretty awful as you might imagine. As with classical music, though, poetry's increasing perception as a pure, artificial and traditional art form means that the field is left completely to the academics and intellectuals (and, it must be said, having worked in a classical music store for years, good old fashioned snobs looking to flaunt their status, cf. the old BMW radio commercials that used to tell listeners, in the most offensively snooty tone, that they were intelligent because they liked both Bach and BMWs).

And I can't speak for anyone but myself here, but the effect which its new place in our culture has had on the poetry itself is probably the main reason why I don't read much of it very often.

Like, to give you an example, if I hear one more old American poet who smokes pipes and wears ribbed turtlenecks publishing through some academic press a book of poems about the god damn wildlife in his back yard I think I'll just have to scream.

Did I mention that I got to be part of a prize jury at the final reading of one of Robert Hass's poetry classes? Ah, now that's a story.

Your academic press comment reminds me of Neal Stephenson's writers' conference anecdote in the second question of this Slashdot interview.

Ah, now that's a story.

Do tell.

The Service poems put me in the mind of Tom Russell's song "The Sky Above, The Mud Below". The (probably bootlegged) lyrics are here, but you should really hear sung it if you can.

...poems about the god damn wildlife in his back yard...

Now were you alluding to Robert Hass here? Because I did find this by him:

Walking, I recite the hard
explosive names of birds:
egret, killdeer, bittern, tern.
Dull in the wind and early morning light
the striped shadows of the cattails
twitch like nerves.

What struck me more was this introduction to his work by Brighde Mullins:

"A man choosing the words he lives by" is James Merrill's description of a poet -- and it is a fitting description of Robert Hass, whose words are active and suggest not only a way of composing but also a way of experiencing reality. His three books of poems open zones of contemplation and revelation. The grand scale of his native Northern California is made visible through his precise and highly musical sensibility, as he capitulates to the rhythm of pure relationships, of description, of naming, of saying.

Opening zones of comtemplation and revelation may be important work but it's not storytelling. Since poetry gave way to prose as the preferred storytelling form, poets
have become, at best, a sort of pilot fish of language, and, at worst, the daft uncle we trot out at inaugurations.

Neal Stephenson's a smart and interesting guy. Still haven't read one of his books though. Any particular one you recommend, Ben?

Telling the poetry contest story is a tall order. I'll have to make it a new post and write it out when I feel up to the task. A version of it may wind up in my entirely-too-autobiographical book.

Now were you alluding to Robert Hass here?

He's one example, though the particular poet I had in mind, I can't remember his name. This sort of poet is all over the place in America, really.

For the record, I also hate Wordsworth.

Opening zones of comtemplation and revelation may be important work but it's not storytelling.

I want to find one of these zones. I wonder if there are any around here? Would they serve beer? Would smoking be prohibited? Would they make you sit bolt upright for 45 minutes listening to the names of birds? Yeah, I bet they would.

"...But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different creature from the sort she generally associated with....

That's lovely. Thx, Ben.

But I don't know if she'd want to associate either with the lesser-known poets who set their words to music around here. One works night shift in a locked mental ward. Another is a dosing nurse in a methadone clinic.

Speaking of naming things, I like that poem by Henry Reed, "Naming of Parts", and the rest of the cycle, too.

Although that site has a recording of the poem read by the author which makes me like it less.

This discussion may benefit from a review of what poetry actually sells -- surely that's what people are reading (if not actually peforming)?

Amazon's top sellers for poetry:
They are updated hourly, but here's the top 5 list right now:
The Illiad (Fagles' translation)
The Odyssey (Fagle's translation)
Gilgamesh : A New English Version (Stephen Mitchell's translation)
The Prophet (Kahlil Gibran)
Waiting for Godot (Beckett)

From this, I draw a couple of conclusions (other than Amazon's definition of poetry is really wide):
1. Popular poetry these days is good translations of ancient poetry. And it's probably read, not spoken or peformed.
2. Although I'm really not sure The Prophet is poetry, Gibran's chapters on love and marriage are probably the most performed public poetry readings. Why, you say? Because 2 out of the last 4 weddings I've been to have featured readings from these chapters.

Which leads to another interesting conclusion, that weddings are the last widespread public forum for poetry reading, of both professional and amateur quality. In addition to the Gibran readings (and that ever popular Apache wedding blessing), the last wedding I went to featured a song composed and peformed for a couple and a couple years ago I attended one with a poem written by a "real" professional (academic) poet for the couple.

I suspect that as weddings become for secularized, modern poetry is replacing psalms as ways of transcending the everyday (because poetry is no longer an everyday event). I don't actually see this forum for poetry changing much or going away.

Welcome, Sara.

It seems to me poetry also gets read at funerals, graduation ceremonies, and other solemn occasions. Maybe it's that we just have fewer solemn occasions than previous generations did?