On my way home, I had a strange and overpowering desire to buy a copy
of "In Memoriam A.H.H" and stopped at a rather large, commercial
bookshop in what turned out to be an overly optimistic quest. I
should have known that commercial bookstores today - motivated as
they are by search of profit and beset as they are by a striking lack
of readers interested in anything more sophisticated that Nora
Roberts and Dan Brown - do not carry books such as the one I sought.
The only poetry I was able to find was the large, expensive
"Collected Works of..." Penguin Classics, which are utterly soulless
and a rather unpleasant way to read a poem. These books are much more
like Almanacs, reference books, than aesthetic experience. There is
so much to focus on that the eye, unable to settle on one thing,
gorges on it all, absorbing very little of it. At least, such has
been my experience with them. The vast majority of the poetry I own
is, of course, in these large volumes, because I seem not to have a
choice: there isn't much call for the individual printing of even
Tennyson's works, which I sought today, let alone someone talented
but generally obscure like Andrew Marvell. Individual volumes of
poetry are still published by contemporary poets, of course, but
seldom reprints of anyone volume of the ancients: it's just moor
convenient and cheaper to slap them in a shitty paperback anthology
devoid of competent editing or illuminating marginalia that has
traditionally been the only advantage that such dictionary-style
volumes. enjoy over their purer companions.
Perhaps this is because poetry, as a commercially viable profession,
no longer exists. Even Billy Collins struggles to make any money from
his books, and that's with all of Oprah's considerable heft
(literally and figuratively) thrown behind it. Most of the great
poets of the past, of course, were compelled to write more profitable
forms of literature during the day, churning out their verses at
night, but at least they were doing so, at least there was some
market. I believe that today I was searching for a flame whose last
strong leap came with Hart Crane and Robert Frost in the middle of
the century in America, and has been mostly dying since then. It's
not just that very little of what I consider to be good poetry is
being published these days (though this is true: most poetry is
artless free form published in self-referencing journals of painful
solipsism and miniscule readership), it's that people don't want to
read anything else anymore. Poets may once have been the
'unacknowledged legislators of the world' but there is no one with
that power now, because no one pays attention. At least that I have
seen. I should be quite happy to be proved wrong, because every time
I bemoan modern poetry's health, someone shows me a Maya Angelou or
Rita Dove poem, and I want to throw up. The canon is still loudly and
lavishly cultivated by the academy, but it is essentially a static
corpus because very little is being added to it. Sure, nothing
becomes classic until its creator has been dead 50 years, but is
there anyone writing at the moment whose gifts even belong in the
same library with John Donne, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson,
Yeats, and company? We can keep teaching the past - and we must - but
I'm worried about the present. Popular music used to be that
performed by symphonies, popular art was painted by Turner, and
popular literature used to be written by the Charles Dickens. Now we
have Britney Spears, Pollock, and Dan Browne. What has happened?
Of course "popular" used to refer to a much smaller audience. During
the times to which I refer, few people could read and even fewer
could access music. Those who could were the 'elite'. Since then,
there has been significant technological and educational
democratization of the arts, which can be much more widely
disseminated and enjoyed than even 100 years ago. Surely, this is a
good thing - but at what price? It seems, at least to me, that it is
has been a dumbing down of the faculty of appreciation of the 'good
stuff'.' There has always been a tension, of course - and perhaps a
necessary one - between the academy and the masses over the
arbitration of taste. Most 'great' art is, in the first instance,
quite inaccessible. It is only through grappling with a great poem or
symphony that its beauty and meaning is unlocked. But when this
occurs, it's a much more majestic and artful truth for having been so
difficult to attain, for this cognitive barrier can impose a
necessary sophistication and grace that would be lacking among the
easily-digestible fodder produced for the best seller lists that are
now stacked in book stores such as the one I visited today.
I realize that. I realize that there will never be millions of people
clamoring for the latest portfolio of pastoral elegies in the way
that they clamor for the Harry Potter books, and that's fine. Perhaps
that's a sign of the continuing vitality of of the critical apparatus
that it reserves its high praise and publication numbers so as not to
demean the next Paradise Lost by sending it straight to slickly
illustrated paper back.
But high art, if great art, eventually becomes popular art...or at
least semi-popularly accepted art. Every school child has read some
Robert Frost, even if it's just 'Stopping by Woods On A Snowy
Evening.' And that's almost enough, because it's something, it's a
measure of exposure to one of the greats. But who is writing today
that will be seen in the textbooks in 50 years? I'm an educated
person and I look for these things. I'm probably on the fringe
between academic and popular audiences as far as poetry is concerned:
I don't read the trade journals, but I'll spend hours with the poem
itself, I probably have a more finely-honed faculty than some, and
even I can barely tell you what's being written today that is of any
merit. And if I, who am searching, cannot find, what is the
likelihood that today's verse will touch a broader audience? Poetry
just doesn't have the same penetrating relevance that it used to.
Even educated people can barely name the Poet Laureate of the United
States because the last giant to hold that post was Robert Frost. Who
can say from memory even one of Billy Collins' poems? Perhaps you can
if you're quite special (and thankfully these people remain) but the
majority of the rest of us haven't got a clue, which isn't nearly as
alarming as the fact that we probably will /never/ have a clue.
All this is to say that today's bookstore experience was somewhat of
a frustrating one. I did not find what I sought, but I did stand,
without noticing, for 2 hours and a half reading the entirety of
introductory and biographical portions of an 'Anthology of the
Greatest Poets In the English Langauge', as compiled by the amply-
jowled Yale professor Harold Bloom. Being immersed as I was in such a
multitude of transcendent lyric, I was both inspired at the majesty
of the past and worried by the potential artistic heritage of the
future.
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