The Marginalization of Poetry in Contemporary Culture
by Harvey Lillywhite
Here is an essay (French essai, trial, attempt, from Old French, from essayer, to attempt, from Vulgar Latin exagiāre, to weigh out, from Late Latin exagium, a weighing : Latin ex- + Latin agere, to drive.) about
how poetry has
been marginalized in our
society, and
ghettoized into the small
literary mags. And why this
might be.
about the
marginalization
of
poetry (and
its reverse side, the
deification of it, taking it out
of the lives of
everyday people), and
about the
contempt the culture approaches
it with, and about
how that
contempt reveals
a weakness and a fear of
what poetry is saying
To begin, a few preliminary points: First, in 1995, the current (14th) Poet Laureate of the United States, Donald Hall, published a book, Death to the Death of Poetry, in which he argues pretty well that while everyone at any time upon the face of the earth has felt that poetry is dead, dying, and/or marginalized it’s not. In fact, he shows statistics to prove that it’s ten times more popular now that it has ever been. (More poetry readings. More poetry web sites. More books of poetry published and reviewed. More poetry writing classes taught. Etc., etc.) For an interesting and a somewhat amusing article by Hall that summarizes his book, go to http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16222. You might also look at a seriously academic article on the state of poetry’s marginalization from 2000 by Anthony Mellors & Robert Smith, which you can find at http://cfp.english.upenn.edu/archive/1999-05/0005.html.
Second, I’m operating under the assumption that words are inevitably pretty blunt instruments, even in the hands of the very best writers—certainly in my hands. They’re an ancient technology that seems to be hard-wired into our brains. So we use it. Obviously we rely on it. I would just ask that we make a conscious effort to keep in mind how words veil or put at a distance or color our simple everyday experiences while at the same time seeming to stand in for those very human moments. For dinner tonight I had pie. So what does that convey? It’s true; I could add modifiers that might help. Tonight I had kidney pie. Or I could give some background information. It was Valentine’s Day, so I made my wife steak and kidney pie with both our initials baked into the crust, reminding us both of our first meal together. Soon you’ve got a short story. But you still need to use your imagination a lot to fill in all the big and little nuances that words can’t carry. What does this have to do with poetry? We’ll see.
Third, poetry, as I imagine it, is also hard-wired into our consciousness. What is it after all? And where is it found? I was watching a National Geographic TV special recently that portrayed the evolution of humanity from one dead-end hominid species to another until it came finally to us. I thought of the big-hearted Neanderthals hunkered down together before a fire at the mouth of a cave, hirsute, all staring out at the sounds in the night and the stars in the darkness. Some of them had babies in their arms. And several of them were sort of humming rhythmically along as they rocked back and forth. And I thought, there’s poetry. It’s the voice disengaged from proper, practical uses. Except that poetry is absolutely necessary in all our lives. Consider the beginning of the following poem by James Tate:
Dream On by James Tate
Some people go their whole lives
without ever writing a single poem.
Extraordinary people who don't hesitate
to cut somebody's heart or skull open.
They go to baseball games with the greatest of ease.
and play a few rounds of golf as if it were nothing.
These same people stroll into a church
as if that were a natural part of life.
Investing money is second nature to them.
They contribute to political campaigns
that have absolutely no poetry in them
and promise none for the future.
They sit around the dinner table at night
and pretend as though nothing is missing.
Their children get caught shoplifting at the mall
and no one admits that it is poetry they are missing.
The family dog howls all night,
lonely and starving for more poetry in his life.
Why is it so difficult for them to see
that, without poetry, their lives are effluvial.
But it’s the voice—expressing what?—emotion. (See, words are such blunt instruments.) Expressing? Okay, thusness (non-duality). I don’t know. It depends, I guess.
But then when I see the paintings inside the cave at Lascaux—The Painted Gallery is justifiably considered to be the pinnacle of Paleolithic cave art, and, in my opinion, just as great as the ceiling of Cappella Sistina—I think, poetry. Watching another National Geographic TV special, I saw a professor who was trying to duplicate the painting technique used by the cavemen. He chewed various substances, mixed this in his mouth with saliva, and actually spit the paint into the rock, like a stone-age airbrush. It was touching to see him sort of speak the paint into the stone, sort of kiss it into the rock. And it worked.
So poetry, at heart, is the emanation of a voice—coyotes barking at the moon or elk bellowing their mating calls into the chilly fall air would both qualify. It’s a state of mind I suppose. Some have called it creating a sacred space. That’s fine, as long as we understand that by “sacred” we mean every single thing imaginable. To go so far as to call it Kosmos (In the beginning was the word….) is already missing the point. Let’s just say it is that it is without getting all religious and serious about it. It’s fundamental to being human, thus it actually can’t be marginalized, strictly speaking.
So let’s list all the obvious places where poetry can be seen with its hardhat on doing an honest day’s work: in song lyrics, hymns, curses are pretty poetic sometimes, in greeting cards, in the sixth grade when a visiting Poet comes in and makes the kids write a poem and have fun doing it, in advertisements, in political slogans, in film, on TV, in a couple of lovers sitting, arms around each other, one’s head on the other’s shoulder, talking a little nonsense, or in the last awful gasps of my Dad dying of cancer—yes, I heard it there—in the owl that hoo-hoos at night in my backyard. It’s virtually everywhere. I forgot to mention the college textbooks full of serious poetry—the cathedrals of our culture—and the bookstores full of poetry books, and the actual self-appointed poets who stand before us and minister to us with their creations, their poems, and on the Advance Placement English tests where poems are flung down at poor high school students who have to account for their being and their aboutness.
So why is it then that poetry is so unpopular? Think of the Arts. There’s ballet, opera, the symphony, art in art galleries. None of these are exactly popular. They’re highbrow. They’re occasions for the rich to dress up and be seen together, and, to be completely fair, occasions for those who love those things to get them. They’re endowed with government funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. And there are popular equivalents of each: just regular dancing, singing, playing the banjo, and stick figure drawings. These are all popular. So if Poetry, with a capital “P” is an art for the well-educated, then there’s the popular equivalent: Roses are red, violets are orange, music is great, but poetry’s boring.
Consider the following poem:
That Time Of Year Thou Mayst In Me Behold
William Shakespeare
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
There’s an intricate poem you could read over and over and dissect down to dust. It takes time and inclination to get the “gold” from such a poem. This was court poetry for the most privileged in society. So how do the masses deal with this? Some of them dig it. Some of them couldn’t care less. As William Carlos Williams said, “So be it.” There’s never been a society, except the one Yeats imagined in “Byzantium,” where most of the people loved this stuff. I’m not especially interested in the spark plug, though many of the kids I grew up with knew as much about them as I know about this sonnet.
So if you asked me if poetry has been marginalized, I’d say something ridiculous like “Poetry is magic.” And if you asked me if it’s been ghettoized in small literary magazines, I’d say, “Poetry is at home in any ghetto.”
What is true, and probably most important for the readers of EAP, is that current culture approaches poetry with contempt. What’s especially interesting to me is how the Nazis and fascists in Spain and dictators in Central and South America sought out the poets and killed them for speaking the truth. (See Carolyn Forche’s anthology Against Forgetting from 1993. See her website at http://mason.gmu.edu/~cforchem/bio.html.)
Ah, speaking the truth. There’s a word—a blunt instrument. I believe it derives from the same indo-European root as the word “tree,” which is a metaphor for the truth—something lasting, with roots, that sprouts, that turns mere sunshine into matter. Few cultures (read: regimes) can tolerate the truth. The marketplace, the powers that be, the political machinery that protects what people own, all need, of course, a certain spin. And doesn’t it send shivers down your spine when you hear about the Bush administration tapping phones and opening the mail?
(This isn’t to say that poetry is the truth. But I’d say that if there’s something like a pure poetic instinct—tied to the truth as we know it very personally in a very everyday and deeply emotional way—we need to hear it expressed, and poetry can express it. Lots of poems, however, have been composed in support of what is not the truth.) It’s no surprise at all that poets are political targets. Let us admit the multitude of voices crying out, even those that offend us.
As I think about this, I recall Amiri Baraka, who was one of my two thesis advisors during my graduate MFA program. One day he came into class and spent over thirty minutes without saying a word, filling up the chalkboards with his revisionist view of the canon of American literature. This was in 1980. He was writing names of writers, women and people of color, I’d never heard of. He brought to class some of his friends he’d published in Black Fire, his poetry anthology. Larry Neal taught his class one day and read us poems from the anthology. These were poems that saw me, a white-upper-middle-class-student-at-an-Ivy-League-university, as the enemy. So, was that the truth? It’s complicated, right? Words are difficult enough to manage. When you get to concepts like truth, it’s just about hopeless. But let’s keep our ears open.
So poets are targets and shamans and just regular folk who like to make poems. We pay quite a lot of attention to some poets, but most have a clerisy, a coterie, or just a few pals who put up with the stuff and pretend to like it.
We should all fear what poetry is saying. See The Aesthetic Dimension from 1978, Herbert Marcuse’s essay in defense of personal expression, the source, as he sees it, of the spirit of revolution. If there ever comes a time when poetry isn’t approached with contempt, we should shudder. Either we’ve died, or poetry has.
In closing, a poem by Wallace Stevens. What should we make of it?
Six Significant Landscapes
I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.
II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.
III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.
IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.
V
Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.
VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
Rationalists would wear sombreros.