Off the Mark

- By Michael Thurston

My first instinct was simply to shrug. Don’t respond, I thought. It just encourages them. But then the incoherence, the inaccuracy, the sheer ignorance of the thing became burrs under the saddle and just couldn’t be ignored.

It sometimes seems that early in each decade someone grabs a bigger-than-usual megaphone and climbs onto a bigger-than-usual soapbox to deplore the current state of poetry in America. You’d think someone could just recycle Dana Gioia’s early-90s version and spare someone like Mark Edmundson the effort. (On second thought, maybe that’s what Harper’s magazine really did for the piece published under Edmundson’s name in the magazine’s July issue). As these prods do, Edmundson’s essay has already aroused a buzzing cloud of responses, from an unpersuasive open letter on Slate to more measured and thoughtful replies.

Herewith, my own two-cents’ worth.

First, I should admit that I, too, dislike it. Contemporary poetry, that is. A lot of it. I’ve got my own list of poets I find overrated, poetics I think are vapid or dead-ended, themes I’d just as soon never again encounter, an entire list of complaints that would, if I let it, swell to overwhelm this modest post. I think most people who read widely in contemporary poetry (or contemporary anything) feel something like this. And I’ll stipulate to the stultifying effects of careerism and MFA program pedagogies. It is a truth universally acknowledged (though too often forgotten) that the vast majority of stuff published at a given moment in literary history is crap. Reading it, however, with perfect contempt for it, I, like many (and like Moore), from time to time discover in it a real toad or two, and not just paper flowers.

I think Edmundson would, too, if he looked a little harder, but more about that in a minute.

Problem the first with this essay is its incoherence. The problem with contemporary American poetry, according to Gioia, I mean Edmundson, is its modest immodesty, its diffidence about big public questions and lasting values and its insistent, loving gazing at poetic navels. Where to find the likes of Robert Lowell, whose Sunday morning anxieties encompassed the future of the nation in legible, accessibly sophisticated lines? The problem with contemporary American poetry, though, according to Edmundson, is that poets are concerned with things like race and gender. Where to find a Wallace Stevens, whose Sunday morning ponderings dispersed the holy hush of ancient sacrifice in contemplation of “our” universal values? The problem with contemporary American poetry is that it's too obscure. The problem is that it’s too plainspoken. Etc.

Here’s the problem with this take on contemporary poetry. It wants to insist that “the poem” is one thing, whether by “the poem” we mean that which is currently produced or that which would be in Edmundson’s ideal literary landscape. Currently “the poem” is afraid of its own philosophical and political shadows, obsessed with the poet’s own moments of insight, obscure in its interest in language, content to sweep and order a little neglected corner of the world. Ideally, “the poem” should exhibit “three qualities” brought by the poet: “the power of expression and the power to find a theme” plus ambition, defined as the willingness “to articulate the possibility that what is true for her is true for all.”

Digression alert! OK, we have to stop here for a minute because I’m noticing, and maybe you are too, that the indictment of contemporary poetry overlaps quite a bit with recent indictments (most masquerading as hand-wringing or defense) of the humanities in the contemporary university. There are villains behind these declines, my friends, and their names are Parochialism and Theory. Just as David Brooks, in a stupid New York Times column, blamed the (nonexistent) decline in Humanities enrollments on the replacement of the good, the true, and the beautiful with race, class, and gender, Edmundson suggests that political correctness prevents contemporary poets from speaking in the universal or royal “we.” It seems to escape these guys that some key questions of profound public value and urgency in American history and in current American society arise from the relationships of power to race, class, and gender. To demand public address but deplore the “parochial” concerns of everyone but middle-class straight white dudes (a.k.a. “universal”) is to demonstrate that you still need a basic education in humanistic studies. That education might also include a focus on how the power differences that construct a social fabric are carried in the threads of language itself, a focus that, at one end of the hall in the English department, sometimes goes by the name of theory (and at the other, in lucky departments, goes by the name of experimental or innovative writing). To demand public address but deplore the “theoretical” concern with how language itself works through and upon its speakers is to miss much of what has been valuable both in contemporary poetry and in precisely the poetry Edmundson holds up as the standard toward which poets ought to strive.

So “the poem” that bugs Edmundson is the generalization suggested by a set of particular exhibits (poems, or parts of poems, by W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, Seamus Heaney, Anne Carson, Adrienne Rich, Robert Hass, and Jorie Graham. “The poem” that would satisfy him? Why, that’s the generalization suggested by another set of particulars: Lowell, Yeats, and Eliot, along with the named but not quoted Stevens, Frost, Pound, Williams, Ginsberg, Crane, Whitman, Auden, Blake, Wordsworth. Not an obscure or self-obsessed line to be found in those oeuvres!

Are there not more poetries under heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Edmundson’s philosophy? Set to one side, for the moment, that Edmundson misreads the Heaney poem he discusses (“Punishment”) and that he mischaracterizes the work of Heaney’s fellow Northern Ireland Catholic, Paul Muldoon (looking for a long poem that brings the resources of poetic form to bear on intractable historical problems? Try Muldoon’s “The More a Man Has, the More a Man Wants”), and, um, that neither of these two is American. (Did I mention incoherence?) Notice the exhibits in his bill of particulars: all white, median age around 70, published, for the most part, by the small handful of big corporate presses (Norton, FSG, Faber, Random House). This is “contemporary” poetry? Dude, honestly.

What happens when we expand the view even just a little? Stay within the rough age bracket but look a little to the left of the big corporate publishers and you find someone like Susan Howe, who, as much as any living American poet, has explored fundamental questions of American history and identity in powerful ways. Is her work immediately accessible? No. Does it repay the effort it requires, just as Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Williams, and company require effort? It sure does. Or expand the demographic slightly and you find Harryette Mullen wittily eviscerating linguistic constructions of power through the discourses of advertising and pop culture that Edmundson finds poets avoiding (and working those veins much more searchingly and satisfyingly than does Frederick Seidel). You find Kimiko Hahn mixing memory and desire even as she mixes Asian influences and American idioms. Readjust the bifocals so you can see more early-career poets, and you find Joseph Massey undertaking the Emersonian imperative to transcribe Nature’s songs in the time signatures of Williams and the key of linguistic estrangement. Lowellesque linkage of intimate anxiety and public crisis in measured lyric strophes? How about Mark Doty? Powerful poetic attention to the wounds history leaves on the national body? How about Martin Espada? Carefully wrought investigations of the ways our very aesthetics are inextricable from our capacity for evil? Try Donna Stonecipher.

One could go on and on here, but the point is that if you’re going to decry the current state of American poetry, you ought to read some current American poetry. Beyond the stuff currently found between the covers of a Norton anthology.