Filed under: Quillblog, Griffin Poetry Prize, Poetry
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Why do people hate poetry?
Given the recent furor over the Oxford professor of poetry post, not to mention the hefty sums handed out to A.F. Moritz and C.D. Wright at the Griffin Poetry Prize ceremony last week, it might seem counterintuitive to argue that people feel antipathetic toward what Chaucer called “the craft so long to lerne.” But that’s precisely what Harry Eyres did in this weekend’s Financial Times online.
Beginning with the notion that the recent controversy in Britain exemplifies “much more nervousness and discomfort about the cardinal art form than genuine understanding and love,” Eyres goes on:
It might be better to ask ourselves why, on the whole, we hate poetry – that is to say why we ruthlessly marginalise it and exile it to a cold place of almost total neglect – than to utter dishonest platitudes about how great it is.
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Poetry is up against it in all sorts of ways. Unlike video games, reality television, amateur dance troupes, it is not a cultural phenomenon that is generally welcomed into people’s lives. But what could it do for us, if we would allow it?
What indeed? In response, Quillblog would like to direct Eyres’s attention to the words of James Wood, the critic for The New Yorker, and not exactly a literary slouch, who had this to say at the Griffin awards last week:
Poetry waves a flower in the face of a highly utilitarian age. That great secular hybrid, pragmatic evolutionary psychology and neuro-aesthetics, is busy telling us that art is a slightly puzzling evolutionary superfluity. Art is defended as “cognitive play,” crucial for the evolutionary development of homo sapiens. Art, for such people, must always somehow be justified. But poetry sings the song of itself, and offers a musical gratuity. Just as no one should have to justify, in pragmatic terms, playing the piano or listening to Bach, so no one should have to justify reading Keats or Wallace Stevens. And I am not making the weak case that poetry evades or exceeds such pragmatic cost-counting, but that it challenges such utilitarianism, makes it doubt itself. It faces down the enemy.
Even when the enemy surfaces in a respected British tabloid.
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People hate poetry because: a) they’ve learned to assume that poetry is hateful, dry and dismal stuff; and, b) much of the poetry out there is hateful, dry, and dismal stuff.
If ‘people’ (who that then?) do hate poetry – some do, some don’t – it is because it is a right brain activity in a left brain world. If ‘the people’ (?etc )all stopped the headlong flight for a few moments (‘distracted from distraction by distraction’) to really look at a land-scape or a sea-scape or a good poem, there is a real risk that the whole set of spinning plates would start to crash about our heads.
If people do hate poetry, it is because the activity of taking time to absorb good poetry is literally full of risk in our society. It deploys the wrong kind of energy.
Pace!
Poetry may be song but most poets can’t sing. It is astounding how badly most poets read from their work in public. And if the acceptances speeches at the recent Griffin Poetry Awards Dinner are any indication they lack the passion and imagination to touch a crowd. And as much as I admire the work of James Woods that kind of babble you quoted is another reason poetry has few true champions. His was a language aimed at an exclusive audience. Snobbish and hectoring. The success for poetry on that Griffin night came from a reading of six poems by German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Sweet, cruel, and strung on the key of life.
Angel Guerra is right about Woods’ “babble.” I’m sick to death of hearing these caricatures of what “evolutionary psychology” and “neuro-aesthetics” have to say about art. All it reveals is that Woods has read almost nothing on a subject which is–or should be–incredibly valuable to anyone interested in making or reading poetry–and an awful lot of poets recognize this and are actively exploring these subjects and integrating what they’ve learned into their poems. Woods’ pseudo-religious gabble misses the point by a barn’s width.
Mr Wells, I could not have said it better.
I hate poetry, because most people who enjoy it are stuck-up pseudo-intellectuals.
It’s Wood — James Wood.
James Woods would have given a more menacing, less articulate speech, and then he would have picked a fight with Moritz in the bathroom.
Personal attacks work best when you attack the right person.
If he was any more wrong, there’d be two of him…
People don’t hate poetry. They just don’t care about poetry and this seems to bother a certain faction. I think they need to ask themselves why. Why they care if or think that people should give a rats ass. Are these people also crying over the lack of public and media interest in, say, classical guitar? or sculpture? or interpretative dance? or any other fringe art that has seen its hay day many a year ago. A very very small faction of the general public reads poetry, has heard of A. F. Moritz, and is aware that the Griffin Awards exist. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Welcome to the world of the arts.
Last Wednesday when Wood was spewing his tired lament of the popular state of poetry at the Griffins there is a damn good chance that at that very same time there was a similar event happening somewhere in the world at which some wryly funny blowhard was lamenting about the lack of love coming polka music’s way.
Zach makes a good point. For example, Denis Dutton’s suggestion that storytelling is an important didactic and instructive component of Darwinian adaptation, that it helps humans to develop interpersonal skills, and to regulate social behavior, and that the survivors of our species were ones who had the most refined capacity to use this faculty…these are all valuable insights.
The general population ignores poetry because it is largely boring academic stuff created by stuffed owls in assorted higher learning centres — poet’s impressing other poets with erudition. It’s a stuffed shirt practice in which political, social proprieties take precendent. Poets seem incapable of applied poetry, in the same manner as applied arts. They presume that poetry should remain in its upright position on a page, or gargled in backroom bars.
Dennis Lee’s, YES/NO is absolutely brilliant, a compression chamber of sensibility and language. It is of such quality that it is inaccessible to the public and to much of the cognisensual. It could hardly be otherwise.
And then there is the “people’s poets” who posture in poetry for the people, and the people, being sensible creatures, couldn’t care less. How many of “the people” show up for a poetry performance of a “peoples poet.” I don’t recall seeing the collected works of Milton Acorn on the bookshelves of line labourers. They prefer the line-a-laugh wit of Two-and-Half Men than the pap of a people’s anything. Poets like to display their condescension and scorn about popular culture, Starbucks, MacDonalds, TV, etc because they believe themselves to be of a higher more refined sensibility. It is as much political crap as it is poetical crap.
Poets are well-endowed with imagination. They should be expanding that turf off the page, out of the backrooms, and applying it to the world at large in ways other culturati attract attention. Poetry, as honed by many of its practitioners, seems to have become the language equivalent of The-Best-Damned-Buggy-Whip-Design.
Meanwhile I have to go convince an architect & developer to build a 14-story condo in the shape of a Petrarchan Sonnet; clad in ivory if obtainable. Or perhaps row housing in iambic pentameter.
I think the issue with poetry is that it isn’t written for the masses but a specific portion of the populace. It’s this alienation of the larger audience that works against poetry as a whole.
At the risk of pissing a whole bunch of poets off, I have to say that if the majority of people hate poetry it’s probably because it has become a soap box for many controversial subjects instead of simply a beautiful art form meant to evoke deep emotion. Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and a place for almost everything but when the topics become as narrow as the minds writing them, one has to wonder why. And one has to question motives and a movement that seems to be very much one-sided. Poets seem perplexed by the lack of promotion while, at the same time, expecting the masses to conform to a set of unwritten guidelines and views toward topics while mainstream America is not interested in hearing these viewpoints. I am in no way talking about ALL poetry but, as an editor, this certainly seems to be a widespread issue. That’s my 2 cents, for what it’s worth. Probably about 2 cents. :)
Sorry to say that Wally Keeler is absolutely correct. Talk about calling a spade a spade. The glove fits like a glass slipper. Oh well, Canlit still has its galas & chocolate fountains. The “hoi polloi” need not apply.
So much anger in most of these responses.
Only Sandee’s response “beautiful art form meant to evoke deep response…” is worth remembering.
Something’s gone missing. Its to do with language, its to do with industrialisation, its to do with commoditisation. Poets were originally healers in early societies; they had status, and their task was, through the power of communally understood language, rhythm and image, to knit together entire communities through the evocation of shared experience. All types of communal trauma could be mastered by this means.
But now the poets are read only by the many ‘professors’ (interesting word), themselves reduced to parasites in a material age. And academics, as a rule, have very little interest in the healing role of true poetry. Better to deconstruct the language than try to understand the mastered emotion.
If ‘people’ hate poetry, it is because society is no longer capable of listening; one of the many reasons why society may no longer be capable of listening is because many so-called poets do not have the power to sing – so Angel’s comment may be worth remembering too, although perhaps not in the sense that he intended it.
apologies
“deep emotion…” not “…deep response…”
People hate poetry? Uh, it’s called rap, dudes. And as for Canadian poets, I guess you haven’t heard of a guy named Drake?
Wow. Having managed to establish myself as the voice of doom on this topic earlier in the week, its time to slip on the shorts and the sandals and pick up a chilled one…what did Joyce say? ‘all these big words that make us all so sad…’
To the nay sayers – read Sonnet 64 by Shakespeare and then tell me that poetry has got nothing to offer. We need to remember that “Poetry” isn’t just what is turned out at the moment…in fact, its rarely that at any time.
Ciao people!
Nic, you mean the guy from Degrassi?
Why does everyone have to like poetry? Except for Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Byron, few poets have made much cash off the thing. So if the motivation isn’t cash, then why does it matter how many people like it? Are we collecting souls? Are we after fame?
Oh, and anyone who says the problem is “academic poetry” hasn’t read enough poetry. There are a load of assumptions in those quotations and I distrust anyone who uses that as a crutch to an argument about the ills of contemporary poetry.
I’m pretty sure more people are reading poetry now than ever before. We might have more people who are literate, and of those, a lower percentage reading poetry. But hard numbers might show we’re in a good stretch, if that’s the goal.
Are we just trying to get bums in seats?