On poetry and accessibility.
Summer before last, amid all the recession and jobs
talk on Capitol Hill, Bill Keller,
the Executive Editor of The New York Times
wrote an article for the Sunday magazine,
musing that if Congress read some poetry, quote,
"it might make them a little more human," unquote.
Not that it would improve them morally,
but that it might help them to, quote, "think outside the box."
Earlier in the article, he confesses,
quote, "I prefer craft to spontaneity,
accessible to esoteric, and poems
that engage both head and heart, but that's just me, unquote."
This is the paradox of poetry for the intelligentsia today,
to be implemented as an anodyne to business as usual
in the marketplace, but please don't
be esoteric in your verse.
In other words, poetry should be fresh and irreverent, quirky,
even, but never out of reach, never just spontaneous.
What folks like Keller seem to want from poetry
is a poem deprived of its force, a poem captured like a leopard,
listlessly stalking behind bars at the zoo, if not declawed,
then sufficiently caged off.
Indeed, a poem without poetry.
Yet, what Keller says, I think, is actually
indicative of poetry's power, its vivacity, its otherness.
When we want poetry to behave, it will not.
When we want poetry to body forth and somehow improve
the hearts and minds of our elected officials on contact,
it cannot.
We are told again and again that for poetry
to be digestible in a broadly appealing way.
Apparently, it must be poetry paired up with something else.
For Natasha Trethewey to be invited to Fresh Air,
there must be a pitch, poetry beside a familiar topic.
Poetry "plus" is what Marjorie Perloff calls this.
For Trethewey, that means poetry plus her biracialness, which
allows Terry Gross to ask, quote, "what does
Obama's election mean to you?"
For former poets laureate, it is poetry plus the homelessness
of a brother, Robert Hass, or poetry
plus the death of a parent, WS Merwin.
And really, why should this surprise us?
It just exploits the fact that poetry can
speak to literally anything.
And so long as the host sticks to the topics we're safe with--
politics, death, family-- then we
will avoid having to talk about what animates poetry,
the language itself, of course.
So much so, perhaps, that for Billy Collins,
it is poetry plus accessibility itself.
Poets on Fresh Air are treated like 21st century mystics,
with specialized access to their own experience.
There is so little mention of language in these interviews
that you might forget that poets work with words at all.
Yet, even Collins, the author of a book called The Trouble
with Poetry, says that this talk of accessibility is now like,
quote, "nails on a blackboard to him."
Isn't this the double bind of poetry?
In order for it to command a popular audience--
and Collins's books have, indeed,
sold millions of copies--
it must deploy what we call accessibility,
in terms of ease of access or lack
of any apparent difficulty, which is to say,
familiarity, recognizability, even avuncular friendliness
in tone, form, and diction, the very qualities for which
his poems are lauded, sometimes even to Collins's
own consternation.
But more on Collins's curious response
to being the poet of accessibility later.
The question comes back to our assumptions
about clarity, which is no more a metaphor for reading
than the term "accessibility," as Rae Armantrout asks,
quote, "what is the meaning of clarity?
Is something clear when you understand it
or when it looms up, startling you?"
Myung MI Kim puts it this way.
"I think the question here is, can the broad masses actually
have a lot more to say about what's scrutable, and readable,
and intelligible than what someone
else external to the broad masses has determined.
That's really the question, to some degree.
In other words, who has the privilege to say,
this is transparent?"
Unquote.
Of course, each poet must ask and re-ask,
what should a poem be, What should it
do, how should it sound, what should it look like,
and how should it behave?
At the moment we concede the terms
of what form a poem should take to a reader new
to poetry in service of readability and access,
the discussion shifts to accommodating or pleasing
somebody who doesn't now read or necessarily care for it anyway.
Am I naive to be confident that poetry doesn't
need to be diminished to attract new readers,
having endured as it has for at least a few thousand years?
And anyhow, to quote O'Hara, "nobody
should experience anything they don't need to.
If they don't need poetry, bully for them.
I like the movies too, unquote."
When we reduce the discussion to the terms of access
and accessibility, what is implied through these words
is that entry has been barred, that we are prevented
from experiencing the meanings of these difficult poems,
despite the fact that many of us are literate adults.
When the word "access" is used in this way,
rhetorically it stages the poem as the esoteric structure
of a willful obscurantist, who would prefer
that you don't even bother until you have read
your way through the library.
But this is not the way of poets I know.
Most of us crave some small readership,
without having to dilute or summarize
the verses we've worked solitarily to invent.
Last night, I googled the word "poetry."
Of the 260 million entries which contain that word,
the first three links are to the following sites.
The Academy of American Poets, which
boasts entire subcategories of poetry
devoted to teenagers, sharks, and drinking,
among dozens of others.
The second link directs you to the Poetry Foundation
in Chicago, which to date has 10,426 poems
online, searchable by theme, title, and author.
And the third is to something called poetry.com,
which boasts, quote, "14 million poems and growing"
under its heading--
14 million.
Do we really believe that there is some drought of poems
that we might call accessible?
In fact, this call to poets to be accessible,
which is most commonly made in its opposite form
to dismiss a poet out of hand because
of their so-called inaccessibility,
is levied like there is some basic shortage of poetry
written in the English language and that the obscure as well
as established poets out there jauntily
writing their strange verses better
shape up so that common readers can actually
begin to understand some of this especially scarce stuff.
Randall Jarrell and his 1953 lecture,
The Obscurity of the Poet, put it like this.
Quote, "people who have inherited the custom of not
reading poets justify it by referring
to the obscurity of the poems they have never read,
since most people decide that poets are obscure,
very much as legislators decide that books are pornographic,
by glancing at a few fragments someone
has strung together to discuss them," unquote.
It seems to me that there are very few things
quite as accessible, in the material sense, as poetry.
As far as I know, there is no library bereft
of at least a few beat-up anthologies replete with poems,
oftentimes with helpful introductions,
biographical sketches, and even discussion questions
accompanying the work.
If you mean literal access, as in entry, admittance,
and permission to use, well, there are a few things as
accessible as poetry.
Funnily enough, never has the overdeveloped world
had more access to learning how to read, understand,
and appreciate what a poem can do,
as every year more scholars, and critics,
and poets themselves publish works
devoted to courting intimidated or perplexed would-be readers
of poetry.
Recent titles devoted to reading, and understanding,
and enjoying poetry, whether by David Orr,
Stephen Burt, Harold Bloom, or Charles Bernstein
come to mind here.
Yet, suddenly, the poet herself is an elitist
if the poem's language resists immediate familiarity.
Poiesis means "to make," not "to make familiar."
And this charge of elitism is possibly the saddest failure
of imagination.
And I hear it often from my students,
students who've voluntarily registered for a poetry course.
If elitism is the practice or belief in the rule by an elite,
select, or favored group, I hope I don't need much time here
to convince you that poets are hardly part of any elite class.
So what is it that we fear?
Susan Howe responds this way.
Quote, "why should things please a large audience?
And isn't claiming that the work is too intellectually demanding
also saying a majority of people are stupid?
Different poets will always have different audiences.
Some poets appeal to younger people, some to thousands,
one or two to millions, some to older people, et cetera.
If you have for readers who you truly touch and maybe even
influence, well, that's fine.
Poetry is a calling.
You are called to write, and you follow," unquote.