I’m a lover of poetry, as you can probably tell from the number of posts listed in that category on my right sidebar (as I write this, it’s 161). But the poetry of the last twenty or thirty or even forty years leaves me cold, for the most part. Oh, there are some poets I think are decent, but they represent a small percentage of the whole, and there are none I think compare with the poets of the earlier part of the 20th century.
Of course, back then the world took poetry more seriously. And poets generally took their mission as poets very seriously indeed.
And it was even more so in a still-earlier time. Here’s Shelley, for example, in “A Defense of Poetry,” written in the early 19th Century:
“A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth . . . the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator.” The task of poets then is to interpret and present the poem; Shelley’s metaphor here explicates: “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”…
To Shelley, poetry is utilitarian, as it brings civilization by “awaken[ing] and enlarg[ing] the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.”…concluding with his famous last line: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
These days a lot of poets still take themselves and their mission quite seriously, but it’s a very different mission, and the circles they move in are very very small. Most of the time they are only important to themselves and to each other, and to the universities that are their usual stomping grounds. Much recent poetry reads like prose broken into lines that resemble poetry to the eye but not to the ear. And a tendency to pretentious and seemingly deliberate incomprehensibility makes much recent poetry accessible only to the academics who seem to make up the vast majority of those who write it, publish it, read it, and analyze it.
As for larger, non-academic venues for poetry, I can’t say I even knew that The Nation published poetry. The New Yorker, yes; as a former three-decades-long subscriber and faithful reader (I canceled around 2003, when I could no longer take their ubiquitous liberal slant), I knew they published poetry. But I’ve never been a Nation aficionado.
So I had initially missed the brouhaha about a poem entitled “How To” that was published there. Go here and scroll down till you get to it, and read. The poem is quite short, and quite accessible compared to a lot of poems written today. The furor seems to have come because it was written by a white guy in a voice that uses urban black syntax. Also, it’s got a political message (as does a lot of recent poetry) but it’s an interesting and perhaps incompletely-PC one, I think: instructions on how to get money from people in the street by begging. It ends with these lines:
…If you’re crippled don’t
flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough
Christians to notice. Don’t say you pray,
say you sin. It’s about who they believe
they is. You hardly even there.
Seems to me the poem is about the hypocrisy the speaker believes exists in people who give money to beggars, and could be summed up as “they’re virtue-signaling rather than actually caring.” It’s also about the tactics used by those begging in order to play on the motives of people giving them money.
Apparently this poem caused quite the social media uproar, so much so that the poetry editors of The Nation decided to issue a joint mea culpa. And what a mea culpa it is! As leftist and PC as the editors almost certainly are, apparently they weren’t PC enough for some readers. And, unlike in the Soviet Union, neither torture nor the threat of death was involved in generating their confession. But apparently being excoriated on social media is an ordeal nonetheless, enough to have put the editors in that Soviet-show-trial-confession frame of mind [emphasis mine]:
…as brigade commander S. P. Kolosov whose final fate is unknown expressed it in an anything but timid letter in 1937: “I am afraid to open my mouth. Whatever you say, if you say the wrong thing, you’re an enemy of the people. Cowardice has become the norm.”
Stalin had won the struggle for power and was now dealing death blows to the opposition by organising uncontrolled terror at every level of society. The purges carried out within the party, the army, among members of the scientific community, artists and prominent cultural figures came to be known as the Great Terror. The term is actually bizarre; terror is hardly a rank great or small but absolute: once it has taken root in a social system it spreads and acquires a life of its own.
Here is the note from the Nation editors on their later, “corrected” thoughts concerning their decision to publish the poem that so offended [my comments can be found in brackets]:
On July 24, 2018, The Nation and its poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, made this statement about the poem below, which contains disparaging and ableist [apparently a relatively recent word popular on social media] language that has given offense and caused harm to members of several communities [“several communities” keeps it vague so that everyone feels included in the apology, and note also the language of groups rather than individuals, because good little leftists think in identity groups]:
As poetry editors, we hold ourselves responsible for the ways in which the work we select is received [so, they hold themselves responsible for what readers perceive; what an extraordinary notion, but it’s one that is quite common in academia and activism today—the postmodernist idea that fault lies in what other people perceive rather than in an objective evaluation of what a person actually has said and done and whether it was wrong]. We made a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem “How-To.” We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities [there are those vague “many communties” again] affected by this poem. We recognize that we must now earn your trust back [on our knees, groveling]. Some of our readers have asked what we were thinking. When we read the poem we took it as a profane [“profane” means “to treat (something sacred) with abuse, irreverence, or contempt”—but what is it the editors thought was so sacred here? The disabled community? The black vernacular? “Profane” also can mean “to debase by a wrong, unworthy, or vulgar use,” so maybe that’s what they’re talking about] over-the-top attack on the ways in which members of many groups [there are those many groups again] are asked, or required, to perform the work of marginalization [the work of marginalization equals what? begging for money? being ostracized? “Marginalization” is another piece of jargon that seems fairly impenetrable unless you’ve spent the last few years on a college campus or social media, I suppose]. We can no longer read the poem in that way [so because some people on social media attacked you, you will abandon your point of view and in the future you will be performing crimestop in order to avoid being guilty of thoughtcrime)].
We are currently revising our process for solicited and unsolicited submissions. But more importantly, we are listening, and we are working. We are grateful [they must thank their accusers to show the proper respect] for the insightful critiques we have heard, but we know that the onus of change is on us, and we take that responsibility seriously. In the end, this decision means that we need to step back and look at not only our editing process, but at ourselves as editors [ironically, “ourselves as editors” echoes one of those final lines of the poem: “It’s about who they believe/they is..” The editors have apparently been shaken to their leftist cores by the fact that they have transgressed.]
Who are the editors? The two names listed are Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith. Looking them up, I see that the first is transgendered (male to female, but the photo looks like a man) and the second is Hispanic. They may have thought that their identities as members of these communities would have protected them from SJW wrath. But if they thought that, they were wrong, and lacked appreciation for the history of the left as well.
However, it’s interesting to note that the comments to their mea culpa at The Nation are uniformly criticat not of the editors’ decision to publish the poem, but of their decision to apologize for it. For example, here was one of the first ones I saw (I couldn’t find a way to link to it):
As a long-time subscriber of (and former reviewer) for The Nation, I am extremely upset that The Nation’s poetry editors felt they had to apologize for this poem, and that the poet felt forced to apologize too. First of all, it’s a perfectly fine poem, and secondly, since when did editors (especially Nation editors!) apologize for their choices?! I took part to some degree in the furor that broke out on Facebook over the poem, and then felt so sickened by all the unsupported assumptions about the poet and the lack of understanding of the poem, that I took a day off Facebook, and thought a whole lot about the lack of civility (and critical thinking!) in this Trumpian Age. I could say more but I think Grace Schulman, The Nation’s former poetry editor, said it all in her opinion piece in The New York Times today: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/opinion/nation-poem-anders-carlson-wee.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
It’s certainly a good development that every one of the comments I read is a ringing defense of the poem and the poet’s right to speak, and a condemnation of the editors’ decision to issue their apology. Since I doubt any of these people are conservatives, it’s encouraging that they don’t like the direction this is going in (although I doubt they’ll be doing anything to stop it).
Note, however, the phrase in that one comment I quoted: “in this Trumpian Age.” My, my, my; the strength of the urge to bring Trump into it and to believe he is the root of all evil is impressive. Now, even the left’s long-established propensity to eat its own is blamed on Trump. And the “Trumpian Age”—I had no idea that Trump had generated his very own era, much like Pericles or Queen Elizabeth I.
