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ON COMPLAINTS ABOUT THE MEDIOCRITY OF CONTEMPORARY POETRY
by Eric T. Racher on August 19, 2007
There are many mediocre poems being written and published today. Many mediocre poets are being praised, in print. I believe that we can safely state this as a fact. Most writers would likely agree with me, as would most readers of poetry. Even the great praisers and back-scratchers who make up much of the world of contemporary poetry would likely agree off the record that they do not really believe the blurbs.
Quite often this rampant mediocrity is presented as a “crisis” of contemporary writing. I must confess that, after reading yet another boring poem in one of the big-name magazines or shoveling through the latest ‘major achievement’, I too am tempted by this point of view. Nonetheless, I think that we should be doubtful about rhetoric announcing the “crisis” of any art form, as it often serves as little more than a veil for other motives.
The reason for my doubts regarding this “crisis” is that other historical periods appear to have had more than their share of bad or mediocre verse, and thus the current situation seems less anomalous than it might otherwise. But when thinking about the poetry of earlier times, we naturally only remember those authors who wrote well enough to survive. Of course, excellent writers will remain obscure (that is why the canon so fluid), but none of those remembered could be called bad writers (this is not to say that none of them wrote bad poetry at times).
How many of the poets in Johnson’s Lives are remembered today, although their biographer felt they were all worthy of his attention? We might likewise consider a volume such as Justa Edovardo King Naufrago (1638), which included thirty-six poems by fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge – the cream of the classical educational system in England at that the time. Only one of these poems, Milton’s Lycidas, is any good; the others are at best mediocre. One need merely glance at some of the collections of verse published in English in the Elizabethan period to find sonnet after sonnet of inept versifying, overused metaphors and ridiculous similes. How many poets published in England in the 17th and 18th centuries? How many wrote excellent poems? Pope’s Dunciad shows that he considered his own age to be characterized by a similar “crisis”, an impoverishment of culture illustrated in the proliferation of bad writing. Some people look back on the modernist period with nostalgia, but if they took the time to leaf through old copies of Poetry magazine from the time when Pound and Eliot published in its pages, they would find many very bad poems.
A friend of mine told me that, although my protestations are true, our epoch is characterized by a large increase in the quantity of bad and mediocre verse. This might be true. To judge accurately, however, we would need to calculate factors such as the increase in literacy relative to earlier times, increase in population, and changes in technological and economic aspects of publishing, among others.
My friend has also noted that there is a large amount of praise for bad and mediocre verse in the contemporary publishing world. This is more difficult to argue against. While I do not think that there are many people out there praising truly bad work, it does seem that much mediocre work is accompanied by glowing blurbs and that some poets who have gotten by with competent work are being accused of greatness. Yet I do not see a cure for this problem other than the intellectual honesty and integrity of individual writers. It is difficult for a young poet to make such decisions: a good review of your MFA professor’s book will get you a recommendation for publication; blurbs are exchanged; reciprocal paid reading invitations are traded, etc. Temptations abound; such is life. In the very long run, the only thing that matters is the poetry.
I do believe that it is better if excellent work is published, rewarded and praised – this is one of my goals as an editor. Sometimes, for complicated historical reasons, great work is neglected. We can see this in the work of the two greatest writers of the 19th century in the United States, Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville. Melville was published but his work was largely ignored, especially after the publication of Moby Dick. Dickinson was barely published; I believe only ten poems reached print in her lifetime. I think that an open-minded reception of her work in the early 1860s would have changed literary history in extraordinary ways, especially if we consider that Le Fleurs du Mal was published in 1857 and her work was far more advanced than anything by Baudelaire.
However, it is not important that every issue of every magazine be filled with excellent poetry. Nor is it important that every book be filled with eternal masterpieces. It would be better, in my opinion, if intelligent people did not praise mediocre work for career purposes, just as it would be better if magazines published more excellent poems. Mediocre poems will be written and will be unjustly praised. Even so discerning a critic as Dr. Johnson was not faultless in this regard. We can do nothing more than try to be clear and honest in presenting our opinions about any work of art.
Yes, there are many mediocre poets who write mediocre poems. There are many bad poets who write bad poems. This does not signal the end of civilization as we know it. Of course, it is not good when bad work is praised, but in the end, it is not important that everyone write great poems, but only that great poems get written.
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Jacob,
Thanks for your comments regarding my post. They open up some interesting avenues of inquiry that I hope to deal with in future blog posts. As a partial response, I don’t think that the answers to the questions you raise are self-evident, although I do think that thoughtful readers usually have their own ideas of what constitutes excellence where poetry is concerned. Your ideas and my ideas of ‘excellence’ or ‘mediocrity’ may be different (the question of the subjectivity and objectivity of literary judgment is extremely complex in my view), but I take it for granted that we both, if we are attentive readers, have those ideas. By this I mean that through our reading we come to an understanding of what we think is valuable and to some extent why we think so. My intention in this piece was not to interrogate those ideas but to examine another phenomenon entirely: the so-called ‘crisis’ I referred to in the post. Most of the people I know personally feel that most of the poems published in journals are not good. These people may have different ideas regarding ‘good’ poetry than I do, but they feel this way about most of the poetry published today.
Your final question is a most interesting one, and I think once again that any answer I could give would have to be complicated and partial. I think that the ways we judge poetry can be quite various. For example, if I read Elizabethan poetry, I need to attempt to enter into the mindset that produced the work, to understand what writers were trying to do, etc. The same thing applies if I read Charles Olson or Don Gordon, for example. Encountering something that does not, as you say, “conform to those standards and conventions” can produce different reactions. It can be one of the greatest experiences of one’s reading life, in the sense that it opens one up to something entirely new. This, I think, is linked to the search for difference that we engage in when we read. Unfortunately, it can also produce a sort of knee-jerk rejection of the work in question, merely because it does not fit in with what we have constructed in our mind.
Thanks again for your comment. Doubly so, because it led me to your blog which I am definitely enjoying.
– Eric T. Racher (08/24 at 24-Aug 06:31 -05:00)
“For example, if I read Elizabethan poetry, I need to attempt to enter into the mindset that produced the work, to understand what writers were trying to do, etc. The same thing applies if I read Charles Olson or Don Gordon, for example.”
I don’t think it’s possible to read Elizabethan poetry in the mindset that produced the work, any more than it was possible for Elizabethan’s to read Virgil in the mindset of the Rome of Augustus, or Virgil to read Homer in the mindset of the Athens of Pedicles… let alone, that of Homer’s heroic age. We can describe and analyze the filters through which we read the past, but we can’t eliminate them, can’t turn all that stands between them and ourselves into a clear transparent window. There is always a fog, a prismatic distortion of the colors that reach us.
That is precisely why it’s so hard to judge our contemporaries. Lasting works of art--literary, visual, theater, have tended to emerge out of critical movements; these may or may not be systematically developed, but they invariable involve a set of standards, catchwords, ideas, manifestos that coalesce into comparative judgments of the past--a past that is seen as an inhibiting force, stimulating a negative generative energy redefining conventions--a perpetual rebirth, phoenix--like, of new art from the declared death of the old. If there is a “crisis” in poetry, it’s a crisis of criticism, not of the poetry. Not of criticism, perhaps--but of the critical spirit, we seem unable to differentiate ourselves from the past in any clearly definable way. Instead, we merge into a timeless eclecticism that paralyzes judgment and diffuses generative energy, leaving us with what Sillman calls the “School of Quietude,” the poetry that fills the quarterlies and anthologies.
I see the striking success of <a href="http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com>Ron Sillman’s blog</a> to the concentration of critical energy applied to every sort of poetry.
I started this with something entirely different in mind… on the time it takes to read poetry and assign it to a meaningful context--how the literary magazines, and most anthologies, are the worst possible way to present a poet’s work. If you can’t get an idea of where the poetry has come from, how it has developed, where it seems to be going, judgment is relatively empty--if not impossible.
Jacob
– Jacob Russell (08/24 at 24-Aug 13:11 -05:00)
I see that the HTML for links doesn’t work…
Silliman’s Blog (with an ‘i’)
http://www.ronsilliman.blogspot.com
I see the striking success of <a href="http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com>Ron Sillman’s blog</a> to the concentration of critical energy applied to every sort of poetry.
To complete the last thought in the previous comment:
If you can’t get an idea of where the poetry has come from, how it has developed, where it seems to be going, there’s no way to understand the poetic stance, the poet’s relationship to both his/her contemporaries, and to the significant past.
Jacob
– Jacob Russell (08/24 at 24-Aug 13:20 -05:00)
... is there no way to edit a comment after posting?
– Jacob Russell (08/24 at 24-Aug 13:44 -05:00)
Sorry, Jacob, there is no function to edit comments (don’t know of any blogs that allow that). If there’s something in particular that you’d like to change, just drop me a line.
Thanks,
Bud
– BudParr | MetaxuCafe (08/24 at 24-Aug 13:53 -05:00)
I agree with you that it is not possible to read Elizabethan poetry in the mindset that produced the work. My expression was imprecise. I was simply saying that one aspect of reading, in my opinion, is to attempt to move toward the text, to understand what it is doing, shall I say, on its terms rather than on a priori terms that I have set.
“If you can’t get an idea of where the poetry has come from, how it has developed, where it seems to be going, judgment is relatively empty--if not impossible.”
Quite true.
– Eric T. Racher (08/24 at 24-Aug 14:02 -05:00)
What in your thinking is the most common fault with the general run of poetry today?
What should a “good” poem accomplish?
What are the strongest precedents poets have to turn to, to draw from, and break away from?
What is the--that should be plural… are the reading constituencies poets are/should be addressing?
What are the formal considerations for writing “good” poetry? And by form, I do NOT mean pattern or template, rhyme scheme, meter, etc.
What about subject matter?
– Jacob Russell (08/24 at 24-Aug 15:09 -05:00)
With all those questions I suppose it’s only fair that I offer some of my opinions.
If there’s any single quality that distinguishes poetry worth reading and re-reading, it’s the question of the “I”, the breadth or narrowness of the poetic subject and its voice. By subject, I mean, not the content, not subject matter, but that which the voice embodies.
I demand a certain level of mindfulness. No matter how clever the language, how emotionally evocative--I cannot value poems that speak from an unexamined “I,” that have not questioned who and what it is that writes the poem, where those thoughts and emotions the poem is meant to express come from--the social, political and psychological complex that of which the “I” is itself an expression. I would say, that these questions themselves constitute an important part--perhaps the most important part--of the content of any poem worth considering. Whatever it’s subject, this will be a subtext, as language itself will always be a subtext.
Poets think, not with, but through language. There can be no poetry, without thought, without poetic thinking. As with other forms of thought, it is never enough to recapitulate received notions. A poem worth re-reading comes into being at the very limits of the poet’s understanding… abandoning the shell of comprehension and courting the anxiety of apprehention.
Not every poem, even those of the best poets, succeed in this--good poems are written that are experiments along the way, the poems by which the poet learns how to think poetically--but that effort is not invisible. You can mark it--especially when you are looking at a body of work, and not a small, random selection.
A few thoughts for starters.
– Jacob Russell (08/24 at 24-Aug 15:44 -05:00)
Of course I agree with the remark that all periods have mediocre poetry, yet I still think we may be in something of a crisis. The quantity of mediocre poetry is not what astounds me, but the lack of good, memorable poetry. A hundred years from now, is anyone really going to remember anything written in the past fifty years?
– Schildan (09/12 at 12-Sep 05:07 -05:00)
“but the lack of good, memorable poetry. A hundred years from now, is anyone really going to remember anything written in the past fifty years?”
Again, this begs the question, assuming exactly what needs to be examined.
We recognize what is good in past works because we’ve learned to read them through the filter of received conventions--conventions made visible by established critical response, and in successive generations of poets.
We remember what we encounter repeatedly, and in enough variations for us to recognize the patterns. Of course we can’t know what will prove memorable in contemporary work! That’s a meaningless complaint.
Contemporary work can’t be read through received conventions, but only in relation to them. That takes work and time. Older poetry (if not of the too distant past) is easier (though only superficially so), because we’ve replaced reading it with a conditioned response to its simulacrum.
– Jacob Russell (09/13 at 13-Sep 11:52 -05:00)
Page 1 of 1 pages of comments
What makes a poem “mediocre?”
What’s a good poem?
What are you criteria for judgment?
You writeas though the answers to these questions are self-evident--as though everyone should just “know” a good poem when they see one.
How many times do you have to read a poem to know?
Since we learn to recognize the conventions of poetry--and to set our ideas of “good” or “bad” on poetry of the past--if we have standards at all, how do you judge poetry that doesn’t conform to those standards and conventions?
– Jacob Russell (08/21 at 21-Aug 10:01 -05:00)