The state of contemporary poetry

By Randy Koch

I recently stumbled across a $5,000 poem, and since it's brief, I'll include it here in its entirety:

Song
One, two, three o'clock, then you go.
Clocks move fast, but time moves slow.
I thought I knew, but I don't know.

The countries quarrel, to and fro.
It's darker out and starting to snow.
You promised yes, but then said no.

Without the bombs, the crops don't grow.
The market sank to an all-time low.
If you don't love me, just say so.
This poem by William Logan appeared in the October-November 2002 issue of Poetry magazine and recently received one of seven prizes given "for poems published [in Poetry] during the past twelve months." Of those prizes, six were for $1000 or $500 each; however, the seventh -- The J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize -- was worth more than the other six prizes combined: $5,000 for a single poem.
Consider the breakdown for Logan's "Song": that's $18.52 per character, $78.12 per word, $555.55 per line, or $1,666.67 per stanza. This for a poem that contains no similes or metaphors, no personification, no onomatopoeia. Every line is end-stopped, its syllabic meter is dully simple (8-7-8 / 8-9-8 / 8-9-8), and its rhyme scheme relies on one of the most easily rhymed sounds in English -- the long O -- with 214 matches in Dell's The Complete Rhyming Dictionary.
Understand, however, that Poetry, founded in Chicago in 1912 by Harriet Monroe and published continuously for the last 91 years, is one of the elite publishers of contemporary verse and, according to Poet's Market 2004, contains work "frequently selected for inclusion in volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthology" (Breen 288). I've subscribed to it since 1998 and consistently find the poetry published in it of very high quality. It's one of a handful of magazines that I routinely read, submit work to, and am rejected by. However, I don't feel bad about the rejections since Poetry "established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and other now-classic authors" ("A Brief History"). This is what makes the selection of Logan's "Song" for the $5,000 Wood Prize so puzzling.
Most poets are typically paid one or two copies of the journal in which their work appears; on the rare occasions that they're paid cash, it's usually somewhere in the range of $10-$20. These are the ordinary economics of poetry. However, the extraordinary compensation for a single poem like "Song" suggests that it must be an exceptionally fine work, but obviously it's not. What's more likely is that Logan received the award not so much for this particular poem but rather as a reward for the body of work he's produced over the past 21 years. Unfortunately, the obvious inferiority of this prize-winning poem and the phrasing of the award announcement will only contribute to many people's confusion regarding contemporary poetry, about which there are plenty of complaints to go around.
One of the most common criticisms of poetry published in literary magazines today is that it is, according to poet Adrienne Rich, too often "personal to the point of suffocation" (Bloom 357). Similarly, Dr. Joseph S. Salemi, professor of classics at Hunter College, CUNY, claims that today's poetry is "relentlessly confessional, employing the first-person singular pronoun," and that "the established models for verse today are amorphous emotional effusions based solely on the poet's personal life." Certainly, contemporary poets working after 1945, such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and other "confessional" poets, included in their work more intimate details about emotional instability, sex, sexual preferences, alcoholism, drug addiction, and familial problems than had poets preceding them. This was a backlash against the more intellectual and impersonal work of modernists such as T.S. Eliot, who in his 1919 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" defined poetry as "an escape from emotion and personality." However, poetry always has been and will continue to be one of people's first choices for self-expression, for putting into concrete form the emotional, dramatic, and traumatic circumstances of their lives, and for saying the things that they feel they cannot say in conversation or in prose. This has been true for hundreds of years, and while the explicitness of the confessions of contemporary poets is greater than that of poets of generations past, it is not unusual. Consider that over 29% of first lines in The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (173/593) contain first-person references ("I," "me," "my," "mine," "we," "our," or "us"). Likewise, William Shakespeare routinely wrote poetry in the "confessional" first person though -- and rightly so -- no one ever accused him of being "personal to the point of suffocation." Of his 154 sonnets, 89 (nearly 58%) also contain first-person references in the first line. Interestingly, however, few of the 30 poems in the November 2003 issue of Poetry magazine open with "I" or similar pronouns (only seven of 30 or a little over 23%), and the same is true of the work contained in the November/December 2003 issue of The American Poetry Review (13 out of 47 or slightly more than 27%). Yes, too much bad personal poetry is written and published these days, but poetry appeals, particularly to the young, because it's one of the few public forums available to us where stating how we feel and what we think is not only accepted but even expected.
Some people argue that contemporary poetry is watered down and uniformly bad as a result of workshops in MFA (Master of Fine Arts) creative writing programs, graduates of which are awarded a terminal degree similar to the Ph.D. Dr. Salemi, in his review of Ginger Andrews' An Honest Answer, offers typical criticism of the effect of these programs: "Wherever academic vultures are making money off the creative impulses of young people -- certain rules are laid down that effectively squelch the possibility of great poetry." He claims that the numbingly average work coming out of MFA programs results because "students are told to write only about what they know[;] . . . are directed to use only plain, straightforward language[;] . . . are exhorted to be sincere[; and . . .] are informed that poetry is nothing but the expression of one's deepest feelings." While I do not have an MFA nor have I participated in MFA workshops, I do recognize absurd generalizations when I see them. To think that Jane Hirshfield, David Lehman, Virgil Suarez, Naomi Shihab Nye, W.S. Merwin, Li-Young Lee, David Mura, Galway Kinnell, and Sharon Olds -- all of whom currently teach in MFA programs around the country -- apply exactly the same stifling philosophy about teaching students to write poetry is patently ridiculous. Similarly, expecting "great poetry" from students who, I suspect, are mostly still in their twenties is also unreasonable. We don't have such immediate and high expectations for the work of MFA graduates in other areas, such as the visual or performing arts. Why then do we apply a different standard to writers, most of whom are at the very beginning of their careers?
In addition, writers of contemporary free verse are routinely accused of being formally ignorant, narrow, and unsophisticated and their poetry described as "indistinguishable from prose, except for the arbitrary imposition of line breaks" (Salemi). Generally, I agree that many writers working and publishing today do not appreciate, understand, or apply to their work the techniques of structure, especially when it comes to turning lines. In fact, many consider the formal structure of poems -- particularly established forms, such as sonnets, sestinas, pantoums, villanelles, and ballads -- restrictive and artificial, an attitude particularly common among young, inexperienced, and (I fear) lazy writers. This excuse conveniently makes people think that they can say whatever they want in whatever way they want to say it and still claim that they've created a poem. What they don't understand is that like formal poetry, free verse is not literally and always free nor does it imply the freedom to do whatever one wants and assume that the result is a successful poem. This attitude is one major source of so much bad free verse written and, unfortunately, published in little literary magazines today. However, the pendulum is slowly swinging back, and formal verse is gradually becoming more popular again (although this may only mean that we'll see more mediocre formal verse and less mediocre free verse). In fact, the 2004 Poet's Market lists 13 different publications, publishers, or contests that accept only formal metrical verse and some of our finest contemporary writers, such as Richard Wilbur, X. J. Kennedy, and Seamus Heaney, regularly use rhyme and formal structure. These kinds of changes make me hopeful that form, one of the delights of good poetry, will again become important and relevant in contemporary formal and free verse.
There is no question that some poetry published today is obscure and inaccessible, and on more than one occasion I've read a poem in The American Poetry Review and wondered what I was missing or why it deserved to be published. Just consider the beginning of "Tincture of Pine," the first of seven poems by Gillian Conoley in a recent issue of APR: "I am Citizen of the wind, I am bird-infested / Data and regret, the clouds purl two / unhitch / [why only one head, why only / two faces] / one for noontide one for old horse in the mire / Furious are giants arguing over maps / History lays a violence under the peacefulness, / someone goes / driving the car" (3). I've read this poem silently and listened to it aloud, examined its structure, looked for related imagery, tried to tie the title to the content, looked for logical connections between the proclamations in the first line and the generalization about history in the eighth. I've given the poet the benefit of every doubt I can think of, but all I can do is shake my head, suspect I'm still missing something obvious, and read on, hoping to find a clue in her other six poems that will help me "get it." Unfortunately, her "Three Figures at the Gates of the Gully" just exacerbates my confusion: "an airport by matchlight / no usual links / how lovely the clouds in the form of unsayability-- / for a change, it's poetry that neglects the capital" (5). My only explanation for publishing this type of work in a journal as prestigious and as widely subscribed to as APR is that these are experimental poems, probably examples of Language poetry, an avant garde movement that's been around for about 30 years and whose poets "use artifice in such a way as to force open given forms and break habitual patterns of attention. For some readers, such a process is often unacceptably disorienting and strange" (Reinfeld 4). I fear that I'm one of those readers and often feel that these poems result from a blindfolded poet randomly pulling words from a dictionary or billboards or cinder block walls covered with graffiti. I regret that I take so narrow a view of work that is obviously considered sophisticated by some well-educated people and hope to someday understand its purpose and value. However, it's apparent to me that while I often don't understand Language poetry and other experiments in verse, I appreciate the risks they take and the freedom that doing so offers all other writers. Even if we don't "get it," we shouldn't condemn or write off all contemporary poetry because of the obscurity of some.
One of the more outrageous claims recently made to denigrate and minimize the significance of poetry came from Chicagoan Bruce Wexler in an essay in Newsweek: "Poetry is the only art form where the number of people creating it is far greater than the number of people appreciating it" (18). First, this suggests that a considerable number of people who write poetry never, ever read poetry. Not only is this extremely difficult to verify but also it's as unlikely as a teenager who loves to shoot baskets never watching college or pro basketball on television, an aspiring chef never eating gourmet food, a novice painter never attending an exhibit of a master's work. Second, people have been proclaiming the death of poetry for decades -- from Edmund Wilson's "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" in 1934 to Joseph Epstein's "Who Killed Poetry?" in Commentary in 1988 to Wexler's uninformed obituary last spring -- and will continue to do so. This kind of proclamation is as predictable and common as parents bemoaning the decline of morality and the collapse of civilization as each succeeding generation of children grows up. Third, Wexler could simply come to Laredo to see how false the idea is that no one but poets read and appreciate poetry. On Thursday, November 6th, San Antonio slam poet Juan Antonio Meza-Compean spoke to and performed for over 330 enthusiastic and inquisitive people -- many of whom were undoubtedly not poets -- at four different events around town: two at TAMIU and one each at United South High School and the VMT School of Communications and Fine Arts. Finally, let's not narrow the definition of poetry so much that we forget the joy that many of us as both adults and children felt upon reading poems by Shel Silverstein, whose Where the Sidewalk Ends sold over 4 million copies, or Dr. Seuss, whose stories in verse delight children and adults alike and who even 12 years after his death is still the world's most popular children's author. In addition, the National Poetry Slam in Chicago this past August, with about 3,000 people attending the finals, was another sign of the popularity of contemporary poetry. And don't forget the sales of poetry books for adults; for example, former Poet Laureate Billy Collins's Questions about Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning have sold over 87,000 copies since 1991. No, he's not on the New York Times bestseller list, but those numbers are just one more indication that people appreciate poetry in all its incarnations.
Poetry is all around us, routinely delights us, and is critical (though not in the terminal sense) to academics and poets and to all human beings who think and feel and breathe. The sort of democracy that exists in the world of poetry may well lead to an excess of the bad but also provides the contrast necessary to sort out the forgettable from the exceptional and the predictable from the wondrously possible.

Works Cited
Bloom, Harold, ed. Introduction. The Best of the Best American Poetry: 1988-1997. New York: Scribner Poetry, 1998.
Breen, Nancy, ed. 2004 Poet's Market: 1,800+ Places to Publish Your Poetry. Cincinnati: Writer's Digest, 2003.
"A Brief History of Poetry." Poetry Magazine. 7 Nov. 2003 (www.poetrymagazine.org/brief_history.html).
Conoley, Gillian. "Three Figures at the Gates of the Gully." The American Poetry Review Nov./Dec. 2003: 5.
---. "Tincture of Pine." The American Poetry Review Nov./Dec. 2003: 3.
Dickinson, Emily. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993.
Eliot, T. S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 2003. Bartleby.com. 8 Nov. 2003 (www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html).
Logan, William. "Song." Poetry Oct./Nov. 2002: 48.
Reinfeld, Linda. Language Poetry: Writing As Rescue. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992.
Salemi, Joseph S. An Honest Answer, by Ginger Andrews. Expansive Poetry & Music Online Review. 7 Nov. 2003 (www.n2hos.com/acm/rev1299b.html).
Wexler, Bruce. "Poetry Is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?" Newsweek 5 May 2003: 18.
Wright, Louis B., and Virginia A. LaMar, eds. Shakespeare's Sonnets. New York: Pocket, 1967.

(Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University.)