Beware The Newspaper's Fear Of Poetry And Poets

I first noticed a palpable fear on the air--not in the air--one morning nearly one year ago. Maybe it was fear of the air. I'm not sure. But then I'm not sure about most contingencies in an uncertain realm poets such as I call our existences.

This strange, and entirely unpoetic and involuntary confrontation with officialized fear as purveyed by an even stranger culture dominated by quick news takes, sound bytes, and abbreviated catchphrases, buzzwords, cliches, stereotypes and other "second world" representations the sometimes inobvious displacement implicit in language, came almost a surprise. Or maybe not as a surprise. One thing was clear that morning: The newspaper is afraid of poets.

Here's what happened. The city where I live announced a search for a suitable poet laureate to represent it. That seemed a surprise. Where I live, a huge metropolitan area that is so business-dominated that it was hard for me to imagine someone either enlightened enough or lightheaded enough to even dare suggest such a position. To be honest, I was happy to learn this. One news report struck out as overly short: just the facts, ma'am; a quick listing, a news brief, a short summary of necessary qualifications for entrants into what the newspaper called "the competition". The second news report--one in an alternative weekly--is where the problem started. The "culture editor" who had written the story went all namby-pamby over this, suggesting all the teens out there in media-land get out their sticker-laden notebooks and become poet laureates. The story stank of snark.

So I wrote the alternative culture editor. Told her I wouldn't want to be described in such a way, and that, in my opinion, her editorialization struck me as disparagement, of defamatory, an inarticulate framing of what any artist might do--even if the art in question is an art conducted with the written or spoken word. I complained a bit about how the culture editor's take mirrored some of the official attacks against poets lately in the news: In Myanmar, for example, a military coup imprisoned scores of poets, and executed many of them. I even went on to cite how Anna Akhmatova had been dealt harsh treatment by Stalin.

Of course, I wasn't comparing local poets with Akhmatova. I simply wanted the culture editor to take notice that, sometimes, because literature borders much closer to intellectualism than journalism or even the plastic arts (at least in most cases), targeting them begins with subtle digs. When an officialized tyranny reduces culture, for example, to commercialized facsimiles of it, real culture, high culture, and even countercultural pop culture, all suffer. And for poets, especially myself, being thrust into competition with commercialized stand-ins for the real thing can border on the absurd.

Before I even dropped that email to the alternative newspaper's culture editor, I checked to see if she'd ever made other disparaging reports about pots. Ironically, she'd been all ears--nothing but fawning, really--when she'd interviewed poet Anne Waldman, a pretty famous feminist poet who has long doubled as a political activist. Boy. Was the alternative culture editor ever engaged with Waldman.

"Just treat local poets right," I said in different words. "Raise us up, don't put us all down."

The reaction? A lot of dismissal, anger, even rage, incendiary language, put downs, even the label for me as "a pedant". "This paper's audience!", the editor proclaimed, "is all about this!"

Whoa. What a defense. But it's typical of reactionaryism to cast the blame on those who dissent. It's reactionary to seek to shift the blame like that. And to conduct oneself via ad hominem? I laughed the poor, deluded woman's missive off as so much puffiness and arrogance.

Big deal. Another boor in charge of disseminating official culture, something I dub "America 90210", right? It's all commercialism all the time with America's "public oracles". Consumer culture. The eaters--that's what I call that mentality. It's everywhere where money is more important than human beings. And we see consumer culture or commercialization or even outright commodification of culture almost all the time in newspapers. We see it in Hollywood blockbusters, in the commercialized side of the music industry, even in the arts to a degree: Newspapers and mass media deal with subjects designed to appeal to the very lowest common denominator. But even worse for poets and other artists who take their crafts seriously, this America 90210 mentality has a tendency to snuff out individuality in general. In favor of a homogenized puppetry where all the little tiny people obey the dictates of "the market".

Think of "the market" a second. The market in education. The market in politics. The market in culture. In information. In the news. Market mentalities have seeped into everything like one Great Big Wet Sop that does nothing but soak us. A sop is what is tossed as a concession of little value to those whose demands are not being met. Market mentalities are reductionisms. They reduce our understanding; they block thought.

If you can't buy it, kill it. This seems to be what occurs when "the market" gets too big for its britches. When we "economize" politics or culture, what we are doing is subverting both to become servile and subordinated to economic clout, power, and worse, economic coercion. Right now, in America 2023, economic coercion has practically taken over everything not nailed down, and even some of that which is nailed down.

Why be nice to what isn't obedient to "the market"? How about "the market in greed" or "the market in mammonism"?

There really is a thing in this world that can be identified as "authentic culture". It's not necessarily a commodity. It can be bought or sold, but in essence, it has a use that supersedes mere economic interpretations. In fact, the best art, the best poetry, indeed the best culture, is that which dissents against the conventional wisdom as persuasively argued by the news media. There's nothing wrong with either culture or the mass media. It's that the latter is dictated by exchange value. Culture is not.

OK. Uncertainty. Solid ground. The alternative culture editor seemed to me to be quite "bitey" in defense against something inside her head. Maybe she's got worms crawling around inside her skull cavity. Maybe she's absolutely terrified of the uncertainty artists both investigate and proliferate. But it's also possible, as an example of a current found generally in mass media, the alternative culture editor wanted me to know who's boss: the boor. The boor that lives somewhere inside of her.

"Are you a poet? Or are you a journalist?"

This was a question a prominent literary magazine editor once posed to me when I decided to drop in to talk to her about "how to get published". I was young. I still hadn't really cut my teeth on poetics strongly enough to merit at that time any publication at all, much less any acclaim. However, I did have one feather in my cap: When I was 25, I "scored" a few book reviews in the local newspaper. I've long wondered, thus, whether the editor was referring to that as a matter of either jealousy or disdain for me (me not being a suitable expert with credibility in literature), or that she was simply expressing the same disdain for journalists as journalists by and large express for poets.

Very odd, that comment. Of course, there could have been more to her question: Was I writing as a poet about my relation to existence, a private expression made public; or was I writing about my relation to society, my public face commenting about society as a public? That's always an option when I consider my puzzlement that morning in the offices of a literary magazine.

"Was I a poet? Or a journalist?" Perhaps in a sense I was both. But even so, the values surrounding the dissemination of factual information to the public differ widely from the values of poetry. Dwelling on fact, on linearity, on the public interest, journalism has a role. As far as writing skill, I am not about to disparage those of journalists in general, mainly because journalists use writing-as-representation in a highly specialized way that is qualitatively different than the way poets use that.

I really do hope this disparity between two uses of skill never rises to a state of total war. But honestly. Isn't art designed to be critical of convention? Aren't the great artists of the past those who were the harbingers of new ways of thinking contrary to the status quo? Isn't the role of art in society to be the dissenting, independent voice that calls the official into question?

In the case of the alternative culture editor, perhaps, she was reacting in defense of her ideas of status and journalistic hegemony. Who really knows? And who cares? I certainly don't care--other than in instrumentalizing an episode at her hands to illustrate a number of usually unaddressed points of contention between the use of words as art and their use to convey fact.

Years ago, one journalist who happened to be the theater and movie critic for the same alternative weekly I've described told me in person that poetry is "nothing but using frilly words". That was it. That was funny, funny in the twinned senses of being humorous and weird. A stereotype. Journalists have a tendency to eat stereotypes as "a nutritious snack that is guaranteed to make you feel more powerful and above everyone else". Or something. You can't really justify making crass generalizations like the one he made or like the one I made about him and all journalists everywhere on earth.

Nevertheless, during an erotic arts festival presented by a local art gallery invited area poets and writers to recite erotic poetry or monologue, there he was, the vaunted theater and movie critic, holding forth before an audience, mainly of poets and artists, as he recounted a fictional and sexual encounter with a Girl Scout. Even weirder--but not at all humorous. Some were upset by it. Then he turned around and cited himself as one of the better readers at the event when he wrote it up for the alternative weekly.

Sigh. Why not call that rag what it really is? Alternative, weakly. The weak alternative. Alternative to what? The mainstream? The middle of the road? To the society pages? Of what? Ah, I'm being flippant. In the real world, the alternative weekly to which I refer has long promoted itself as the alternative to the one daily newspaper in a metropolitan are of over five million people. The daily, however, is so conservative--if reactionary is tantamount to conservative these days--that it's often difficult to get any relatively even-keel slant out of it. Many people have rejected the daily for that, and for its over-reporting on sports and business. This daily has always been "conservative", and in the past, it was part of the last big explosion in paranoia politics, the one that hit us like an unenlightened lightning bolt in 1964 with the onset of the Barry Goldwater campaign for the Presidency. Hence, when the daily's competitor, a newspaper that had moved to challenge the city's conventional order, run of course by the business community, collapsed, the alternative weekly claimed to be stepping in to "fill the gap". Which went OK for a while. Then, slowly, it became a sort of farm team practice run rag for reporters wanting to cash in on true crime bestsellers. Yes, suddenly true crime was all about us. But hey. The burger joints it featured were also very rad. The theater critic who committed the infraction during the erotic arts festival, by the way, seemed to be commenting on publicly aired worry that the city's spoken word community was descending into vulgarity. OK. So he went full-on with that--and got booed. It was all so arrogant of him. "Let's make an editorial comment about the vulgarity of Dallas' poets for fun and commentary!" Hell, even I was painted as "a porno poet" by denizens over at a private university that apparently were out to protect their "literary expertise". it was all so silly.

How about a good headline for what that theatrical critic really did?

JOURNALIST TAKES UMBRAGE AGAINST POETS BY SPREADING UGLINESS BEYOND IMAGINING

I've had a pet theory about all this for many years. Sometimes I wonder about how and where poetry fits within a conventionally capitalistic social order. This social order has been commented upon by great literature for over 200 years. Jane Austen writes at length about how the bourgeoisie, emergent in her lifetime, shocked the old British aristocracy with its pretense of possessing culture by the simple fact its purveyors were obsessed with capital and property. "Mansfield Park" tells the story of an aristocratic family that is literally invaded by a group of bourgeois from London--people of less cultural value than they imagine. Flaubert, later in the 19th Century, writes at length as he mocks the impositions of the bourgeoisie on the traditions and peacefulness of French society. Zola writes of how the poor and the misfits are treated and deformed by rapid industrialization. Yes, the bourgeoisie is all over European literature--and much of it is, of course, defended in the 21st right here in the USA.

Before the sudden bourgeoisie revolution that accompanied rapid industrialization and even infected the liberal democratic tradition around the same time, poets once were seen as performing an oracular role in society. As oracles, poets were seen as the possessors of wisdom that had been granted to them by the gods. In other words, poets were performing a dual role: as a literary artist and as a pundit. A sort of journalism of the divine. But with the rapid increase in the dissemination of information, the bourgeoisie began to commercialize the arts. After all, if one is part of a faction or a mass movement that is focused on exchange value rather than what Marx once dubbed as use value, commodification of the arts is a moneymaker. As is mass media--to some degree.

Newspapers, true to the dictate they must vie for the lowest common denominator, write at a 5th grade reading level simply to reach the largest number of people and thus glean larger amounts of advertiser dollars and interest. Poetry does no such thing. And, in fact, poets really are all but ignored in the journalistic world. Regardless of that, poetry has never gleaned a large audience. In fact, as it now is coerced into competing with movies, television, music, the Internet, and video games, poetry is often drowned out and even disparaged in a world unmotivated by what poetry does.

Because poets are not lorded over by "the accounting department", poets, independent, knowledgeable, knowing, and by no means naive, can pose a threat to a ruling order that is not interested in promoting any of that. Today, with a rise in what is called a poetry of social consciousness where poets look for self-identity in the crowd--ethnic, racial, classist, etc--that independence really could be another side of a widespread reaction against the ruling order. I've long seen these cultural turns as signifiers of vast social disenchantment, alienation, nihilism and worse. And, now that American poets in particular are moving toward a sort of "bruised realism" within which those in deep poverty, or under forms of economic oppression or beset by more formal cultural regimes--we're seeing the oracular nature of poetry defying the world of the paid oracles we call pundits and newspaper columnists.

I remember another almost hilarious encounter with commercialism's excuse for culture when I was a guest at a local Democratic Party fundraiser and soiree. I worked at the law firm that occupied the building where the event took place. Political celebrities, wealthy donors, "lights" of the city, and all sorts of socialites had descended upon the building to raise money for the 1988 political campaign season. At the time, I viewed myself as a sort of wide-eyed slave of The Man. I didn't have much money, I possessed no prestige, I was only beginning to write poetry as a serious craftsman, and thus, when I appeared within the crowd of well-to-do visitors, I should have known I'd inevitably be asked "what do you do?"

See that? It's as if what we do as human beings is far less important than what we do as performers and dancers to the dime--at least in this society. "What do you do?" on lovely woman in a sparkling cocktail dress coyly asked me.

"I work at this law firm," I told her, "but I am mainly a poet."

"A poet!" she exclaimed. "Hon", she added, turning to her husband, "My husband's a poet, aren't you honey?"

"Really," I said. "Do you really write?"

The woman broke in: "No, but he's a poet. Aren't you hon?"

Ridiculousness on stilts.

Of course, there is some truth in the woman's arch attitude towards either me or as me as a poet. We all use metaphor. Metaphor is an essential aspect of language. But more to the point, where it intersects with commercial culture, metaphor can be used as a short-cut, or even as code, symbolic-speak via private symbolism designed to keep the interlopers within earshot in the dark.

"I like existentialism's influence on metaphor," I added as I stood before moneyed royalty.

"Exist-- what?"

There. The bourgeoise mentality which reduces high art, philosophy, even science into instrumentalization and terminology, all of it bent towards the acquisition of capital and property, was suddenly on full display like maybe The Wizard Of Oz, right there in the mezzanine. One of my coworkers watched me as I struggled to simultaneously keep a straight face and refrain from live, on-stage, verbal invective directed towards a couple of wealthy boors.

Who knew this is what I was getting myself into when I chose at a young age to pursue the art of poetry?

Two years ago, after President Joe Biden and his administration chose a very young woman, Amanda Gorman, as the country's youth poet laureate, many expressed both shock and outrage as Gorman, standing before thousands at Biden's inauguration, performed a sort of slang piece so dumbed-down for a vast crowd of onlookers and listeners that it seemed as if, no, poetry in the US was going to be going exactly nowhere in the next few years. Gorman was only selecting her audience. In other words, she wasn't committing what is often highly romanticized among all contemporary artists, often in an unconscious way: the romantic refusal. This is where an artist intentionally "ignores" the audience/artist dynamic in order to become more authentic. The romantic refusal is where the cliched stereotype of the poor artist struggling in a dusty and cold garret unknown to anyone stems. For many years, especially among the modernists, poets placed the audience secondary to their relationship to the art itself. This has resulted in stellar poetry. It's also resulted in a slur:

Navel gazer.

Apparently, if one is using poetry as a vehicle of self-discovery and self examination, in today's commercialism dominated "scene", the poet is pondering his or her guts. Oh boy! If that's not supporting the arts with a two-word remark, I don't know what is!

Said no one sane, ever.

As for Amanda Gorman, those of us who dug a little deeper into her very short career as a poet have likely found her less down-where-the-goats-can-get-it poetry to be fairly awesome for an 18-year-old woman. Only naturally, some poets, noses out of joint, found themselves jealous of Gorman's access to visibility. Oprah Winfrey lauded her. Gorman's first book of poems made her a millionaire. Gorman posed for a fashion magazine.

Apparently, Gorman, at least for a while, became "the commercial hobby horse of the day". A sad fate. I'm sure she'll recover from a role tossed onto her like a burlap bag over the mouth of a draft horse.

Way way back when I got that serendipitous chance to review a couple of books for the conservative daily I today find almost unreadable, I remember how I'd slave away at a 500-word book review. One half-admirer/half-critic called them "Your book reports". And, if the reviews were too wordy or too serpentine and byzantine, the editor would say, "Pure poetry!" That was a slur. After all, I was in the midst of a large newsroom. And sure. The editor, a kind man, jibed at me a little. He was trying to teach me to write like a journalist: short sentences, generally identifiable verbiage, and to the point. To me, that was like bending over backwards.

We live in an age of prose. Herman Hesse called this The Age of The Feuilleton, the feuilleton being the short squib that appears in the newspaper. Going into depth--not allowed. Writing about the full context--no allowed. Departing from the straight facts--sometimes but usually not allowed. Journalism is a tool different from a poem. But that doesn't stop some journalists from praising their friends as "a real poet!" It's hilarious to witness that one.

I never expected to be a diviner. I may unconsciously prophesize once or twice in a decade. I may write skilled poetry sometimes. But I use words to make art. Poetry is not "pure art" because it deals in black-and-white representations in such a way as to subvert the black-and-white. While all representationality in the arts does this, poetry seems to have a bigger task in representations than do other artists.

Poetry by nature is subversive. That stance seems odd in a democratic republic where the biggest and most unnoticed subversion of the country--the state--is being conducted by wealthy capitalists who are anything if not reactionaries. Yet poets are pushed into the background for supposedly good reasons:

The emperor has no clothes. We're the sorcerer's apprentices. We can indeed work magic. And our skills do allow us to see through the pretenses before us, pretenses designed to hide the truth from those who are already too credulous. And if poetry releases stasis into a ephemerality of becoming, this could constitute a threat to those who want to keep minds from examining, those who know that those who do examine have the power to resist them.

Who's the real Mephistopheles here? A friend of mine recently mentioned this demoniacal presence as he spoke about Doctor Faustus. We live in a society that is beginning to freeze in place. Change is becoming more difficult. Necrosis is setting in. Even our judges seem to wish to conduct what Thomas Pine called "rulership from the grave". Not a good thing. And if agents of change are relegated to the proverbial back pages for purposes of keeping them quiet, what can anyone really say as an independent, somewhat sovereign citizen? "Nothing really changes if you give nothing a chance to change." Scary thought. Straight to your room--from the Temple of Doom.