You see that question every year, in magazines and newspapers. Is Poetry Dead? Articles usually accompanied by a few contemporary poems, evidence that the question is truly rhetorical. The literary equivalent of asking your family what they would do with the lottery money if you won it. These articles are often written by some English professor out East, sometimes by a famous novelist and usually come out in April, which happens to be National Poetry Month.
What a coincidence, you might say. Here we are in April. Someone getting a little tapped for topics?
No. I've got plenty of things to babble about. It's more a personal question.
You see, approximately one million years ago, I used to write poetry. A lot. I wrote a lot of poetry in high school and college. I won contests. I did poetry readings.
And then I just...stopped. I was not able to reconcile the $5 payment per publication with any sort of life where I had a health plan, or a rent I could pay. I was cowardly, and couldn't feature an endless round of thankless poetry readings, the audience stuffed with friends and family, mostly, or as Wislawa Symborska wrote, "people who came in to escape the rain."
I remember a professor of mine discussing Jorie Graham, how she had
written some "difficult stuff" - which was to say, it was difficult to
read, understand...and enjoy. I recall feeling annoyed at this notion,
and when I looked through the actual work, that feeling intensified.
I remembered a photo of Jorie Graham in an anthology of poetry I owned
- wearing a black cape-like coat, smoking a stubby cigarette - and I
itched to smack her in the cakehole and tell her off. Wrinkle up my brow all snotty and
ask her if it was fun up there on that haughty escarpment where she was
compelled to write "difficult stuff?" Did she ever consider she was
one reason why people ask the old "Is Poetry Dead" question every April?
And I didn't have an endless appetite for poetry. Not only for the difficult stuff. There was much I didn't want to read. I don't enjoy old stuff. I don't enjoy long stuff. I don't enjoy poems that endeavour to tell the history of the Cherokee Nation, for instance, or poems that are a modern retelling of Homer's Paradise Lost in hip-hop dialect. That shit's stunt poetry, usually done by men who might be trying to compensate for how soft their hands are. I'm not trying to make fun of them, mind you. I don't care if you have soft hands or like turns of phrase. Just be honest about it.
I like honesty. Here's my list of likes: Pablo Neruda and Garcia Lorca, Minnesota poets like Philip Bryant, John Rezmerski, John Engman, Robert Bly, famous folks like Louis Jenkins, Billy Collins, Marge Piercy, Wislawa Symborska. Stuff you can find in Barnes & Noble, nothing weird and obscure. As far as poetry is concerned, I'm an easy lay. You look at my poetry titles on a shelf and you'll quickly say, like John Engman writes in his poem "Temporary Help":
"Ah, yes we know your type."
John Engman. What a guy. He taught my freshman English class at St. Stupid Private College of White Nordic Peoples back in the spring semester of 1993. He died in 1996, a brain aneurysm in the bathtub. What a cool guy. He always wore the same rust-colored shaker-knit sweater. He was short, smoked cigarettes, was losing his hair. His poems weren't full of thundering know-it-all phrases, though I suppose he did get profound at times. But mostly, he wasn't too serious about himself.
And my guess is that is the answer to this question. No, poetry isn't dead, but it is dead to me. The honesty of the medium is lost to me, because too many poets and poems must take themselves too seriously. I guess you have to, if you've committed to a life of performing at pitiful little readings in small, under-attended events, scrabbling around for prize and grant money, diligently sending your beautiful text jewels to hoity-toity journals with names like the Soughing Pine Review, in hopes of getting published and a few contributor's copies, working passionately in your spare time on something that can never support you financially, since you have to go out and do - Engman again - "something truly hateful" for a living wage.
Right now I am getting all the tingling feelings I can manage from blogs online or fiction in books. Maybe someday, some part of John Engman will be reborn in a new poet, and I'll get hard nipples again for poetry. Until then, I'm just another prole for prose.
