A couple years ago, before I dedicated myself full-time to sophistry, I was more regularly committed to an even bigger intellectual black hole: poetry. Reading this overheated attack on Garrison Keillor reminds me why I’m not so much anymore. Partly I suppose it is a matter of rhetoric. I can’t stand this loose, informal, limp “naturalistic” style that has become utterly ubiquitous in recent decades. Not that the turgid, cliché-ridden sermonizing produced by the mediocre poets of the more declamatory past eras was necessarily any better, but I feel that total informality of expression is more fundamentally at cross-purposes with the very nature of poetry. Because after all the whole business with line breaks and pauses is still essentially of a rhetorical nature, even if poetry is mostly a visual medium nowadays. Hearing or reading casual observations and ruminations chopped up in this artificial way is about the farthest from a “natural” mode of expression imaginable–when contemporary poets read their work the impression is as often as not of someone with emphyzema and perpetually running out of breath in mid-phrase.

So what does all of this have to do with Mr. Kleinzahler’s anti-Keillor screed? Well, quite naturally because he decided to follow the time-honored tradition of attacking someone considerably more famous than anyone in the poetry profession as a way of generating publicity so as to lay out his views on the problems with poetry and how to resolve them. I’d say that his central observation is absolutely correct, and one that I myself made at the very instant that I decided to withdraw to some extent from poetry:

“Let me put it starkly: the better animals in the jungle aren’t drawn to poetry anymore, and they’re certainly not tuned in to Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. Just as the new genre of the novel drew off most of the brilliant young writers of the nineteenth century, movies, television, MTV, advertising, rock ‘n’ roll, and the internet have taken the best among the recent crop of young talent. Do you suppose for a moment that a spirited youngster with a brilliant, original mind and gifted up the yin-yang is going to sit still for two years of creative writing poetry workshops presided over by a dispirited, compromised mediocrity, all the while critiquing and being critiqued by younger versions of the same?”

I would even support his other contention that “good or bad, art’s exclusive function is to entertain, not to improve or nourish or console, simply entertain” as a corrective to the orthodox pseudo-religious view of the arts and poetry in particular, even if I do find the statement exaggerated and simplistic. Nevertheless, I question the competence of anyone the musical ideal of whom is a saxophonist whose sound is described by him as being “as shocking as hearing someone scream “Fuck!” in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York” to lead the way to a more interesting, entertaining form of poetry. And that is the central problem of the whole attack. He points out a real problem with poetry, namely its lack of responsiveness to its audience (or, really, any audience), which in turn has led to a progressive marginalization that has made it unattractive even to the bright minds that might write it. And yet he also wants to play the provocateur, the respectable scoundrel who antagonizes his audience, either because that is really what he finds entertaining or because he feels exceptionally superior to his readers. First of all, that is difficult because it is nearly impossible to antagonize what is left of the small “literary” audiences these days in any of the usual ways (i.e. sex, Satan-worshiping, vulgarity–I’m sure that you could bring down the house by voicing support for Bush or the war in Iraq, but somehow I don’t think that’s what Kleinzahler has in mind). I don’t buy Klienzahler’s theory that poets have stopped antagonizing to preserve their cushy university positions; in my opinion literary circles and university types have been so indoctrinated by the view that anything offensive is “authentic” that it is precisely the scat-whippers that get hired to cushy university positions (like the inimitable Amiri Baraka), where they no doubt discover sooner or later that they have co-opted by the institutions that hired them. All that they can complain about, however, is having been too successful. Bill Hicks, probably the greatest provocateur of our time, could rile up his audiences with the most outrageous suggestions. But in contrast to the average poet a) he had to make it on his own rather than landing a government-funded sinecure b) his audience was genuinely diverse rather than being a pack of true believers and c) he managed to be amazingly funny and entertaining at the same time. Poetry audiences will uncritically applaud anything with the poetry label: yes, I would not hesitate to call the comedy-club audience more discriminating than the poetry audience.

But on a more serious note, I don’t doubt that Garrison Keillor’s schtick, in poetry as in everything else, wallows in a somnolent middle-aged nostalgia which is unlikely to produce anything of lasting value or entertainment, at least for me, but based on his peculiar stature in America I have to imagine that he is closer to the nub of what people want to hear and read than some randy old beatnik who still approvingly cites Antonin Artaud (!?), the inventor of the “theater of cruelty” who entitled his final radio broadcast “Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu” (“To have done with God’s judgment”), which is described in the following terms (keep Garrison Keillor in mind as a point of contrast):

“a heretic’s scatalogical tirade at the extreme of the linguistic lunatic fringe…the broadcast was cancelled at the last minute by the director of French Radio, Vladimir Porche[,] citing Artaud’s scatalogical, vicious and obscene anti-American and anti-Catholic pronouncements as something that the French radio audience could do without…In the actual text of “To Have Done With The Judgment Of God” America is denounced as a baby factory war-mongering machine. Bloody and apocalyptic death rituals are described. Shit is vividly exalted as evidence of life and mortality. Questions about consciousness and knowledge are pursued and answered with more unanswerable questions. It all dead-ends in a scene in which God itself turns up on an autopsy table as a dissected organ taken from the defective corpse of mankind. In the recording all this would have been interspersed with shrieks, screams, grunts, and an extensive vocabulary of nonsense words– a glossolalia of word-like sounds invented by Artaud to give utterance to the dissociation of meaning from language.”

Needless to say, I’d probably turn off my radio if Keillor came on, but if Artaud came on I’d throw it out the window. I was going to say that Kleinzahler’s prescription for contemporary poetry would only make it popular among the masochistic, but I’m pretty sure that is already its main audience.