Comments on: Poets, is there anything they don’t know?

By: selling waves » Blog Archive » Poets: is there anything they do know?

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 04:57:56 +0000

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        Poets: is there anything they do know?


            A couple days ago, Curt  [...]

By: Curt

Curt — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 04:15:00 +0000

Given that nostalgia for the supposedly better old days is probably the most instinctive intellectual instinct in history, I would normally consider Kleinzahler’s statement to just be a vacuous variation on the theme. After reading and listening to this particular plaint as applied to literature for a number of years, I have concluded that precisely the factors you cite to suggest that literature is booming are exactly those that displease the pessimists, even if they don’t realize it. It’s true that few people believe that there is a contemporary author that they can point to as an equal of Dante or Shakespeare (whether Dante and Shakespeare were themselves considered of much stature during their lifetimes is itself an interesting question). But if there has been any decrease in the relative stature of authors, it is probably precisely because the sheer proliferation of work has created an infinitely wider spectrum across which it is more difficult for any single author to stand out. And the democratization of production mirrors an accompanying democratization of taste, so that readers are both less willing to bow to the taste-making of influential figures and less comfortable with the idea of exalting a single individual too high above his peers. I do still believe that Kleinzahler is probably right about the best and the brightest pursuing other paths–it is hard for me to imagine that the most daring and creative minds would really be attracted to the cozy dullness of the tenured university life, and one ought remember that the London theater-scene in Shakespeare’s day was much more similar to Hollywood than to the Iowa Writer’s Conference (Dante’s Florence was more like Iraq, but let that be). But one has to take an encompassing view, and certainly creative productivity across all areas has only increased with the years.

By: shonk

shonk — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 23:02:34 +0000

From the article:

Cultural and economic forces only suggest further devastation of any sort of vital literary culture

Is this guy fucking joking? The literary culture in this country is booming as I suspect it probably never has before. Millions of people write publicly on forums and blogs, reaching a bigger audience than ever before. And the best of those writers don't have to wait until they die and have their work uncovered and published by their executors; I can think of dozens of writers who started with nothing more than their own, non-revenue producing websites and are now employed or published by major publishers who reach an international audience (or who remain officially unemployed but derive their income from those same, formerly modest, websites). Is there a mountain of crap out there to sift through? Of course. But that has always been the case; the numbers of both good and bad writers who reach a broad audience are simply greater than they've ever been before.

And if those writers aren't communicating through the traditional forms (poetry, novels, etc.), well, that might not necessarily so bad either (although a surprising number are writing novels, with mixed success). Let's be honest: if the measure of art is entertainment, then the movie is better than the poem, because given a movie and a poem of comparable quality, the movie will almost always be more entertaining. And it's also simply false to claim that the movie is an inherently more commercial form of art than poetry. There are an astounding number of pretentious arthouse pieces of crap out there that never make any money nor intend to, more than enough to keep the elitist intellectual circle occupied (not that all arthouse movies are crap, but plenty are).

That all being said, poetry will never die, because the rare great poems evoke a response in the reader that simply can't be achieved through any other medium (of course, the same can be said of most forms of art). Plus, it only takes one person to write a poem and he can do it without having to buy any expensive equipment, neither of which conditions holds for movies or albums. And, if we take an honest appraisal of history, great poets tend not to be the sort of people that work well with others or accumulate much money.