By Dale Favier
In my second year of grad school at Yale, I made a
faux pas, which I still regret. On learning that a couple of friends were going
to be reading poetry at an event, I mused, after absent-mindedly congratulating
them, "I wonder, do we need any more poetry?"
It was a terribly rude thing to say, and I still,
twenty-five years later, regret having said it. It was philistine and awkward
and unpleasant. But now I'm going to say it again. Do we need any more poetr
Well -- in one sense, no. We have more than we can
read already. We have not only more good poetry than we can read already, we
have more great poetry. I am only now, after forty years of assiduous reading,
getting around to Li Po, who stands in the Chinese poetic tradition, very
roughly speaking, as Chaucer does in the English. He is not just a good poet.
He is a Major Poet. An Important Poet. He is an amazing poet.
And there's plenty more where he came from. The
shelf life of poetry, if it has one, has not yet been reached in historical
time. There are people who won't read an old poem, and I don't really know what
to do for them. Someone who thinks Shakespeare beyond his sell date is someone
I probably just can't talk to: I wouldn't know where to begin.
But beyond that, whole new literatures have been
unearthed in my lifetime, and translated into English. I have on my shelves a
book I picked up free, some thirty years ago. It's a translation of what I'm
assured is -- and believe to be -- a great classic of Vietnamese poetry. It's
become something of a memento mori, for me, because I have gradually become
aware that I will never read it. Not because I don't want to. Not because I
won't love it when I get to it. Not because I doubt that it is in fact the
great classic of a great literature.
No, the reason I will never read it is
very simple: it's that I will die before I get around to it. Dead as a
doornail. And the Tale of Kieu will end up in a second-hand bookshop, or
possibly pulped and recycled on the spot. (I'm sorry, Kieu. I didn't mean it to
end like this!) So: on the demand side, no. We don't need any more. What about the supply side?
Poetry doesn't have a general audience, any more.
This is occasion for much hand wringing, and remarks on what crude barbarians
we have become. Sure, I can go with that. But the fact is that written poetry
only ever had a large audience for a century or two -- during the 19th Century,
with a slop backwards into the late 18th and a slop forward into the early 20th
-- and this was a direct consequence of technological advances that greatly
increased the potential audience of poetry without much increasing the number
of potential poets. To wit, advances in printing, which made it cheap to
produce lots of copies, though it was still quite expensive to produce just a
few.
The great medieval poets didn't write for a
general audience: they wrote for little court circles, and counted their
hand-transcribed editions in -- if they were very popular -- scores, not
hundreds, of copies. The same goes for most Renaissance writers, in the early
days of printing: Shakespeare's readership -- as opposed to his play audiences
-- was quite small.
The effect of printing was to artificially
preserve the small community of poets -- all the Romantic and almost all of the
Victorian poets knew each other -- while their audiences grew. So there was
still something similar to the small court circle: it just had a fishbowl of
interested (but mute) listeners around it.
This highly artificial and temporary situation is
what many writers now look back to nostalgically as the way things ought to be,
and what many of us aspire to. We want to be known nationally. We want to be
the Coleridge or the Tennyson of our times. We want lots of people to buy our
books.
But population has exploded and technology has
moved on, and a very different landscape has appeared. There are not, now, a
score of good poets in a generation. There are thousands of them. Bad news if
you want to be Tennyson, and have graduate students write dissertations about
your poetry a hundred years from now. Because let me tell it to you straight:
there are not going to be any more Tennysons. Not ever again.
English poetry has shattered into a thousand
little circles: and that's not because there are no good poets any more, but
because there are scads of them. There are going to John Ashberrys for the
foreseeable future, because academics grind on regardless -- the exact
counterpart of the medieval monasteries, producing their Lydgates -- but
Tennysons and fishbowl audiences are gone.
This is a good thing. Because those mute audiences
didn't want to be mute. And now when you find a poet as good as Tennyson -- it
takes more digging, I admit, than it did when there was a desperate scramble to
catch hold of the single national microphone, but it's still quite doable --
when you find your Tennyson, you can strike up a correspondence with her.
She'll probably even read your poetry in return, if you ask nicely. This may be
a hard time for poetic egos, but it's a wonderful time for poetry.
So once again, we are writing in small circles. We
are publishing our poems in human-scale numbers: editions of a dozen or a
hundred copies. We are talking to each other in poetry.
Look at it this way. In Chaucer's time, in all of
England, how many young men or women were there who could even conceivably get
a shot at airtime for their poetry? Who might get a chance to read their poems
at a royal or noble court? A few hundred, tops: dependents of great houses;
monks in some of the great monasteries; members of the royal or noble families
themselves. There just weren't very many potential poets. Probably a number on
the same order of magnitude as, say, the number of poetry bloggers in Cleveland
today.
You may think that modern culture is inimical to
poetry: that we are so busy truckling to capitalism and so bombarded with
entertainments and so ignorant of our traditions that not many of these
potential poets will ever write poems, and far fewer of those will write good
ones. And I may agree with you.
But even if you think it's a hundred times
unlikelier for a potential poet to become a good poet nowadays, when the pool
of potential producers of English poetry has gone from a few hundred people to
hundreds of millions of people -- as it has -- you're still looking at a
generation with some thousands of Chaucers in it. Not hundreds: thousands. (Do
the math, if that's your sort of thing.)
There is simply no way that we could, or should,
pare that number down to the small literary circles that used to make literary
history. There will be no more Tennysons, because we are awash in Tennysons.
There are half a dozen poets in my blogroll that I think are that good. Odds
are they won't be in the Norton Anthology in the year 2050: those slots will be
taken, as they are now, by the pets of academia -- good poets, some of them, no
doubt: but to call them the good poets of the early 21st Century is simply
delusionary.
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Dale Favier has taught poetry, chopped vegetables, and written software for a living. Currently he works half-time as a massage therapist and half-time running a database for a non-profit in Portland, Oregon. He is a Buddhist, in the Tibetan tradition. He writes about meditation and poetry, and whatever ever else he may be interested in at the moment, at Mole. He has an M.Phil. in English Literature from Yale, but he never wrote much poetry until he began blogging, a few years ago, and fell in with bad companions. With them he eventually brought out an anthology, Brilliant Coroners. His poems have also appeared in Qarrtsiluni and The Ouroborus Review. His first chapbook, Opening the World, will be coming out next year from Pindrop Press.
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