Memorable Speech John Hart’s Poetry Blog

In the February issue of Poetry magazine, there is a poem—well, a verbal phenomenon—in the form of a cootie catcher, or origami fortune teller. You have to cut out the page, fold per instructions, and manipulate it to generate combinations of pre-printed words. I am butterfingered and rusty at this skill, and it took me a while to get things working. When I did, none of the combinations was very interesting.

This gizmo can represent another large realm in the current poetry scene: poems that puzzle but, in the end, cannot please.

The Surrealists started it. They expressly didn’t care to please. In their adoption of automatic writing, random devices, and game-like exercises, they were striving for a revolution in thought, indeed in society.  If they added new powers to poetry along the way—and they surely did—this was almost beside the point.

Half a century later came the cluster of writers sometimes known as the Language poets. They too sought a kind of liberation, freeing the reader from the bossy presence of the writer with “something to say.” (This control-by-the-writer was vaguely linked to capitalism.) This avant-garde championed a poetry that was not only hard to paraphrase but hard to experience. Let the reader do the work of connecting fragments or, at the other extreme, of wading through miles of unrewarding text. These obstacles, it was felt, echoed the way language works, the way life works. To offer an order was to bully, and to lie.

(But isn’t this just more of the obfuscation Modernists were often accused of? I say No, because the Modernists, at their most difficult, meant to build houses of language that could actually be lived in. The Language poets scorned this idea.)

Surrealism and Language are no longer news, yet both are very much with us today.  Some poets follow the automatic writing path and simply gush, producing about one gorgeous line per page. I prefer that to the post-Language intellectual games I find in the three recent winter issues of Poetry. Along with the cootie catcher, there are poems containing underlined blanks, bidding the reader to supply a key word; poems that leap all over pages, requiring us to decode how the content flows; poems with words grayed out or struck out; poems with several lines of type superimposed.  These mechanisms have one thing in common: they invite the (sufficiently patient) reader to enter into a game, to ask for hidden intentions, or to extrapolate a message.   But it’s all in the head, fodder for the puzzle-solving mind, not the mind that feels and visualizes, and sometimes understands in a new way, because of poetic words.

I’m thinking back fifty years to a course in descriptive linguistics, taught by the eminent William G. Moulton.  The adjective meant that, in characterizing a language, you don’t set up as a critic―you just describe what is.  The way people talk is the way people talk.  If someone wants to say “it seems to Sue and I,” instead of “Sue and me,” you don’t wince.  You make a note and observe that this is the way usage seems to be going.

I am a critic, of course.  But what if I applied a purely descriptive eye to the flood of writing that carries the label “poetry” today?  Instead of concentrating on the precious exceptions, how about looking at the norm—not the peaks, but the plains from which they rise?

My sample, of course, is limited: a handful of mags I follow; a few thousand manuscripts submitted yearly to one little periodical, Blue Unicorn; the occasional binge-reading of a poet who catches my eye.  But maybe it’s a start.

To my eyes, the world of poetry-as-she-is-wrote-right-now has a definite geography.

By far the biggest terrain is, simply, prose.  I don’t know how many times, listening to the car radio, I’ve heard a mildly charming anecdote or essay, only to be informed at the close that this was a poem.  Such pieces may have a few metaphors or other linguistic twists along the way, just as much good prose does; they may unfold a little unpredictably; or they may lack any distinction at all.  In judging a printed poem, I sometimes give it the radio treatment:  I remove line breaks and other traditional signals of verse and see just what remains.

But isn’t there good prosaic poetry, or good poetic prose?  For sure.  Yet I get a lot more pleasure from words that pose as prose (while offering something more) than from words that pose as poetry (while offering much less).

Another large country is the Formalist one.  After a mid twentieth century eclipse, rhyme and meter and other useful patternings came back, a good thing.  Reading the new formalists, however, tends to make me appreciate the old ones more.  Too often now the words are wrenched into sonnet form, for instance, with evidence of strain.  Often, too, the words thus treated are banal.  A neatly filled form is a pleasure, but it can’t do all the work.

Overlapping these domains is the zone of sentimentality, the too-sweet, the too-easy, the obviously edifying. Greeting card stuff.  This used to be confined more or less to the amateur mags, but it has lately found a frequent home in our flagship journal, Poetry.  The same goes for verse that expresses political and cultural concerns of the day too baldly.  One may nod in agreement (or not); but that is a kind of counterfeit of being moved.

Objection: You’re not saying that all bad poetry tends to the obvious?  No indeed.  I read plenty of puzzling poems I don’t like.  Some speak to the intellect only; others can be traced back to the old Surrealists, who sought to banish conscious control and put together the most outlandish word combinations.  More about this other hemisphere of the poetry-scape another time.

I am glad that somebody with a platform has finally ventured a criticism of Amanda Gorman’s oration at Joe Biden’s inauguration, presented as a poem and rapturously received. It’s about time that this heartfelt effort by an impressive young woman was taken seriously enough to be questioned on its merits. But I am sad about where the critique has appeared, and where it has not.

The excellent William Logan, not surprisingly, was the one to take on The Hill We Climb. After acknowledging that any inaugural poet has an almost impossible task, he pulls no punches: “Her poem was a sorry affair, composed of stock metaphors and dreary banalities . . . ”  I reluctantly agree.  I have heard similar reactions many times in private, but this is the first public statement of them that I have seen.

A healthy debate should ensue. Outrage in some quarters. But so far there’s no sign of it. The trouble is that Logan’s piece, part of a review of several books, appeared in The New Criterion, a distinctly right-wing journal easily overlooked or discounted by those not at home in that part of the current political spectrum.

Founded in 1982 by New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, The New Criterion exhibits a split personality. It pairs valuable, subtle critical responses to the arts with harangues on the wider political and social scene; the latter assume the reader’s agreement and argue mainly through scorn. The serious pieces are the bait that makes me subscribe; I skim the rest, looking for a genuinely stimulating challenge to my own views. For, politically, I am more in tune with Amanda Gorman than I am with the Criterion editors in their combat mode.

But why should criticism be sectioned off in this way? Why no debate about Gorman’s work and its reception in, say, in The New York Review of Books? Are we so imprisoned by our politics that only an almost fringe publication will carry a negative assessment of a newsworthy piece of work?

As a liberal and environmentalist, I’m distressed to note that my political tribe has an awful weakness for weak poetry—or at least an ingrained habit of judging art of all kinds by content, origin, and social utility, not by style.

Poets come in all political shades. Strong political poetry has been written, though it is tricky to pull off. But poetry should not—it simply does not—belong to any side in the ongoing culture wars.

PS. At least one more voice, distinctly not a right-wing one, has been raised in gentle dissent about the choice of Amanda Gorman as inaugural poet. Ishmael Reed, the renowned Black satirist, thinks a more seasoned Black literary figure ought to have had that honor.

The question comes up. If you don’t care for the bulk of the poems you read today, what do you admire? And don’t go back seventy years. What do you like that’s reasonably new?

Sitting down to answer this question, I kind of surprised myself. I like a lot. It may be a tiny percentage of what I read, but a minuscule fraction of a deluge is still a lot of water. And as a magazine editor—the Spring issue of Blue Unicorn just went into the mail—I take much more pleasure in saying Yes than No.

It is indeed a question of what I like, not who. “There are no great poets, only great poems,” Lawrence Hart liked to remark. Nobody hits the mark all the time. But as Ezra Pound wrote a century ago, “If a man write six good lines he is immortal—isn’t that worth trying for?” That man, these days, is rather more likely to be a woman, but the principle holds.

While I tend to like underdogs more than the regular denizens of Poetry, The New Yorker, and the like, there are exceptions. The glaring one is Kay Ryan, recent poet laureate, whose compact constructions have earned her about every recognition you can think of. If I could, I’d add another. Then there is Nobelist Louise Glück; I will not forget, for instance, her late “The Arboretum” (encountered in The New York Review of Books).

But there are total surprises. I had never heard of Gabrielle Calvocoressi before I read her haunting narrative of pollution, “The Death of Towns,” in Literary Imagination. Of the Brit Miles Larmour, before I saw his family drama “The corncrake, alive and cupped” in the UK publication Orbis. Of the Californian David de Leeuw before I heard him evoke an alpine landscape in an almost empty café in Berkeley. Of Tom Laichas, author of tellingly displaced Biblical parallels, until his work popped up in the inbox of Blue Unicorn. I was barely aware of the Frenchman Benoît Conort till I saw him at BU in translations by Kim Cushman: a successor to Yves Bonnefoy? I won’t mention, this time, poets who are or have been students of mine.

To even begin naming people is to leave dozens out, and what can a reader make of a string of names and titles? So what kinds of poetry am I responding to?

One of my weaknesses is for formal work. When ably handled, rhyme and meter greet me like old friends. Writers like Mary Jane Salter, Susan McLean, and Dan Campion wield these tools with the seeming effortlessness that shows how hard they work. (The deliberate torture of form can be lots of fun, too. Mere sloppiness, never.)

Without form, as Galway Kinnell said, “the responsibility for the poem [lies] wholly on speech itself.” Word by word, the language must do more—make us see, make us feel, sometimes (no lecturing, please) make us think. None of this happens without an element of daring that, in contemporary verse, is rare. I am always alert for signs of the itch to get beyond first thoughts and easily-come-by words. As an editor, I’ll take a somewhat rough piece with some standout lines over a smoother one that makes fewer demands.

If I did an annual anthology—a fantasized Poems John Hart Likes Quite a Bit—it wouldn’t have the heft of the influential Best American Poetry series, which logged 268 pages in 2020. But it wouldn’t be a chapbook, either.

The March 2021 issue of Poetry magazine arrived. I sat right down with it, on the principle that onerous duties should be tended to right away.

If you’re following the field you have to read Poetry, of course. With its handsome packaging, lavish endowment, and century’s worth of accumulated prestige, it enjoys an unequaled authority. Its associated Poetry Foundation website, open to all, is a wonderful resource. An ongoing collaboration with the PBS NewsHour connects prominent voices in the field to millions of viewers.

What’s not to like? Well, for me, the lion’s share of the verse that is being printed.

I read each issue carefully. I read many poems twice and some out loud. I read in the hope of pleasure, which of course sometimes I get. I read as an editor—would I print this? I read as a student of the scene—what do these poems and essays tell me about trends and preoccupations in the poetry world today? I guard against rejecting something just because it is unfamiliar.

That’s just the problem with March 2021 Poetry: far too much of the language in it is absolutely familiar. Predictable. Lazy. Sentimental. Off the shelf in some poetic dollar store.

The first piece, Jennifer Woodson’s “Weight,” sets the tone. “When I was a kid,” it begins, “there was this song that played on the radio all the time.” The song ( “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” as sung by The Hollies) mentions “a long and winding road.” Musing on recent political and cultural troubles, the poet picks up the theme. “And still—ahead of us, the road keeps winding into a place we cannot yet see.”

A poem, or an editorial? I had to check twice to see that it was in fact billed as a poem.

And so it goes through 80 more pages, the linguistic level often dropping to that of a Hallmark card. A red-crowned crane is “wondrous white.” Nathalie Handal tells us: “I’d like to be a poem, to reach your heart and stay.” Michael Simms, teaching a daughter to swim, says: “Watching you I grew stronger—/your courage washed away my fear.” In the issue’s final piece, Margarita Engle instructs us: “Children and poetry were born to love each other”—and yes, this too is part of something published as a poem.

There is a certain amount of labored wit. Chen Chen writes, “One day you will create an online personality quiz that also freshens the breath.” Linda Sue Park has a stanza: “Walk./Bike./Walk some more./Recycle.” And then: “(See what I did there, bike—recycle?)” Even this tiny foray into play with words, it seems, requires a self-deprecating elbow-nudge.

Reviews are supposed to be balanced. I did nod at a very few lines by Chen, by Kara Jackson, by Mahogany L. Browne. Elizabeth Acevedo is at least doing something different from most of the rest. But this reader can bend over backwards no farther than that.

As I worked my way through the issue, a complaint made by New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl in an exhibit critique looped around in my brain: “It seems that we’ll never be permitted to graduate from the university of the obvious.”

Certainly not in Poetry magazine, March 2021.