POETICKS

Having no idea of a plan of attack on my essay on the state of American poetry yet, I’m going to scatter thoughts I may include here.

1. A very standard thought of mine (although it may not have been when I first put it in print years ago, although I doubt I was the first to have it, is that serious poetry’s audience is relatively small for the same reason serious music’s is, and the research and development department of poetry is virtually ignored by the media and academia for the same reason music’s research and development department is.

2. Another standard thought of mine is that poetry has always been very popular and still is.  Who, for instance, can’t quote with enjoyment at least one portion of some poem that serves as a popular song’s lyrics?  Limericks, nursery rhymes and folk doggerel are continuingly popular (and doggerel may be a crude kind of poetry but it’s still poetry, at least for sensible people who prefer an objective to a subjective definition of the art).  People noting the limited interest of the masses in “poetry,” mistake serious poetry for poetry as a whole.

3. Very few people have the abilities required to work in poetry’s research and development department.  Most of them have no idea what they’re doing.  Academics need reports on it they can understand before they can bring it to the public’s attention, and to be an academic requires more love of received knowledge of a field than will leave room for much of an exploratory drive, particularly a strong enough one to nudge the academic into an interest in the field’s r&d operations.

4. Academics generally have an innate need to protect the received knowledge of their field from any significant enlargement that will complicate it beyond their meagre ability to understand it.  Ergo, academia is the enemy of R&D.

5. Academics will deny they hate R&D, and support their support of it in poetry by alluding to their interest in poets writing about subjects or points of views never getting into poems before, or inventing new metrical schemes for poems or the like, but by R&D, I mean significant R&D, which means entirely new kinds of poetry, not variations of old kinds of poetry.

6. Academics will deny the existence of R&D, too, claiming the people involved in it are not doing anything more than those making up new rhyme schemes.  They’ll find poets making visual poems hundreds of years ago trying to prove visual poetry is old hat, for instance, instead of poetry’s second great R&D discovery in modern times, the first being free verse.  Visual poetry has by now become too standard although still a minority kind of poetry to be considered at the R&D stage, but there much more chance that continued R&D work on it will yield tools for the poet of importance than R&D work on the poetry of Wilshberia will.

7. Genuine language poetry is the third great achievement of modern poetry R&D, and is continuing without being much noticed because ersatz language poetry is now acadominant, ersatz language poetry being jump-cut poetry like Ashbery’s going back to The Waste Land,” and most of Ron Silliman’s (much of which is admirable but not what I’d call “language-centered”–“language-centered” to a greater degree than all the poetry of the past was, I need add for the literal-minded).

8. The main poetries still almost entirely the concern of R&D departments are various kinds of computer-related poetry, my own cryptographic and mathematical poetry, sundry conceptual poetries and non-non-poeties miscalled poetry but nevertheless under fruitful development in the wrong R&D department.  So far as I know.

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