The Problem with Poetry

 The history of a Movement, it is said, begins as tragedy and ends as farce. The GOP these days seems to epitomize that. It began with the Abolitionist Movement, a noble effort to deal with the tragedy of Slavery, and the first President from the Grand Old Party was Abraham Lincoln, one of America’s greatest; now it seems closing in on its end with the truly farcical competition among clownish politicians for the party nomination in 2016. When I hear yet another Trumpism, like his statement that an enacted Constitutional Amendment was unconstitutional, I can’t help but recall the comment of Everett Dirksen (a great Republican in his day), about another politician that, “like Samson,  he seeks to destroy his enemies with the jawbone of an ass.” . The Democratic Party candidates also seem so far at least lacking in the luster one associates with candidates for President. The same lack of seriousness applies to policy debate in the Congress (neither side excepted.) Real public and foreign policy debate has been discarded for slapstick. So, recognizing the futility of serious political discussion in the face of that, and in part to protect my stomach, I plan to shift the focus of my postings for the next few months away from policy and politics to other, more serious topics that interest me. I shall get back to policy eventually.

I start by angering many contemporary poets – at least those few who might read this. Poetry is an area I dearly love but I have mixed feelings about poets.  My belief is that much, not all, currently published poetry suffers a malaise similar to that of modern Jazz in late 20^th century, though Jazz seems to be recovering now. Mary Oliver, Billy Collins and Mark Doty are notable exceptions, but like the later “cool” jazz of Miles Davis, et al., poetry in the hands of some of its practitioners has become hermetic, contemptuous of the audience and possessed of “a problem with communication.” Notable non-exceptions to that are much recent poetry published in the New Yorker. I hardly bother with much of their poetry these days because it so obviously is not intended for the little old lady in Dubuque.

Poetry has entered a period of over- emphasis on prose poetry, a mess in the hands of unskilled practitioners, but that is not its problem. Prose poetry was out of fashion in the 20^th century, but its history, from scriptural psalms to the prose poetry of John Donne, runs long before that. The malaise stems from two causes. First, some poets have forgotten that great poems are great because they communicate to a wide audience of all varieties of readers. If the sonnets of Shakespeare had been written only for the appreciation of a knowledgeable crowd of insiders they would not be with us today. Contemporary poets such as Doty, Collins and Oliver are in tune with that. A new poem of Oliver’s about her dog playing in a new fallen snow was like a breath of fresh air. Second, too many poets seem unaware of or have forgotten that great poetry, in the words of Shelley, involves a search for the transcendent in the ordinary. Too many poems today are personal and psychological rather than transcendent. Transcendence is just not there in them. Robert Frost riding along a country road at night found far more that spoke to the human condition than such contemporary poets.

 I plead for poets to resume their search for that elusive transcendence in each of us. In the words of Mark Doty, “Imagine breathing surrounded by the brilliant rinse of summer's firmament. What color is the underside of skin? Not so bad, to die, if  we could be opened into this— If the smallest chambers of ourselves, similarly, revealed some sky.”