Chekhov’s Mistess

November 14, 2005

When Good Poems are Bad Poems

 

“On the other hand, there’s also plenty to be annoyed about. The most obvious problem with ”Good Poems for Hard Times“ is that it proposes that ”the meaning of poetry is to give courage.“ That is not the meaning of poetry; that is the meaning of Scotch. The meaning of poetry is poetry. But a more subtle and intractable difficulty is that Keillor’s taste isn’t just limited, it’s limited within its limitations. He likes plainspoken writing that is long on sentiment, short on surface complication – a defensible aesthetic, if one that occasionally condescends to its subject matter and audience. But rather than emphasizing the strongest writers in this mode (James Wright and Sterling Brown, for instance), Keillor favors soggy tough guys like Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski, as well as a host of small-scale epiphany manufacturers, almost all of whom appear to be, as they say, white. (”Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average, and all the colored people are in somebody else’s anthology.“) ”

David Orr on Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times, in the NY Times (On Poetry: Hit Parade, November 13, 2005).

This is Orr’s take on Keilor’s book, but the article as a whole is about Poetry Magazine’s dueling reviews of the book in its April 2004 issue. Not sure why the Times is covering this so long after the fact and particularly since Orr doesn’t add much of anything. The two arguments were Dana Gioia on the side of populist poetry or perhaps the survival of poetry (in the public at large’s consciousness) at any cost and August Kleinzahler’s argument essentially that if it ain’t good it’s not worth saving (covered way back when at Tingle Alley).

Of course, the idea of good poetry here is something like the opposite of bad poetry, which makes Kleinzahler’s argument a little empty: he’s arguing against something instead of for something and what he’s arguing against has every right to exist – that is, the best argument against bad poetry is writing good poetry. Orr captures that: “This isn’t real confrontation; it’s Narcissus chewing out his own reflection.”

One thing Orr touches on that should have more significance on the populist side of the coin is the race issue. This from Rita Dove, who wrote in [to Poetry magazine] after the reviews appeared:

For those readers who might have missed it (as both of Poetry’s esteemed gentleman reviewers, Dana Gioia and August Kleinzahler, did), let me point out that in Keillor’s entire book, all two hundred and ninety-four poems of it, I could find only three Black poets—all of them dead, no less, and the one woman actually a blues singer. Now, I may be missing someone—poems can be blessedly color-blind—but by any standard, this is an abysmal percentage. (Nor is there a Hispanic or Asian-American or Native American presence to speak of.) In his foreword, Keillor claims to have merely collected poems America—real America, good America!— wants to read; one can only conclude that his America never reads work by living African-American poets. There’s no Lucille Clifton. No Marilyn Nelson. No Elizabeth Alexander or Sonia Sanchez, not even Gwendolyn Brooks!

What’s irritating is that there are issues at stake, as Dove points out, but the rest of this is just [entertaining] bullshit. That’s why Orr has no more of a conclusion than to hope that when the title of the book is “Good Poems” that they really are. Kleinzahler should save his words for his poetry because what his argument presupposes in some way that doggerel poetry crowds out serious poetry. Serious poetry will continue to play a marginal role with society at large and always exist for the “happy few,” to use Stendhal’s words, bad poetry will always proliferate as long as people care to write it. We wouldn’t know the good if it weren’t for the bad. So it almost seems to obvious too talk about; as Orr says,

So which way do we turn? Do we agree with Kleinzahler that art is meant to be an entertainment for the select few by the select few? Or do we sign on with Keillor, and embrace poetry as a means of creating a common life, even if we lose a few highbrow writers along the way? The truth is, it was never a real choice to begin with…

• posted by Bud Parr
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