Stop Complaining About Contemporary Poetry, Because Steve Gehrke Is Probably Brilliant

Disclaimer: I wrote this pretty late last night after I got back from the RNC media party (open bar), and I don't feel like re-writing it for intelligence, so please read charitably. Hah.



First, I'm sorry I'm not writing about my life -- and I only say that because I'm assuming (WARNING: SOLIPSISM AHEAD) that most people visit this adorable little blog because they want to read about Glamorous Life In The Big Apple, and, unfortunately, my life is only describable as None of the Above. So I have to pretend I'm still trying to get a B.A. in English instead.

Now that that's out of the way, here's another little Contemporary Poetry Rant.

It's easy to go off on why all modern poetry is terrible, and it's The Poets' fault that nobody reads poetry anymore, but it's also The English Teachers' Fault, and it's also The People's fault, and our entire society is pretty much screwed because nobody reads verse and that means Western Civilization was basically a cute little failed experiment, and we should all invest in dry beans and plastic emergency blankets as the apocalypse is, for lack of a better term, eminent.

Okay. It's easy to say that.

But it stops being easy when you read Steve Gehrke. I wrote a little bit about him, and Serena wrote a follow-up, but he's not an international celebrity yet, so obviously we need to write more. Seriously, people. Read Steve Gehrke. This is not a drill. Do it. Stop reading this and go read him.

In case you didn't immediately close your browser and boogie on over to the Poetry Foundation's website to check out his work, here's an argument for it:

First, he's seriously good. He knows what he's doing, he does it well, and he accomplishes what he wants to do. Second, what he wants to do is really lovely and brutal and chilling, and it's worth doing, and I don't think I've read anyone who's done it quite as well as he does. Third, I think he really loves English. His lines have a vigor and intensity and (gag) energy that kind of pulsates, and he's hard to stop reading once you start -- in fact, I don't start reading one of his pieces until I know I have time to read it at least three times.

And if you aren't sold yet (which, IMO, is impossible, but this is a contingency paragraph), reading contemporary poetry matters. Especially if you hate contemporary poetry. It's easy to write it off (hah! a writing pun!) and ignore it, and just re-read the same old Hopkins sonnets you've been reading since freshman year when you discovered "God's Grandeur" and decided you'd found the zenith of Western culture. But that's intellectually lazy, and it stops being fun after a while. And poetry is supposed to be fun. And part of the fun of reading poetry is reading new poetry and having to decide if you like it, without the built-in Test of Time Answer Key. Contemporary poetry forces you to make a decision. Its quality is still up for debate. Nobody's concluded that it is or isn't good. And that means that you can pretend you're part of the canonization process -- which, if you think about it for a bit, is really, really, really cool.

So go read Steve Gehrke. You might hate him, and that's okay (actually it's not okay, but I feel like I should say that, just in case). Tell me what you think. And remember that if lay people don't read poetry, it will keep on being just for the elites who have (let's be real) kind of bad taste. And it will stop mattering altogether, and Western Culture might actually take a fractional, incalculable step away from loveliness. And your apathy will have played a role in that sad migration.

Go read Steve Gehrke, right now. This is not a drill.

Prose Means You're Crazy

I'm re-reading Hamlet right now (pregaming Infinite Jest) and the introduction of my edition made a fascinating point that everybody else (especially Serena) probably already knows: apparently in Elizabethan English drama, characters only spoke in prose to indicate a formal proclamation, a low conversation, or insanity.

Let me say that again: when a character in Shakespeare speaks in discursive prose, it usually means s/he's nuts. Joshua Mehigan points this out about King Lear (in an essay I'll dig up and link to because it and him are both great), but I didn't realize that that's standard.

So this raises a few questions: What would Shakespeare think about contemporary theater, where things tend to be a bit, um, prosaic? Would he assume everyone was crazy? And would he be a little bit right?

Other question, for people who paid more attention in school than I did: when and why did we decide that human speech doesn't sound like poetry? And can we trace the decline and fall of contemporary poetry to that shift?



*Disclaimer: I don't actually feel that gloom-and-doomy about contemporary poetry, but let's be a little bleak about its current state for the sake of the conversation.

"Poetry" Magazine Provides Insight Into Why Nobody Reads Poetry

-Requisite explanation for why I haven't posted here in so long, something about being busy at work and moving, bla bla bla nobody cares-


Hey guys, here's a fun fact: "No one, other than poets themselves, really gives a damn about poetry." That's Michael Corbin writing for City Paper in 2001, and he's pretty close to the truth. Although I stopped writing poetry around the time I stopped being an angsty 15-year-old, I think it's safe to say that 80-90% of people who regularly read poetry also regularly write it. That's terrible news. Can you imagine if only moviemakers watched movies, or only chefs liked good food? We'd assume that either A) something was wrong with the creators of this narrowly appealing product, B) something was wrong with the target audience, or C) Both. 

I posit C, but for the purposes of this little rant, I'm going to focus on the people pumping out poetry that only appeals to like 1% of the population. 

Seriously, guys, just stop. 

I understand that Eliot wanted to reclaim poetry for the elites. I understand that maybe Frost watered it down a bit and made it too pop-culturey. I understand that college professors get grants for being cutting edge/avant garde/innovative (read:inaccessible). I understand that America's sad little education system does a pretty lousy job of cultivating ears for artful language. And I understand that the Facebook generation might not have the attention span for oblique, insightful, subtle verbal stylings. 

But whatever. No excuses. If the only people who want to read what you write (poetry geeks) are just like you, you're doing something wrong. 

The July/August issue of Poetry gives us a great example of this. It has a section pretentiously titled "The Poetry of Other Things" (which actually has a bunch of really great essays; highly recommended), prefaced by a short paragraph starting with this sentence:

"We thought it might be interesting to ask a few poets to write on subjects other than poetry that are close to their hearts."

Wow!! Neato!! What a crazy idea!! Golly gee willikers, I would love to know what my favorite contemporary poet thinks about something besides my favorite contemporary poetry!

Just kidding. As long as we're surprised to hear poets' thoughts on the non-poetic, nobody besides poets will want to read it. Let me say that another way: If poets only write about poetry, they make their entire craft a sort of intellectual Rotary Club -- super super interesting to the tiny fraction of the population that cares, and totally worthless to everyone else. 

In one of the only good poems about why poetry matters, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," W. H. Auden writes that poetry is "[a] way of happening, a mouth." (Heads up, poets! Auden already explained why poetry matters, so you don't have to! Please stop it!) In other words, poetry is a means to an end. It's a lens; it helps us see other things, other people. If the only role of poetry is to help us value poetry, it's a stupid waste of time, and it's no great tragedy that only 8% of Americans read a poem in 2007. 

Now, granted, this poetry-about-poetry house-of-cards garbage isn't the only thing contemporary poets are doing wrong. And not all contemporary poets do it (Thank you, Averill Curdy, A. E. Stallings, Steve Gehrke, Roddie Lumsden, et al; may you live for a thousand years). But here's the point: As long as we expect our poets to only have insight on poetry, we're wasting our time on them. I don't know what the solution is (probably not ranting on the Internet), but for now, all I can think to do is praise the poets who get it right and say snarky things about the ones who get it wrong. Our culture is on the line. 

Let's figure out if Steve Gehrke is brilliant

I'd never heard of this poet before, Steve Gehrke, but he has two things in the July/August issue of Poetry, and one of them, "The New Self", is kind of crazy. This piece has something to it that I'm not sure I've seen before -- this weird energy or movement or musicality, and a slippery darkness that's hard to explain but really vivid/visceral. You all should read it and tell me what you think. Serena, I especially want know what you think about the "this language is the jeweler's bluff" bit. And if anyone picks up any Prufrock/Eliot references besides in the sixth stanza, please let me know.