“Provocative” and “Upsetting”…
Yet Somehow Safe for Bourgeois
Consumption: Poetry Magazine
As editor
of a literary magazine, I receive periodic mail from Poetry, asking for
money despite its $100 million drug-financed foundation. Periodically, I stuff the envelope it sends not
with money but with a broadside critical of poetry. To date, I have received no response. The poets involved with Poetry
magazine, including its editor Christian Wiman, evidently live in safe-house
cocoons. They generally have money and
security and are often careerist academics.
In the most recent envelope sent by Poetry, an
unbelievably nauseating hagiographic two-page essay by Adam Kirsch, “Poetry
Magazine’s Rebirth,” was included. Kirsch notes regarding the magazine that “in
its fabled early years helped to establish poetry as a serious American art.” Allow me to replace “serious” with
bourgeois. Well, Kirsch does mention
“stolidly institutional.” Perhaps that
phrase is even more revolting than the term bourgeois in its implication of
being run by literary apparatchiks. It
certainly explains why the magazine’s editor and staff don’t seem to give a
damn about issues of literary ostracizing and censorship, unless of course a
famous poet is concerned. They don’t
give a damn that National Poetry Month (Boston) and Massachusetts Poetry Festival,
for example, refuse to even respond to my requests that the magazine I edit be
included on their lists of literary magazines.
They don’t give a damn that PEN New England refuses to respond to my freedom-of-expression
grievances. They don’t give a damn that the
American Library Association’s “Library Bill of Rights”—specifically article II,
“Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of
view on current and historical issues.l”—is perhaps violated by public
libraries across the country. As an
example, Sturgis Library, the oldest public library in the country, subscribes
to Poetry, but refuses to even accept a free donation to the magazine I
edit, which presents poetry as highly dissident and thus at antipodes to the
highly bourgeois verse presented by the former.
Kirsch goes on to note regarding Poetry that “its age
and prestige mean America’s best poets have always been glad to publish there”
without questioning in the least what “best” might reply imply (e.g., well-connected,
unthreatening to the established order, and academic). Sadly, the “literary fruits” stemming from
the monetary load dropped upon Poetry by the famous drug company will
simply serve to bolster and otherwise assure the iron-clad bourgeois grip on
poetry. As a dissident poet, openly and
highly critical of that grip, I was invited only once to read poetry despite my
persistent contacting of places that periodically invite poets (e.g.,
libraries, writing centers, and colleges). That money will serve to make Poetry
the prime literary gatekeeper in America.
And gatekeepers, as we all know, serve as censors, assuring bourgeois
propriety and good taste—just what poetry needs, n’est-ce pas? Yes, that money will indeed put Poetry
at the center of American poetry.
Kirsch notes regarding the magazine that “it has become one
of the most interesting literary periodicals of any kind published today.” But “interesting” is a highly subjective term,
not objective. Kirsch bases his
evaluation on quantity: from a
circulation of 11,000 in 2003 to 27,000. Popularity thus equals “interesting” in his
mind. And that’s fine, but should that
factor be applied to poetry? One could
also wonder, though Kirsch doesn’t, how many of those copies are given away. Money certainly enables Poetry to
reign in regards to circulation.
Kirsch goes on to praise editor Wiman, comparing him to
Joshua, though Jesus would probably have been even better. But, well, Wiman has 100 million dollars at
his disposal. So, Jesus was out of the
question. Thanks to Wiman, we’re
informed, “Poetry has done what so few magazines of literary and political
opinion ever dare: It has confronted its readers with new, potentially
upsetting ideas.” Oh, my! Well, again, he doesn’t have to worry about
losing subscribers. But what might
constitute “upsetting”? Would this essay
be upsetting… or rather too upsetting to publish?
Kirsch tells us that the origins of the new version of the
old magazine can be found in Dana Gioia’s 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter.” Gioia, however, was a poet bureaucrat in
charge of the NEA, which is manned and womaned by cultural bureaucrats. Kirsch mentions that the key solution in that
essay was to decloister poetry from the confines of academe and to “address and
care about the common reader.” Now,
that’s a good one. In fact, I wrote a
satirical dialogue several years ago on the “common reader.” Somebody had criticized me for not writing
for the “common reader.” So I’d asked
who the common reader was? Would the
common reader understand what I write here?
How might I better address the uncommon reader? Should I use common vocabulary and common
themes to attract the “common reader’? If
so, what were those themes? The notion
of a “common reader” is of course absurd. In fact, the “common reader” likely never
reads poetry at all and would hardly think of lifting Poetry off of a
library shelf. Perhaps he or she would pick
up People magazine or the Boston Herald. The “common reader” idea was nothing but a
transparent ploy to propagate a veneer that poetry was somehow not in the hands
of elite bourgeois poets.
Because of Poetry and other such
well-distributed literary magazines like Agni, New Letters, Ploughshares, and on and on, poetry
would remain a filler item of the type published in The New Yorker,
hardly, in Kirsch’s words, “the highest branch of literature.” The contradictions in Kirsh’s essay are
egregious. For Poetry to suggest
that the “entrenched institutions of the poetry world are stultifying” is in
itself absurd, since Poetry represents one such entrenched institution. Why does Wiman on the one hand decry the
professionalizaion of poetry while publishing so many professional poets? Where is the sense in that? Kirsch notes that the poetry in each issue of
the magazine is generally of a “high standard” without mentioning what that
means or rather implies. And again, one
must emphasize safe for bourgeois consumption.
Finally, Kirsch notes that Poetry is “intelligently provocative.” Hmm…
