Christian Wiman

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This cartoon was sketched in 2006.

Eliza Griswold

Open Letter to Poetry editors Christian Wiman, Don Share, and Fred Sasaki, as well as Valerie Jean Johnson:

A satirical cartoon on Poetry magazine (Eliza Griswold) is currently posted on The American Dissident blogsite (seewwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com).  Will you actually be curious… or like most average-Joe poets incurious?   Of course, I’ll probably never know.  No matter. 

The fundamental flaw with Poetry magazine is that its editors refuse to publish harsh criticism with its regard, as well as with that of the established-order poetry milieu in general.  Byron and Pope hit the poet laureate of their time with sledgehammers, but Poetry mag would never publish poems like theirs today relative to one of our laureates. 

The PC-multiculti dogma reigns at Poetry, where ostracism and banning under the guise of moderation are currently effected.  Apathy to ostracism and banning has become a pitiful trait of today’s poets.  The Academy of American Poets not only censored my comments after having posted them, but also banned me, a poet, from participating in its poet forums.  Do you care?  It is highly unlikely that you do or, at best, would justify the censorship and banning.   Poetry Foundation has ostracized The American Dissident from its vast network in refusing to list the journal with other literary journals listed.  

In a nutshell, censorship, banning, and ostracism form your protective cocoon, making it happy-face bland and PC safe.  You represent that shameful aspect of far too many poets in America today. 

Christian Wiman

“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…

Big Money & Public Money Usually Support Obedience and Conformity

Normally, sites that censor do not interest me at all, and that includes Rattle and Poetry Foundation, which refuses to even list The American Dissident with other journals listed. With all its millions of dollars, one ought to wonder just how much Poetry Foundation serves as established-order censor. Evidently, The American Dissident must be INSUFFICIENTLY TASTEFUL for it (see below). In any case, two people suggested I check out Tim Green’s latest blog (see http://timothy-green.org/blog/2010/03/open-letter-to-the-poetry-foundation/comment-page-1/#comment-2863), a hagiographic piece on Poetry Magazine and its staff. My response to it was this essay, which was posted on Rattle, but censored by Green. A critical poem I wrote on Poetry Magazine, a while ago, appears after the essay.

If the citizenry ceases to question and challenge, ceases to think out of the conformist paradigm, preferring instead the comfy pathway of group positivism, the nation is lost. And I think it is lost today.

Green’s essay is indeed an example of base flattery, something that seems to have become very, very prevalent in our dying democracy. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read anything quite so transparent.

As for Ruth Lilly, who dumped $100,000,000 on Poetry Magazine, one can only assume that her education (and money) failed to shape her into a questioning and challenging citizen. Instead, she became yet another blind worshipper of established-order (bourgeois) poesy. Read about her money: “most unethical drug company on the planet” [see www.oralchelation.net/data/Lilly/data6.htm]).

“Beautiful in production,” notes Green regarding Poetry Magazine which is, however, very simple in design and format. “Beautiful” implies extraordinary.

“Poetry Magazine is tasteful,” notes Green. Now, what might that mean? Innocuous? Inoffensive? Bourgeois? PC? Evidently, it's come to mean BOURGEOIS. But should poetry be daintily “tasteful” or should it rather stand up on its hind legs and decry the bourgeois corruption ever trying to smother society in “tastefulness”?

“Tastes are subjective, but tastefulness isn’t, and you’re tasteful,” notes Green, again in praise of Poetry Magazine. But the statement is clearly a non sequitur and idiotic at best. How can one possibly go from the subjectivity of "taste" to the purported objectivity of "tastefulness"? Even if a particular "tastefulness" is shared by the whole of the bourgeoisie, that does not by any means render it an objective trait. It is truly amazing to think that colleges and universities, including the one that graduated Green, might actually be teaching students that "tastefulness" is somehow an objective quality.

“To top it off, you’ve made the outwardly generous, inwardly smart decision to give it all away online, for free,” notes Green, again in praise of Poetry Magazine. One must really wonder how Green's professors managed to fail him so royally. Evidently, his professors would have to ask how their professors failed them so royally. With 200 million dollars in the bank, how can putting up Poetry mag online even remotely be considered generous? An independent mind would rather ask why Poetry constantly beggars for subscriptions. With 200 million, it shouldn’t be charging anything at all for anything.

Quantity seems key to persons like Green, whose corrupted logic would conclude that 30,000 subscribers must equal greatness. What it really equals, however, is POPULARITY and INOFFENSIVENESS. It also implies that the so-called literate populace fears criticism and knows it ain’t gonna find it in Poetry Mag.

“And I’m good,” notes Green about himself. Yet reading his essay on Poetry Magazine, one would really have to conclude the opposite! Evidently, Green is the product of today's educationist emphasis on giving students positive feedback for just about anything they do... or don't do.

“Jealous criticisms,” notes Green regarding anything critical of Poetry Magazine. Yet how easy, lazy, and typically uncreative it is for him to dismiss criticism with an epithet. It reflects the multicultural, PC way of doing things today. Just call it a name... and thus ignore the criticism, even if valid. Only a lazy mind could dismiss all criticism of Poetry Mag as “jealous.”

In his essay, Green makes only one seemingly valid point: spreading the money, instead of dumping it on one organization. But would that have changed anything at all? No. Because the money still would have likely remained in the hands of established-order literature and literati. Thanks to Wiman and others of his ilk, students will continue yawning during their university poetry classes because 99% of their professors will never expose them to poetry as a sword, as opposed to poetry as bourgeois tea and crumpet wordsmithery. As for NPR, can it possibly get more bourgeois? NPC would be a better name for the organization, as in National Political Correctness. Who can bear even listening to those voices?

The real sadness with so much money concentrated in so few hands is that it will inevitably determine what poetry shall be read and what poetry shall be forever buried. Any poet daring to go against the money grain will be buried. Period. Poetry does not NEED to be supported, as Green stipulates. Supporting poetry kills poetry by helping to keep it bourgeois in taste and substance.

Now, do you think Wiman will respond?


From… Not One of Them
If you’re one of them, you’re either “great” and “brilliant”
or on the way to becoming “great” and “brilliant,”
for they man the helms of the grant-according machines
and occupy the literary posts of the nation’s universities
that accord such designation.
If you play their game and try your damndest to become
one of them, they might not make you wealthy, but they’ll
surely succeed in making you revered and well off—
not bad for a poet… or is it?

If you’ve been one of them, they’ll likely post-mortem you
on the front cover of one of their well-endowed magazines.1
If you’ve been one of them, and haven’t yet croaked,
but are on that verge as ambulating poet posterboy corpse,
they’ll devote a whole back cover to something you once wrote,
no matter how inane or trite, as in
“living is a meatloaf sandwich.”2
If you’ve been one of them, but are still midstream careerist,
they’ll eagerly publish one of your self-serving rants where
you mention the diverse nationalities of the bards
sitting upon your comfortable oak desktop, while declaring
“the truth is that the creation of art is laborious,” though you
create it with a $150,000 annual university salary, not to
mention the six or $700,000 in foundation grants.3

Now, as one of them and with a recognizable name,
they’ll even publish one of your divinity tirades
where you omnisciently declare that if one chooses not to
“call light and energy by the name of God,” one will sadly
“lose bearings,”4 which of course leaves me hopelessly lost.

Finally, if you’re not one of them at all and don’t even wish to be,
you’ll truly have to create laboriously, for without their money.
And they’ll likely either never have gotten to read, see, or hear of you,
though, if by odd chance they have, be assured they’ll hold
nothing but deprecating scorn for you.
……………………………………………………………………
1In this case, Poetry magazine (March 2009)
2The words are John Ashbery’s and featured on the back cover of Poetry, March 2009
3C.K. Williams
4Fanny Howe