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John Horvath Jr
Patronizing
A poet today is introduced to 'poetry' at second or third grade. In high school, is persuaded to self-publish in the school 'magazine' where some very pitiable 'poems' have surfaced only to be quickly forgotten. Then a 'poet' takes creative writing classes in college where the poet is "authorized'. Afterward, on to graduate school where one is taught grant writing and, once graduated, is fed into the local/region only, one gender only, theme only identity magazine which now takes the place of one's personal privacy...'a New England, feminist womyn, lesbian whose name escapes me' becomes a description of our new poet laureate. No one seems bothered by that. The poet is now ready to be fed back into the system where the goal is cash-flow and the highest honor is to have a patronizing government [trying most desperately to conceal itself as the poet's colleagues] award a grant or laureate; soon, I expect, every school will crown its own laureate hired straight from a preferred local or regional 'feeder' college.
Poets more or less abandoned the habit of patronage in the Ninrteenth Century. Many poets and fiction writers took odd jobs to support their imaginations: bank teller (TS ELIOT), librarian (ARNA BONTEMPS), newspaper opera reporter (WALT WHITMAN), pediatrition (William Carlos Williams), steel mill mechanic (John Horvath Jr). It is near impossible to list the jobs of all poets as the list is as broad as the number of poets in a given year. By taking up such jobs, our poets become involved in the everyday world of common people. And that involvement led to a new poetry, one for, and about masses. Poets, thus experienced, became advocates of one or other concern with which the masses identified: feminism and vegetarianism, 'Old Believers' and new-age Zen, pacifism and internationalism. Being a member of the masses meant an ability to observe from the 'front-trenches'. But, being 'up front' seemed to require a deference or an inability to criticize a poet's patron. One may offend the reader; but, one never offends those for whom the poet writes.
Then something happened in the 1950s and '60s. Poets moved indoors and begain writing to and for each other. There had been literary salons before the '50s (Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas come to mind along with the Brook Farm crowd of transcendentalists). And, there had been 'creative writing programs on a few well-known college and university campuses.
But the off-campus salon movement brought together local luminaries, often second or third rate 'poets'. These poets saw the light of private and all-too-normal angst as confessional poems so that any 'problem' from boy-girl 'relationships' to elderly incontenance were acceptable. We had lost the ability to judge what is a poem and what is prose, whether it is a good or bad poem; lost even the willingness to have judgements. It all became highly personal and mass-produced. Poetry also became private, a simpleton's haven which could answer any criticism with 'I dreamed it' or 'I felt it'.
Form became as elusive as e.e.cummings' "LEAF" or the operatic lists of Walt Whitman. When poets moved indoors; they gave up their 'day jobs'.
Thus they surrendered the one thing most needed for healthy poetry: a reference to a broader context. 'I' and "you' became ubiquitous - the 'you' being broadly interpreted as the reader or as 'someone' to whom the writer is writing. That someone turned out to be no-one. Poetry became a closed circle of in-the-know poets and those out-of-step poets who struggle failingly. The salon was an anything goes, mutual admiration society. Over and against the standardless 'guild' of local poets, some academics began asking what it was that made a poem a "Poem". Criticism became an academic exercise and, like keep-fit/slim-down diets, theories flourished.
When I say 'academic' I mean a poetry anyone could make from elementary school age to college classroom. There are poets in the schools. Today, I think, a majority of poets are either in academic circles (from first schools to secondary, to university) or are on state and/or federal grants. This makes the government patron of the arts an arbiter of what gets funded and what is not worth funding. The situation is reversed from the 19th century. At ceutury's end flatulators were popular on-stage entertainment (I assume this developed into television entertainment for the lowest denominator and it need not nercessarily be 'common'). Four lines one letter each may be a poem or a kind of saga of an individual stranger. In truth, academic poetry riskx little: an open Midwestern dialect descries urban decay or rural still-life. The poet becomes anonymous; one can hardly distinguish from one poet to another except by the 'political affiliation' or by the group-identity of the poet. The classroom became somthing of a hothouse producing many more self-important, self-centered, self-referencing writers than poets (if any).
The argument is that without college writing courses, there'd be no meetings of poets and little sponsorship of poetry. Indeed I, myself, once made this argument. But if that argument were true we would yet need to explain bringing 'poetry' into the first twelve years of schooling except as a means of producing a product which proves to the parents that their children are being 'taught' to think and write - about themselves if nothing else. Oddly enough, as poets moved into academe, they entered all levels rather than stay at college level. Journals and presses proliferated almost apace with the loss of spelling and reasoning skill. And, as is true for all business ventures, the goal is SALES.
Money never translates well into poetry. Monied poets produce either beourgeois or boring poems. If you disagree then answer:
What is a poem today; on what dunghill will you find it? Answering is truly difficult because it is rejected by almost all who read it. Its audience is not yet born.
--- copyright John Horvath Jr
JOHN HORVATH, who edits poetryREpairs, has been at one time or another a college professor, a street poet, a soldier; HORVATH has worked in a carwash, a steelmill, a caravanserie. His poetry is widely published in the United States and internationally. See www.horvath.ws for a partial (near full) bibliography and biography.
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