America’s ‘Only Real Art’

Thomas J. Fleming’s article (Editorial Pages, Aug. 27), “Movies, Television, Popular Music Are Our Only Real Art,” recommends cutting from the federal budget “a small but unsightly piece of fat: aid to the arts.” In advancing his argument, he makes scattershot attacks on contemporary art, including contemporary poetry. His attack raises more questions than one letter can answer; I’ll confine myself mainly to defending contemporary poetry, but similar arguments could be made in favor of the other arts.

Critics of Ronald Reagan’s arts budgets have pointed out that current federal funding to the arts would not buy one wing of one new bomber, and that Reagan’s budget devotes more money to military bands than to all the other arts combined. Nonetheless, if the arts are forced to do without federal funding, they will; unlike the joint chiefs of staff, artists are accustomed to operating on shoestring budgets.

I’m really more concerned about Fleming’s tired old complaint that modern poetry is too difficult, that the “experts” or “snobs” praise only poetry that is “foreign or at least unintelligible,” and that contemporary poetry is not “addressed to the experiences of ordinary Americans.”

Fleming opposes such obscure poetry to the supposedly simpler poetry of the Beatles or Bob Dylan. (Can he be referring to such abstruse lyrics as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” or “A Day in the Life,” or the surreal nightmares of Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” album?)

Fleming’s argument is nonsense, and it’s the kind of nonsense that scares readers away from contemporary poetry. Admittedly a few fine contemporary poets, such as John Ashbery, are notoriously difficult. Others, such as James Wright or Robert Hass, are relatively accessible but still require a slow, careful reading. However, many fine contemporary poets are downright easy to read--at least as easy as, say, the best-selling novels of John Updike or John Irving.

If anyone is sincerely afraid that contemporary poetry is too difficult for him or her, I can recommend several wonderful and accessible recent books: “Tar,” by C. K. Williams; “Black Dog Red Dog,” by Stephen Dobyns; “The Fact of a Doorframe,” by Adrienne Rich; “The Sacrifice,” by Frank Bidart; and above all, “People Live Here,” the collected poems of the great American poet Louis Simpson.

Only slightly more difficult than these, and well worth the effort, are “Willingly,” by Tess Gallagher; “A Happy Childhood,” by William Matthews, and “The Dead and the Living,” by Sharon Olds. (Many bookstores would be able to get most of these books for you within a week.) All of these books, by the way, are “addressed to the experiences of ordinary Americans.” I doubt that Fleming has read them, or he might have realized that poetry, after all, is “still capable of speaking to the living.”

Let me add a final word about “difficulty.” Many things in life are difficult until we make an effort to understand them. Reading modern poetry is no more difficult, I think, than watching professional football--certainly no more difficult than repairing a car. Naturally, the more you watch football, or read poetry, the easier these activities become. I believe that our culture, like any other, will finally be judged by what we have been willing to take time to understand.

KYLE NORWOOD

Panorama City