The Poetry Wars, Part I

On April 12, I announced in this space a new poetry policy: “We shall continue, yes, to review a few books of poetry as books, but our main coverage of the genre will be one brief poem in each Sunday issue of The Book Review with just a word about its author and the new collection from which it has been taken.”

On April 16, Harry E. Northup and a group of poetry lovers demonstrated against this policy on Times Mirror Square. The demonstration--far more, I think, than the policy statement--seems to have caught the public fancy. Several radio stations and the Associated Press reported it. I am told that it was covered on French television. An article on the controversy will appear soon in Publishers Weekly. Another will run next September in Columbia Journalism Review. And then there are the letters from Times readers, more than 100, most of them opposed.

A few arrived in verse. Scott Wannberg--poet laureate of Dutton’s bookstore, Brentwood--wrote:

Sing these languages forth. Onto the afternoon’s skin, onto the dance floor of the Sunday Book section. Thanks.

I am not sure about the scansion of Thanks , but the hortatory intent is clear, and representative. Poet Robert Crosson, Los Angeles sent a more elegiac letter closing:

Alas, Pedestrian. A contemporary fact. To be lamented.

There were, not to linger over them too much, a few voices raised in favor. Thus, Roberta Jordan, Los Angeles: “ ‘Scars’ is a truly exceptional poem, one I have clipped and read to my students. Last week I encountered ‘Willing Witnesses’ and was similarly moved. Most of us are too poor to go out and buy untried volumes of poetry--now we have some direction.”

Confirmation on a secondary point came from poet Timothy Steele who shared a letter written for another purpose in which he compares the 1957 anthology, “New Poets of England and America” with “New American Poetry: 1945-1960”: 36 poets in one, 44 in the other, and not one duplication.

A more searching comment appeared in the Washington Post. Critic Jonathan Yardley learned of the new Times policy from an anonymous reader who sent him the April 12 “Endpapers” with the comment: “Thought you might have some views on this depressing literary news from California.” Yardley replies: “Yes I do, but my views are unlikely to please my correspondent.” He concludes his piece: “The question Jack Miles asks is in no way frivolous: ‘Is it not odd to publish comparative discussions of whole volumes of poetry for readers who rarely read even a single poem?’

“Yes, it is odd, though a case can be made that it is an oddity that a well-balanced book section should tolerate. But I’ve little doubt that in newspaper offices around the country there are book editors who quietly envy Miles and his colleagues for taking a step they would dearly love to follow. A book section exists to serve not authors but readers. . . .”

Yardley’s distinction between the needs of authors and those of readers is a crucial one. Many of the letters on the new policy were from and/or about Los Angeles poets. Thus, Laura Chaney Holland, UCLA Extension, with 20 co-signers: “There is a flourishing poetry community in Los Angeles . . . a revolution of poetic thought and style. . . .” And poet Holly Prado, Los Angeles, a frequent Times reviewer, quoting the late Robert Kirsch: “If Los Angeles were San Francisco . . . , what is happening in poetry here would long since have been hailed as a golden age.” Holland and Prado may be right about Los Angeles, but then I did not say that nobody was writing poetry, I said that almost nobody was reading it. Some years ago, when the Episcopal Church was losing members, a statistician predicted that in 25 years, there would be one Episcopal priest for every Episcopalian and that in 50 years, every Episcopalian would be a priest. The new golden age of Los Angeles poetry looks analogously hierocratic to me: Everyone in the pulpit, no one in the pews.

Does criticism often attract completely new readers? I doubt it. If you had never heard a violin, would a description of Nathan Milstein in action lure you to the Ambassador Auditorium? But literally millions of Times readers are in just this condition when it comes to poetry. A young scientist tells me that he has read more poetry in The Times in the last five weeks than otherwise in the last five years. A real poem is far more likely to attract such a reader to poetry than any critical discussion is.

Many letters argued that writing about poetry was not so difficult as I said it was. Thus poet Amy Gerstler, Los Angeles: “It would be interesting if such an attitude was more widely applied to what newspapers choose to report; i.e., ‘It’s complicated to write about scientific discoveries well, not many people are interested in science, so let’s replace science coverage with extra sports pages, or a larger food or fashion section.’ ” And, more nihilistically, poet Lee Rossi, Tarzana: “I’m glad The Times has finally caught on to the real cultural level of Southern California--customized vans and corn dogs. No more boring poetry reviews! Give us more Barbara Cartland, more gothic romances, more puff pastry Hollywood biographies.”

To these correspondents, I would respond, first, that poetry reviews are being reduced in number, not eliminated altogether; and second, that the space they vacate is not being given to sports, food, or Barbara Cartland but to poetry itself. The overall proportion of The Book Review devoted to poetry grows, it does not shrink, under the new policy. As for the analogies to the discussion of music, painting, science, I concede the point in principle but insist that the audiences in the mentioned areas are not nearly so attenuated as the poetry audience is. If they were, then a policy like the new poetry policy in The Book Review would be in order there too.

It will be evident by now that I have not been deflected from my new course by the demonstration and all the letters against it. I have, however, been moved again and again by the intelligence and deep feeling of those who have spoken out, most especially perhaps in the following from Annie Reiner, Los Angeles, whose conclusion I reproduce in full, with apologies to my other omitted or condensed correspondents: “While I agree with your estimation that at this time poetry does not seem to have a central character, this is something perhaps which it is searching for. That search will be hindered by removing even the dim spotlight that one review of poetry every week or two provided for those interested in finding poetry’s waning purpose in a society that, perhaps not coincidentally, often seems to have lost its own.”