The Poetry Wars, Part II

Does poetry play a smaller role in American life and letters than it should? Many who have lately written to The Times clearly think so. Poems and poetry reviews in The Book Review aside, can anything be done to change this? I offer the following three modest proposals:

1--Abolish poetry readings.

2--Collectivize poetry distribution.

3--Get the poets off campus.

1--Abolish poetry readings.

Several recent correspondents point out that poetry is a more important, more powerful art in the Soviet Union and in Latin America than it is in the United States. They are right. I have it on good authority that Pablo Neruda once filled the 200,000-seat Sao Paolo soccer stadium with devotees of his work. Russian poets regularly address crowded theaters. American poets, by contrast, hold out in small university lecture halls or student lounges. What accounts for the difference?

There may be many reasons, but I saw one in action some weeks ago at a small luncheon for the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky. Knowing that I would not be able to attend his evening appearance at UCLA, I had brought along a copy of the bilingual edition of “An Arrow in the Wall” (Holt). After lunch, I asked him to read a poem from it, one I especially liked. “Of course,” he said; but as for the book, he waved it aside. He stood. He moved a few steps away from the table. He paused--a long pause: We could hear the chairs squeak--and then, from memory, he recited a long poem in which his widowed mother begs him not to go to distant, dangerous America.

This was no poetry reading. This was, to repeat, a poetry recitation, and the difference between it and most of the poetry readings I have attended has at least something to do with the differing status of poetry in his country and in ours.

A poet who does not know his own work by heart confesses that his heart is not in it. Do you wish a large, a popular poetry? Tear down your lecterns, I say, tear down. Strip your goliards of their books. If they fall silent, strip them of their honoraria as well. Our literature is both written and spoken; at different moments in its history, one aspect or the other will require renewal; the spoken aspect requires renewal now, and readings do not provide it.

The typical American poetry reading is the quasi-liturgical enactment of the bookishness of American poetry itself. Shackled to the book, the poet typically seems to be trying to make the audience see the poem, not hear it: see what the type looks like on the page, the stanza breaks, the quirky spacing; see which words are in italic, which in small caps, etc. No wonder we are so relieved by the patter in between. That part, at least, is in real speech.

In and of itself, reading aloud is a good thing. Indeed, the new currency of audiocassettes enriches the appreciation of poetry more than it does that of any other genre. (More about finding good poetry cassettes in a moment.) But listening to poetry without a book at hand serves to highlight the consequences of the rupture of forms. That is to say, meter and rhyme, whatever else may be said of them, once enhanced the audibility of the compressed and (for that reason) difficult diction of poetry. Some contemporary poetry in broken forms is almost literally inaudible. It positively requires the eye. It requires, in other words, what only its printed form permits: an immediate doubling back from the middle to reread the beginning which the middle has made so puzzling, and so by successive reversals down the length of the poem, like a nervous squirrel descending a tree. Not all silent poetry reading proceeds this way; but until one has done a lot of no-turning-back poetry listening, one does not notice how much of silent poetry reading does indeed proceed this way. For poetry, the audiocassette is a medium beginning to become a message.

But reading aloud, however good, is a far cry from recitation. In recitation, the poem, the thing that took life from its creator, gives its life back, and the poet speaks as more than an ordinary man, as more than himself. Only to something this large can a large audience respond. In a reading, poem and poet remain separate, merely life-size. All is friendly, companionable, essentially quiet even when the reader shouts (and few do). Of the true, demonic power of poetry, there are in poetry readings at best only hints.

Abolish poetry readings, therefore, require poetry recitations, and see if some of the power of poetry is not felt anew.

2 -- Collectivize poetry distribution.

The modernist impulse--now, some say, played out--was an adversarial, often anarchist impulse. One of its consequences may be that poetry publishing has become the most decentralized form of publishing in America, small presses shading off into smaller presses, short books into “chapbooks,” and poetry cooperatives into group self-publishing. But this state of affairs, some recent letters to The Times suggest, is less a reflection of the inherently unruly character of poetry than it is of the “bottom line” orientation of mainstream American publishers. In brief, the correspondents object (or boast), there is no money in poetry.

Oh no?

According to Alison Coles writing in the British magazine The Listener (April 23, 1987), Desmonde Clarke, a military-man-turned-poetry-publicist, has announced his intention to become Britain’s “first poetry millionaire.” If it can be done in Britain, can it not be done here? But how does Clarke propose to do it?

According to Coles, Clarke has created something he calls Poetry Catalogue, in which he claims to offer for sale all the poetry published anywhere in Britain. A subscription to Poetry Catalogue, an annual publication, is available gratis to anyone who requests it. Though subscribers to the Catalogue constitute a kind of book club, there is no minimum purchase. In promotional mailings of the catalogue, Clarke bypasses bookstores and concentrates on individuals and smaller libraries in more isolated parts of the country.

It all seems just a bit quixotic, and yet it seems to be working. Coles reports a “poetry boom” in Britain. Sales at Penguin and Faber are up 60%. Some smaller houses report even larger gains.

Can something similar work in the United States?

It seems to me that the germ of something similar is already working here. “If it’s POETRY and it’s available ON TAPE we have it--or we’ll get it!” boasts Poets’ Audio Center, POB 50145, Washington D.C. 20004-0145; 1-800-824-7888. Poets Audio Center is a poetry distribution project of the Watershed Foundation, 6925 Willow St., NW, No. 201, Washington, D.C. 20012. Besides functioning as a distribution center, the foundation also functions as a producer. Its Watershed Tapes claims indeed to be the world’s largest producer of audiocassette recordings by poets, with 120 titles in print, all featuring poets performing their own work, and a production schedule that calls for 20 and soon 36 new titles each year.

Watershed cassettes are superbly produced. But what most invites comparison to Desmonde Clarke is that catalogue boast: “If it’s POETRY and it’s ON TAPE,” etc. Strike the words “on tape,” and one might imagine a collectivized, one-stop-shop poetry distribution system for American poetry like the one which the great wholesalers now constitute for commercial publishing and which, it would appear, Clarke has now set up for Britain. Distribution is not the heart of the poetry problem, to be sure, but it is a part of it.

Since the Watershed Foundation is a nonprofit organization, founder and executive director Alan Austin cannot aspire to be, like Desmonde Clarke, the “first poetry millionaire.” But the core of the Clarke program--the unified distribution of poetry in book form--seems a natural complement to what the Watershed Foundation is now attempting for recorded poetry. For my part, I would be happy if printed poetry remained merely a complement; that is, if over time audio-publishing became the principal form of poetry publishing, with the book as simply an inclusion for those who especially wanted it. But that highly debatable notion aside, the more important point is that anarchy in distribution must yield to something like solidarity if poetry is ever to reclaim a large public role.

3 -- Get the poets off campus.

Poets have long been accused of corrupting youth, but in the campus setting, I think the poor poets are more often corrupted than corrupting.

Poetry is not naturally a nurturing pursuit. As an intense form of self-expression, it requires a professional attention to the self that is as far from conventional selfishness as a clown’s attention to the red spot on his nose is far from conventional vanity.

But poets are also people. Surround them with students in need of nurturing, and at length, with whatever awkwardness and reluctance, they may begin to provide what is needed--and gradually to stop writing.

With all due respect then to “in residence” programs, which have met a genuine need on the poets’ side and offered a unique boon to thousands of students, there must be another way for the writing of poetry to be subsidized. And for this reason, it is welcome news that a contemporary arts foundation, the Lannan Foundation, newly arrived in Los Angeles (5401 McConnell Ave., Los Angeles 90066), plans to make poetry an integral part of its programming. The Foundation, which is rehabilitating a warehouse in Marina del Rey as its national headquarters, has already begun the production of poetry videocassettes, according to programs director Bonnie Clearwater. In 1988, the foundation’s first year of full operation, its auditorium will offer a major program of poetry readings--or, as I would dare to hope, of poetry recitations, many of which will be made available afterward as videocassettes.

The off-campus poetry programs of the Los Angeles Theatre Center and Beyond Baroque are, of course, commendable ventures in the same direction; but with its $100-million endowment, the Lannan Foundation has the potential, if it so chooses, to undertake a program of support and renewal for poetry much larger than theirs.

Where should poets be more at home--in the scuffed cafeterias of the campuses or in the sleek lounges of Marina del Rey? Philip Roth once said in another context, “There you pay for there, here you pay for here.” For decades now, poetry has been paying for there. The time may have come for it to start paying for here. Welcome to Marina del Rey, future poetry capital of Los Angeles.