The Poetic-Industrial Complex
A Review of ‘The Best American Poetry 2000’ (Rita Dove, ed.)
by
Rachel Rabinovitch
What is it that a poet actually does? What conditions encourage him to do it?
What conditions encourage the society around to react to it as it does? How does that affect future such production?
With those questions in mind, I recently had a look at ‘The Best American Poetry 2000’, edited by Rita Dove. Not the poems, at first, since the productive process rather than the creative end product were my main interest. I looked, rather, at the brief author biographies at the end of the book. The result was enlightening.
Who wrote the ‘best poetry of 2000’? According to the profiles in the rear of Dove’s edition, of the seventy-five authors included in the book, fourteen are full professors of English. Another eighteen teach poetry or creative writing courses. Another twenty-two are recorded as simply 'teaching', and do not specifically say what subject -- humanities rather than electrospectography, I would suspect.
The twenty-one remaining do not say what they do. But fourteen of those twenty-one describe themselves as being involved with academic or quasi-academic institutions, being recipients of a fellowship or grant, being the product of an MFA writing program, being published by a university press, etc.
Only seven out of seventy-five do not say that they are associated with a university or a university-associated subsidizing organization. Nor do they say that they are not.
Contrast these results with the previous producers of the 'best poetry'. Eliot — a bank clerk. Wallace Stevens, corporate insurance salesman. Frost the farmer. Pound the ‘Bohemian’, and so on.
Those poets were a number of interesting things; but they were not creative writing instructors. Indeed I can think of no major poet, till perhaps the near mid-twentieth century, who taught poetry or creative writing full-time, as a living.
Of course, whether any of the poets in Dove’s volume are ‘major’ involves a subjective value judgment. But, objectively, it is a fact that nearly all and possibly every last one of them makes their living from or is partly financed by large publicly funded institutions.
Moreover, nearly all if not every last one of them have their work selected and published by outlets (journals, magazines, publishing houses) which are part of, funded by, or subsidized by such institutions.
An exaggeration? Look at the data. Thirty-nine fellowships and grants are recorded as being given to the poets herein included.
Several of the poets in the volume are formally affiliated with, or judges on, the awarding committees. (The NEA is the one most mentioned, with thirteen references, the Guggenheim a close second).
Fifty-one book publications of the work of poets in the anthology have been through university presses.
The seventy-five poets in the anthology are recorded as having won eighty-three prizes and awards, the majority of those prizes carrying the names of university-affiliated or state-subsidized organizations.
And of the seventy-five poets in the anthology, twenty-two -- roughly a third -- described themselves as editors or anthologists. That is to say, poets empowered to select other poets for publication. (Virtually all, as teachers, are capable of assigning books by other poets to their captive audience students, who are then forced to purchase them and so fund the author and presses in question.)
In short: nearly every poet selected by the editor is capable of returning the favor to that editor, who is himself or herself a poet. The poets published are poet-teacher-editors who can publish the poet-teacher-editors who publish them and so put them on a higher academic career track. Or, they are poet-teacher-editors who can force their captive audience of students to purchase the books that the fellow poet-teacher-editors publishing them have written.
Which means? That nearly all and possibly all of the authors of every poem included in ‘The Best American Poetry 2000’ is a writing teacher whose productions and livelihood are state-subsidized. And who is in most cases can select for publication or assign for purchase the work of the poet-teacher-editor who does the same for him -- a closed circle of state-subsidized quid pro quo providing mutual benefit to the members.
E Pluribus Unum
Given the monolithic uniformity of background and context in this rewarding network, can one say that there is a certain similarity of viewpoint and standards as well? An encouragement of certain modes of expression and discouragement of others?
One might guess no. After all, what does it matter if well over two-thirds of the contributors to a book of poetry are teachers? ‘Teachers’ are diverse: they have no common values or attitudes or even interests.
But does the data support that? Is it even reasonable to make such an assumption?
Say that a book of poems purporting to be the best poetry of the year consisted of the poems of 14 professional dentists, 18 instructors of dental medicine, 22 teachers at dental academies, and that 14 or the 21 remaining (if not all of them) were being funded in some manner direct or indirect by the American Dental Association.
Dentists have no common philosophy, but still one would not be surprised if resulting anthology contained a fair supply of, shall we say, biting remarks.
And if all the dental poets represented happened to be upper-middle-class American dentists, a lower-middle-class Iraqi or Rwandan dentist might find those remarks to be expressed in ways that are remarkably culture-specific -- although the American dentists, within the culture, would probably be no more aware of it than a fish might be of the water in which it swims.
One hesitates to call so presumably loose a collage of attitudes and inclinations among selectors as an ‘ideology’. It is nothing so coherent. (Though one would love to do an extensive attitudinal poll on the judges and published poets in the volume and contrast them to the general public. How many voted for Bush, one wonders? For Buchanan?)
This is not to argue that a conscious will to propagandize -- or censor -- exists. No one seems willfully to be imposing preferred modes of expression.
But clearly we can expect attitudinal similarites -- several, in fact -- to be there. And to affect the selection and submission process as clearly they exclude countervailing inclinations and attitudes.
Criteria For Greatness
Consider. The editors of each volume of ‘The Best American Poetry' were asked to select the top fifteen poems and authors of the century. How does literary greatness stack up among the directors of this series?
Generally conceded earlier masters -- Pound, Eliot, and Auden (all either Christians or far-rightists) -- do not even take the brass medals, much less the gold. First place (surprisingly, for he both rhymes and scans with a felicity absent from every single poem in the anthology) is Robert Frost, picked by all of the editors except John Ashberry. Second comes Elizabeth Bishop, with Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens tying neck-and neck in third place.
Eliot straggle eventually by in fourth place, followed by William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and, tied in seventh place James Merrill and John Ashberry. In eighth place, we finally find Auden and Ezra Pound, puffing heavily, with five votes each. In ninth, Berryman, Creeley, Roethke, Robert Lowell, and Robinson trail, and behind them in tenth spot, Ammons, Hayden, Jarrell, O’Hara, Schuyler, Warren, Richard Wilbur, and James Wright.
By what specific criteria were those writers selected and ranked? None are stated, and no explanations given. John Ashberry, for instance, does not see fit to include Eliot, Pound, Hart Crane, Robinson Jeffers or Robert Frost anywhere among his top fifteen.
But Ashbery does see fit to name a piece by Christopher Edgar, printed for the first time in the 2000 anthology itself, as one of the leading poems of the century.
Mr. Edgar (‘published in Transfer, The Germ, and Shiny’) begins his poem of the century thus:
I have a confession to make --
When I was young,
I was constantly losing shoes.
Of course, the climate was different then
Aesthetic judgment is to some extent subjective, of course. But is a one-and-half page poem filled with the above better than The Waste Land? The Pisan Cantos? The Bridge? The Tower Beyond Tragedy? Paterson? The Changing Light At Sandover? The Age Of Anxiety?
One has the impression that Mr. Ashberry is picking a poem that he likes, and he likes the above more than he likes Eliot and Pound. OK, fair enough.
But the book is not ‘Ashbery's Favorite Poetry’ but ‘The Best American Poetry’. And it just does not look like the selections are being made on the basis of objective criteria. Just private whim.
But in his other selections, Ashbery's private whims are shared by his fellow jodges. Not surprisingly, perhaps, since those judges and editors have extremely similar university and educational and social backgrounds, and clearly share a general consensus on who should be considered for inclusion and who should not.
Eliot, for example, is considered an American poet — despite his spending the great majority of his life in England and his English citizenship. Milosz and Brodsky -- American residents both, American citizens both, and both winners of the Nobel Prize for Poetry -- are not included. Nor are popular but non-academic figures like Charles Bukowski.
In short, invisible guidelines seem to be operating. guidelines that have little to do with the estimates of those outside the closed, subsidized, academic circles of what we may term the Poetic-Industrial Complex.
Unfree Verse
Given the rigid context surrounding these verbal products, and a rigidly enforced criteria for who is qualified to produce them, is there a similar rigidity to the works themselves?
Consider the aspect of form.
One would think that in a free country where free verse is -- well, free -- that formal diversity would reign.
Does it?
Out of seventy-five entries, in 'The Best American Poetry 2000', how many rhyme?
Answer: three. Seventy-two out of seventy-five of the best poems of the year do not rhyme.
How many scan in the traditional sense of being recognizable iambic pentameter or tetrameter?
Subjectivity has some sway here, but at most I count four.
The remaining seventy-one poems are not merely prose-like in their scansion. Six are written as prose, in unindented blocks. Two are written that way throughout at least part of the poem.
What about content? What are these poems about?
Let’s take a sampling: the opening lines of the first fifteen poems:
1. It’s a terrible scene, the two men talking to the girl who foolishly lets them lead her away
2. Rain falls between the notes
The violist in the next apartment plays.
3. I’ll never forget the day this beautiful woman
right out in the office said I was “sneaky”
4. I can hear them, choking on spoons, screaming
in shower stalls
5. When we decided on the Japanese,
forgoing the Victorian, its Hester
Prynne-ish air of hardly mastered urges,
I thought it would be peaceful.
6. Pescado grande was number 14 while pescado chico was number 12; dinero, money, was number 10. This was la charada, the sacred and obsessive numerology my abuela used to predict lottery numbers
7. When you did not come for dinner, I ate leftovers for days.
8. Crow is walking
to see things at ground level
9. When the birds begin to walk
when the crows in their silk tuxedos
stand in the road and watch
10. This is not bad --
ambling along 44th Street
with Sonny Rollins for company
11. Last night a friend called
To say she’s dying of brain cancer.
12. I think “vesicle” is the most beautiful word in the English language.
13. It’s the Fourth of July, the flags
are painting the town,
the plastic forks and knives
laid out like a parade.
14. It always freaked me out when my father
called my mother “Mommy”
15. I have a confession to make --
When I was young,
I was constantly losing shoes.
What do we see at once? Shared formal characteristics. Or lack of characteristics.
None of the lines rhyme. None follows traditional patterns of metrical scansion. The lines are essentially prose, sometimes broken, often not.
All the words are short: in fifteen opening lines there is only one word with four syllables, and only one with five.
Latinate diction (and presumably any awareness of Latin) is non-existent, as is any hint of the conceptual. ‘Birds’ and ‘shoes’ and ‘rain’ seem common phrases; ‘Islamicization’, ‘Aristophanic’, ‘dialectical’ are not.
The most common verb, by far, is ‘is’ and its variants, followed by verbs of communication -- call, hear, say, scream. There are almost no active verbs: ‘walk’ and ‘eat’ seem to be the limit.
Grammar? Clearly it is optional.
The topics are personal. An “I”, explicit or implied, appears at once in the very first line to narrate 11 out of the fifteen poems above (13, actually, since an “I” turns up after the first line in two of those remaining. The only two ‘impersonal’ poems, interestingly, do not even have human protagonists, but crows.)
But though the “I” in question may seem at first glance to be familiar, upon acquaintance it reveals itself as spectral, minimalist. Without the poet’s name beneath the title one would generally be hard pressed to define the speaker as male or female, old or young, or even living in America at all (but for the numbness of the diction: no Welshman or Dubliner, surely, would write lines as flat).
The frequent use of ‘I” is interesting in that a study by has shown it to be a marker of suicidal tendencies. UT Professor James Pennebaker, in a study of the language patterns in poetry of poets who have committed suicide, observed writers who are suicidal or depressed use the word ‘I’ at much higher rates, with a corresponding drop of references to other people.
How often are the ‘Best Poems of 2000’ ‘I’ poems? By the above sample, 86.6% of the time.
It may also be interesting to correlate suicide with profession, which Pennebaker neglects. For example, none of the of the great names of the preceding generation of American poets on this list -- Pound, Auden, Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Williams, and Crane -- had a full-time university connection. The subsequent generation -- Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Delmore Schwartz, Jarrell, Roethke, Berryman, Plath -- did.
So it’s interesting to note that whereas among the seven individuals on the older generation there is only one suicide among its members -- Hart Crane. There was also only one person institutionalized for mental incompetence -- Pound, although political factors are generally conceded to be a factor in his incarceration.
In striking contrast, every single person in the latter University-associated list either committed suicide (Bishop, Schwartz, Jarrell, Berryman, Plath.) or was repeatedly institutionalized in sanatoriums.
Being Without Doing
It is true that tenure does not necessarily result in suicide; not even in intellectual suicide, necessarily.
But solipsism, fatal or not, does seem rank with despair as the preferred stance of latter-day poets -- or at least those deemed to be 2000's 'best'.
Most all the poems seem to be short personal vignettes -- snapshots of some everyday incident or reflection that is, frankly, trivial. The death of God, vertiginous technologization, repercussions from the collapse of Communism, the starvation of eighteen million people a year, war and uprisings in the middle east, the cultural encounters of mutations of Western and Eastern civilizations -- these are not subjects for the ‘best’ poetic reflection.
Father calling mother “Mommy”, losing shoes, listening to Sonny Rollins, deciding which piece of furniture to buy, eating leftovers, a call from a sick friend, numerology, strolling crows -- these are the topics of choice.
Nor are there any abstract statements, any generalizations, any ideas. Sustained argument (much less logical argument, or argument supported by evidence) is simply absent, as is sustained narrative.
There is no past or social history: every poem is set either in the now, or with the poet in the now reflecting on some personal memory.
(The one, somewhat bizarre, partial exception turns out to be, after a few madhouse-scenes in the opening, a poem about Mary Todd Lincoln on her deathbed. But the poem says nothing about Washington or the Civil War, instead soliloquizing about choking on spoons, sex with Abe, and ‘the tireless Jew’ following her ‘from train to train with his satchel of poisons’ because her petticoats were ‘stitched so tight with money’. Even history is subjective here.)
Economic relations and social activity seem absent too: no one mentions coordinated purposeful group undertakings or actions. Relations are largely limited to sex and family, if not sex with family. Political protest is absent -- not, perhaps, surprisingly, given that virtually every poet is in some sense state-supported.
(Am I saying that since the 'best poets' uniformly receive paychecks from the State, that they are for that reason therefore avoiding any criticism of it? No, not at all. I am merely pointing that criticism is absent. One may argue that it is implicit. One may also argue that implicit criticism is impotent criticism.)
The fact remains, the problems the poets face are virtually without exception ones have no objectively repairable social cause. Denise Duhamel‘s ‘Incest Taboo’ is a good example. In this poem a woman’s entire life is spoiled because her brother saw her breasts as a child when he barged in to where she was changing her swimsuit at the beach, and he leered. Haunts for decades afterwards, the poet's work ripens into gloomy meditations on the universal emotional incest permeating everything subsequent.
This is problem. But not a political problem nor a political poem, for how could political action make a difference?
One would be tempted to call this habit or mind Freudian, but for the terminological baggage that label carries along; spoiled religion seems to cover it better. These poets proffer a kind of Original Sin minus transcendence. The poems seem to imply that man is fundamentally flawed and weak, but there is no help from outside, and no objective goodness or redemption to aspire to.
What the poems as a whole convey is that human beings are weak, miserable, trivial, sexually obsessive. A poet broods over the last minor marginal incident till it reveals its mild slimy horror, then records it and waits in dread for the next one to manifest. The problems are posed in a way that are unsolvable, and the posture of choice is inward-gazing passivity.
A Closed World
Uniformity of profession and background, similarity of attitude and outlook, restriction of themes, formal limitations, rigid networks of mutually rewarding patronage -- in looking at ‘The Best American Poetry 2000’ one can only come to the conclusion that the production of poetry in America is the business of a closed world. A world in which certain forms and contents are encouraged and others excluded, and a world in which the practitioners belong not merely to a particular class or group but to an actual specific state-subsidized profession which allows them to directly reward and promote the others in the profession, and deny rewards or promotion to those who are not members, or who do not follow the hazy but palpable and rigid guidelines.
One supposes that it is not impossible that someone lacking this ability could come from nowhere and be published in one of these university-subsidized presses or journals.
But it doesn't seem to occur. And it's not likely, for there is only so much space, and to put in an unknown is to bump a colleague -- a colleague whose gratitude can mean not only increased sales as one’s publications are assigned, but acceptances that result directly in boosts to one's status and salary and career track.
That is not to say that there is no one who, honorably, would say that a poem from unknown writer A is better than one from well-known well-published Professor B. Just that anyone who elects to do so punishes himself -- mildly, perhaps, but socially, publicly, financially, job-wise. To expect many people to do so, or to do so consistently, is naïve.
What's the result? Bad, coerced, conformist literature.
Opening Closed Doors
What’s the solution? That’s rather difficult to say, since there are a variety of both problems and solutions, depending on one’s point of view.
Say that one wants to become a poet of some stature. How does one go about it?
Attention to craft, immersion in tradition, the study of rhyme and prosody, do not seem to be the way.
The easiest way seems simply to enter the network of reinforcements on its own terms.
If only teachers are allowed into the club, become a teacher -- an English teacher, preferably a professor.
If it is principally creative-writing instructors who are published, teach creative writing.
Since a majority of contributors are themselves editors, edit: propose an anthology (not difficult to do, since sales are assured: the poets anthologized will assign your volume to captive students for years to come). Or begin a literary journal. Those whom you select will be duly boosted in the publish-or-perish university rat race and be inclined to return the favor to you one day.
Given internet publication, publishing someone ceases even to be costly. Particularly given the existence of subsidized university web servers beside the subsidized university presses and the subsidized university journals.
Quality? That is not really an issue. For one thing, no standards exist. Since Derrida and the rise of deconstructionism, all texts like all races and genders are considered to be equal. It is impossible, in the current academic environment, for someone to say, ‘this poem is bad’, and make it stick. What counts is the ability of the critic (read: poet-teacher-editor) to construct his own meanings using the piece as a pretext.
Formerly accepted standards and criteria are gone: to judge by Dove’s volume, the poet no longer has to rhyme, and he -- correction: s/he -- no longer has to be able to produce scansion. Poetry is now prose, albeit sometimes broken up arbitrarily into lines of equal or unequal length.
Minor aspects such as capitalization, grammar are also optional. Correct spelling still seems to be in evidence, but one suspects this is the result of spell-checking software rather than linguistic expertise.
This evaporation of standards is not absolute, however, since the poem in question does have one criteria: it must resemble to some extent the other poems, just as the author must to some extent resemble the other authors. It’s inconceivable that Kipling’s ‘If’ or ‘The Lady Of Shalott’ could appear here. If anything the poems seem interchangeable: uniformity is their most vivid feature.
But this is achieved not so much by a repetitive individuality as by a shaving away of individual characteristics. In that respect the aspiring poet has a superb tool: the workshop. By presenting one’s work to workshop participants and colleagues, any work can be stripped of offending characteristics and be ‘pre-approved’, as it were -- acceptably shaved down prior to acceptance. The poet has little more to do than provide a first draft, in short.
I am not suggesting that such drafts are necessarily shabby or second-rate. To be truly terrible requires individuality of a high degree and a unique judgment, qualities that are rare. Both genius and retardation are numerically miniscule.
Mediocrity, however -- by simple statistical definition -- is the norm, and it requires no more than simple mediocrity to draft, or even simply paraphrase, passages reminiscent of poetry in and present them to workshop participants to knead. Here any unacceptable content will simply be watered down or aborted beforehand.
Simply imagine a typical crowd of poetry workshop participants reviewing a work and ask: what would they criticize, what would they suggest? The resulting submission nearly writes itself.
Of course the whole canon of Western literature would be destroyed by such a review process, but then Milton and Dante are not submitting to The Antioch Review and you are.
The result may not be literature; but it will be acceptable, and accepted. For acceptance seems to be based not on a ‘quality’ which is almost universally regarded as philosophically naive or passé or elitist, but on resemblance to the work of others and on one’s ability to offer a quid pro quo.
To accept a poem by a colleague is to provide tangible aid in the academic career-track leading directly to more status, security, salary, grants, fellowships; it is only to be expected that such colleagues will do the same for you. What is occurring is an exchange of value; merely not of literary value.
What are published poets today?
Published poets today occupy definite state-funded niches.
Published poets today are poets who can publish or favorably review or sell copies of the works of other poets.
Published poets today work in strictly circumscribed forms (free-form free verse).
Published poets today dwell on certain topics (personal memories, sexual incidents, sensory reportage, diary-like notes, politically correct grievances that cater to the preferred pressure groups).
And published poets today avoid certain topics (politically incorrect grievances or any effective criticism of the state that subsidizes them and their work).
Poets who produce work in accordance with these criteria are rewarded with publication, praise, jobs, remuneration. Poets who do not are not published, not discussed, and not heard.
Is this situation good for poetry? One doubts it. But for society, perhaps it is. After all, there have been stretches of Western history when one only or two poets in a given century -- if that -- have produced work deemed worthy of survival. This century may be no different.
Of the 20,000-plus accredited poets churned out by graduate and undergraduate writing programs every ten years, not all will be of Shakespearean caliber, and allowing today’s forgettable poets to survive comfortably in a closed little enclave is not a social disaster.
Still, if the current situation does not produce good poetry, is there a way to arrange conditions so as to produce better?
Possibly. But before we consider making such a change perhaps we should think twice.
Suppose that all subsidized poetry were to end tomorrow. Every poetry teacher and professor and editor expelled from the university, and tossed out into the street. Every grant and fellowship withdrawn. Every journal and university press closed. What would be the result?
Some thirty to fifty thousand or so unemployed intellectuals, nearly all unskilled and unsuited to make a living, untutored and ignorant of other areas but their own, convinced of their personal intellectual and spiritual preeminence, penniless, furious, and rhetorically gifted.
The discordant voices that talk principally to one another about personal neuroses would instead enter the stream of public discourse, as journalists, ad men, sitcom writers, and -- worse -- demagogues. (Not for nothing were Marx and Mao poets. And mediocre ones.)
The current system produces a standardized sort of versification that is, to put it mildly, not the sort of thing produced by Milton or Keats, and if you like Milton or Keats that is a shame. But it also safely isolates intellectuals, providing a sort of day care center, an pleasant and amiable Gulag, for verbalists who in many cases are unable to contribute anything more to the real world than their own extended self-contemplation.
But if the sleep of reason produces monsters, perhaps we should be content that it produces only verbal monstrosities, in venues that are mercifully unread.
And how should the genuinely talented poet seeking independence and wishing to produce non-standard work feel about this? Perhaps the lines from Jim Daniels’ prize-winning contribution to ‘The Best American Poetry 2000’, called ‘Between Periods’, expresses it best:
Fuck ‘em, I agreed, and there was nothing
more to say.
