Making Poetry Matter

Tags

art, criticism, poetry, The Atlantic

I’ve been meditating for the past couple of weeks on a recent article in The Atlantic entitled “How Poetry Came to Matter Again.” If you didn’t see it yet, that’s ok. The article is a breezy lope through a half dozen contemporary poets, and it quotes only tiny snatches of their poetry, so it’s really quite impossible to tell from the piece whether their work is any good. From the slender supporting evidence of the article, the way a poet “matters” is by obtaining grants, being appointed to university positions, getting on award lists, and developing a large YouTube following.

Of course, those grants, positions, and awards have been with us for quite some time. These poets “matter,” in contrast to the poets of previous generations, the author tells us approvingly, because “They are immigrants and refugees from China, El Salvador, Haiti, Iran, Jamaica, Korea, Vietnam. They are black men and an Oglala Sioux woman. They are queer as well as straight and choose their personal pronouns with care.” In other words, they are poets who matter because of their identity.

I don’t feel any need to critique the nonsensical assertions of the article (I’ve been choosing my personal pronouns with care for years!), and I don’t know the work of the poets mentioned in it; for all I know, some of them could be quite fine, although the tidbits quoted in the article are uneven. It does trouble me, though, that a magazine which purports to be a champion of culture would give itself over to such shallow assertions. Even The Atlantic feels a need to prove its cutting-edge bona fides, I suppose.

The way that a poem matters – a poet matters – a school of poetry matters – is by actually mattering, across generations and across cultures, by being repeated and quoted in new contexts, spoken by others and taken to heart. Do these poets and poems matter? I don’t know, and no one else does yet, either. For now, I’m going to try to keep my eye on the page and not on the CV entries. Emily Dickinson didn’t have much of a resume, as I recall.

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A Great Year for Reading

Tags

C.D. Albin, criticism, Daniel Green, literature, short stories

Hard Toward Home

Beyond the Blurb

Looking back over the past year, I realize what a great year I had for reading. (I know, it’s already the end of February, but I’m still digesting work from 2016.) Two books that I read toward the end of the year were C.D. Albin’s excellent collection of short stories Hard Toward Home and Daniel Green’s literary critical essays in Beyond the Blurb.

The stories in Hard Toward Home are brief and rather jaggedly structured, with characters we often find mid-crisis and for whom the crisis remains unresolved at the end of the story. They’re mainly set in the Arkansas Ozarks, in the contemporary era, with a few excursions out. The stories are beautifully written, but what I like best about them is that they take characters often overlooked or stereotyped in rural fiction–the angry middle-aged male, the frustrated professional man’s wife, for example–and find depth and humanity in those people.

Many of the characters in Hard Toward Home are poor, or nearly so. Even those who are not poor are pushed by economic necessity. I appreciate this element of the stories; the contemporary short story has so often been taken over by characters whose concerns are more ethereal, and (in my view) thus often less interesting. Albin’s stories explore and humanize overlooked people, and to me that’s a great thing.

Daniel Green’s book does a wonderful job of surveying the current landscape in literary criticism and evaluating those who practice it. It’s not a book for the general reader (I confess, I don’t consider myself qualified to evaluate the book entirely, as I’m not familiar with some of the critics he discusses), but for the literary scholar it’s a valuable addition. Green writes with great precision, and in a  time when much literary analysis seems more interested in advancing a theoretical perspective than actually engaging with the work, it’s refreshing to read a book that returns the focus squarely onto the workings of the literary work. I read it in little bits, as it consists largely of a sequence of essays, and I tend to take my literary criticism in small doses.

Both are well worth reading!