Lay Down Your Weary Tune

Today I'm blogging on a subject that's of absolutely no interest to anyone.

It's my blog, right?

Listen up, world! I don't write poetry anymore.

You heard me correctly, and you may put your false teeth back in. Get your lower jaw off the floor. I know it comes as a shock, and most likely you're reaching for the Jack Daniel's bottle to steady your nerves.

I TOLD you it was a subject of no interest to anyone.

I started writing poetry when I was in junior high school, circa 1970. My school chum, ASB President Chris Anderson, (who later went on to teach at Oregon State) had taken it up, and he encouraged me to do the same. We wrote poems together. We collaborated on a mercifully-forgotten "anthology." I moved away, but throughout high school we sent our poems to each other. When I was in my mid-forties, going through a cardboard box of old stuff, I came across a letter he had written me in 1972, with a couple of his teenage verses in it. We lost touch after graduating from high school, Chris and I. But I continued writing poetry. The only place I ever managed to publish any of it was in STATE magazine, the in-house monthly organ of the U.S. Department of State, where I worked for some years. My STATE magazine poems all had "foreign service" themes. (If one is permitted to have favorites among one's own poems, my favorite was one called Bach In Mato Grosso, a reflection upon listening to the Second Brandenburg Concerto on my Sony Walkman while driving through Brazil's Pantanal, looking at crocodiles.)

To come to an understanding of why I've stopped writing poetry, we need to come to an understanding of what poetry actually is.

And there's the first problem right there. No one seems real sure. Our prevailing notion about poetry, when we think about it at all, is that it has something to do with the expression of high-flown sentiments and emotions. I once heard no less a personage than Tom Brokaw conclude an interview with a poet by remarking, "That's what poetry is all about. Feelings."

Uh-huh.

Well, okay, so we need to discuss how we got there. Which means I'm going to spend just a minute or two discussing not what we think poetry is now, but what it originally was.

There isn't a whole lot of agreement there, either. The late Robert Graves held to the interesting-but-crackpot notion that poetry originally arose as part of a religious ceremony, that being worship of the triple moon-goddess, later incarnated as the nine muses of antiquity. His book The White Goddess is worth a read.

But read it in context. Graves came out of the trenches of World War I as an unmistakeable Vietnam shell-shock case. He saw ghosts, and sublimated his desire to serve the moon-goddess into the abject worship of a shrill, unpleasant woman named Laura Riding, who mistook her own talent for genius and resented the world for not agreeing.

But of that another time.

I go with the school of thought, concerning poetry, that it no doubt did arise, in the gray mists of ancient times, as part of religious ritual. The epics of Homer arose from this tradition. But the most important thing to keep in mind about poetry's origins is that they go very far back. Prose is a relatively recent invention, prose fiction even more so. Poetry is ancient.

And there's a perfectly good reason for this. Until the Germans invented the printing press in the 15th century, the overwhelming majority of people in the western world couldn't read. For most of history most people couldn't read. Reading was the domain of priests, scribes, lawyers and other educated folk.

But all civilizations have their stories, and stories have to be told. If no one in town or at the court can read, there are two ways left to tell stories: either in pictures or in some way that makes them easy to remember and recite. Hence, medieval churches were festooned with stained-glass and statuary that communicated the stories of the Bible to illiterate parishioners. When printing took over from oral and visual tradition, the newly-minted Protestants, brandishing The Word, declared
war on "images" and ran around Europe smashing stained glass windows and breaking up statues.

And indeed the Gutenberg Bible may be viewed as the first salvo in the victory of prose over poetry.

But of that also another time.

The fact is that for thousands of years poetry's chief use and function was the transmission of stories, not so much the expression of subjective feelings. Sure, the great epics from The Iliad to The Divine Comedy are shot through with powerful emotion, but it's the emotion of the theater. It aims at arousing certain emotions in the reader, as great drama does with its audience. Homer isn't interested in telling you how he feels; he wants you to know how Achilles felt. Dante is a first-person narrator, but he's taking his readers on a much broader journey than simply one through the garden of his own emotions.

Now. Go and try to memorize a page of say, Henry James. I'll wait.

Couldn't do it, could you?

On the other hand, I have personally witnessed performances by people who were able to memorize and recite whole pages, whole cantos of Milton. And there's a perfectly good reason for this. Poetry, as it was originally conceived, enables that sort of thing. Because for the longest time, poetry was written to be recited, not read. Ancient Greek lyric poetry was meant to be sung, you know, like Garth Brooks. Well, maybe not like that, but you get the idea. The Romans employed poets to reel off favorite epics at parties. Poets made their living wandering around propagating the old stories, most of which they carried in their heads. Tradition has it that the bards of ancient Wales had to go through something like "memorization boot camp," where they underwent such trials as being required to recite long verses to themselves while submerged in water, with only their noses poking out so they could breathe.

The ancient devices of poetry, its measures so to speak, were developed to facilitate these virtuosic feats of memorization. Meter, stress, syllable-counting, rhyme, assonance, alliteration and all the rest of it served a twofold purpose: they helped to emphasize the action of the story being told, and they facilitated its memorization, both in the reciter and in the audience. Measured poetry is extremely mnemonic. I can recite Yeats' Sailing To Byzantium or Robert Frost's Come In, but I can't recite Yeats' account of his first meeting with Lionel Johnson, nor can I recite Frost's prose.

Nor, I daresay, can I recite anything by John Ashbery or Charles Olson. I've read Allen Ginsberg's Howl plenty of times, but I'm damned if I can recite any of it without the printed page in front of me. "I've seen the best minds of my generation, something something something...angry fix...machinery of night..." I'm lost.

In the wake of the French Revolution a revolution also occurred in the arts. We now call it the Romantic movement. When I was in high school, my very-hip, product-of-the-sixties English teacher, Ms. Rochelle Terry, (who was still called MRS. Terry then) derided William Wordsworth as an anemic old fuddy-duddy. (In fairness to her, so did Lord Byron, but he, as they say, "was there.") Mrs. Terry, in her early twenties then, preferred to let us decide for ourselves what poetry was, and that meant that when it came time for each of us, as part of the curriculum, to get up in front of the class and "teach" a poem, what we served up to ourselves was a cornucopia of Top 40 lyrics by the Beatles, James Taylor, Black Sabbath, Richie Havens, Joni Mitchell, etc. etc. At age 15, I got the scent in the wind and decided to treat the whole thing as a joke: when it was my turn, I selected "National Brotherhood Week" by Tom Lehrer, rather than something by Dylan Thomas, which would have been my preference.

But you see, I was already writing poetry then myself, and such things mattered to me.

But despite Mrs. Terry's sneering, Wordsworth was actually a revolutionary figure in his own time. He was among the first to abandon the mannered style of poetry, with its alexandrine couplets and hard-working rhymes, that had characterized most English poetry of the 18th century and found its apotheosis in Alexander Pope. Wordsworth famously announced that he wanted to write poetry in "the language really used by men." He wasn't the first English poet to write blank, that is, nonrhyming verse; Shakespeare and Milton were just two who had gone before. But he was among the first to use blank verse to express a highly personal view of the world. His blank-verse epic The Prelude is essentially an autobiography. One of my personal favorites among his poems, the beautiful Tintern Abbey, is a personal reflection on revisiting a favorite spot which, before it's over, morphs into an outburst of love poetry directed at his sister.

Wordsworth and his cohort opened a floodgate. It had its corollary in the other arts of course; Wordsworth's famously fecund period, roughly 1799-1807, was followed by Beethoven and Berlioz, Delacroix and Goya, Verdi and Wagner. It was Romanticism; it was all about ego and it virtually defined the 19th century in the arts. And it came concomitant with the triumph of literacy, as the industrial revolution and the rise of bourgeois democracy gradually resulted in nearly-universal education.

So now everyone could read and write, and everyone was not only having feelings, but celebrating the fact that they did. "Feeling is all," Goethe wrote in Faust, and a Europe grown weary of Enlightenment reason and rhyme was only too happy to go along with that sentiment. In just a few short years Romanticism took the inevitable turn for the morbid as poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud began probing the darker side of the psyche, taking their cue from the crown prince of morbidity himself, Edgar Allan Poe.

Eventually all this wallowing in emotion spun itself out, as movements will, and then the global explosion that followed Sarajevo suddenly seemed to render everything the 19th century stood for as just horribly moot. But even after the First World War blew the last shreds of romanticism to smithereens, the new, interior-focused nature of poetry that had arisen in the earlier century remained. The disillusion of the postwar generation merely reshaped its attitude. The celebration of feelings was replaced by the pathology of society and the individual. Yeats retreated into personal myth; T.S. Eliot, following in the French symbolist traditions of Baudelaire and Mallarme, took up refuge in an intellectual hermeticism, dipping into the past to write verse shot through with allusion and allegory, cast ironically among the fog-shrouded cities, rat-infested alleyways and iron bridges of Europe entre les deux guerres, as his generation used to say.

But the triumph of the printed word, and of poetry meant to be read more than recited, also brought about the triumph of vers libre. As Yeats himself put it in a 1932 lecture, the prevailing attitude among poets was "The past has deceived us, let us accept the worthless present." That past included nearly all of the traditions of poetry including its forms. In America, Walt Whitman had already assured the victory of "free" over measured verse when he shook up Ralph Waldo Emerson with the first edition of Leaves of Grass. So poetry not only became a personal affair as far its content, but also as far as its form. Anything that could be spilled on paper could be called a poem, and the more unintelligible or symptomatic of personal neurosis it was, the more likely someone would think of it as "profound."

By the time I hit Mrs. Terry's 10th-grade English class, the war was over, if you care to call such a tempest-in-a-teapot a war. Allen Ginsberg certainly did; he proclaimed the so-called "poetry wars" of the 1950s as having been won, and won by his side. The new free-verse crowd, including such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Olson, Gregory Corso, Robert Duncan and Ginsberg himself, had triumphed over what he derisively called "The Bread Loaf poets," people like John Ciardi, Louis Simpson and Richard Wilbur who still wrote measured verse. To the kids in my high school this attitude was a "given." You didn't even think about it. "Free verse" was the only honest kind. Verse that rhymed was old-fashioned, out of touch, phony, because it wasn't as conducive to the direct expression of feelings. The feminist movement just gave this more impetus when its need for martyrs prompted poets like Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath (the last of whom, by the way, had mean technical chops when she wanted to use them) to turn poetry into a medium for expressing how neurotic and suicidally unhappy the bad old patriarchal world had made them.

Poetry is now entirely a personal matter, and what constitutes it entirely a matter of opinion. When Anthony Hecht died in in 2004, the New York Times reported his death as that of a "traditional" poet, not just a poet. Hecht had never abandoned measures, and measures had long since been thrown out by the academic establishment in favor of complete solipsism. So now "traditional" poetry has been marginalized as a subcategory of poetry, like kickboxing is a subcategory of boxing. Vers libre alone gets respect from critics as the genuine article.

The most damning argument I can come up with against the digitalization of reading is that gadgets like Amazon's Kindle need batteries, and books don't. By the same token, I can't think of a single free-verse poem that I've ever been able to commit to memory, so ultimately what good is it, since poetry had its birth in the necessity for oral transmission? Then again, I guess that's the idea, right? We get back to the triumph of the written word. Since vers libre is intended to be read silently to oneself, not recited, it isn't necessary that it provide any mnemonic cues. But goddamn, what fun I have at my annual St. Patrick's Day party reciting The Fiddler of Dooney and The Song of Wandering Aengus. I can't imagine getting a similar thrill from trying to recite one of Charles Olson's "Maximus" poems. I don't think my guests would appreciate it, either.

I would not personally have had any problem with the two traditions existing side-by-side, but the vers libre crowd would have none of it. Academia had decided that it could not serve two esthetics. John Ashbery may be the finest poet of his generation, (judged by what standard, I always find myself asking?) but if he ever starts worrying about dactyls and spondees, we're not going to take him seriously anymore. He'll be buried over there with Anthony Hecht and the "Bread Loaf" crowd.

Believe it or not, I was bothered by this as early as high school. My teachers, particularly my creative writing teacher during my senior year, Mrs. Joanne Massie, were very impressed with my poetry. More than I was, in fact. Because I knew, deep down inside, that it didn't take any particular talent, outside of a knack for descriptive language, to do what I was doing. Now, my friend Charlie Berigan, he could play the piano. He could play Beethoven. There was an acquired skill. Me, I could ramble on in free verse about any subject at hand and my teachers would be impressed. But even at that early age I was haunted by the feeling that there wasn't much percentage in playing a game that didn't have any rules. Robert Frost whacked a major nail on the head when he remarked that writing free verse was like "playing tennis without a net." I felt that even as a teen whose teachers were ooh-ing and aah-ing over his supposed precocity. All I was doing at 17 was shooting off my mouth with a bit of panache, a vocabulary beyond my years and a dash of attitude. Gertrude Stein told Hemingway, "Remarks aren't literature." Shooting off your mouth isn't poetry.

And my feelings haven't changed much in 35 years, which now and then gets me into interesting exchanges with people who never thought much about poetry, but who remember that Rod McKuen was once cool, that poetry is supposed to be all about "feelings," and who assume that "rules" (the word non-poets use for what poets call "measures") are something inhibiting to the direct expression of feelings and therefore must be something bad. It's interesting: The same people who will agree with me when I say that Chopin is music, while random fist-banging on a piano keyboard (which can certainly express strong feelings) is not, will respond to anything I say in defense of measured verse with the sort of look a guy gets who has just admitted that he collects kiddie porn. These are the same people who listen to Barbra Streisand and think she's great, but if they hear Arnold Schoenberg's atonality they'll say they aren't hearing music because they aren't hearing a tune. But that doesn't apply to poetry, which is actually closely allied to music, or once was. "Rules:" music si, poetry no.

So there you have half my beef: poetry has been "defined" as a free-for-all with no rules, the more invertebrate the more sincere, and therefore, as far as I'm concerned, a hopelessly debased currency. And every issue I receive of the American Poetry Review slams that message home ever louder. Some of the dreck I read in that journal, written by famous people I never heard of, sets my teeth on edge. Some of it reminds me of the junk I was writing in high school. And these are adults.

I just made mention of the other half of my beef, e.g. "famous people I never heard of." In a culture where anything is considered poetry if the lines don't reach the right side of the page, anyone can be a poet, right? Of course. And America currently has more poets than it has poetry-readers. The practitioners of what W.H. Auden called "this unpopular art" are more numerous, and more unpopular than ever. Don't believe me? Go to www.poetry.com and check out the poets. It's like looking at the penguins at the South Pole. And every one of them has an audience: themselves. Even the "famous" ones, the ones who get their pictures and their poems in publications like APR, have audiences consisting of as many students and colleagues from the English department as they can herd into Barnes & Noble for a book-signing of their most recent university-press-published 67-page paperback tome, which won the 2008 Apple Tree Award -- adjudicated by their former teachers and colleagues in the English department -- and is destined to sell 142 copies.

I wrote poetry off and on for 35 years, from about age 15 to about age 50. I have a footlocker full of it in my basement, some more in various folders on my computer.

And, as Bugs Bunny said, walking away, brushing the dust off his paws, that's that. Poetry will have to get along without me, thank you. I have more skill-intensive things to try and master. It won't miss me, I'm sure. Since Anthony Hecht died I don't think it misses anybody. Come to think of it, the hordes who congregate at poetry.com see to that.