Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://theconversation.com/poetry-is...about-it-89784

Poetry is more popular than ever – but not all poets are happy about it
January 29, 2018 7.21am EST
Author
JT Welsch
Lecturer in English and Creative Industries, University of York

Disclosure statement
JT Welsch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Partners
University of York
University of York provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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We believe in the free flow of information
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The joke among poets is that it’s never a good thing when poetry makes the news. From plagiarism scandals to prize controversies, casual readers would be forgiven for thinking the so-called “poetry world” exists in a state of perpetual outrage. In a recent article, The Guardian reported that an essay published in the magazine PN Review “has split the poetry establishment”.

Rebecca Watts’ contentious essay, The Cult of the Noble Amateur, first appeared in the magazine’s print edition in December. In it, she laments social media’s “dumbing effect” on recent poetry, and a “rejection of craft” that is fueling the success of what she calls “personality poets”. In particular, Watts criticizes Rupi Kaur, whose bestselling verse initially found an audience on Instagram, and Hollie McNish and Kate Tempest, whose performances have garnered millions of YouTube views.

To some extent, the only surprise in this latest debate is the wider media interest. Within days, what might have passed like so many online squabbles had prompted further coverage in The Guardian and Bookseller, a segment on Radio 4’s World at One, and an interview with Watts herself on BBC’s Front Row. It’s with no small irony, of course, that the essay’s viral spread came only after it was posted on PN Review’s website, then shared on Facebook and Twitter.

But by focusing on the false opposition of quality and popularity, both sides have been reluctant to see the debate itself as a symptom of the media’s growing interest in the art form. As Watts’ essay admits, poetry is more popular than ever. And over the past few years, news of scandals has increasingly been replaced by celebrations of its renewed relevance.

Within days of the 2016 US presidential election, for instance, the LA Times, CNN, Buzzfeed, Vox and dozens of other outlets were offering what The Guardian called “poems to counter the election fallout”. The Atlantic declared “Still, Poetry Will Rise”, and Wired warned: “Don’t Look Now, But 2016 is Resurrecting Poetry.”


Is Trump unwittingly behind some of the surge in poetry’s popularity? JStone / Shutterstock.com
The political impetus for poetry’s media “resurrection” has also fed into a more general sense of its coolness. In the same week that inspired so many election poems, “London’s new generation of poets” were seen “storming the catwalks of Fashion Week”. Meanwhile, Teen Vogue offered a slideshow of young poets who “are actually making the genre cool again” and a Guardian columnist who has written in the past about coconut water trends assured us that poetry is now “the coolest thing”.

For some, this visibility might seem to justify Watts’ worry that poetry like Kaur’s (which featured among The Guardian’s “coolest things”) has become a form of “consumer driven content”. Like some jazz or comic book devotees, certain poetry lovers remain uncomfortable with its widening fanbase. Indeed, in his mapping of the cultural field, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggested that poetry’s economic priorities are “reversed”, and that relative obscurity has long been part of its caché.

Desperate to preserve that, perhaps, Watts begins her attack by suggesting that poetry’s “highest ever” sales over the past two years are to blame for declining standards. But she’s not the only one to bristle at poetry’s growing currency, or to assume it proves that “artless poetry sells”.

After Patricia Lockwood’s Rape Joke went viral in 2013, Adam Plunkett, writing for the New Yorker, sneered at her “crowd-pleasing poetry” for its appeal to the “lowest common denominator” online. A similar cycle of praise and censure was repeated last month, when Kristen Roupenian’s short story Cat Person earned a seven-figure book-deal after going viral in the New Yorker itself.

Celebrities trying their hand at verse have been another easy target for the preservationists. The Independent declared that Kristen Stewart had written the “worst poem of all time”, after her piece appeared in Marie Claire in 2014. And in November 2016, Cosmopolitan called on Harvard professor Stephanie Burt to explain why the poems included in Taylor Swift’s new album didn’t really work for her as poems.

Yet, beyond poetry’s appearances at Fashion Week or in financial adverts, there are signs that hang ups over its popular appeal are losing their grip. Beyoncé’s use of Warsan Shire’s work in 2016’s Lemonade, for example, was met with few claims that it was dumbing anything down. Just as tellingly, the week that saw such heated battles over the PN Review essay also saw the singer Halsey’s moving Women’s March poem go viral to unanimous praise. And there was hardly a peep from the “poetry world”.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Poetry is more popular than ever – but not all poets are happy about it
January 29, 2018 7.21am EST
Author
JT Welsch
Lecturer in English and Creative Industries, University of York

Disclosure statement
JT Welsch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Partners
University of York
University of York provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

View all partners
CC BY ND
We believe in the free flow of information
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.


The joke among poets is that it’s never a good thing when poetry makes the news. From plagiarism scandals to prize controversies, casual readers would be forgiven for thinking the so-called “poetry world” exists in a state of perpetual outrage. In a recent article, The Guardian reported that an essay published in the magazine PN Review “has split the poetry establishment”.

Rebecca Watts’ contentious essay, The Cult of the Noble Amateur, first appeared in the magazine’s print edition in December. In it, she laments social media’s “dumbing effect” on recent poetry, and a “rejection of craft” that is fueling the success of what she calls “personality poets”. In particular, Watts criticizes Rupi Kaur, whose bestselling verse initially found an audience on Instagram, and Hollie McNish and Kate Tempest, whose performances have garnered millions of YouTube views.

To some extent, the only surprise in this latest debate is the wider media interest. Within days, what might have passed like so many online squabbles had prompted further coverage in The Guardian and Bookseller, a segment on Radio 4’s World at One, and an interview with Watts herself on BBC’s Front Row. It’s with no small irony, of course, that the essay’s viral spread came only after it was posted on PN Review’s website, then shared on Facebook and Twitter.

But by focusing on the false opposition of quality and popularity, both sides have been reluctant to see the debate itself as a symptom of the media’s growing interest in the art form. As Watts’ essay admits, poetry is more popular than ever. And over the past few years, news of scandals has increasingly been replaced by celebrations of its renewed relevance.

Within days of the 2016 US presidential election, for instance, the LA Times, CNN, Buzzfeed, Vox and dozens of other outlets were offering what The Guardian called “poems to counter the election fallout”. The Atlantic declared “Still, Poetry Will Rise”, and Wired warned: “Don’t Look Now, But 2016 is Resurrecting Poetry.”


Is Trump unwittingly behind some of the surge in poetry’s popularity? JStone / Shutterstock.com
The political impetus for poetry’s media “resurrection” has also fed into a more general sense of its coolness. In the same week that inspired so many election poems, “London’s new generation of poets” were seen “storming the catwalks of Fashion Week”. Meanwhile, Teen Vogue offered a slideshow of young poets who “are actually making the genre cool again” and a Guardian columnist who has written in the past about coconut water trends assured us that poetry is now “the coolest thing”.

For some, this visibility might seem to justify Watts’ worry that poetry like Kaur’s (which featured among The Guardian’s “coolest things”) has become a form of “consumer driven content”. Like some jazz or comic book devotees, certain poetry lovers remain uncomfortable with its widening fanbase. Indeed, in his mapping of the cultural field, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggested that poetry’s economic priorities are “reversed”, and that relative obscurity has long been part of its caché.

Desperate to preserve that, perhaps, Watts begins her attack by suggesting that poetry’s “highest ever” sales over the past two years are to blame for declining standards. But she’s not the only one to bristle at poetry’s growing currency, or to assume it proves that “artless poetry sells”.

After Patricia Lockwood’s Rape Joke went viral in 2013, Adam Plunkett, writing for the New Yorker, sneered at her “crowd-pleasing poetry” for its appeal to the “lowest common denominator” online. A similar cycle of praise and censure was repeated last month, when Kristen Roupenian’s short story Cat Person earned a seven-figure book-deal after going viral in the New Yorker itself.

Celebrities trying their hand at verse have been another easy target for the preservationists. The Independent declared that Kristen Stewart had written the “worst poem of all time”, after her piece appeared in Marie Claire in 2014. And in November 2016, Cosmopolitan called on Harvard professor Stephanie Burt to explain why the poems included in Taylor Swift’s new album didn’t really work for her as poems.

Yet, beyond poetry’s appearances at Fashion Week or in financial adverts, there are signs that hang ups over its popular appeal are losing their grip. Beyoncé’s use of Warsan Shire’s work in 2016’s Lemonade, for example, was met with few claims that it was dumbing anything down. Just as tellingly, the week that saw such heated battles over the PN Review essay also saw the singer Halsey’s moving Women’s March poem go viral to unanimous praise. And there was hardly a peep from the “poetry world”.

Poets that are informed about poetry's rich history. legendary poets and can both write, understand and delve into its infinite depths, view most of this modern poetry as shallow, too oft chaotic, emotionally stirred ramblings that are so highly praised by modern poetry critics as more proof that modern critics are themselves shallow, liberal, snooty morons that out of intensive jealousy and abject hatred, infinitely loathe the past golden age poets, IMHO...--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/col...n-to-modernism

COLLECTION
An Introduction to Modernism
The monumental artistic movement that changed poetry forever.
BY THE EDITORS
Large Composition A with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow and Blue (Grande composizione A con nero, rosso, grigio, giallo e blu), by Piet Mondrian, 1919-1920, 20th Century, oil on canvas, 91 x 91 cm
Large Composition A by Piet Mondrian (Photo by Alessandro Vasari/Archivio Vasari/MONDADORI PORTFOLIO via Getty Images)
“Poets in our civilization,” T.S. Eliot writes in a 1921 essay, “must be difficult.” Such difficulty, he believed, reflected the times: advanced industrialization transformed the West, Europe reeled from World War I, and the Bolshevik Revolution ignited Russia. Thinkers such as Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Einstein changed people’s understanding of history, economics, philosophy, science, psychology, physics, and even religion. “Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity,” Eliot continues, and “this variety and complexity … must produce various and complex results.” With the inventions of everything from the automobile to the airplane, the vacuum cleaner to the incandescent lightbulb, the motion picture to the radio, and the bra to the zipper, people’s lives were changing with unprecedented speed. Many English-language artists, including poets, thought a new approach was needed to capture and comment on this new era, requiring innovation in their own work: the result was called Modernism, the largest, most significant movement of the early 20th century.

Difficult, various, complex: these are often the very terms critics use to describe Modernist poetry in general. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is often seen as the acme of Modernist writing—so much so that William Carlos Williams later compared its publication in 1922 to “an atom bomb” dropped on the landscape of English-language poetry. The long, obscure poem exhibits many of the techniques associated with the movement: use of collage and disjunction, free verse, an unsentimental impersonality, and a dense web of references to both high and low culture. However, neither those gestures nor the poem’s apocalyptic atmosphere fully represents Modernist poetry, which is often, in its “variety and complexity,” difficult to read and to define.

One of Modernism’s most famous slogans is a case study in its contradictions. For later critics, “make it new” became a shorthand for the movement’s goals, especially its obsession with artistic novelty. But the phrase, attributed to Ezra Pound, wasn’t well-known to the Modernists themselves and, ironically, wasn’t itself new. In fact, it’s an ancient, a translation of a translation: according to the Confucian texts Pound took the phrase from, it was once emblazoned on the bathtub of the first ruler of the Shang dynasty.

For Pound, the it in “make it new” was perhaps not so much poetry as history. His magnum opus, The Cantos, is a case in point: it retells classical stories as it attempts to revitalize outmoded forms, such as accentual verse. Both a scholar and an agitator, Pound had a hand in many of Modernism’s decisive turns. In the 1910s, he dabbled in theories under the heading of futurism, and alongside H.D. and Amy Lowell, he founded Imagism, an early Modernist school crucial to the development of free verse. Pound’s friendships with W.B. Yeats and Eliot propelled both men toward the visionary, and Pound’s influence on dozens of writers helped define Modernism more than that of any other poet.

Not every Modernist poet thought as Eliot and Pound did. Wallace Stevens, another giant of the era, saw contemporary upheavals in a less pessimistic light. His lavish philosophical poems explore how poetry might constitute a “supreme fiction” that could take the place of organized religion. And Hart Crane positioned his varied, ornate epic The Bridge as a direct challenge to The Wasteland in an expansive, Whitmanesque vein.

Others sought a more decisive break with tradition. “Nothing is good save the new,” William Carlos Williams writes in the prologue to Kora in Hell. For him, the new meant jarring enjambment, vernacular language, and an improvisational style—innovations fueled in part by innovations in the visual arts such as cubism and the readymade. Marianne Moore mixed “plain American which cats and dogs could read” with quotations from a huge range of sources, and measured her jagged lines by syllable instead of stress. Some poets discarded the line altogether. Gertrude Stein, one of the earliest Modernist innovators, wrote prose poems that sought to focus readers on the sonic and associative textures of words. And E.E. Cummings seized on the potential of the typewriter, using the space of the page, the parenthesis, and even the individual letter in radically new ways.

Mina Loy also experimented with typography, but saw her male counterparts far eclipse her reputation. Her example raises questions about who is included in conversations about the movement. For instance: should Robert Frost, with his ear for both the vernacular and the iambic, be part of the story of Modernist poetry? Langston Hughes offers another limit case: is his blues prosody better understood as a Modernist achievement, or in the context of the Harlem Renaissance? What about such poets as César Vallejo and Anna Akhmatova, innovators outside the Anglo-American tradition? As with any far-reaching movement, individual artists rise above any particular tradition: not everyone’s work adheres to all the same principles nor does a movement’s output exhibit all the same styles and tendencies.

Such questions are crucial but vexing; more certain is Modernism’s legacy. The movement’s most immediate heirs were the Objectivists, whose varied writings extended the work of the first-generation Modernists starting in the later 1920s and ‘30s. But the influence of the Modernists extends well into the postwar period. Charles Olson’s influential 1950 essay “Projective Verse” consciously aligned the Black Mountain School and the later San Francisco Renaissance with “the experiments of Cummings, Pound, and Williams,” but they would “make it new” by innovating their own poetics to address their different times and culture. The formidable effects of Modernism are also measurable by later reactions against them, the postwar turn towards Confessionalism in particular.

The following selections of poets, poetics essays, poems, articles, poem guides, and audio recordings are intended as an introductory sample of the Poetry Foundation’s offerings on Modernism; they cannot be an exhaustive representation of the school’s many and varied aspects.

POETS
Ezra Pound
T. S. Eliot
William Carlos Williams
William Butler Yeats
Wallace Stevens
Charles Olson
Mina Loy
E. E. Cummings
Gertrude Stein
Marianne Moore
Hart Crane
Basil Bunting
POETICS ESSAYS
Preface to Some Imagist Poets
AMY LOWELL
“A Retrospect” and “A Few Don’ts”
EZRA POUND
The Poetry of the Present
D. H. LAWRENCE
Tradition and the Individual Talent
T. S. ELIOT
Hamlet
T. S. ELIOT
Composition as Explanation
GERTRUDE STEIN
Introduction to The Wedge
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
The Poem as a Field of Action
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
Projective Verse
CHARLES OLSON
SEMINAL POEMS
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T. S. ELIOT
The Waste Land
T. S. ELIOT
In a Station of the Metro
EZRA POUND
Three Cantos
EZRA POUND
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley [Part I]
EZRA POUND
Sea Rose
H. D.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
WALLACE STEVENS
Sunday Morning
WALLACE STEVENS
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley [Part I]
EZRA POUND
Sea Rose
H. D.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
WALLACE STEVENS
Sunday Morning
WALLACE STEVENS
At Melville’s Tomb
HART CRANE
from The Bridge: To Brooklyn Bridge
HART CRANE
The Red Wheelbarrow
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
To Elsie
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass
GERTRUDE STEIN
[anyone lived in a pretty how town]
E. E. CUMMINGS
The Second Coming
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Leda and the Swan
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Sailing to Byzantium
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Wild Common
D. H. LAWRENCE
From "Paterson V"
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
from Briggflatts: An Autobiography
BASIL BUNTING
ARTICLES
Edward Thomas 101
THE EDITORS
E.E. Cummings 101
THE EDITORS
William Carlos Williams 101
BENJAMIN VOIGT
100 Years of Poetry: “In the Middle of Major Men”
LIESL OLSON
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100
THE EDITORS
All Things Original and Strange
GREGORY WOODS
Significant Soil
CHRISTINA DAVIS
Willing to Be Reckless
ANGE MLINKO
Reading the Difficult
PETER QUARTERMAIN
The Modernist Journal Project: The Little Review, Blast, Coterie, The Owl, The Crisis, and more magazines for you to download (seriously)
HARRIET STAFF
POEM GUIDES
Hart Crane: “Voyages”
BRIAN REED
Mina Loy: “Lunar Baedeker”
JESSICA BURSTEIN
Wallace Stevens: “Sunday Morning”
AUSTIN ALLEN
Wallace Stevens: “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”
AUSTIN ALLEN
William Carlos Williams: “The Red Wheelbarrow”
CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER
Gertrude Stein: “The house was just twinkling in the moon light”
JOEL BROUWER
William Carlos Williams: “To a Poor Old Woman”
STEPHANIE BURT
Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken”
KATHERINE ROBINSON
Robert Frost: “Mending Wall”
AUSTIN ALLEN
Amy Lowell: “The Garden by Moonlight”
D. A. POWELL
Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Renascence”
HANNAH BROOKS-MOTL
AUDIO
Gertrude Stein: Essential American Poets
FROM ESSENTIAL AMERICAN POETS
Wallace Stevens: Essential American Poets
FROM ESSENTIAL AMERICAN POETS
E.E. Cummings: Essential American Poets
FROM ESSENTIAL AMERICAN POETS
William Carlos Williams: Essential American Poets
FROM ESSENTIAL AMERICAN POETS
William Carlos Williams
FROM POETRY LECTURES
Langdon Hammer: American Perspectives
FROM POETRY LECTURES
Helen Vendler: American Perspectives
FROM POETRY LECTURES
The Waste Land: The App
FROM POETRY OFF THE SHELF
Robert Pinsky
FROM POETRY LECTURES
ONLINE RESOURCES
Modernist Journals Project
The Modernism Lab at Yale
EdSITEment: Introduction to Modernist Poetry
Becoming Modern: America in the 1920s



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"" Others sought a more decisive break with tradition. “Nothing is good save the new,” William Carlos Williams writes in the prologue to Kora in Hell. For him, the new meant jarring enjambment, vernacular language, and an improvisational style—innovations fueled in part by innovations in the visual arts such as cubism and the readymade. Marianne Moore mixed “plain American which cats and dogs could read” with quotations from a huge range of sources, and measured her jagged lines by syllable instead of stress. Some poets discarded the line altogether. Gertrude Stein, one of the earliest Modernist innovators, wrote prose poems that sought to focus readers on the sonic and associative textures of words. And E.E. Cummings seized on the potential of the typewriter, using the space of the page, the parenthesis, and even the individual letter in radically new ways.""

I adamantly reject that totally biased view- "" “Nothing is good save the new,” William Carlos Williams writes in the prologue to Kora in Hell. ""

As it casts away the very historic foundation of poetry -pre-1900.
Many of those comments are made by great modern poets but also have such bias, intense conceit and self -promotion that it is alarming and even to any with true knowledge, true appreciation of poetry such will be wholely rejected, imho..
I admit my own bias against William Carlos Williams.
As I have never seen in Williams poems the genius and the true heart of poetry...

Seems to me that they that could not match the greats of the past chose to decry their magnificent talents and seek to stray far afield while calling that collection of rejection- fantastic new innovation..-Tyr