|
That it should come to this ...
We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket.
-- John Keats
I forget now in which of her film reviews Pauline Kael said that the film under review was so bad that after sitting through it she actually felt stoned on boredom, but after reading through The Best American Poetry 2023 I can see what she meant. The selections have a tedious variety: each one seems to amount in its own smugly ingenious way to a tendentious, strained argument for why you have to like it as a poem. But to be worth reading and remembering, a poem must seduce, not demand. Reading through the poems in this collection is like watching a series of brief video clips showing various people trying to get a date by issuing subpoenas.
But if the book is of scant interest as poetry, it is of considerable value as an example of what has happened to poetry in American society: it has become academic in the worst sense of the word. Beneath their spurious variety, these poems are actually narrowly limited to the types of diction, subject, tone, and poetic and rhetorical strategies sanctified by contemporary creative writing programs, grant applications, and academic hiring and tenure committees. These poems are not works of art, they are credentials. Rather than quote passages here to support my criticism (an exercise which I am reluctant to inflict either on my readers or on myself) I think it would be easier to suggest that any who may be unintimidated by the book’s implicit demand that “you have to like this because it’s poetry” read through the book with my comments in mind, and then ask themselves whether the Emperor is wearing any clothes.
It is as astonishing as it is discouraging that the poetry of the nation which produced Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H. D., Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, e e cummings, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Allen Ginsberg should be reduced to this yawn-inducing assemblage of arid pretentious exercises.
[Two footnotes: (1) The collection includes a hitherto unpublished poem by W. H. Auden which is very good. I don’t see why he never published it; perhaps he felt he was continuing in a style which he had already done enough with. (2) The book’s cover is illustrated with a portrait of Anna Akhmatova, a fine poet, but why choose a portrait of a Russian poet to illustrate a collection of American poetry?]
|