Poetry+Today

I just wanted to comment here on the last statement of the essay: "I will allow Howard Nemerov the last word. . . . 'It is when poetry becomes altogether too easy, too accessible, runs down to a few derivative formulae and caters to low tastes and lazy minds--it is then that the life of the art is in danger' (//op. cit. 30)//" (7). Obviously, if this is the last line with which Shepherd leaves us, he wants it to make an impact and to echo in our minds. And I think it is very true, let alone witty; after all, why simplify the art? It would be depressing to see it become something like modern art today, a dot on a solid color canvas (as we discussed in class today). Of course, something simple can still retain meaning (as Shepherd discusses on page 4 with interpretive difficulty), but something with little meaning when it also lacks much substance, cannot retain its importance--let alone the interest of readers. Poetry is all about interpretation, exploring ideas and new experiences, and 'unlocking' meaning. Why would we want to take that away? What would make the words still poetry, as opposed to something like rhyming song lyrics. Poetry has depth, and it should take some effort and intelligence to decipher it. I like when Shepherd mentions that poets should assume that their readers are "intelligent human beings" (2); it makes sense. I also like how Shepherd writes the same way towards us, clearly but casually. I agree with what he is saying.

Comments?1203557633

sorry to comment immediately on myself, but I just read something from __The Making of a Poem__ that related exactly to what I was saying here: "what blank verse offers--greater suspension of the sentence, an acceptance of duration, and, finally, an imatation or a description of thought" (104). In this section The Contemporary Context the authors are talking about how concise and to the point modern poetry is. Blank verse, on the other hand, often offers a description of ideas, what goes on in the poet's mind -- the "description of thought." It is this length and complexity that gives the form its worth. This form is a good example of how positive maintaining the duration of the poem, rather than simplifying it, can be. Blank verse invites active interpretation from its deep-thinking readers.1203560794

I'm not seeing the justification behind the criticism of modern art. I mean, since I was little, I was always asked the question, what does it mean? How a phrase or even a simple word altered my reality didn't really matter much. But school is supposed to prepare us for the real world, and so in the real world, we are to rationalize everything. This is why when we look at a dot in a solid colored canvas, we think that there is nothing to interpret. Nothing to experience. As Shepherd puts it, "Sometimes one discovers that the mystery isn't to be solved, but still that process of exploration has helped one to know it better, to experience it more fully." (1) Then he goes on to discuss superficial mystery as shallowness posing as depth, which you would describe a dot on a solid colored canvas to be: superficially deep.

But this business of experiencing a poem, and having that be satisfying enough, it's something I would like to achieve, but not sure my brain will allow. In the margin next to the passage I just quoted, I scribbled that the acceptance of exploration as the extent of a poetic study is just a positive way of looking at being defeated by a poem. But after some reconsideration, why can't it be good enough? Here, in school, there always has to be an answer. But one doesn't always exist. Vernon Shetly is quoted as saying, "only by increasing the level of intellectual challenge it offers can poetry once again make itself a vital part of intellectual culture." (1) But can't the intellectual challenge be accepting the lack of answer? Can't an experience offer as much insight into life as a definition? 1203561852

I do not think we can say that modern art is meaningless nor can we say that all poetry is meaningful. I think it is based on perspective and patience. I know that some modern art I have seen I thought was dumb, but I have also seen a lot of modern art that it extremely meaningful and looking at it once only scratches the surface. I think in order to be successful as a modern artist you have to create something that has a meaning to you as the artist and someone else who will buy the art. A lot of people look down on modern art and say that they coud do that. Well that may be true, but you didn't. You didn't because that piece of art does not have any meaning to you, however it had meaning to the artist and the person who bought it.

This same idea is true with poetry. We are taught that all poetry has a meaning and our goal is to find it. I think this is wrong. Some poetry has no meaning to some people and one poem may be extremely meaningfull to one person and then someone else will turn around and say that same poem is not even a poem. We can compare poetry and art because they are both so subjective. There is no one textbook meaning to a piece of art or a poem. Different people will find different meanings based on their life experience and knowledge. That is why I think that we do not have the authority to say that something is good or bad or a poem or not a poem. We can say that we like or dislike something, but never that it is good or bad.1203641860

That is what I liked most about the essay; Reginald said that what a poems "means" does not define the poem. I struggle with this because if I don't know what a poem means, I say that it's too hard and I don't get it. This essay helped me realize that there is so much more to poetry than just the meaning. There is still the music, the lyrics, the rythmn, and much more to appreciate. He mentioned that he had a favorite poem, but didn't understand it's meaning for the longest time. I have always been one to not like poetry because it's hard for me to interpret them, but this essay helped me see poetry in a new light. 1203652254

Surprisingly, I disagree with Matt. I think that it is essential that poetry has a meaning, as well as all literature, for that matter. Poetry without meaning is not poetry. Literature without meaning is not literature. It is ranting. As for poetry today, I find a good portion of it to be garbage. I can't stand poems

that are supposed to be po ems even thoug h they're written like this.

Contemporary poetry disgusts me. It is abstract, random, and haphazardly constructed. There could be no greater contrast to the elegant, hand-written poems of the 19th century and before. Nevertheless, I can handle some poems that are written in free verse if they express a deeper meaning, uses some sort of imagery, and have around the same number or syllables per line. For what its worth (which may be nothing to some of you), my opinion on modern art is that most it has no purpose but to make me ask "this garbage is art?" I'm sorry, but paintings made of random splashings of paint are not art. Call me old-fashioned, but that's what I think. 1203653413

John, I wouldn't necessarily call you "old-fashioned" ... or ... maybe what you mean by "old-fashioned" is that - in art and poetry - you value one kind of artistic production, organization and control over others. Artists and poets of the (mostly) 20th century "discovered" or "invented" new kinds of aesthetic organization and control that were strikingly at odds with what came before.

You are, of course, free to make whatever judgments you care to make about these matters - this "garbage"; but, for academic purposes, you (and all of us) might try to take a more discrete, semi-objective, or nuanced position.

For example, in the "poem" you wrote:

//...poems

that are supposed to be po ems even thoug h they're written like this//.

I find some real interest in this ... much more interest than if you had written: //poems that are supposed to be poems even though they're written like this//. You may call it "random", but there's a certain organization here ... and you had to exercise a certain kind of control over words, phrases, sound, sight, and sense in order to present the "poem" in this way. Of course, the manner is fragmented and apparently random, but what is the effect? And why might someone (mocking E. E. Cummings in this case?) choose to use such fragmentation? A stained glass window can only be made of broken glass. The fragmentation of your "poem" draws attention to the stuff out of which a poem is made: language. You draw attention to (make us conscious of) the difference between written language and spoken language ... the seen and the heard.

I love the way you split the "h" off from "thoug". It reminds me of the strangeness of that word ... and the apparently "random" pronunciation of it as "tho" while words like "rough" and "plough" get their own unique pronunciations. Language IS strange in all of its manifestations. Isn't it a wonder that anything like communication can ever happen?

Sometimes our rush to judge and label a work of art (according to our present biases ... and we all have them) prevents us from seeing what is actually there.1203888133

I think that when we are dealing with poetry, or any art, for that matter, we really need to open our minds. So many of these posts have dealt with the rules and the meaning of poetry, but I think that the most important thing when looking at a poem is to recognize that to someone, this poem had a meaning. Otherwise, it never would have been written.

The same is true of modern art, and, though everyone seems to think, "I could have made that," we have to realize that whether or not you could have created it is irrelevant. Modern art is more about opening your mind to abstract ideas and modes of expression, and not as much about proving that you can make something better than everyone else.

So, my point is this: when poetry is difficult, it is tempting to dismiss it. It is easy to say that if it doesn't follow rules it isn't worth anything or because it is not perfectly coherent in a traditional sense, it is junk. But this is not bad poetry, it is a bad way to read poetry. All of those aspects of form and style present different kinds of difficulty, and open-mindedness is the willingness to sort through that difficulty.

Therefore, an open-minded attitude is essential to preserving the art of poetry. A rigid, closed minded attitude towards poetry will only lead to the formulaic, easy poetry that Nemerov warns against. 1203982222

Just because poetry is abstract or obscure doesn't mean it's not saying something. Like the modern art mentioned, it is showing a certain obscurity of the human mind that needs to be considered. The poems of today may be strange at first look, but it seems unlikely that people are putting them together without thought and just throwing some words down. It takes deeper reflection to see the true meaning of these poems. Someone must realize that they are worth reading, otherwise poems today wouldn't be publicized. Because of close-minded readers people aren't seeing the true meaning of the difficult poems or making the necessary connections. 1203983623

I kind of disagree with the statement from Nemerov used in the opening post. I mean, I understand that he's trying to say that poetry is dead when it caters to simple minds, and I agree with that because when you can fully understand a poem after only reading it once, it probably doesn't have much depth and probably doesn't have much to it. Still, sometimes the repetitive predictable derivative formula works because sometimes if a writer goes about it the right way, he or she can write something that appears simple on the surface, but has a whole lot more depth to it that can only be seen after repeated readings or listenings. I for one think that what makes a poem or any piece of writing great is that it has some sort of "hook" that catches your interest and might make you bob your head or remember it. Great pieces of literature have both "hooks" and depth to them, but the only way to get people to recognize that depth is first to hook them with something catchy that they can understand.

Just think about music for the simplest example. People have been doing 12 bar blues for at least the past 100 years and it's an incredibly derivative form of song. Still, people manage to take this tired, worn out form and adjust to themselves so that they produce something rooted in 12 bar blues, but something which is also distinctly their own statement and their own piece of art.

I think though that what Nemerov was getting at was that poetry is dead when people start catering to the low and lazy minds; it is dead when artists compromise their integrity for things like acclaim. I agree with that because when people start writing just so that they can get the most people as possible to read what they do, they are missing the point of writing and actually causing backwards progress in the overall world of writing. I feel that as long as people continue to express themslves without compromising their work for fame and fortune, the poem will always be alive and kicking.1204045207

I believe I stand somewhere in the middle of this argument. On one hand, I believe that poets should not purposely write poems to please the unintelligent audiences out there--but who really does that anyway? I think that poets have to change their style of writing to please his or her audience, because why wouldn't anyone want his or her work to be popular? I think that people who publish their work do so in order for others to view it, if that was not the case, then they would just keep their work to themselves. I do not believe that people are compromising their work, but rather, they are changing thier work to grow and change with the times. People today are not less intelligent then they were yesterday, so then how is change a bad thing? But then, on the other hand, of course I wouldn't want the face of poetry to be completely effected by the culture of media all about reality drama and sex that sells. But, with that said, I don't think the MTV culture that I speak of is really affecting the refined poetry that we are speaking of? Is it possible to have different types of cultural poetry? 1204147616

The problem with contemporary or new-age poetry is that there are too many poets. If you think about it, we read only a handful of poets from before the Dark Ages; and for good reason, the monks chose to write down and thus save only those which were good. From that time to the age of the printing press, we have even fewer poets that we read. Why? Because they were mostly bad and nobody today wants to read them and thus nobody published them or they have been forgotten about. We read a larger number of poets from that time until the beginning of the 20th century because they were not forgotten as easily. Because of technology and the lack of time needed to weed out bad poems, we do read some "garbage" from the 20th century onward. I'm sure that centuries from now only a select few poets from our time will ever be read, we have the unfortunate burden of reading them all. user:PSp-c

I think the point here is much more simple than people are making it out to be. New-age poetry is most certainly different than a lot of the other stuff we read, but it's all simply a matter of personal preference. Is the question whether or not it's still really poetry? Of course it is. It has some sort of structure, and it's expressing the thoughts of the author. If the question is whether or not authors are trying to please certain members of their audiences, I believe that some poets probably are. I mean, I believe I mentioned this in another topic, but some poets out there are making money off of their poetry, so when they find something that works with a certain portion of their audience, they're probably going to stick with it. I do find it a bit sad to hear that some poets write solely to please the more unintelligent members of their audience, but if that's what they want to do with their poetry, it's their choice. I don't think that necessarily means that poetry is dead or anything. 1204163488

Well, really, I think that when everything becomes a little to easy, where the masses can all contribute equally, you lose a little of the quality of it all, in the 'dumbing down' of the form of art. Modern art's different though, and it depends on what kind you're talking about. Impressionism and figurative art is great, in my opinion. even cubism is pretty sweet if you can get into it, realism ain't the only things out there. The extreme modern arts, the 'painbucket' stuff, the dots, arrows, and solid colours are another things. yeah, I'd call them art, but still, they don't take as much time and perfection as more conservative forms might take. (How long does it take to make a dot, really?) Part of the great thing about poetry though is that people can't just contribute equally. I mean, you've got all those 'high school poets' and poetic youth and such, but their work is garbage, and people that are really into it know that there's a whole different level between that kind of poetry and the poetry of a real writer, and that's something that can't be taken away from poetry that quickly, so I don't think it's in any immediate danger. It requires true genius and inspiration to make real good poems, and at the end of the day, those are hard to come by. 1204256501

I think that the one thing that poetry always needs to be is that it must always force some kind of deeper thinking. So no matter what it is even if some people consider it to be oversimlified, if it forces people to slow down, and read closely then it is still poetry. And since it is an art, and art is really different for everyone, then it's still good poetry, otherwise people wouldn't read it right? Art only survives because people like it, otherwise nobody would care, and the makers of the art (who are starving anyway) will probably die off and not be remembered. 1205448494

I like what Brother Tom mentioned in response to John's post: "Sometimes our rush to judge and label a work of art (according to our present biases ... and we all have them) prevents us from seeing what is actually there."

This relates to what Shepherd discusses on the fifth page of his essay: "All of the kinds of difficulty I have enumerated and described are violations of readerly expectations. All readers, no matter how catholic in their tastes and in their knowledge, come to poems with some or another set of expectations...It's impossible to approach a poem as if one were a blank slate." While I agree that people should be open-minded when approaching poetry and other scenarios in life, I find it hard to imagine that we cannot start with a blank slate. Why not? I understand that our biases and past experiences shapes the way we read, interpret, and judge a poem, but shouldn't we do that //after// we read the poem? We all have different likes, dislikes, and expectations--that may be true--but don't we all have the ability to sit down with a poetry book, take a deep breath, and open to a page saying to yourself: "I am going to read this with a fresh outlook, no judgments passed. Don't judge it til it's over"? We can do that, right?

I guess I am just confused as to why we can't have that "blank slate" that Sherpherd refers to. 1205448970

Sometimes I wonder if we overanalyze poetry. We study and pick it apart and then we study it and pick it apart again. The cycle seems to be continuous. But maybe we're just ment to read poetry and enjoy it for what it's worth. Who said that the authors of poems wanted their work to be picked apart to find hidden details and so forth. And I highly doubt they would like to know that we sometimes rip them apart because the flow in their poem was off or we didn't like how they didn't insert a beat here or there. Who are we to decide what's right and wrong. We're still learning about all of this. I think we need to tread lightly when we think we know something about a poem.1205470435