Poetry Snapshot:
The State of the Art 2000
Our network of correspondents contributing poetry news, notes, views & reviews to Museletter is 14 strong now -- poets from all across North America keeping you up to date on the evolutionary & revolutionary lives of poetry everywhere around us. So, to mark the 5th annual celebration of National Poetry Month in the U.S., we've decided to bring you a composite snapshot of the state of poetry right now, shot through the lenses of our Museletter correspondents' eyes & ears.
We hope you discover poems & poets you didn't know about as you read through these lists of our correspondents' favorite poetry Web sites, books, CDs & live performances. Don't forget to help us develop our portrait of poetry in the year 2000 by visiting the Poetry Forum to join the discussion of where poetry lives right now & where it's going as an art, & to tell us about your favorites, the ones we missed.
--Bob Holman & Margery Snyder
Where Poetry Lives Now
& Where It's Going
BOB HOLMAN (New York): BOB'S CHOICE WEB SITE BOOK CD PERFORMANCE
IAN FERRIER (Montreal): IAN'S CHOICE WEB SITE BOOK CD PERFORMANCE
VICTOR INFANTE (Orange County): VICTOR'S CHOICE WEB SITE BOOK CD PERFORMANCE
BOB REDMOND(Seattle): BOB'S CHOICE WEB SITE BOOK CD PERFORMANCE
JENNIFER JOSEPH (San Francisco): JENNIFER'S CHOICE WEB SITE BOOK CD PERFORMANCE
MARJ HAHNE (Philadelphia): MARJ'S CHOICE WEB SITE BOOK CD PERFORMANCE
LEONARDO DELLAROCCA (Miami): I think poetry is becoming more splintered despite the Internet and the incredible number of poetry magazines and readings that would normally make one think poetry is getting homogenized. I don't believe it's splintering into geographic lines (There was a great essay recently in Hungry Mind Review, now known as Ruminator Review, about regional poetry losing its flavor the last several years.) I think it's splitting up into spoken word, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, post-modern, neo-formalism and the more now-traditional confessional poetry. The literary magazines take a major responsibility for that, I think. Many poets read them and write much like what they read, thinking, “Well, that's what's getting published, so. . . .” Of course, it depends on which journals one reads. I think many poets read many of the same journals -- you have a group in love with APR and other publications like it, others are reading Indiana Review and that ilk, etc. Much of the poetry getting written is in response and therefore itself “sums up” the state of poetry. Throw in the zillion MFA programs being offered and the Breadloaf, Iowa & other workshops, and there it is: a hodge podge. And I think that's healthy.
LEONARDO'S CHOICE WEB SITE BOOK PERFORMANCE
SHANN PALMER (Virginia): SHANN'S CHOICE WEB SITE CD PERFORMANCE
STAZJA MCFADYEN (Austin): STAZJA'S CHOICE WEB SITE BOOK CD PERFORMANCE
TA'SHIA ASANTI (Denver): TA'SHIA'S CHOICE WEB SITE BOOK CD PERFORMANCE
ROBYN SU MILLERZ (Boston): JASON PETTUS (Chicago): JASON'S CHOICE WEB SITE BOOK CD PERFORMANCE
GARY GLAZNER (Santa Fe): GARY'S CHOICE WEB SITE BOOK CD PERFORMANCE
CRISTIN APTOWICZ (New York): CRISTIN'S CHOICE WEB SITE BOOK CD PERFORMANCE
State of Poetic art: Healthy. As the Breakthrough Poets of the early 90's turn 30, they seem to be breathing fire as well as spewing it -- a good thing, patience. MP3lit is poised. Anne Carson and Billy Collins show that outsiders can still take over the center, like Ashbery did 30 years ago. More commercials are sampling po-stylee and Taylor Mali’s cynical baritone finally makes Burger Kingy our way. Sherman Alexie’s improvised poem at the Peoples' Poetry Gathering is played on NPR and is the greatest poem since The Iliad -- plus he sticks with Bob Hershon’s Hanging Loose Press for his poetry publishing, which gives pole-vault legs to that great press (and poet guy, hi Bob!) -- a model for poets who make it. Personally, I got to meet the Griots and other African poets at the utopian African Languages & Literature Conference, Against All Odds, in Asmara, Eritrea this year, and am more than ever convinced that the more we learn roots, and listen to poetry air, the fresher and wilder and more useful our own poetry grows.
Slam seems to be moving away from stand-up and towards some deeper values -- the power of words to project images inside out, so we can live another's life as ours. I continue to listen for, and even hear sometimes, the odd line whose music you'd remember years down the road, far longer than the continuous noise of pop culture. Both of these are good signs: of poetry moving away from the academy and into songs for the ear, cinema for the mind. Nothing else will keep it alive.
Is it too cliche to quote Yeats here? “The Best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity?” I feel like things had real potential a couple years back, that poetry was on the cusp of being revalidated as an art form in the public eye, but that hasn't happened. Too many poets are content to play the circus oddity or are too comfortable locked up in their ivory towers still. Sometimes I think far too few poets are looking out the windows at the people on the street and wondering how to write for them. The state of poetry is what it has been for decades -- desperate.
Poetry in the year 2000: From the continental divide, the academicians in the trail of Yeats, Pound, Eliot go one way towards their own wasteland; the rest in the spoken cadence of Langston Hughes, Whitman, Ginsberg, all headed towards the land of tribes, promised land. Page v. stage; text v. hypertext. There are of course those who cross all borders (Gómez-Peña, Baraka, Shange, to name a few). But not since Gutenberg flipped the old blind bards (Homer) or homeless wanderers (Chaucer) have we crossed roads such as these. No doubt, Poetry births itself again in the next 25 years: Who will be its midwife, and what will it wail?
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” -- on the one hand, poetry is more vital today, with more participants writing and attending readings, than it has been since the Beat era in the '50s. On the other hand, the schism between the formal academic poetry community and the popular culture poetry community seems to have widened, with the MFA-program types stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the literary merit of performance-oriented poetry. There are very few publishing companies with national distribution publishing work by unknown poets. I hope the Internet will become a viable alternative resource for the dissemination of written poetry.
(Forgive my poetic experimentation:)
saturated self-indulgent publication glut
well-endowed strokes of cerebrum
*too many footnotes
Thank God for the inglorious mob
the uncivil uncerebral citizenry
wielding words that wake us up
but insurrection is inside out:
“You must be the change you
wish to see in the world,”
Gandhi said to the people.
Don't just poet.
Show it.
The State of Poetry -- boy, Dana Gioia summed it up best in his “Can Poetry Matter?,” but if I had to take a crack at it. . . .
This week, I'm traveling to Texas to read at the Austin International Poetry Festival with 200 other poets, including Larry Jaffe and Stazja McFadyen. There'll be readings, signings and discussions on all manner of poetry, written and spoken. A diverse group, we'll be folded together like a burrito, hot and spicy, filled to bursting with sound. This is poetry today: inclusive and alive, in speech, rhyme and rhythm, put on paper, spread onto the Internet, bringing poets together to hear each other face to face, to touch hands and meet friends, to share stories.
Stazja's been too busy travelling around the country & preparing for the Austin International Poetry Festival to write a state of the art summary this week, so we'll simply quote from her most recent MAP of Austin Poetry: “Welcome to Austin, live poetry capital of the world. Prepare to run on adrenalin. . . . A kind of Poets' New Year, if you will.”
When I migrated to Denver from Los Angeles, I was quite optimistic about the poetry scene. I expected to find little old ladies in a knitting circle reading poems from a tattered book with frayed edges. Instead, I found Brother Jeff's Cultural Cafe and Cafe Nuba. I discovered the courageous voices and words of bold poets such as Patrice C. Queen, Brothah Jeff, Ashara Ekundayo, Mutima, Trinidad Sanchez, Maurice, Shahada, Monique and Black Child.
The interstate of poetry in New England is so rockin' this correspondent crashed (upon finally hitting home) and slept through your editor's deadline. . . Luckily, there was a day's reprieve. So I questioned Boston Slammaster Michael Brown, who confirmed my suspicions about the state of poetry here: “Rhode Island.” For slam poets, it's all about Rhode Island as the competition intensifies for the Slam Nationals this summer. The poetry here rocks, and you don't know how hard it rocks until you hit the road and make it to AS-220 in Providence and sit in the “cool corner” with that night's feature, Sou MacMillan, and her Worcester teammate, Becky Henderson, and Cape Cod Poet Laureate Adam Stone, and that night's slam winner, Zilla McCue, who rocked the house. Rocked really hard. You'd have to come hear what I mean. And this August, the whole nation's invited.
In the last several years the National Poetry Slam has seen two distinct factions form in its ranks: older, more academic poets who wish to turn the competition into a legitimate, respectable organization; and younger, more bar-oriented poets who want to keep the slam the way it is or even deregulate it further. Now that Marc Smith has voluntarily stepped down as head of Slam Inc., I predict that we will see a major split within the organization. It's my belief that within the next year, plans will be formed by the latter (younger) faction to actually separate from Slam Inc. and form a second yearly national poetry competition having nothing to do with the NPS. The changes being proposed at this year's Slammasters meetings are too reactionary for this not to happen.
Poetry sales are way up for the year 2000. As poet-in-residence at the Inn on the Alameda in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I deliver an average of 700 poems per month, small scrolls placed on the guests' pillows. This summer I will lead a group of poets on a 30-day 28-city tour called “SlamAmerica” to kick off the release of the anthology Poetry Slam being published by Manic D Press. The Poets' Plaza in Albuquerque has just received $5,000 in seed money and $25,000 in matching funds. I firmly believe you can make your living as a poet!
I think we are moving towards Bob Holman's dream, of poetry being as accessible to the general public as ordering a pizza. More and more people are opening themselves to poetry, and more and more poets are becoming increasingly responsible in their work, taking the time to realize that they are living in a new poetry renaissance, and working hard not to squander that opportunity.
Museletter Correspondents' Choice
WEB SITES BOOKS CDs PERFORMANCES
