Mediaization, Democratization, Popularization:
Poetry Makes Its Move Move
Poetry is becoming a popular art, not by mass marketing, but by a one-to-one old timey populist movement, something out of the turn of the last century instead of this one. You still won’t find poetry readings reviewed in newspapers, or in most cases even listed. MTV’s flirtation with the art seems to have hit a lull -- and remember that MTV never allowed the “p” word to be used. Poetry was not uttered over those hipper’n hip airwaves; instead, you watched “Spoken Word Unplugged” and, just to make the point clearer, word is spelled wurd.
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Something has been missing... |
Poetry’s reenergizing is not the result of some Madison Avenue ad campaign or a major merchandising blitz. There’s something about poetry that’s resistant to these attempts at marketing -- I think it’s because there’s nothing to sell. Ads sell products; poetry sells nothing but an idea. The poem sits there like the black box after the plane has gone down. The secrets are all in there, but you’ve got to understand the whole thing, the context and your own consciousness, before meaning will gush, as Frank O’Hara says, “feminine, marvelous, and tough.” Robert Creeley says poetry is an activity, not a product.
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from the soul of this country,... |
Poetry’s renaissance is happening now because poetry as a spoken art, as a performed art, is finally being recognized. In his recent book, Poetry As Performance (1996, Cambridge University Press), the Chair of the Harvard Classics Department, Gregory Nagy, discusses the etymology of “Homer” as the Greek word for “joiner,” specifically the master carpenter who took the wooden arcs other carpenters had carved and joined them into the chariot wheel or cyklos, cycle. Thus the poet who traveled from town to town joining the strands of history and myth into the epic cycles of the Iliad and the Odyssey was Homer. Was a Homer. In fact, some say there were 400 Homers!
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and who better to tell us... |
Poetry is reclaiming its oral roots. Years ago I was on the bill with the rapper LL Cool J, and told him that he had won my poet of the year award for his rhyming the word “Ayatollah” with “granola.” He shushed me, explaining that nothing could be worse than being labeled a poet -- it meant economic death.
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what it is than those... |
These days we all know rap is poetry. Or it can be. Or some would define it as such. The point being kids can fight for their belief that this densely rhymed, richly rhythmic language construct is in fact a poem, and if it’s not, what is your definition of a poem? and once you've got people arguing about the definition of poetry, as you all know, we all win.
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for whom words... |
We all win because literature is becoming participatory and not owned by somebody on the other side of an ivy wall. We win because poetry no longer has to be explained to you to be understood. Am I saying rap, performance poetry, the oral tradition, is taking over the arcana? No I am not. This is not a battle between oral and text poetries, although the media is very attracted to such controversy. It sells newspapers; I don’t know if it sells poetry.
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are living things... |
The fight is for poetry’s survival, for a way into what has been seen as an elitist, arcane art. Poetry’s opening to its oral roots grabs minds on familiar turf -- what if a nursery rhyme, in your mother’s or grandmother’s voice, were called to mind as your introduction to literature? The soldier’s drill, the auctioneer’s patter, the double Dutch rhyme?
Today we can add a weapon to our arsenal -- the hated Cyclops in the Corner, TV. Don’t you relish the irony of poetry becoming popular by utilizing the technology that was to spell its demise? Still, though, it’s not like you can find a poem on TV every day, or week, or month -- in the past five years, there have been four series dedicated to poetry and a few other shows, all on PBS. Several of those shows are still living on the Net:
- Fooling With Words, Bill Moyer's series from the Dodge Poetry Festival
- Literature and Life, series on African-American lit
- Voices & Visions, series profiling the best known American poets
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...our poets. |
Poetry is not a mass market-driven phenomenon; it is a poet-driven art form, and we poets are in this with the librarians, the booksellers, and the high school English teachers who believe in the power of words and the beauty of artful communication. Language is the essence of humanity, and poetry is the essence of language. Something has been missing from the soul of this country, and who better to tell us what it is than those for whom words are living things, our poets. That is the way we begin to respect all our individual voices: by hearing the poet in each of us.
Bob Holman
Follow these links to BarnesandNoble.com if you want your own copy of the books mentioned above:
- Poetry As Performance, Gregory Nagy (1996, Cambridge University Press)
- The United States of Poetry anthology, ed. Bob Holman (1996, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.)
- Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, ed. Donald Allen (1995, University of California Press)
- Lunch Poems, Frank O'Hara (1986, City Lights Books)
- Meditations in an Emergency, Frank O'Hara (1996 reprint, originally published in 1957, Grove/Atlantic)
- Poems Retrieved, Frank O'Hara, ed. Donald Allen (1996, Grey Fox Press)
- Selected Poems, Frank O'Hara, ed. Donald Allen (1977, Random House)
- Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945 - 1975 (1985, University of California Press)
- Day Book of a Virtual Poet, Robert Creeley (1999, Spuyten Duyvil)
- Echoes, Robert Creeley (1994, New Directions)
- Selected Poems, Robert Creeley (1996, University of California Press)
- So There: Poems 1976 - 1983, Robert Creeley (1998, New Directions)
- Life and Death, Robert Creeley (1998, New Directions)
- The Iliad, Homer, trans. Robert Fagles (1991, Viking Penguin)
- The Iliad, Homer, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (1992, David McKay Company)
- The Odyssey, Homer, trans. Robert Fagles (1996, Viking Penguin)
- The Odyssey, Homer, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, intro. Seamus Heaney (1993, Everyman's Library)
- I Make My Own Rules, LL Cool J's autobiography (1998, St. Martin's Press)
- All World Greatest Hits, LL Cool J (1996 CD, Def Jam)
- Walking With a Panther, LL Cool J (1989 CD reissue, Def Jam)
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