15 May 2004. Another excerpt from my essay about contemporary poetry today:

Accessibility versus Complexity

The central problem for Gioia and Kleinzahler, and many others in poetry, has to do with the accessibility of poems. Gioia, an extreme stasguard, favors extreme accessibility, so is much taken by Keillor's "intention to compile a book 'to read in normal circumstances.'" From my point of view, Kleinzahler differs from Gioia on this subject about as much as Monet did from Constable--a lot if you think representational painting is all there is, but not much if you're aware of Kandinsky and Pollock. But he is closer to my view than Gioia is. He quotes Keillor at length: "The goodness of a poem is severely tested by reading it on the radio. The radio audience is not the devout sisterhood you find at poetry readings, leaning forward, lips pursed, hanky in hand; it's more like a high school cafeteria. People listen to poems while they're frying eggs and sausage and reading the paper and reasoning with their offspring, so I find it wise to stay away from stuff that is too airy or that refers off-handedly to the poet Li-Po or relies on your familiarity with butterflies or Spanish or Monet."

To this Kleinzahler responds, "'So I'll be feeding you mostly shit,' is what Garrison could well go on to say." This isn't entirely fair: one can't read more difficult poems not familiar to one's audience even at a college poetry reading and expect them to sincerely enjoy them. Yet, why should a reader of poetry not occasionally read something difficult--and then read it again a month or two later? Or read it, discuss it--and read it again on the same radio program? The reader might even announce in advance that he will be reading certain poems that are in print somewhere so that some listeners could follow him. And why need he have only poems he considers orally-effective in a poetry anthology he eventually puts together? Why not try to stretch his listeners' sympathies?

The truth is, Keillor does not believe there are any worthwhile poems that are not orally effective. In fact, he suggests that a poem's effectiveness is tested by presenting it orally. The implication is that if a poem that is presented orally doesn't go over, there's something wrong with it. This equates immediate understanding with effectiveness, which is nonsense. The reverse is true, in fact--if the understanding which is immediate is total. The best poems are those which are sufficiently understood the first time presented--by those of its audience with wide experience of the kind of poems involved and sympathetic to them. Such wide experience of the newest kind of poetry is much harder to come by than wide experience of the poetry stasguards defend so ardently, which is the main reason it seems difficult. It isn't widely disseminated by, or written about in, The New Yorker, The Hudson Review, The American Poetry Review, Knopf, etc., nor taught in schools from second grade on. It is thus unfair to expect otherstream poetry to be as easy to follow as knownstream poetry is.

Not surprisingly, Keillor considers memorability, which is closely related to oral effectiveness, another important sign of a good poem. But surely only predictable poems are easy to remember, word for word. My own view is that a good poem is one you wish you could memorize but can't, so you have to keep returning to it. But you take a long-lasting, vivid impression of something about it away from your first exposure to it.

Closely related to memorability as a characteristic of a good poem for Keillor is narrative interest: "A story is easier to remember than a puzzle." My retort to that is that stories are easier to forget than puzzles, too, particularly puzzles triumphantly solved after effort. Where's the thrill at having read a poem to the end and learned how things come out compared with the thrill of mastering a difficult poem?

Gioia defends Keillor's Philistinism on the grounds that "what makes a poem good depends both on what one intends to use it for and who intends to use it." I believe that to the contrary good poems are those intended to reach the best aesthoyagers; they are not fast food, much as I myself love fast food. In other words, given a choice between poems intended to reach a general audience and poems of more subtle values, one should choose the latter. However, there's no reason we shouldn't have both kinds of poems--as the stasguards in the Ashbery-to-Wilbur crowd continually clamor for. It'd be nice, though, if we could also have a few adventurous poems in anthologies like Keillor's, too.