Why I Hate Poetry

These two old guys drove twelve miles into town to attend a special poetry reading, hoping to eventually read publicly a few of their own poems in the ordered process of each signing into the listed queue holding court on the official table of the local coffee house. These two gray-haired gentlemen suffered through the reading of the chief poet, the headliner, the star, who had earlier sashayed into the coffee house wearing his poet's garb, looking indeed like the great poet he claimed to his university students to be because he had published books and because, in the course of things, his peers themselves also said he was certainly a great poet.

He was there to be seen as the great poet he believed he was and to premiere new poems about his cat. On and on he droned in sentences so boring it was hard to tell anymore what the old men had come to and where they were going. And then he was done. Finished. And off he went, this handsome poet in his great coat and hat, out the same door he came in, not stopping to listen to any of the waiting novice or amateur readers still waiting to come, some of them surely his current students, but the important poet had other more pressing things to attend to. The eager readers then shuffled up to the same podium one by one until finally, seemingly hours later, the old friends cried uncle and put their own poems away.

I hate poetry simply because of all the poor poetry that stands with others of their ilk as good poetry which in fact is not. And all the bad poets praise each others work and more bad work is propagated because of it. Some of the propagators are teachers, or become teachers, and on and on it goes. When the teacher gets to a kid like me (of course that was many years ago) and tells me how great something being taught is that I inherently already know isn't, it makes a kid like me not trust adults beginning at a very early age. It is sort of like religion being taught to an atheist as something real and factual. It just doesn't hold water. But when one comes upon a great poem read correctly you know it in every fiber of your being, teacher or not. The body knows. Something happens to you physically. Sometimes that type of reading has to be taught. You have to be taught how to read a poem. But you can't teach a bad poem to anyone but a poor reader or a terribly bad listener. All you can do is teach your morals, politics, or gender issues and hope for some sentimental support for what you are saying. Why not instead have an experience unexampled in its feeling? Something novel, new, fascinating, and even a bit disruptive.

From Genesis West, number one
Interview With Jack Gilbert, conducted by Gordon Lish
Poetry Is The Art Of Prejudice

page 86:
Jack Gilbert- "...But usually my poems are caused by an impulse to communicate some part of my life rather than to please. I don't want the reader to finish the poem and say how lovely it was. I want him to be disturbed. Even miserable."

page 88:
Gordon Lish- "Do you think people who are involved in poetry to further their careers or who make mild poems out of trivial material are dangerous to the reader?"

Jack Gilbert- "Mostly in being dangerous to themselves and other poets --- in that they reduce poetry to something toilet-trained and comfortable...Poetry is almost the only way we can escape from the vicious constipation of moral relativism. Because poetry is the art of prejudice. If prejudice is the inability to discuss a conviction calmly, then poetry is prejudice...(Poetry) doesn't argue, it demonstrates...Poetry isn't fair...Poetry is one-sided, and being one-sided, it can say what truth is."

I think it is a shame to search here through the available articles about poetry and the writing of it and have to sift through the drivel most of us call good. But I am not in the crowd of "most of us". It's bad, people. And the conversations about them are bad. It seems to me to always be a community of like-minded slap-happy citizens who like crappy poetry and the crappy writing of it. Well I don't. I am insulted by the work and I think it adds more fuel to the fires that maintain poetry is boring and even stupid. I will go on the record here saying I think ninety-nine point nine percent of it all is crap.

From 19 New American Poets Of The Golden Gate
(Jack Gilbert speaking on believing a poem or not) page 6
"...A lot of Elytis and the others feels like lazy language-mongering. A pretend-surrealism with no need behind it. The Mediterranean delight in the dance of the mind over a subject without trying to get anywhere. The subject being merely an occasion for the performance. Like poets giving birth without getting pregnant."

Hey, but wait. First off I want to say that there are some excellent poets and poems available for us to read, listen to, and enjoy. Just not here. I will positively present examples of some of these brilliant pieces of work if you stay with me. But there are far too many crappy ones out there, full of sentimentality and sap, eager to spread their morals, beliefs, and politics to the eyes and ears of the innocent. My guess is that most of the poems written and published would have been better left to the scrap heap called our waste basket. I will not make examples of these bad poems because, as elementary teachers generally say, I am trying to make lemonade.

From 19 New American Poets Of The Golden Gate
(Jack Gilbert speaking on less being more) page 7
"...One of the special pleasures in poetry for me is accomplishing a lot with the least means possible...and a pleasure in the scantness of means...the use of a few words with utmost effect."

Please, please, please, there are far too many poorly written poems in the world for one man to bear. That is why we have schools from which to spread more bad poems and the writing of them. Teachers throughout history have taught the same old stuff, boring the hell out of most young minds, and sealing the fate of a vast majority of students never to have seen or heard a very good poem. I know I didn't. Of course, there was Shakespeare's words available to us all to use as he did, but with no teacher capable of explaining anything meaningful about his work the typical student could not gain much of anything from his poems except perhaps a headache. Am I being too hard on teachers? I think not. Perhaps there was the random teacher who cared so much for the words that the teaching was meaningful. I never met one until much later in life. Gordon Lish was the first person to ever get so excited over teaching a poem that he infected me too with all his invigorating talk of making history. I would suppose Harold Bloom over there at Yale could get pretty excited as well, not to mention most likely Frank Lentricchia holding his own at Duke. Those three are serious scholars. But I never had Bloom or Lentricchia for teachers. Just that tyrant Lish who gets all the controversial press now for making Raymond Carver a big star.

The Abnormal Is Not Courage


The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers,
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
The bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that. Not at its best.
It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight,
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,
And the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
Not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
That is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

I found the following piece online and do not know who to credit it to, but clearly somebody is not telling the truth, or it has been enlarged, twisted, and made mythical. Nonetheless, there is a history behind the gallant Poles of which Jack Gilbert wrote so masterly about in his poem The Abnormal Is Not Courage.

"The headline of this post is one of the greatest and most enduring myths of World War II. Despite a complete lack of evidence to verify it, the notion keeps coming back: that on some unnamed battlefield, on some imprecise date, some unidentified unit of Polish cavalry–presumably with lances lowered–decided to have a go at some German Panzers. Like a lot of the mythology of the war, this one has come under attack by scholars and specialists for a long time now. As far back as 1991, Steven Zaloga and Victor Madej wrote a good book called The Polish Campaign that, to my mind, should have demolished the myth once and for all. They discuss a charge by the Polish 18th Lancer Regiment (part of the Pomorska Cavalry Brigade) against a weak German infantry position near the town of Krojanty in Pomerania on the first day of the invasion. Initially successful in dispersing the Germans, the 18th Lancers later came to grief when several German armored cars happened on the scene and opened up with their machine guns and light cannon. The regimental commander, Colonel Kazimierz Mastelarz, was killed in the incident. This “skirmish at Krojanty,” described in sensationalist terms by journalists like William Shirer, is almost certainly the source material for the fanciful tale of Polish cavalry charging tanks. We might also add that at times during the campaign, as Polish mounted units sought to evade or escape encirclement, they may indeed have encountered German Panzers. But that’s a long way from “charging” them. Such myth-busting has hardly seemed to matter, unfortunately. The story continues to have legs, as anyone who has ever taught a course on World War II can testify. Forget how improbable it is, even ridiculous. It’s almost as if we want it to be true, perhaps as an illustration of the power of the new German “Blitzkrieg,” perhaps as proof of the central role that technology plays in modern warfare, perhaps simply as a tribute to doomed heroism. German General Heinz Guderian included the tale in his memoirs as a sign of Polish backwardness (“The Polish Pomorska Cavalry Brigade, in ignorance of the nature of our tanks, had charged them with swords and lances…”) But Polish cavalry would hardly be surprised by the capabilities of tanks: each cavalry brigade had an armored troop attached to it, and the Polish army in 1939 contained the not-inconsiderable number of 600 tanks. Cavalry charging tanks. A lot of people have bought this one for years. It makes me wonder what other “facts” about the war we still need to call into question."

Because I am a poet and I come from the ranks of the un-poets I am fighting an uphill battle here. Poetry was ruined for me from a very early age. I did like nursery rhymes my mother read to me as a young child, but these were later dismissed in school as poetry for younger children and they were not used to teach us how poetry can work. Then we had Dr. Seuss who was also dismissed by most as some eccentric fellow writing silly stuff for young kids. The Doctor actually wrote some very brilliant poems that tend to stretch reality into something unmanageable and therefore unsavory to most palettes.

Interesting note about Dr. Seuss from wiki:
Though Seuss made a point of not beginning the writing of his stories with a moral in mind, stating that "kids can see a moral coming a mile off", he was not against writing about issues; he said "there's an inherent moral in any story" and remarked that he was "subversive as hell".[6][7] "Yertle the Turtle" has variously been described as "autocratic rule overturned",[8] "a reaction against the fascism of World War II",[9] and "subversive of authoritarian rule".[10]
The last lines of "Yertle the Turtle" read: "And turtles, of course ... all the turtles are free / As turtles, and maybe, all creatures should be."[1] When questioned about why he wrote "maybe" rather than "surely", Seuss replied that he didn't want to sound "didactic or like a preacher on a platform", and that he wanted the reader "to say 'surely' in their minds instead of my having to say it."[7]

Important poetry is needed, especially in the time we are living in now. Whether one speaks to the unconscious in all of us from the unconscious, or simply, but strongly, says what has happened that we all know consciously is the truth as in 9/11, words matter.  The poem MEWL HOUSE IN SEPTEMBER was written to honor those slain in the attack on the USA that fateful day. It records the truth, just as Jack Gilbert recorded the truth of the Poles riding out against the German tanks on horses, with sabers so many years ago.