Le Sabot Post-Moderne

This brings to mind the interview with Frank Peretti that Jared blogged about in the spring:

" C/A: How important is poetry to a novelist?

FP: Well. It’s not important to me at all. Hardly. Except in terms of?well, sometimes poetry’s kind of good. I’ll read poetry to just get my own imagination flowing. Poetry’s often good for using words to paint a picture with a minimum economy. Other than that, I’m pretty much just concerned with working a story so? on the one hand its good for getting my own word-generators working. On the other hand, its not real important to what I do.

C/A: Name three poets that you really enjoy?

FP: Carl Sandburg. Then a whole smattering of others that I don’t even remember. But I remember Carl Sandburg was good. Well, Robert Frost. I guess I should know more about him but I don’t.

Sigh. See why I was disappointed when J9's fourth grade class was assigned a F.P. novel as a class reader?

Hi Duchess!

Frank Peretti. . . Do we even have to come out and say 'consider the source'? :P

Hello there, Just browsing and stumbled across your blog. Instead of writing an essay for uni I thought I'd join the discussion.

You make some good points discoshaman. I too have pondered the sad decline of poetry today. Your reasons seem quite sound. Here are my thoughts, if you're interested.

The rise of the novel could hardly be considered a reason for the decline of poetry since the first novel was published in the C18th. Since then we have had hundreds of years of fantastic poetry. So I'm with you on that.

Radio; decline in form; and elitism all contribute to the decline of poetry in my finite little mind.

On hip hop, only the other day was I thinking how rhyme and rhythm both feature very strongly and may thus contribute to its popularity. Perhaps it is a return to some kind of form long lost. Ravi Zacharias has said for a long time that songwriters are our modern day poets. Alas!

I think the only way to revive poetry is to write it and publish it. Be it in an online uni journal, or whatever. Yet, I find myself with the dilemma of which form to write in. Do I use rhyme or not? Enjambment? Measured line lengths? Should I use stanzas? Perhaps I should just write.

I would like to see national politics debated through the arts again as they used to be. In Australia our creative arts are so ineffectual! We need to make the arts a place where we are heard. Sigh.

now that I've effectively avoided essay writing for long enough i must away.
till anon...

Oooh. We're going to like having you around. :)

I love poetry, but I have no abilities in the poetry-writing department whatsoever. I can do it in a pinch, but it takes me all night and the results are doggerel. I'm hopelessly prosaic, I'm afraid. :)

I agree with all of the above, but add the following:

1. Refer to CS Lewis' essay "Men Without Chests." When the literature teachers in the red book said that when Coleridge said that the waterfall was "sublime," they said that it meant that Coleridge meant that it made him feel sublime, not that the waterfall WAS sublime. We stopped believing that art -- and poetry as purely expressive art form -- didn't refer to real objects anymore but was simply the poet gassing on about their feelings. How dreadful it is to listen to undergraduates and amatuer poets -- and of course now the professional ones -- simply barf their emotions onto the page. Without structure or form and call it poetry because they expressed themselves and we must must honor their self-expression. Please, tell your inner-child to shut up and stop calling it art. Art, like love, has to have an object. The poet reveals some truth to us, helps us to see something in the real world in a new way. The self-absorbed simply spread their kimono.

2. Good artists -- I mean those with real skills -- have gravitated to art forms that are more lucrative and demanding and competitive. There are really talented and disciplined and trained people working in film and television and music and advertising. People who can really write and self-edit, people who can turn a phrase and express an idea through image. I'm not one of them, but I'm privileged to meet and work with a lot of them. Poetry is no longer the big-leagues for serious and trained creatives anymore.

Perhaps that was said about Coleridge because he was a Romantic poet and Romantics generally value feeling - and other senses - over thinking and knowing. However, Coleridge was one of the more cerebral Romantics. And his poetry is completely sublime - in the Burke sense of the word. One only has to read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or Christabel, to see that this is so.

May I ask you a question cu buffalo 86?
When you say that "Art, like love, has to have an object," do you exclude feelings, or emotions, as objects of art and poetry?

I ask because of your abhorrence at those who "simply barf their emotions onto the page." Is it the lack of form that you detest, or the absence of an appropriate 'object'?

On 2, I have to say, I am dissappointed that you think artists with talent are simply gravitating towards the $. Is art only 'good' if you get paid for it? I really hope this is not so. Most poets I know write because they have to. It's a part of them. If they get published and paid it's a bonus. But they don't give up and gravitate towards the $. Oh, and in case you were wondering, some of them have real talent. Having said that, they generally reject form. Not to say they can't write a brilliant sonnet...

Missmellifluous,

1. In that essay, Lewis used the example of the Coleridge/waterfall thing not to say something about Coleridge, but about literature teachers. He thought that Coleridge believed that the waterfall WAS sublime. Which is to say that that there are things that are worthy of us feeling awe, not just awe. It has to do with a certain metaphysics: do you believe that things hold intrinsic value? And that our responses are either proper responses to those values, or not? If a tree is beautiful in the forrest, is it still beautiful even if the poet isn't there to see it? And there are proper responses, and not. The proper response to the waterfall is awe, the proper response to the Holocaust is horror and outrage.

2. Thus -- in this classic view -- the poet plays a valuable role in the community: she teaches us, trains us, as to what our proper responses are to the world around us. To beauty, love; to magnificence, awe; to evil, horror; to vulnerability, tenderness.

3. If, Lewis said, objects don't have intrinsic value belong how they make us feel, then the poet can't teach us anything valuable except to tell us what they are feeling at the moment. The poet sees a mother and child, but because the poet's own childhood was unhappy, he feels contempt and describes the mother and child so. Because the poet had an unhappy experience with the Church, he describes Christ in mocking terms. While it may be interesting to hear the poet's feelings, they don't teach us anything and -- if you believe that things do have real, objective values -- the poet's subjective feelings may actually misleads us rather than lead us to truth.

3. I understand that this depends upon a certain view of the universe: one that is classically western, classically Christian. Throughout most of Western, Christian history this was the worldview: things had real meaning, poets described that meaning to us, and in a sense their personal feelings about those weren't relevant. Now I understand that this all changed in the early 20th century with the rise of expressionism. That also coincides with the end of the golden age of poetry and when it starteed getting kind of lousy.

4. If you object to the last point, my response is that I have a classically orthodox, western and Christian worldview. You are free to disagree with that, but my view of poetry comes from my worldview. The notion that modern poetry got bad around the time this view fell out of fashion was the point that Discoshaman started this thread with.

5. As far as do real artists just follow the money... well, yes, most of the time they do. Remember all that great Renaissance art? Paid for by wealthy patrons like the Medicis or the Vatican or wealthy Dutch traders or what not. I don't necessarily think that it's crass: truly gifted, hardworking people who dedicate their education and the vast majority of their waking hours to perfecting their craft need to support that dedication and like to get paid. Do you think those great master painters wanted to paint their patrons' faces in the crowd adoring the virgin or whatever? My point is not to say that all movies or TV or advertising is noble or well-intentioned or really great art, but that since the middle of the 20th century those coming out of college who could write really well, turn a great phrase, connect with an audience -- and this is key -- had the discipline and resiliance to hone that skill over and against rejection and competition found their way into professions that paid them full time for those skills. A lot of creatives who can really deliver under deadlines are paying the bills in Hollywood or on Madison Avenue or wherever because they can't make a living as a poet. Most of them have an unpublished novel or notebook of poems in the closet, but they spend their time writing scripts or clever commercials.

Miss,

Another way to explain what I am trying to say:

I was just scanning the Insrutable Discoshaman's blog post about radio blabbermouth Michael Savage. Mr. Savage has feelings. I have no doubt he feels those feelings very intensely, even passionately. And he is loquacious. Now and then he may turn a clever phrase.

But I am not obligated to honor Mr. Savage's expression just because he feels things passionately and expresses them cleverly. As a listener/reader -- dare is saw "consumer"? -- he cannot ask that I respect his views or even expression of those views just because he feels deeply and pours his heart out on the air.

In fact, I am free to feel that he is, as the Discoshaman might say, a chucklehead. And I am free to change the channel and ignore him.

It seems to me that many modern poets cannot understand why they do not command the attention if not the respect that earlier poets did. "Why don't people pay attention to me? Don't they realize that I feel things deeply? Don't they realize that I am pouring my heart out here?"

What I am trying to say is that modern poetry may have become unpopular precisely because it offers NOTHING MORE THAN the feelings of the poet. The poet's feelings are interesting, maybe even important, but if that's all that modern poetry offers, if it doesn't point us to something that is transcendant and real and important and teach us HOW we should feel about that -- and do so in a way that is lyrical and -- dare I say entertaining -- it will be ignored by most people. Which most poetry in the last 50 years pretty much has been.

Thankyou for contextualising that for me cu buffalo 86, I see I can learn a lot from you. I'd like to read the CS Lewis paper.

Here are my ideas on what you have said so far – now that I’m up to speed. However, that’s no guarantee that I’m on track. Anyway…

"do you believe that things hold intrinsic value? And that our responses are either proper responses to those values, or not?"

I would have to say, yes. Completely.

On point 3a, I would say that in the case that a person looked at a mother and child, was filled with contempt, and wrote a poem expressing his/her feelings about this, their feelings would then point to the object of the broken relationship. A focus on feelings does not have to be devoid of didacticism. Further, to say that the expression of wrong feeling can only mislead is itself misleading. The poet’s subjective feelings can help us identify with those who had experiences different to our own; they can express a counter point of view; they can make us evaluate why we think our feelings are right; they can lead us to consider what truth is. Poetry that upholds the status quo teaches us little.

“…things had real meaning, poets described that meaning to us, and in a sense their personal feelings about those weren't relevant.”

Even the predominantly rational poets of the C18th were revealing their feelings to us. For example, I really like Rochester’s ‘Satire Against Mankind,’ in which Rochester describes the state of the world as he sees it. But more than this, Rochester’s poem gains force when his passion – indignation (line174) – is revealed to the reader. Some may argue that Rochester’s feelings were not right. He, for whatever reason, is deriding the church. Yet I think his poem teaches us a lot, even if we don’t agree with his response to hypocrisy which was to become a libertine punk.

Thanks, Miss, for your thoughtful and gracious response. I fear that I sounded too harsh in my earlier posts. No time for a proper response, but two quick points:

1. You're right about the poet bringing his own subjective experience to the object to describe it for us in a new way. Without that, it's just journalism, right? But my point is that if it's no MORE than self-expression than what does it teach us, and who cares? It's an expression of self-centered solipcism, which much modern art is.

2. When the poet does bring their unique perspective to the object to reveal something new to us or attempt to persuade us of a new viewpoint, we have the right to ask whether that new viewpoint "rings true," or seems valid to us. So when (I think it was Maplethorpe, but maybe Serrano -- shows how little I care!) submerged a crucifix in urine, made a photo and demanded we honor it as art, I believe we are right to ignore and even ridicule that expression (and even forget the name of the artist).

It will be fun having you to banter with here in Le Sabot Post-Moderne! You are obviously a thoughtful and well-read person who shares a slightly different viewpoint. That's great! :-)

Welcome back to blogging. Sorry it took a few days to notice :(

To the subject, the late Walter Ong I think made a quite convincing case for this development in his astonishing book Orality and Literacy (make sure you read this!). He says the decline in poetry is a natural consequence over time of the technologies of writing and print. One of the functions of poetry is that it puts stories into a regularized form for easier memorization. Since we have print, there is no longer much demand (my term, not his) for poetry. So its not really a question of whether people are writing poetry and of what quality. It's that poetry has become culturally/technologically obsolete.

Paul-

I need to be reading more Marshall McLuhan, Postman and Ong. I've read a bit of the first two, but am completely innocent of the third. Thanks for the book tip. That point seems to have a lot of validity.

I love Postman too :) Haven't read McLuhan yet, but I'd certainly like to.

Ong makes the point that the novel is more or less what replaced poetry, but that the novel could only occur in a society which had been thoroughly shaped by print.

Oh btw,

I'm working on my own thesis (informally) about radio and other sound transmission technology being responsible for the decline in music education, but that's a different matter.

Not a problem cu, I didn’t sense harshness from you. In fact I was stoked that you took the time to explain things so clearly and concisely. It’s gold. Also, thankyou for the welcome. One of the reasons I like this blog so much is because everyone is operating on an intellectual level that is challenging and appealing. The way issues are nutted out is compelling. Sadly, I am not quite up to this level of intellectual endeavour, so will probably derail the thread at times. For this I apologise. I hope you will bear with me because I, too, look forward to banter: not for the sake of it, but as a means to discover new ideas.

“…if it's no MORE than self-expression than what does it teach us, and who cares? It's an expression of self-centered solipcism, which much modern art is.”

Agreed, ‘I’ centred poetry is about as repulsive as ‘I’ centred politics. Actually, ‘I’ centred anything! I don’t even want to talk about the crucifix.

On Paul Baxter’s relation of Ong’s argument:

“One of the functions of poetry is that it puts stories into a regularized form for easier memorization. Since we have print, there is no longer much demand (my term, not his) for poetry. So its not really a question of whether people are writing poetry and of what quality. It's that poetry has become culturally/technologically obsolete.”

I can see how this would be true for epic poetry and ballads which use a lot of mnemonic devices so a story can be remembered. The arrival of print could then explain the decline of the ballad and the epic (although I don’t know if this is historically true), and also the decline of form in poetry. That is, print enabled poets to abandon stanzaic form, rhyme, anaphora etc… as their poems could be printed and read without having to be memorised. Sadly, print probably lead to the decline of the Rhapsode. Alas! I love a good recitation. But I’m not sure it lead to the decline of poetry. It could lead to the decline in a certain type or form of poetry, but perhaps not poetry. Having stated my opinion boldly, I must confess, I have not read Ong’s book.

As we are talking about the rise of the novel, perhaps you will permit my somewhat tangential question:
Has anyone read Michael McKeon’s book ‘The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740,’ The John Hopkins Uni. Press, 1987, ?
If so, does anyone know exactly what McKeon is arguing re the dialectic relationship between history and the rise of the novel? In particular I was looking at chapter 11, but any ideas are welcome…