[...]Joseph Wood on Poetry and Life | Open Letters Monthly – an Arts and Literature Review[...]…

Is this a poem?

After spending part of the week mulling over larger problems and “real life” issues concerning on harder topics, this article seems a little navel-centric. It is a fun read nonetheless.

OK, must get back to work… Too-de-loo, gents – and PLEASE do me a favor & read someone that is not Dead and White one of these days.

I do like some of Merwin’s work, but not this, which would be as good or better as straight prose–and which I had read before as prose.

I’m afraid that the author’s own prose strikes me as overwritten, dense and at times pretentious–as in his fondness for the word “calibrated.” As for the idea of intimacy or connection, that could apply to any of the arts and not just to poetry, so what makes poetry “poetry”?

As for me, I admire any writing that takes the top of my head off–Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Derrida, Proust, Woolf. Fred Jameson, etc.—regardless of genre.

I agree with one comment that po’ biz needs real critics who aren’t afraid to say that certain work is boring or dull or bland or unimaginative or derivative. I’m tired of reading poetry about the poet’s own life and, as a grad school friend of mine put it, his or her “precious subjectivity.”

Your point is taken. Too often a sincere piece of writing is immediately shot down; and as it’s been said many times, the discussion forum tends to produce a kind of piranha instinct, which is no credit to anyone involved. This is why many people stay away. However, the objections are legitimate, imho, and I do think that J.W. has skirted some difficult issues, which he himself brought up. You can’t start an article about the deflating effect of AWP and simply blame the state of affairs on the snarkiness of certain critics.

I have said so on spirited occasions in the past, and will again: snark is often a legitimate and wholly appropriate response. If you were living in, say, Communist (current) Vietnam, snark is one of the only defenses that you have against the establishment. If you’re a writer or an ontological reader (to crib a phrase of Geoffrey Hill), who believes that the literature establishment is ruining the meaning and experience of literature (to be dramatic about it; in all likelihood it’s not that bad, though it is bad), then snark may be a legitimate response. Mayakovsky was snarky when he upended poetry readings. Rimbaud was snarky (though he transcended snark and ceased to write poetry). Pope was snarky and was a great poet for it.

In short, I think that J.W. is sincere, but he seriously misses the point – as another reader has said, the article cunningly positions itself in the middle of a very particular (and equally exclusive) school of poetry, i.e. the no-one-is-undeserving and poetry-is-humanity-at-its-best school of poetry that pretty much runs the show (think Seamus Heaney, for example). The inescapable point that J.W. misses is that the industry he participates in (and for which AWP is the mouthpiece) artificially inflates the supply of poetry, leading to over-competition and destruction. Young writers and academics alike are so snarky because there are so many to compete against, for so few jobs.

I propose we make nice, and agree that “there are things that are important beyond all this bother.” If you were ever in Madison, we could talk about it over a pint of fine Wisconsin lager.

The article is also embarrassingly sloppy. Others have noted the misplaced modifier in the first paragraph, but there is plenty more that disappoints. “Devolve” doesn’t mean “degenerate” or “deteriorate,” but that’s how it’s used here; the excerpt from “Behind Our House,” so important to the author’s story and his life, is so badly misquoted that it doesn’t make sense; the author mistakenly writes “jive” where he means “jibe,” and on and on. I don’t think this is nitpicking; a professional writer – with an MFA, no less – should be able to write, spell, cite, and proofread as competently as we all were expected to do back in high school. Learning simple things like that would have served Mr. Wood better in his quest to move people with his words far better than fretting about pretentious nonsense like taxonomy. Stop biting your nails; get outside and enjoy life a little.

Thought for a while that I might get everything sorted into ‘Unreal,’ but that didn’t work either.

Nope. I’ve still got some things sorted Real and other sorted Unreal.

Academia…I passed through, and I can tell you.

Very real.

The verb is “My neighbor walks crippled … toward the flag …” Perhaps the verb was unintentionally left out in the original html and added later, but it’s certainly there now.

I took “half left” to mean “partly tilted,” for whatever that’s worth.

No, I just wanted to mention that with the correction of the typo, that was how I had been reading it anyway (until Charles pointed out how an observant reader would go about it), my mind filling in the corrections, as when you cn rd smthng wth th vwls rmvd without even noticing.