Some Thoughts (Again!) on “Bad Poetry” in Response to a Blogger’s Lament that Too Many People Are Publishing and Writing Bad Poems.

Blogger proposed this: 1) poems are, first and foremost, communicative objects, and 2) artistic objects second.

I responded:


1) Regardless of what Harold Bloom or Adam Kirsch will tell you, "artistic value" is, by and large, in the eye of the beholder. Rodin for one, pink flamingos for another. To complain that too many people write crappy poems is to complain about poetry in general. There will always be "crap" by anyone's definition. It will always be mostly crap--see Sturgeon's Law. That's okay. Read the poems you like. Ignore those you don't.

2) But, if what you mean by “bad poem” is one that doesn't communicate, then we have to interrogate (each one of us) what we mean by "communication." I for one, find many poems in Hejinian's BAP that "communicate" to me. Do they all communicate in the same way, using the same pre-determined communicative conventions? Well, no. Clark Coolidge's Crystal Text, for example, doesn't "make sense" in a straightforward journalistic sort of way, but I "get" it. It definitely communicates. So to say that people are writing a lot of bad poems might be another way of saying "I don't understand or like this poem," or "this poem makes me work too hard to extricate meaning," or something along those lines.

3) One of the central tenets of many "avant-garde" movements (and I use that term loosely) is that poetry/art "communicate." The paradox arises, then, when the avant-gardist attempts to write in a "new" way that his own peeps don't quite understand. If one of the goals is to seize power from the elite, it is either a) doomed to fail because the "peeps" have been schooled at the knees of the elite, or b) doomed to fail because if "the peeps" pick up on the new lingo, the new way of expression, other peeps will too, and pretty soon, the once-avant-garde is the new orthodoxy.

4) A Very Famous Poet once wrote a letter to The Canary, explaining that, while he admired some of the poems we’d published, he felt that we had no “editorial vision” because we included a lot of Other Poems that he didn’t admire. I wanted to publish the letter in the next issue, but my co-editors thought better of it. In this context, “editorial vision” might mean “appreciation for a very stylistically limited range of poetry.”


Just some thoughts,
Tony