The state of American poetry is lively

May 31, 2010 Poetry in the United States is factioned, argumentative, lively, impassioned, full of ennui, often aggravating, even sometimes interesting. It is driven by aesthetic conviction, political conviction, the feel of words on the tongue. It’s brainy, blockheaded, full of ideas, full of things. It rises out of landscape, dialect, intuition. There is a poetry for every ability, a classroom for every student.

But first, again, it is factioned. It offers camps for populists and elitists, leftward and rightward ideologues and poets who refuse ideology ; it has its attention-seekers and recluses, communitarians and rugged individualists, its Dirty Harrys and its Blanche Dubois. It encompasses poets who place themselves (successfully or not) solidly within traditions and those who seek to break free of tradition. It includes the chatty and the taciturn, poets who hew to the Germanic line and those who speak largely in Latin. If it doesn’t offer a poetic that suits you, make one up.

Sometimes, I look at a poet’s work, then learn what the poet calls himself, herself, and am astonished. The list of labels includes all of those mentioned above, one for every gender and ethnic identity, and more I’ve forgotten or never heard of. We have poets who retype newspapers verbatim and republish them as poems, poets hard at work erasing words from Milton.

The language poets are now embedded in the establishment, or in an establishment anyway. On the front lines, at least last week, we had Flarf poets and poets writing computer programs to make poems for them, presumably while they are down at the bar.

I am glad. When I pay attention, I feel a hum and buzz in the air, as if in every basement in town somebody is writing, or inventing, a new poetry. Will I want to read most of it, sit in a close, hot room while it is read to me? Heaven forbid.

Forbid also that I forget there is a constant ratio, don’t ask me what it is, of good poetry to bad. This is true in science – Einstein said so – and I believe it of poetry too. If this is so, the more poetry being written, the more likely we’ll get something good enough to take the tops of our heads off, whatever our schools. I am no cynic, as you will have concluded; I believe that somewhere out there the next best new thing is being invented. And the next. And the next. Out of all that, eventually, comes something for the ages. I hope I’ll know it when I see it.

Of course, this isn’t happening only here. I speak of the U.S. because I’ve been asked, and it’s what I know. The unfortunate thing is how little we over here and you over there know each other. Here, those of us who read beyond our own little groups might know only English poetries and maybe, outside of translation, those of one other language, nothing like the great polyglot pot of simmering word stuff the world offers. So we shouldn’t be surprised if people divided from us by oceans and languages have only the smallest view of who we are, a view, like our own, shaded by politics and preconceptions, defined by poets who have won Nobels or other international prizes and those who have been translated, perhaps not because they represent what is happening in their own country but because they show other countries something they already believe. We all know who they are. This happens to your poetries in my country and to our poetries in yours.

From a distance, I suspect, we look like a monolith. But we can’t be. We are at once the people who elected George W. Bush and the people who elected Barak Obama, the people who hate our healthcare legislation because it’s “socialist” and who hate it because it doesn’t offer a single-payer system. We can’t blame you for being confused. As Whitman said, we contain multitudes.

So I suspect our poetic landscape as we see it (as I see it) bears little resemblance to our landscape as it looks to you. And indeed, it looks different to me than to my neighbors, all of us peering through the lenses of own practices. To my friend the language poet, our poetry is language poetry, is Michael Palmer and Susan Howe and Lynn Hejinian and Christian Bok, never mind that he’s Canadian – and also the oppressor of language poetry. For my friend the formalist, our poetry is Marilyn Hacker, Annie Finch, Richard Howard and Mark Strand, never mind that neither Richard nor Mark is really a formalist, is he? Last night I heard Karen Volkman – a youngish poet living in Montana – read. Her second collection was made up entirely of prose poems, her third entirely of sonnets. What school for her? I’ll invent one: the magpie school. A magpie poet picks up any tool that comes to beak, robbing the nests of others in a passionate form of wandering attention.

I don’t mean to be flip, though I do mean to make light. Members of every one of our schools and little walled classrooms within schools are serious – unless their point is not to be, in which case they’re serious about that. But I don’t want to pretend, even when tempted, that American poetry can be represented by two, three, or half-a-dozen strands. In its chaos and diversity, weird optimism and occasional bad-temperedness, U.S. poetry reflects the nation, vertiginously large and stamped with every kind of diversity – geographic, ethnic, linguistic, political. You name it.

It’s never exactly what I want it to be.

It is exactly what I want it to be. This article was written on the occasion of the 41st Poetry International Festival Rotterdam. Katharine Coles will be speaking about the PIW USA domain and contemporary American poetry in an afternoon talk on Thursday 17 June 2010 at 16.00 hrs in the garden of Café Floor, just next door to the Rotterdam City Theatre.

For more information about the festival, visit www.poetry.nl.