Po-Biz Trend One: Prose.

As colleges and universities increasingly make the education, publication, sustenance, and honoring of American poets their business writing program professionals have assumed a number of nonpoetic responsibilities. It has become part of their business to attract students and sponsor an ever-growing body of work produced by graduates and colleagues. Such practical concerns have led professionals to tolerate aesthetic trends designed not so much to make poetry better as to make it easier to produce and publish.

Most obvious is the "prosification" of poetry-the publication of flat, pedestrian prose with the assurance, explicit or implied, that it is the real thing. The notion that lineation is a magic wand that can turn prose into poetry has been uncritically accepted by too many literary editors. So many poets publish lineated prose today that it would be unfair to single out one or two. In "On the Prosing of Poetry," an installment of the Boston Comment published on Web del Sol, poet and columnist Joan Houlihan makes a similar argument, providing poems by writers such as Donald Hall, John Balaban, John Brehm, and Robert Creeley as examples. She writes, "We have reached the point [where] we are being asked to believe that a text block, chopped randomly into flat, declarative lines, is a poem."

If the profusion of prose made to look like poetry is disconcerting, it is equally annoying when similar fare is dished up under the faddish moniker "prose poem," a form in which text is set like prose in ragged or justified type, line breaks thereby losing significance. The "poem" part of the equation promises greater density and compression than we normally expect from prose, achieved through poetic devices such as rhythm, imagery, metaphor, simile, and figures of speech.

William Blake and Christopher Smart wrote prose poems long before the term was invented. Poe and Baudelaire more consciously a century later. In our own time Russell Edson has written brilliantly in this genre, producing a body of original work that can hold its own with the best poetry of our time.

The current popularity of the genre is attested to by Peter Johnson, editor of The Best of The Prose Poem: An International Journal. "I have read so many prose poems," he complains, "that I feel as if a large gray eraser is squatting in the hollow of my head. I am not even sure what my criteria are, anymore." At least one prestigious graduate writing program understands the genre well enough to offer students an entire course in "The Prose Poem."

The jury is still out on definitions. Some critics deny that the term has any meaning at all. Others concede that the term is muddied, since it is difficult to define the genre without opening the door to the heightened prose of many a novelist and short story writer. Still, the term leads us to expect a combination of and tension between prose and poetic elements. Unfortunately, these expectations aren't always met.

Examples abound. Here are two excerpts from "Doubt," by Fanny Howe, which appeared in The Best American Poetry 2001, edited by David Lehman and Robert Hass, both long associated with writing programs:

Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941 when the German bombing campaign against England was at its peak and when she was reading Freud whom she had staved off until then.

Edith Stein, recently and controversially beatified by the Pope, who had successfully worked to transform an existential vocabulary into a theological one, was taken to Auschwitz in August 1942.

These excerpts from what appears to be a paracritical essay on Virginia Woolf and other writers (the author is a writing professor at the University of California, San Diego) are part of a prose poem that goes on for four pages. Howe offers interesting insights in a style appropriate for a scholarly or critical journal. But it's hard to find any definition from Aristotle to the present that would admit such writing as poetry, certainly not under the term free verse or open form; for it has been the concern of responsible poets in those movements to find nontraditional, personalized strategies for making poetry musical. "Poetry atrophies, when it gets too far from music," Ezra Pound observes in his ABC of Reading. Howe's piece lacks the rhythmical, imagistic, metaphorical texture needed to fulfill the poetry part of the prose-poem equation. In her author's note Howe explains that she "can no longer make distinctions" between poetry and prose. It is unfortunate that the editors of an anthology entitled The Best American Poetry are equally unable to make a distinction that readers who buy a book with that title have a right to expect.

Even more unfortunate (for what it implies about the future of poetry) is The Spoon River Poetry Review's award of its $1000 Editors' Prize for 2002 to "Departing Iceland" by Suzette Bishop. Written by a creative writing instructor at Texas A&M University, it's a "prose" poem- chock-full of technical data-sheet jargon like the following:

The EC2001 Panther is a fiber optic system that transmits information over SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork), video, voice, and low speed data….

For instance, with Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS), if an accident or blockage occurs, remote detectors activate video cameras and relay live video feeds of the occurrence back to the maintenance position….

The ever-increasing prosification of poetry assures prospective students that they needn't employ meter or rhyme or cadence or figurative language, or any of the devices, for that matter, in a standard poet's dictionary; that the drabbest encyclopedia prose, even technical jargon, can be hailed as "poetry" of the highest order. It's the profession's way of redefining the art downward to accommodate its talent pool.

Po-Biz Trend Two: In Praise Of The Banal.

"Defictionalization" of poetry is another disturbing trend. In this case, the profession hitches its star to a legitimate revolution, but does so in a robotic way.

In the '50s and '60s "Beat" and "Confessional" poets found the High Modernist Mode-with its masks, personae and characters, and emphasis on irony, paradox, ambiguity, and allusion-stifling. They wanted to talk about the vital details of their biographies, including hitherto taboo subjects like sexuality and mental instability. They wanted poetry to be more expressive, more directly and intimately connected to the lives they were living, including their socio-political dimensions. As in all valid aesthetic revolutions, new subject matter demanded new form. Readers were not only fascinated by the diverse lives revealed by Ginsberg, Kerouac, Lowell, Plath, and Sexton, but by the new poetics each developed to make his or her life sing with a fresh and authoritative voice.

We should keep in mind that the Beats and Confessionals had no more aversion to embellishing their lives with fiction in the interest of poetic truth than they had to arranging syllables to make their lines musical in ways clearly distinct from prose. The father figure in Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" is a mythic creation that bears only a tenuous relation to the professor of entomology who died when Plath was eight years old.

While artistically-shaped biographical material can be compelling, much of the poetry coming from the profession that purports to tell "the truth" about the poet's life is anecdotal, over-literal, and trivial. Senior poets who have written well in the past seem particularly susceptible to believing that the most banal details of their lives are so inherently fascinating that they need add little or nothing in the way of fiction to command the attention of readers. Because ordinary readers continue to want lively stories and interesting characters (that is what draws them to novels, television, and the movies) defictionalization is one more way the profession limits poetry to those who read not so much for pleasure as to keep an eye on the competition.

Take "Happiness" (from Sun Under Wood) by Robert Hass. The poem offers readers an ordinary day in the life of the poet. Yesterday, the speaker and his wife "saw a pair of red foxes across the creek." This morning, when "she went into the gazebo with her black pen and yellow pad" he "drove into town to drink tea in the cafe and write notes in a journal." On the way he observes "a small flock of tundra swans… feeding on new grass." In closing, he turns the page of his journal and (after jotting down the poem's title) reminisces about how he and his wife "lay in bed kissing" that morning, their eyes "squinched up like bats." Evidently Hass assumes that readers will find these details fascinating. Too often, the focus on literal truth presents us not with the essence or core of the poet's being, but with the patio furniture of his or her life.

Prosification and defictionalization frequently converge in writing that succeeds neither as poetry nor fiction-its virtue amounting to little more than the fact that it's easy to write for professionals and amateurs alike. James Tate's "The Diagnosis" (Best American Poetry: 2001) exemplifies what happens when poets embrace fiction half-heartedly. It is a prose poem, in which an attempt to write fiction fizzles, leaving us with something partial and abortive. In clean (though undistinguished) prose, Tate tells us about a man who fails to keep from his wife the fact that he is dying. Tate's solitary paragraph reads like the opening of a short story or novel; it is a snippet of fiction that leaves us wondering why the writer didn't finish what appears to be the opening paragraph of a longer piece. Work that is too short, anecdotal, or unrealized to be published as fiction routinely appears as "poetry" or "prose poems" in today's literary journals.

Indeed, many creative writing students choose poetry because fiction is too demanding. A novel takes a huge chunk of time to write, to say nothing of the talent and experience required to construct interesting plots and plausible characters. The journals are so many and standards so low that if students can learn to write something called "poetry" (easy to do when redefined as defictionalized prose, with or without line breaks) they can get published and even gain recognition as poets.

Students are aware that writing program novelists and screenwriters have not been able to commandeer the business side of their genres in the way that poetry professionals have. Publishers have been quite good-natured about ceding control of the petty-cash poetry market to writing program professionals. But where tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake neither publishers nor film producers are impressed by professor X's letter of support for a protégé novelist or screenwriter. It is much easier to get a poem, even a full collection published today than it is to place a novel or get a script produced-partly because the same professionals who educate poets often control poetry publications as well. Ironically, what was once regarded as the most demanding of the verbal arts now appears to be the easiest, not only to create, but to place.

Po-Biz Trend Three: Change of Address.

Prosification and defictionalization are frequently accompanied by a change in rhetorical address-in the way the poet imagines himself and the reader. Until recently poets almost always assumed the generous voice of a full human being speaking to any other human being willing to listen. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Yeats all have nonspecialized, nonrestrictive, inclusive voices that invite all readers into their poems.

"I'm going out to clean the pasture spring," Frost writes. "You come too." The speaker is talking to his spouse, or his child, or a friend, but we feel that we are being intimately addressed as well and that the poet has too much respect to characterize us according to what he supposes we are or do. "Let us go then, you and I," one voice in J. Alfred Prufrock's mind proposes to another. Again, we sense a larger voice behind Prufrock, wooing us into the poem, a voice too tactful to straitjacket either poet or reader with presumptive adjectives.

What we hear too frequently in today's poetry is the shrunken, diminished voice of the professional addressing his or her colleagues. Increasingly, poets write about literary subjects-about writing poetry, about other poets, about art, music, sculpture, literary history, or jaunts to the great art shrines and museums. Poems are frequently prefaced with epigraphs by other writers, often obscure ones who will be known only to professionals as if to warn the general reading public that what follows is not for them. "Shut Not The Door," Whitman warns, with one of his titles. Too often, professionalized poetry seems bent on slamming the door in the face of the ordinary, intelligent reader.

Call To Arms: Time For Another British Invasion?

In an on-line interview in the New Zealand journal Sport, British poet James Fenton argues that "the way people have been writing in England is much more liable to reach and please and gratify an audience's taste than what's generally being written in America." The British have, in fact, been reluctant to follow America in professionalizing poetry. In 1992 William Logan observed in Reputations of the Tongue that in Britain there were no graduate writing programs in poetry (he reports in a recent letter to Poets & Writers Magazine that several universities have since added them). The British aversion to workshops, according to Logan, derives partly from "what one journalist calls 'the American model of high professionalism and low quality.'"

"We call on America to stop killing, torturing, and imprisoning its poets," Fenton warns in Out of Danger. Sounds like the Brits think America needs a poetry revolution! But don't hold your breath. The professionals have their hands on all the levers: education, publication, sustenance, and reward. The moneychangers are in the temple. Revolution is not in their interest.

Several thousand professional poets are now teaching in writing programs. An aesthetic revolution that could break through to general readers in the way that the Modernists and Beats and Confessionals broke through might render their poetry irrelevant and destroy many comfortable careers. The profession's idea of poetic revolution is confined to tinkering with the status quo, as in New-Formalism (spiffing up a former mode) or Language Poetry (a sub-species of nonsense verse that allows spiritually exhausted professionals to continue to publish by turning what was once a communicative art into a hermetic game).

I have been defining the poetry professional as one who must publish poetry in order to sustain a writing career at a college or university. But I don't want to ignore some very positive aspects of professionalization. The parity women achieved that brought us so much fresh poetry in the last half of the 20th century was accelerated by the burgeoning writing programs of the '60s and '70s. And the university's commitment to affirmative action further enriched poetry by nurturing talented poets of ethnic background who at an earlier time in American literary history might have been underrated or ignored.

Nor should we forget that many genuine lovers of poetry are teaching, editing, and evaluating their students and colleagues responsibly. Many nonprofessionals have attended their workshops and conferences, taken their poetry courses, and even completed MFA programs. In many cases they have become more seriously committed and their poetry has improved. And the seductive powers of any profession are such that most can sympathize with the conflicts writing program poet-teachers face. There are many excellent poets on college campuses who are fighting valiantly to keep the art above career and politics.

Other professionals, however, seem oblivious to the fact that many men and women who are not professionals are writing poetry, and writing it well; they simply write out of love for the art. Since they support the profession financially it is not unreasonable for them to expect a fair playing field. They are the ones who send checks each year to the Academy of American Poets; who subscribe to Poetry and APR and other elite journals; who plunk down $500 to go to this or that workshop; who enter book contests they never win with reading fees that go up every year; who buy the books of elite poets and attend their readings, often baffled as to why X or Y is garnering such extravagant praise.

We nonprofessionals need to speak up and make our presence known. We need to remind professionals that the ad-hoc, personalized, dare I say amateur writing process they are striving to replace has produced practically all of the great poetry in the world for over 2500 years! We need to let them know that we expect poetry to continue to be published and honored on the basis of its quality rather than on the professional status or nonstatus of the poet.

When you open a literary journal and see what you think is downright prose parading as poetry, write a letter to the editor and ask what it is doing there. When you see poems full of shoptalk, insider references, poetic name-dropping and credential-showing, complain-or, better yet, cancel your subscription. When you notice a strong connection between the winner of a prize and the judge, question the ethics, let them know you've noticed, and boycott that contest in the future.

Make your views known, not only by writing poetry, but by also writing reviews, articles, and manifestos about poetry. Although professionals routinely publish books on poetry, most of them are how-to manuals that promote homogenization and glut; there is far too little original thinking going on, as it once did in books like Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Pound's ABC of Reading, Auden's The Dyer's Hand, or Eliot's The Sacred Wood, to mention a few classics that can lead poets to settle for nothing less than the best not only in their own work, but in that of their contemporaries.

We cannot disestablish the profession; but we can make it better. If poetry professionals come to recognize that they are part of a wider literary community—one that expects them to act responsibly when it comes not only to poetics but to poethics—we may, in Dana Gioia's words, be able to make poetry matter again, not only to poets, professional and nonprofessional, but to all intelligent readers. END