The end of verse. Again?

The end of verse.Again?
by Ted Burke
07/19/2009, 10:06 PM #

Newsweek ran a piece not long ago about a the results of a report from The National Endowment for the Arts that was a mix of good news and bad news about American reading habits; people were reading more , with increases in fiction and non fiction alike, but we were, collectively , reading less poetry. The article takes the usual dooming sensationalist slant with the article's title, The End of Verse?People love to read about funerals, I guess, or the cultural echo of re-runs have truly colonized our attention spans. This is the same used car with a new coat of paint.

There is a long history of poets and critics declaring poetry is something completely other than prose, a separate art approximating a form of meta-writing that penetrates the circumscribed certainties of words and makes them work harder, in service to imagination, to reveal the ambiguity that is at the center of a literate population's perception. An elitist art, in other words, that by the sort of linguistic magic the poet generates sharpens the reader's wits; it would be interesting if someone conducted a study of the spread of manifestos , from competing schools of writing, left and right, over the last couple hundred of years and see if there is connecting insistence at the heart of the respective arguments .

What they'd find among other things, I think, is a general wish to liberate the slumbering population from the doldrums of generic narrative formulation and bring them to a higher, sharper, more crystalline understanding of the elusive quality of Truth; part of what makes poetry interesting is not just the actual verse interesting (and less interesting ) poets produce, but also their rationale as to why they concern themselves with making words do oddly rhythmic things. Each poet who is any good and each poet who is miserable as an artists remains, by nature, didactic ,chatty, and narcissistic to the degree that , as a species , they are convinced that their ability to turn a memorable ( or at least striking phrase) is a key with which others may unlock Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The lecturing component is only as interesting as good as the individual writer can be--not all word slingers have equal access to solid ideas or an intriguing grasp on innovative language--but the majority of readers don't want to be edified. They prefer entertainment to enlightenment six and half days out of the week, devouring Oprah book club recommendations at an even clip; the impulse with book buyers is distraction, a diversion from the noise of he world. Poetry, even the clearest and most conventional of verse , is seen as only putting one deeper into the insoluble tangle of experience. Not that it's a bad thing, by default, to be distracted, as I love my super hero movies and shoot 'em ups rather than movies with subtitles, and I don't think it's an awful thing for poetry to have a small audience. In fact, I wouldn't mind at all if all the money spent on trying to expand the audience were spent on more modest presentations. The audience is small, so what has changed?
ted burke
http://ted-burke.blogspot.com/

VFW

VFW
by catnapping
11/08/2008, 9:31 AM #

Sitting with friends
at a long table cluttered
with bowls of oatmeal
and cold stacks of pancakes,
he holds his coffee mug
with both hands.

And recites the memory
of a cold ditch in Korea,
of hot chinese metal
and smoldering wool,
and the certainty
that he would burst into flames.


© catnapping

OPP

Thurs. OPP - news item ...
by Lunesta
02/29/2008, 7:43 AM #

Hi everyone,

Let me begin by thanking all of you who have participated in the Thursday OPPs for so long now -- both as Top Posters and initiators and as loyal, thought-provoking respondents. It's been fun for me to have served as weekly organizer for the past few months and I have enjoyed it. But my recent workload increase and some upcoming travel plans have combined to force me to decide to turn over 'the gavel," or the list-making, more accurately. Luckily for the Poems Fray, Mary Ann is once again available to take on this task and will do so, as of this week/for next week, and then, on an ongoing basis. I am grateful to her for being able to take up the OPP gauntlet, once again. I'm also quite proud of us here on the PFray, for keeping this idea going for so long now! When Kip Soteres and I originally came up with this concept so long ago (2003? 2004?), I doubt that either of us, or perhaps anyone on here, could have predicted that our OWN version of Mr. Pinsky's Tuesday posted poem, The Thursday OPP (Other People's Poetry), would have lasted this long. I also hope that more people will volunteer for OPP "duty," because, believe me, Top Posting one is not work at all, it is a labor of love and as much fun, really, for the Top Poster as for the respondents. I hope my schedule will permit me to continue to respond to the OPPs and have learned much and gained much from doing so to to this point.

Thanks again to all and special thanks, as always, to those brave souls who 'put up' their own, original work here.
And thanks, of course, to our own PFray Doyenne, Mary Ann.

Attack of the Feminazi

Taking a Psychotic Break?

Several times Lillith denied being TheOddNebber. I considered that at the very least, she and Laurie were sharing the account. But it has also occured to me that even if/when Laurie actually did hit the submit button, that it was still Lillith who'd written the text and possibly emailed it to Laurie.

The particular insults made in the posts to SouthernGal (Geoff flushed most of those to SG.) and to Zeus-Boy matched those made by Lillith in the past, and in other nicks.

Hello. I'm New Here.

Crazy Shapes and Impossible Colors

Subject: cat
From: Ted_Burke
Date: Sep 11 2006 2:54AM

Crazy Shapes and Impossible Colors

We take a hard look as
each comes into the house

still breathing, no bullet holes,
no signs of rigor, the skin a hail pink,

and everyone gets a hug, a handshake,
are told to make themselves a drink while
the turkey finishes cooking in its own juices,

somehow the year feels
lighter than it seemed,
less like overcoat pockets lined
with lead weights and rocks

and more a windbreaker that lets the
latest wind from up the canyon
a bone chill with
each fingering gust,

most of us are still here,
our tales have been

added too, our families
have gained more
than we've lost,

small kids jump
on the beds

where the coats are laid,
investigate alien closets and

their landscape of dress shoes in
crazy shapes and impossible colors,

someone is already impossibly loaded,
stewed in his juices,

baked with his smoke,
hand gestures that speak

too loud of love
that never dies when

it's a good man
with a woman at his side,

dinner comes ten minutes late
and just in the nick of time,
the world has seldom been this delicious,

Sarah Vaughn sings a blues
that is the color of every night sky.

http://fray.slate.com/?id=3936&m=18152234

dead weight

Snowflakes

Subject: Snowflakes
From: Daysman
Date: Dec 14 2004 7:39PM

In bits of rhythm, laced together by rushes of tethered thoughts
It fell upon my clothes, and brushed my eyelashes
Whispering thought in my ear, asking me why I care
So much, for what? The way I waste my years…
But I shrug them aside, a natural motion of pace
Moving ahead to my destiny, not straying in their
Beckons to relinquish the thoughts of the day
Tonight I'll gaze out my window and try to remember
What they told me, why I was here, what to watch for,
Why I should have strayed…
Why are they always right, when they come they cause panic
They fall into our lives, they take over our paths
Gentle, soft, but powerful, and in control of agenda and time
"Not that way!" they insist, "don't be so harsh!"
…give it time, it will carry, there's no need to rush
Remember your thoughts in your youth? The days
When cares were fleeting, when time was not the enemy?
Why do you make it a weight? Crush yourself with the lie?
Come look out at the moment, breathe the fresh humid puff
Stare at the cloud, your hot steam stirring with the cool reprise
If you rush, you will lose the chance to peer into the stillness
Steal one more invisible take of the lovely quiet,
the dream; You can't hold and can't let go
Like the quality of the misty air in front of you
Something you know so well and forget so readily
To not kill your life on the hard stuff
Return to the quiet, take back your own heart
That's what they were telling me
I hate them, they are so free to follow the wind
While I return to my room and worries of the night




(daysman's visit to the poems fray Wintersol contest)

---

http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=13284497

Tempo Abdicates

Subject: Ironic though it may be, since I just
From: Tempo
Date: Sep 28 2003 10:23PM

spent an hour on the BOTF reading through a long thread
where a favorite poster of mine announces his resignation
from the Fray, it is regrettably time for me to do the same
thing over here.

I'll check in from time to time as a guest, if I may, but it's
clearly time for me to leave this place.

A Fray that won't accept, with respect and consideration, a
serious and well-thought-out post about our current political
and international disaster, even when that post is focused on
poetry and states in a clear prose introduction as to why it is
being written, is NOT a Fray where I care to hang out any
longer.

I wish you all the best, but my usefulness here is
clearly done.

Powder, thanks for pushing me over the edge with your
well-meant but inaccurate poem; I've needed to do this for a
long, long time. If you ever get your cowboy self down to the
City, I'm still buying lunch.

Mary Ann, you want this throne so badly? Take it, it's all
yours. And I hope you find the courage to try to write a
poem someday; I truly do.

Ted, thanks for fighting the good fight but it's clearly a
losing one, over here. I will follow your fine work with
interest.

I write this with sadness but finality.
Everybody knows where and how to reach me.

I will post my poems on the BOTF from time to time; if
you-all ever figure out how to break out of the confines
of this little isolated Eden, you can find them over there.
And 'as always, any and all comments will be welcome." :-)

And I will continue to email to the core group for responses
to the new poems, with one obvious exception.

Best to all
and to most, LOVE,


Tempo (Contempo that was)

http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=8310545

Found in the P-Fray Attic

Subject: To Loree
From: Jack Dallas
Date: Dec 9 2001 12:34 PM

To Loree:
Viet Nam was not a noble cause. it was an imperialistic war and Americans are not imperialists (Nation building is best left to the British). The Viet Nam war was fought for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It's not that we were on the "wrong" side, it's just that there was no "right" side. After the French were defeated in 1954, Ho Chi Minh actually thought America would take his side because of his perception that the Vietnamese were simply expelling a European power from their soil just as we had expelled the British.
My feeling is that if we are going to assist a country in blowing itself up then we should start the rebuilding by forcing the new government to adopt the U.S Bill of Rights and ensure that their people are afforded those liberties.
Anyway, I'm drifting off into politics again and I didn't want to do that. I am sure that you are shocked that a right wing, Conservative (did I spell it right this time?) republican could write an anti-war poem.
Jack

---

Subject: Less politics, please, folks...
From: "22"
Date: Dec 10 2001 1:52 PM

Hi Jack,

I see that you've read my other post to you in the "Freedom" thread btw'n you and Denny. "Bien."

Please observe from now ON, ok? Today's Papers or others are best for that stuff.

We've had SO MUCH STRIFE over here recently & are all now *just beginning to heal,* that the LAST thing we need here is ....

any more content that could work up nasty disagreements... (esp'y when they are NOT about the poems or contents thereof...)

Thanks for understanding, as I know you do :-)

Cordially,

"C."