Just like grumpy cats, some poets have been grousing about the dearth of good poetry for eons, as evidenced below:
In the summer 2016 issue of the poetry journal Rattle, there's an interview with Alan Fox:
Rattle: What impact has the Internet had on poetry?
Alan Fox: I think you’ll get very different answers from different poets…I just had a conversation with a poet I can’t name, who was very angry because they felt that the internet was flooded with lots of mediocre poetry. Now that anyone can put a badge on their shirt that says “poet” and communicate with other poets and have all this great access. The world, the media, the “readers” are overwhelmed with bad work, and thus can’t find or recognize where the “good” work is. That is a paranoia I don’t share. It’s an argument I’ve heard, over and over, that bad poetry somehow diminishes our joy and plight. That if the “bad” poets are allowed to publish, it destroys connoisseurship. I don’t see that to be the case. I think that every great artist, like every great art critic, will die ignorant of most of the good art of their time. That’s been true of virtually every generation. I mean, why else does it seem that half the work that ultimately “comes to define a generation” is discovered posthumously?”
Now I read that at the very same time I was reading the book Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years of Poetry (1912-1922) by Ellen Williams (1977) while researching local Santa Fe poet Alice Corbin Henderson (who was the assistant editor during that time). From the book:
William Marion Reedy acknowledged a renaissance in writing Harriet Monroe on June 1, 1915, and remarked that he felt Poetry was responsible for it…Reedy visited the annual banquet of the Poetry Society of American in New York, and the sleekness and propriety of the assembled poets made him feel grubby…He felt irritated by the sheer volume of verse poured out: "Never before were there so many pleasant, well-phrased, melodious poems written as there are today, and at no other time has there been such a dearth of really distinguishable poetry.”
Alan Fox is right. This was the era of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost, among others. Nothing distinguishable as it turns out.
Leave a Reply