poetry for the masses

ok, so this piece was from the nytimes...In late 2002, the radio host Garrison Keillor committed an act of inadvertent but undeniable depravity: he published a poetry anthology for average readers that sold pretty well. Anthologies are often troubling for poets (who likes being left out?), and many serious writers are ambivalent about popular success, but the combination of these concerns - a popular anthology - can create a near perfect storm of psychic distress.

In the case of Keillor's collection, modestly titled "Good Poems," the trouble came to a head in a rare double review in the April 2004 issue of Poetry magazine. The first review, by Dana Gioia, the poet who is chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was a reasonable and amiable appraisal that said, in essence, "This book is surprisingly O.K." The second, by the poet August Kleinzahler, was a different story - or as they might say in Lake Wobegon, a whole 'nother pan of casserole. Kleinzahler began by suggesting Keillor be locked in a Quonset hut and tortured to persuade him never again to stray from "Lutheran bake sales" into the Realm of Art. After that, Kleinzahler got mean. He claimed that Keillor "makes no demands on his audiences, none whatsoever." He accused him of "appalling taste," of hosting an "execrable" show, of compiling a "rotten collection," and of having a weird speaking voice ("that treacly baritone, which occasionally releases into a high-pitched, breathless tremolo"). Not content simply to wallop Keillor, Kleinzahler then turned his megaphone on every target within soapbox range, accusing the M.F.A. system of being filled with "dispirited, compromised" mediocrities and asserting that "American poetry is now an international joke." Finally, he said your mama is fat.

It was a performance to savor. According to Christian Wiman, Poetry's editor, the response to the double review - mostly to Kleinzahler's polemic - was "enormous." The magazine ran over a dozen letters from readers with reactions ranging from amusement ("funny and true") to annoyance ("tired and cliché") to double annoyance ("I need look no farther than Poetry magazine to find a reason for poetry's decline"). The controversy hit the Internet, and later became the focus of David Lehman's introductory comments for "The Best American Poetry 2005." As Lehman wrote, "It was as if one of the two reviews of 'Good Poems' was in favor of civilization and one in favor of its discontents; as if one spoke with the adjudicating voice of the ego, while the other let loose with the rebellious rant of the id."

Whatever Freud might think of that comparison, Keillor doesn't seem to have been too troubled by all the shouting, because "Good Poems" has now been joined by a sibling anthology, "Good Poems for Hard Times." Like its predecessor, "Good Poems for Hard Times" consists of poems previously read on Keillor's public radio show "The Writer's Almanac" and sorted into thematic sections. The poems themselves range from classics of English verse (Marvell's "Thoughts in a Garden") to the best of modern American writing (Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses") to a large number of genial and frequently forgettable contemporary efforts. In his unabashedly personal introduction, Keillor recounts his childhood theft of a poetry anthology from a department store, talks about how his dad's work as a carpenter had "the cadence and fervor of poetry," and delivers a Grumpy Old Man rant about the "shallow knowingness" of today's culture, as opposed to the trueheartedness he finds in Poetryland. According to Keillor: "Poetry is the last preserve of honest speech. . . . All that matters about poetry to me now is directness and clarity and truthfulness. All that is twittery and lit'ry: no thanks, pal." Well, fair enough, pal. Of course, in the literary world, directness and clarity and truthfulness are themselves matters of artifice, but a man is entitled to his preferences. There's plenty to admire about this anthology and the spirit in which it was undertaken.

On the other hand, there's also plenty to be annoyed about. The most obvious problem with "Good Poems for Hard Times" is that it proposes that "the meaning of poetry is to give courage." That is not the meaning of poetry; that is the meaning of Scotch. The meaning of poetry is poetry. But a more subtle and intractable difficulty is that Keillor's taste isn't just limited, it's limited within its limitations. He likes plainspoken writing that is long on sentiment, short on surface complication - a defensible aesthetic, if one that occasionally condescends to its subject matter and audience. But rather than emphasizing the strongest writers in this mode (James Wright and Sterling Brown, for instance), Keillor favors soggy tough guys like Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski, as well as a host of small-scale epiphany manufacturers, almost all of whom appear to be, as they say, white. ("Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average, and all the colored people are in somebody else's anthology.") You could hold nine of Kleinzahler's Lutheran bake sales in the gap between the best and worst poets in these collections, a fact that seems to bother their editor not one bit. Indeed, "the pleasure of making this book," Keillor wrote in "Good Poems," "is the chance to put poets such as Jennifer Michael Hecht and C. G. Hanzlicek and April Lindner and Ginger Andrews and Louis Jenkins into a club with Frost and Dickinson and Burns and Shakespeare." The comparison is as unnecessary as it is stupendously silly. One of the more interesting things about Keillor's project is that it quietly emphasizes poems over poets - a social, craft-centered approach that has fallen by the wayside in the age of Harold Bloom. But when Keillor claims to be putting Ginger Andrews "into a club with Frost" (instead of "a good poem" by Andrews beside "a good poem" by Frost), he not only undermines his credibility as an editor; he sets Andrews up for an annihilating failure.

So which way do we turn? Do we agree with Kleinzahler that art is meant to be an entertainment for the select few by the select few? Or do we sign on with Keillor, and embrace poetry as a means of creating a common life, even if we lose a few highbrow writers along the way? The truth is, it was never a real choice to begin with - a fact neatly demonstrated by the extent to which Keillor's and Kleinzahler's own careers are mixtures of high and low, lone wolf and average bear. After all, Keillor may praise the homely world of Wobegon, but he is a sophisticated writer with New Yorker magazine credentials and possesses an angry wit rarely heard on Main Street. Similarly, Kleinzahler isn't anyone's idea of an avant-garde poet; his work is published by a major house and is easily appreciated by a smart but untrained reader. This isn't real confrontation; it's Narcissus chewing out his own reflection.

Yet even if the arguments are taken at face value, both Keillor (playing populist) and Kleinzahler (playing elitist) are hoping to hold back waters that can't be dammed. When Keillor writes that poetry "is entirely created by peasants" and that "the intensity of poetry . . . is not meant for the triumphant executive, but for people in a jam - you and me," he's assuming that poetry is a tool to be used, rather than a force capable of doing a little using of its own, not all of it wholesome. And he's assuming, along the same lines, that "you and me" are bound to like a certain kind of thing; that "we" won't turn out to be as strange and unknowable as all those "lit'ry" poems out there. Similarly, as a talented poet, Kleinzahler would like to believe that poetry is split between "real originality" and pointless mediocrity; in an art so divided, there's little doubt where a strong writer like Kleinzahler would end up. But great poets often produce mediocre work, bad poets can be surprisingly good, and very good poets are frequently no better than consistently above average - all of which is to say that it's far more difficult to isolate "great poetry" than Kleinzahler (and most critics) might like to believe. We're forced to live with a chaos of styles and a muddle of best guesses. This makes everyone uncomfortable; we're much happier when we can have well-worn arguments about populism and elitism, about Good Poems and High Brows. But what Elizabeth Bishop once said about knowledge may be equally said of poetry itself; that it is "dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free"; not a sure matter of sides, but a fleeting balance of currents. The best we can do - the best we have ever been able to do - when faced with the words "Good Poems" in a book's title, is to turn the page hoping to say yes they are, or yes they were, or yes (believe it or not) they will be.