Not long ago, collecting poetry aphorisms for an essay,
I visited Google’s main search page, put the cursor in the box, and typed
poetry is
Google helpfully suggested a
number of common search strings that begin with those two eternally vexed words.
The first of these was
poetry
is dead
There are a number of possible reactions to this,
including no reaction. My reaction was what might be called resigned laughter,
really more of a plosive bilabial fricative in tandem with a backwards jerk of
the head. The set-up was that I know, and know as fact, that poetry is not
dead. The punchline was that my perception seems to be importantly at odds with
other people’s. “Ha-ha!” I thought. “The pursuit to which I have chosen to
devote my life is thought by everyone else to be dead. Ha-ha!” Then I began to
ponder the popular image of poetry in the United States and decided to expand
my investigation by searching just the one word “poetry.” Because I’d been thinking
in terms of poetry’s image, I thought it
appropriate to conduct my search in Google Images. I found a single page of search
results (389 images) to be almost startlingly instructive.
of poetry.
I learned, for instance, that far and away the most
prevalent visual representations of poetry are extravagant pens, almost always expensive-looking
fountain pens or quill pens, the latter with oversized, even sinuous plumes.
Often there is no human hand attached to the pen in question, as if an angel
were operating it. The pen or the angel is usually just at the end of writing
something—often, logically, the word “poetry”—and never in illegible, moronic
print like mine, but in a fine eighteenth-century hand. More telling in that
regard may be that there never seem to be any cross-outs. Because of all the
quill pens, there are also a lot of inkpots, a few tipped over and spilling ink,
sometimes into the shape of a completed word or a poetic landscape. As for paper, the
preferred type for poetry appears to be parchment, preferably discolored by
age, sometimes with chipped edges. When the paper appears in a photograph, it
is presumably more practical to use the kind produced in a mill, so to
add a touch of class the paper is shown along with a brass fountain pen or a pair of very
serious upturned eyeglasses. I count two ballpoints among the quill and
fountain pens. Despite my having written poems for twenty-some years, I have never
written a poem with a quill. But now I’m thinking about starting.
The visual rhetoric of letters and words would seem, also
logically, to be key in evoking poetry. Script, even without a pen in sight, is
by far the favorite style. This includes everything from elegantly looped calligraphy
to lackadaisical italic computer fonts. It also includes a forearm tattoo of
the word “Poetry,” or two. After script, the most popular approaches involve the
self-conscious use of typography, with an emphasis on print as quaint
technology. A lot of these representations, which are full of horizontal words
abutting vertical ones, seem meant to evoke blocks of type. Others form a
criss-cross design reminiscent of Scrabble. The word “poetry” always appears
somewhere central, almost invariably in seriffed letters, but other words are
needed for the design, too. “Listen,” “create,” “culture,” “beauty,” “spirit,”
and “love” are some of the ones I have seen. The associations could be a lot worse.
But the particular design is an inescapable cliché of advertising. Tending to recur
in the more expensive-looking graphics indexed by Google, it makes me think of the
designer who, some past April, was assigned the bewildering chore of making
poetry seem attractive to readers of Connecticut
magazine, or to corridors full of
randy high-school kids two months from summer. Clearly management is on the
side of poetry.
Among the indexed images, there is a surprising lack of
real poets, living or dead. That includes Shakespeare, the most popular poet in
history, who appears once or twice. The massive amounts of poetry clipart indexed
by Google tend to show aggressively disarming cartoons or old-timey engravings
of what must be most Americans’ view of a poet: a person in Renaissance or Victorian
clothing, with a quill pen and an inkpot, at an escritoire, writing on
parchment or staring dreamily into space. It is mostly men with their hair down
but there are also women with their hair up. The former wear loose-fitting shirts
and the latter wear dresses with constricted bodices. Maybe, in the popular
imagination, men are San Francisco Renaissance poets and women are New
Formalists. When the poets are not seated at desks, they are busy intoning,
sometimes to a female lover, sometimes onstage, always gesticulating like
Shakespeare’s sexton minus the prop. Shakespeare may also come to mind here
because, writing for a general audience, he so often took obvious pleasure in
laughing with them shamelessly at his own expense, reminding all of us
self-consciously belated magicians-in-words that ardent sighing, woeful ballads
to eyebrows, and mad eyes rolling have characterized poetry forever.
Believe it or not, Google also shows that to this day there
continues to be a lot of ridicule directed at poets and poetry in general.
Google indexes many single-frame comics lampooning poetry. One of these is “Chicken
Poetry Reading,” by Doug Savage, in which the chicken-poet recites
Chicken.
Road.
The Crossing is within.
There is no other side.
This is actually kind of
great, even if the humor is a little bit obvious. The problem is once again
that it could very well be most people’s only experience of poetry. Every pointed
comic I found, though none seemed intended to cause harm, nevertheless had an
unflattering point to make about poets: Poets are pretentious. Poets are
incomprehensible. Poets are boring. Poets are bums.
It is
worth mentioning that 30 of the 389 images, like Joe Camel, very clearly
target children. Many involve colorful refrigerator magnets arranged unevenly
by adults to look as if they were arranged by children. Ladybugs, sparkles,
wildflowers, and more fancy pens adorn these images. Some use cartoons. One
pictures a little boy and a little girl flying on a book of poetry like a magic
carpet. One shows my best childhood friend, Bulwinkle, reciting—hooray! One
shows my worst childhood enemy, a smurf, holding a quill pen larger than his body—boo! Most of this
seems unobjectionable, really, and whatever is irritating can be chalked up not
to kids but to adults obtusely trying to trick children, whom they
underestimate, into liking something the adults themselves don’t like. It’s
great if rainbows and comically exaggerated facial features can serve as
gateway drugs to Hardy and Plath, and I’m all for indoctrinating the under-10
set with “This Is Just to Say,” or even with John Ashbery. (See "Poetry Not Written for Children That Children Might Nevertheless Enjoy" in this month’s Poetry.) But I would ask where Dr. Seuss
is, or Stevenson, or X.J. Kennedy, or Gwendolyn Brooks’s Bronzeville Boys and Girls.
At the
same time, I sometimes wonder if the popular conception of poetry-in-general hasn’t
been infantilized in some way. For decades, now, poetry has been used as a kind
of game or low-stakes writing exercise for children. Good! Most of this poetry
isn’t meant for scholars, just as most Pee-Wee football isn’t meant for ESPN.
And, later on, when the kids turn 13, poetry can also help them to be moody and
disagreeable alone, with a moleskin, rather than at breakfast. Good! But, once
more, confronted with the relative volume of poetry imagery targeting kids, I
begin to feel something like Gresham’s Law at work. Again, this is not a
problem with children, and not even, strictly speaking, with the adults selling
them kid-poetry. It’s the complex, shared problem of a society that cares so
little about grown-up poetry that its most popular image index returns dozens
of cartoon animals meant to advance poetry for children, but no image of Dante’s
or Emily Dickinson’s face. It is difficult to imagine that this obvious imbalance
wouldn’t eventually begin to feed on itself, helping to produce the widespread
impression that poetry is primarily a pursuit of childhood.
Maybe
the next time an Aesthetics professor or a three-year-old asks us what poetry
is, we might begin by telling her or him that it is not primarily a way for children
to learn self-expression or a quaintly antique artform practiced by stunted, pompous
adults in funny clothes extemporizing histrionically in a special language. Or
at least we might suggest that that’s not all
it is.
At some point, as I worked on this post, I happened on
footage of Rowlf the Dog from The Muppets, reciting his poem, "Silence." During his recitation,
he is continually interrupted by Reality, first represented by an old janitor
sweeping noisily, then by a loud South American fowl, and finally by my
favorite muppet, Animal, who appears on a drum platform to illustrate Rowlf’s
line about “the endless emptiness drumming in our ears.” Then, as I continued
to ruminate about popular conceptions of poetry, I heard the construction
workers outside my window getting started again with jackhammers and backhoe
after their coffee break. I went outside to talk with them about their general
impressions of poetry.
“Joe,” a man in his mid-50s and the security guard at the
construction site, was first.
“I
think poetry’s great!” he said. “But, you know—me?—I’m a rocker. I like Jim
Morrison, Sly Stone. Those are the real poets now. And—I don’t know if you’re
familiar with him—Neal Peart, from the band Rush.” I assured him I was familiar
with Neal Peart. “And—oh, oh, oh!” he interrupted. “Bob Dylan!” But Jim
Morrison was his favorite. Morrison, he told me, wanted to be a poet, but then
found out most poets don’t get famous.
Mark, a
huge guy with a neatly-trimmed handlebar mustache, was eating lunch in his van.
Mark is 60-something, and an environmental consultant.
“[Poetry]’s not very
interesting,” he said immediately, blinking slowly and shaking his head. “Where
does it belong today? It’s got no place. It may have been something in the
past, but now. . . .” Asked if he’d
ever enjoyed a poem, Mark replied definitively, “I can’t say I have.”
After
bothering the two construction workers, I decided to ask a few other people the
same question. Passing a bus stop, I accosted “Marla,” a retired hairstylist in
her 70s.
She thought a moment and said, “I happen to like
poetry.” She mentioned Maya Angelou by name, but she admitted that her interest
in poetry pretty much stopped there.
Finally,
I spoke with a mother and daughter walking home from our neighborhood public
school. Jasmine is in her 30s and Chelsea is 9.
Jasmine answered very directly,
but with no ill will whatsoever: “I’ve never been into poetry. I never
understood it. In school, the way they taught it, I wasn’t able to comprehend
it.” Then she thought a moment and added, “The teachers didn’t do a good job!”
Chelsea had a different feeling about poetry. Though she couldn’t remember any
specific poets she liked, she said, with tremendous feeling, “I like poetry!”
Of course neither the Autocomplete phenomenon nor the more
dispiriting answers offered by my respondents means that most people think
poetry is dead. It could simply mean that bitter 15-year-olds conduct most
Google searches on poetry. Or it could mean that there is a song by a pop star
I don’t know called “Poetry Is Dead.” It could mean a lot of things. But it
does not mean that poetry is dead. This is true for one simple reason: Poetry is
not dead.
Maybe it has occured to you, if you are a poetry fan,
that the reason for the Autocomplete phenomenon could be the buzz around Alexandra Petri's Washington Post article, last January, called “Is Poetry
Dead?”; or Mark Edmundson’s “Poetry Slam, Or the Decline of American Verse,” in
July’s Harper’s; or one of the
subsequent responses debating the health of contemporary poetry. It may be. I
have been interested to note that the authors and posters who have written
“poetry is dead” in articles or comment threads are usually defenders of contemporary poetry, who have
used the word sarcastically against a critic who has made an uncongenial
general argument about American contemporary poetry. It is supposed to show how
manifestly absurd it would be to pronounce poetry dead. It would be
particularly sad, but also suggestive, if the Autocomplete phenomenon is
accounted for in some way by the behavior of those who care most about poetry and,
despite the terrible idée force they
are helping to nurture, recognize the fact that it is alive.
Still, the Google phenomenon is hard to ignore. What if
the facts simply do not—as they often do not—matter? There are many different
ways of being alive. And what if the life of poetry now is like the life of
Amelia Earhart, say, from 1937 until her bittersweet death on a mound in the
Pacific Islands, comfortable and well-loved among her small adopted family, but
with part of her wishing she could’ve flown a little farther.