Why Poetry Is So Bad

A man who should need no introduction.

We were discussing the other night, I and a prominent local poet, the sad fact that no one is interested in poetry any more.

“Even other writers,” she laments, “never come out for poetry readings.”

I remarked on the dramatic change from my youth, when perhaps a dozen poets were national celebrities, and everyone had read at least one of their poems. Irving Layton, Earle Birney, Margaret Atwood, Al Purdy, Dennis Lee, Milton Acorn, Leonard Cohen, F. R. Scott, P.K. Page, George Bowering, bpNichol ….

And we both immediately agreed on the problem: it is that poets in Canada now write only to impress one another, and not for the general public. It had become, in proper Canadian style, a Family Compact.

It seemed to me the solution was simple: launch our own poetry journal, to bypass all this and get directly to the public. We could have a podcast, a YouTube channel.

No, she explained, she did not have time for that. Too much editing required.

I did not see the problem—just a matter of selecting the poems to feature, right?

Ah, she explained, but we would need to find experienced poets with a strong publication record to evaluate each entry.

I could not make her see the irony of her position. This is exactly what we were trying to get away from.

“But,” a colleague intervened, “who else is qualified to evaluate a poem? Would you let non-doctors evaluate a medical treatment?”

Here, I think, we see the essential problem. Not just with poetry, not just with art in general, but with our current society. The very problem that is getting some folks out in the streets wearing yellow vests, and others voting Johnson or Trump.

It is the forming of little cartels everywhere, seizing control of everything. Generally under the banner of “professionalism.” While it does make some limited sense for doctors or engineers, it does not for most other endeavours. It is a disaster for poets, or any artists, or journalists, or teachers. Can you imagine the rule applied to comedians? Only other comedians get to decide what is funny?

Even for doctors or lawyers, it is a dangerous seizure of power by a self-selected group, with little oversight; and, in effect, a cartel in restraint of trade.

Prior to this, and driving it, is an obsession among the educated with the concept of power. This is why politics has permeated everything: they think life itself is all about grabbing power and money for themselves and their group.

And the obsession with power probably comes, in turn, from a collapse of morality. Take ethics out of the picture, and what is left? Grabbing as much as possible for yourself.

But power and politics is especially a blasphemy against art.