Not remarkably long ago, I was a creative writing student at a large state university. My coursework consisted, primarily, of writing poetry, and, in order to write it, reading poetry. What I learned prepared me more for reading prose, and for fiction, than I could have imagined, but what you learn first (and most) is the infamous anxiety of influence.
Most of us come by it naturally, as a product of working closely with each other, and with the same professors, and from reading the same great poets. If the professors are any good at all, they will influence you with their sheer brilliance, with the fact of their gravity and your orbit. I had two of these: John, an extraordinary adjunct who taught me a great deal about reading fiction, and Mike, an extraordinary bastard who taught me a great deal about being a bastard poet.
It was the lack of recognition that the university afforded John that convinced me that there wasn’t enough going on in universities. What was worthwhile though, was the sense of possibility, of self-importance, and the many opportunities to publish and to read in public and to form lasting ideas of what should and could happen on a page. Even without workshops and “training,” writers will probably write. It’s a compulsion. But creative writing programs prepare readers like you wouldn’t believe.
The world needs thoughtful readers.
But not everyone grows out of the sense of self-importance and not everyone realizes their limitations. This can be a good thing, but more often it leads, as David Alpaugh notes in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, to a spectacular abundance of poets, and of journals, and of readings and so on.
I’m not sure what’s wrong with that. I don’t fear, as Alpaugh does, that we will miss the next Ginsburg or Plath amidst the steaming piles. I know we’re missing something, but, like I said before, it’s a compulsion; these people will write. If the unwashed masses feel this compulsion, let them. Gilbert Sorrentino and Gregory Corso (and Hubert Selby Jr.!) were artists, unwashed as people come, and thrust as much by circumstance as by hard work and violent talent into the fore of their respective crafts.
I’m not scared like Alpaugh. I am not scared of those who, “protest that most of these thousands of journals can be dismissed as marginal—that we need pay attention to only a handful of “prestigious” ones, like Poetry and The New Yorker” and I agree with Alpaugh that “there could be a few Blakes or Dickinsons swimming with the guppies in that wide prosodic sea.”
There’s probably whole schools of Blake-Fish. And we’ll catch enough to eat.
But tell me one thing, friends: who looks to The New Yorker for poetry? And what reader doesn’t have friends, publishers, and editors they trust to cull the heap on their behalf?
And, above all, who would look anywhere BUT to the margins for art?
Jeff, in a certain way, I feel like this question is endemic to our times. Who among us isn’t concerned with overproduction, be it reams of poetry or piles of old tires? That’s not to say there isn’t a huge difference between the different strains of overproduction, only that I feel like it’s something we’ve been trained to see–and even to worry about–everywhere. Of course, it’s one of the biggest responsibilities of our critical class (a responsibility too many of them don’t take seriously) to wade through these piles in search of the next real deal.
I think your last sentence nails it. If the thought of too many published or stably-funded artists in the world confounds you, then how can you claim to be interested in art to begin with?
The CHE article just struck me as silly more than anything else. Surely this man doesn’t believe that Plath, Frost, or whatever other very talented, mainstream-published talents of the past were the only (or even the “best”) poets of their day. There has always been an insurmountable amount of writing in the world, some of it good and a lot of it bad. Only difference now is that we have more access to more of it. Like Scott said: a real critic, one who actually celebrates the art, should be thrilled.
Many thanks, Jeff. One way of thinking of the margins might be thinking of them also as uniqueness of mind. Though we ourselves may not be capable of seeing it, hopefully, there will be others to. The fear is that writing, like most anything, will be (or is) overrun by the current preoccupation with fashion.
I think though without the shit you don’t got the shine. And sometimes it’s true, the shine is lost or never found. This makes that which does survive that much more valuable.
Long live the margins and the writers who can’t manage to escape their grip despite those writers’ best efforts.
Alpaugh’s lament is oddly both a cry against gatekeepers and a lament about the slow deterioration of the power of gatekeepers that we’ve been living through for years. For at least a half century–at a minimum since the real acknowledgment of the power of youth culture in the mid-1950s–we’ve been in an era of ever-more-fragmenting audiences, and thus the power and legitimacy of any claims, by anyone, that X or Y is the best, the most important work of a period is ever less convincing. In my view, that’s a healthy development for the most part, but I can see arguments for the other view.
At the same time, the gatekeepers do continue to control access to a lot of the rewards of art–funding, prominent publication, awards, etc. That seems to be what Alpaugh is primarily railing against–and his frustration is understandable. I don’t think there’s a straightforward–let alone simple–solution, however: in some ways, I think it’s just a matter of every reader having to accept a bigger share of the work of judging him or herself, not only carving a path of reading and writing that interests them, but also finding voices they trust, no matter their institutional home, and being willing to follow some of their suggestions and see where they lead. The best work may not be recognized, but it’s no clear that it always ever was; all we can do is care about it and try.
[...] February 27, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment Sorrentino SoupShareSpeaking of Gilbert Sorrentino—I was, anyway, here—Roger Boylan reviews Sorrentino’s final book in the NYT Book Review, out now [...]
I think that Alpaugh is onto something; an important distinction in his argument is that publication is not writing. My interpretation is that Alpaugh fears that many poets are now more focused on publication rather than driving themselves to write the best poems possible. As he points out in his sports analogy, more competitors in such an arena drives athletes to be at the top of the game. However, the segmentation of poetry, not only into schools, but into subject matter, might mean that poets become more focused on voicing a societal aspect rather than finding the best language to express a larger human condition. (Of course, one can question whether there is a larger human condition to be expressed or whether post-modernity means poets should be expressing specific concrete concerns.)
Although I don’t know, I do consider it possible that we are in an inverse proportion of quantity to quality, that even while more poems are being published that less good poems are being written.