Poetry is dead ...
... or so Matthew Zapruder implies in his article (‘Understanding Poetry Is More Straightforward Than You Think’, New York Times, 10 July 2017.
One of the interesting things about a society becoming decadent is that the cultural commentators are usually the last to realise it, and can even praise the very features which identify their society as decadent. Matthew Zapruder has made just such a mistake in his article in the New York Times.
The crux of his article is the following sentence: "I don’t know what writers of stories, novels and essays eventually discover for themselves, but I can say that sooner or later poets figure out that there are no new ideas, only the same old ones — and that nobody who loves poetry reads it to be impressed, but to experience and feel and understand in ways only poetry can conjure." Quite simply, this is a statement that intellectual development is dead. If “there are no new ideas, only the same old ones”, then there can be no intellectual growth, since growth requires the ability to change and move in new directions. A society which cannot develop new ideas is intellectually dead, and becomes subject to the process of decay inherent in the cycle of life and death, and cultural decay is decadence.
Even if we accept Zapruder’s disingenuous suggestion that “writers of stories, novels and essays” might be able to have new ideas, he is still stating that poetry as an art-form is dead. The only difference is that he is arguing that this is because poets are too stupid to have new ideas of their own or to recognise new ideas around them. Either way, he appears to be explaining why so few people read poetry; after all, why would anybody want to read the work of poets who are stupid or intellectually dead?
Zapruder’s answer to this question is that poetry is simply about language: “By being placed into the machine of a poem, language can become alive again”. It seems a strange idea to propose that language thrives and reaches its pinnacle of development in the absence of any new ideas to express with it, but Zapruder is not afraid of contradictions, even if this means contradicting himself.
At the end of his article, he defends the power of language by stating that “The words we use in our everyday lives carry along with them deep reservoirs of history (personal and collective) that can, through a poem, be activated.” To put it another way, words carry cultural allusions based on their links and references to past events. Surprisingly, though, Zapruder started his article by rejecting Harold Bloom’s claim that “The art of reading poetry begins with mastering allusiveness in particular poems, from the simple to the very complex.” Perhaps Bloom thought that allusiveness in poetry has nothing to do with words, but I doubt it.
Again, Zapruder notes that “Like classical music, poetry has an unfortunate reputation for requiring special training and education to appreciate [it]”, but the first task he sets his students is “to pick one interesting word, then go to the library and investigate that word.” If this is not involving them in the “special training and education” needed to understand the art-form, then what is it?
The key to these contradictions lies in Zapruder’s remark that “as a teacher, I’ve found that regardless of how open or resistant my literature students initially are to poetry, real progress begins when they get literal with the words on the page.” What sort of a teacher is he? I find it incredible that any teacher would need to discover that you have to start with the words on the page (or the words heard) if you are to understand a poem. But then he did go on to discover that there are no new ideas, only the same old ones …
If poetry is not about using words more fully and allusively in order to convey new understandings of the world about us; if it is not about creating new perspectives by re-assessing the relationship between experience and knowledge; if it is not about doing so in such a way that those new perspectives and understandings become a part of the experience of the reader (or listener) carrying them forward into further revelations about the world, then it is probably contemporary poetry written by teachers – and students under their influence – and understandably ignored by sensible people.
Poetry is not about words for their own sake, but about what those words do in the process of communicating ideas which explanatory prose cannot do. Of course poems should not be obscure, but in addition to a clarity of initial impact, they should have a rich texture which is difficult to fully unravel just as it is difficult to create. Where prose may explain complex relationships between experience and kowledge in a long discussion of the connections, poetry embodies the relationships in a short but intensely packed form in which the elements continually react with each other.
Great poetry as a living engagement with new ideas is not dead, but, it struggles to get heard in the current period of decadence, when the main stream of published poetry writing is more concerned with finding subjects to write about and clever ways of doing it than with having something new and profound to say. I wonder what Zapruder would say to my May Days, a poem which has a lot of new things to say!
