Lost in the Forest

The only people who read contemporary poetry are contemporary poets. I don’t care what Donald Hall says; stop a random stranger on the street and ask him who Donald Hall is, and chances are, he won’t know. This despite all the prizes Hall has won and his recent stint as US Poet Laureate.

As to how to rectify this, opinions vary, although the opiners are consistent in that they all believe their own poetry to be part of the solution, not the problem. Reportedly, the problem centers around the habits of a mysterious species known as The General Reader. Not much is known about this elusive creature, except that he used to be gaga for poetry, and isn’t anymore. Until recently, The General Reader was an enthusiastic consumer who regularly sent poetry books rocketing up best-seller lists, making millionaire-celebrities of poets. Whenever a newcomer appeared on the poetry scene, The General Reader descended on bookstores like the swallows at Capistrano, atwitter with excitement and admiration.

Today, sadly, the poet who seeks The General Reader in his old haunts is lucky to find one or two aged, sickly specimens; more often than not, she is greeted only by the sound of a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. Where has The General Reader gone? All we know for sure is that he has left us. Without him we are forlorn and destitute, like fishermen whose quarry grows scarcer by the year. In discussion forums, in blogs, in literary journals, the question on everyone’s lips is “How can we win back The General Reader?”

Ever since Dana Gioia posed the question “Can Poetry Matter?” in 1991, countless essayists have answered in the affirmative (if anyone has written an essay titled, “Poetry Is Dead, For God’s Sake Just Forget It And Move On” I would love to read it) and provided poets with various prescriptions for making their poetry matter to The General Reader. Any such plans must be premature, however, pending careful study of the characteristics of this creature. In other words, how can we know what bait to use when we don’t know what we’re fishing for?

The Olden Golden Days

We know what The General Reader used to be like. He was a smart fellow, smart enough to appreciate poetry, and smart enough to know better than to try writing it himself. He was moderately well-educated by the standards of Pre-Dumbed-Down society. An avid reader with a steel-trap memory, he used to sit by the fire of a winter evening, besuited and brilliantined, his adoring family gathered around him, and recite poetry for their entertainment and edification. He liberally quoted poetry in conversation, and, the average person not being an illiterate cretin back then, his allusions were universally understood. Newspapers were stuffed from cover to cover with poetry and poetry reviews, which The General Reader pored over in fascination. If stopped in the street and asked to name a living poet, he could easily name forty or fifty, right off the top of his head. Poetry was everywhere, embraced by everyone; not just literature professors, but people from every walk of life. From brick layers to lawyers; from barmaids to ballerinas; from butchers to bakers to candlestick makers; all considered poetry as essential to life as oxygen. The milk maid, lugging her heavy buckets up and down the alpine trail, timed her steps to the rhythm of Homer’s hexameter. The lowly chimney sweep, inspired by his surroundings, was liable to recite, on the spur of the moment, a canto or two from Dante’s Inferno in the original Latin. Babies in diapers learned how to recognize slant rhyme before they could walk. Even cats and dogs knew a sonnet when they heard one. Ah, those were the days — the days when poetry mattered.

Alas, those days are over. The General Reader is not the man he used to be. So what exactly has he evolved, or devolved, into? The reports conflict so wildly that it’s hard to arrive at a single answer.

The General What?

According to some, The General Reader has morphed into a mouth-breathing, flabby teenage boy who, when he’s not huffing rubber cement, spends all his spare time playing violent video games and watching reality TV in Cheez-Doodle-stained pajamas. If this is true, then “Reader” no longer applies; we must rename him. “The General Public,” perhaps. In this scenario, our erstwhile friend and patron has been seduced by that temptress, The Popular Culture. For poetry to have any appeal for him now, it must be presented in video form, with lots of exploding cars and big bazooms.

Mauled by Modernism

Other accounts have The General Reader drifting away because contemporary poetry has let him down. According to these experts, ever since Modernism came along and ruined everything, the typical American poem has been too cryptic, too plain, too political, too mealy-mouthed, too personal, too detached, too scholarly, too illiterate, impossible to wade through in its entirety, and too short. It’s not The General Reader who has changed; he would be as receptive to good poetry as ever, if only he could find any.

The problem, the experts say, is that bad poetry so dominates the poetry scene that only arse-dribble can get published. Whenever a good poet (such as the expert himself, who knows what the people really want) tries to gain an audience for his work, The Powers That Be conspire to crush him. That’s why the truly good poets have no readers. Their poetry is exactly what The General Reader has been hankering for these many years, but The General Reader apparently can’t find it. Word of mouth, advertising, and Google are of no use; the website gets no hits, the self-published book sells no copies. If only The General Reader knew how to find what he wants on the Internet! But no, the only way to reach The General Reader is to have one’s poetry printed in a prestigious literary journal to which The General Reader does not subscribe; and The Powers That Be will never let that happen.

Abused By Academia

For all their diversity of opinion, the experts are united in their condemnation of Academic Poetry. The fact that many of these experts are academics themselves is no hindrance; indeed, academics are the most vocal of the anti-academic poets. They may work at universities, pursue advanced degrees at universities, edit university journals, and socialize almost exclusively with other academics, but the “academic poet” is always the other guy. If you’re a traditionalist, the academic poet is that pretentious avant-garde hack who’s always nattering on about nonsense; while in his eyes, you are the academic poet: that stodgy, old-fashioned dweeb who writes boring sonnets about Persephone. You think it’s his ilk who ruin poetry for regular people by baffling them with bull; he thinks it’s your ilk who ruin poetry for regular people by forcing them to read “old, classical stuff” in high school.

Whoever the academic poet really is, he is reputedly the reason The General Reader no longer likes poetry. It is the evil academic poets who control everything, and are bent on suppressing the kind of poetry people really want. If it weren’t for those darn academic poets and their fixation with Pre-Modern, Modern, and/or Postmodern poetry, The General Reader would be lapping up poetry by the tubful.

The Vast Untapped Market

So what kind of poetry does The General Reader really want? What are those deep, unsatisfied longings that the marketing firms — in an age when those who want bacon chocolate chip pancake mix can buy it online — have failed to tap into? In the sections that follow, I shall describe a few of the many product opportunities that are just waiting to be exploited by the business-savvy poet.

Epic Poetry

Here’s a hot tip from the “expansive poetry” folks: What The General Reader yearns for most is a good, long yarn. No matter that fewer than half of American adults are interested in literature, or that one in four read no books at all in 2006; that’s only because the books that are available are not the kind that excite them. The General Reader, who doesn’t have the patience to read a novel in prose, would certainly read one if only it were written in heroic couplets. That’s what the people really want: a good, rousing epic saga in verse form. Forget red wheelbarrows; think Paradise Lost. If poets want to lure The General Reader away from his Wii, his HDTV, and his iPhone, and start selling poetry books by the truckload, there’s only one thing for it: stop cranking out wimpy little ten-line poems, and start writing 300-pagers.

Efficient Poetry

Poets, take note! Linear thinking is the new in thing. Enough of this beating around the bush, confusing readers with your highfalutin metaphors and fancy-pants language; what The General Reader wants, above all, is to be spoken to in plain English. He doesn’t like Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, E. E. Cummings, or anyone else who monkeys around with words. When was the last time you asked someone what his favorite poem was, and he answered “The Jabberwocky”? Say what you mean and say it clearly, and your books are guaranteed to sell like hotcakes.

Relevant Poetry

Another school believes that poetry can be “relevant” only when it’s about people like us, doing things that people like us do, in places where people like us spend all our time. We can’t “relate” to voices from other times and cultures. Nevermind all those shelves at Barnes & Noble devoted to Sci-Fi and Fantasy genre fiction, or all those TV shows about superheroes and vampires. When The General Reader reads poetry, he wants it to be just like sitting at his own kitchen table, picking his very own teeth.

Inner-city teens in particular are considered to be in dire need of Relevant poetry. Apparently, there’s just something about them that makes them less imaginative than their suburban counterparts. An inner-city teen has no interest in the world outside his own neighborhood, nor should he have. Rather than expand his horizons, we poets have a duty to write more poems about things with which he is already intimately familiar, thus helping to insulate him as much as possible from the outside world. This poses a problem for the suburban poet, who may not have the necessary grounding in street life and contemporary slang. The solution? Mentoring! Find an inner-city teen who can mentor you, and before you know it, your poetry will be more popular than American Idol.

I hope this essay has been useful to you. Now get out there, people, and start making poetry matter!