Before alphabets came on the scene, we had guys who memorized long things That often contained some rhyme And metering. They were singing, basically. In old-timey times, to sing Was real good for communicating. Like the ancient Greeks--they loved to sing Everyone did, actually.
This is helping me draw a comparison between music performance and poetry. I've been preoccupied lately thinking about how music performance, especially of amateurs, has become so devalued because we have recorded music available literally at our fingertips, while 120 years ago live performance was basically the only way to experience music. Of course it was easier to make a career as a musician! And of course a young woman could gain social status by being e.g. a decent pianist, because this helped her to be a hostess whose parties people would want to come to for the entertainment.
Poetry strikes me as similar, but the technology that transformed the genre (printing) predates recording technology by several centuries. Storytelling became less personal, something that could be received in private from a book rather than from a person in front of you. The form evolved in response to this - innovating directly on the page or else split into the separate art of songwriting. But that immediate need for stories was satisfied by a technological solution, and modern poetry is constrained by the fact that its initial purpose no longer exists in the society we have. If what you're after is a story, you read a novel (or watch a film or etc.). What's left is meter, language, feeling - which in my personal opinion is too abstract to be as popular.
just an observation / intuitive memory type of deep thought/comment, ...
re the opening poem, that before 'He' sang, women had been crooning to their babes for 'ever' .... but you made me interested enough to have a read of this book, so thank you.
Very interesting review! I came from a country where poetry as a literary genre was always held at the highest level. I don't know how it is now. But in 1960-1980, our poets- E. Evtushenko, B. Akhmadulina, and others gathered the stadiums of listeners, thousands of poetry lovers. We lived by poetry. I still live by poetry, so I write my essays, Russian Poets Before and After the Revolution. Russian poets were shot to death- Gumiliov; Mandelstam died in Gulag- because of their poems; Tsvetaeva was driven to suicide. Poetry has been a center of our lives. I noticed a huge difference in understanding poetry in Russia and here. Here, a poet is an individualist, writing only about him/herself, his/her personal feelings, nature, beauty, and what we call "art for the sake of art." Problems of country, people don't bother a poet. Problems of humanity and philosophy are absent from the poetry, too. Poetry becomes a narrow-minded vision. Why? Because of capitalism and market value? I am not the judge. I see a lot of demand for poetry on Substack. So, I hope for the Poetry from a capital letter.
Thanks for the Huizinga rec! I'm currently on the lookout for work that captures changes in the nature of human experience across time and place, particularly when those changes are so foundational that they're difficult to imagine or describe (because they've become the water we swim, the air we breathe). Like a change in our relationship to emotional expression. Have you read The Bicameral Mind, by chance? It puts forward a similarly unprovable but fascinating and well-supported thesis, this one about a change in how people conceptualized their own thoughts and decisions in antiquity. It might pair well with the Huizinga.
In a similar vein, I recommend Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre, which was published in the 80s. Like Bicameral Mind, I think it’s been criticized for not being able to support all of its assertions, but it’s thought provoking in a similar way too.
LMAO. The number of things that are predicated on entirely new forms of social organization among a certain subset of artsy leftists is hilarious. I haven't read Context Collapse, but I sincerely hope he engages with hip hop artists, poetry influencers like Rupi Kaur, and the sort of Instagram doggerel that gains a following by being unabashedly dramatic and political.
No to hip hop, yes to Kaur, but the latter rather dismissively, saying she's basically a tool propped up by big tech (Instagram), designed to give them more data and eyeballs.
I don't think Ruby *can* acknowledge hip-hop, because if he did it would mean that there *is* a new form of poetry that's super-duper-popular with the public, and it's 1) very much about juggling rhymes and meter, and 2) pro-capitalist (or at the very pro-hustle). Not what poetry MFAs want to hear!
"The reasoning seems to be: poetry is good; however, not enough people think poetry is valuable enough that they should pay for it; ergo a system where people pay money for writing is bad."
I loved writing poetry in college and even got paid (a tiny amount) for it. But it's extremely difficult to write good poetry: I was reading or writing it ~40 hours a week for about 6 months, and I had fellow students in the same program who were definitely partying all the time and the professor who was advising us wasn't quite willing to say that their unmetered, unrhymed, "provocative" free verse that mostly just sounded like Rae Armentrout that I knew they wrote in the hour before class was sloppy, not a response to technology and modernism or whatever. I wasn't trying to write in a classical style, but I was using forms and models and meters and reading it out loud to make sure it was musical, and sometimes they'd have a comma that made no sense in the middle of a sentence and it was infuriating!
I don't think that all the reams of sloppy free verse churned out in the last half-century or so are bad, or that if they were all more musical people would love poetry again, but it is definitely no surprise that no one wants to pay for it.
I guess Ruby's point is similar to yours, which is not that nobody wants to pay for poetry, but that the supply overwhelms the demand. He would argue that the supply even of good poetry is much higher than the demand, though. I'm not totally sure I disagree. I also prefer formal verse, but there is certainly more good formal verse being written today than I personally want to read or pay for!
This really is the problem right here. Not only is it very hard to write good poetry, it is very very easy to write bad poetry. Of all the art forms, poetry is probably the easiest to write a complete work of dubious value. It takes a long time to write a novel, a team to create a movie -- even to write a song, you need some baseline musical knowledge. But the baseline of a poem is "a few sentences written on the page." Making it good is the hard part!
You’re never recovering from Creation Lake, are you ;-).
This is helping me draw a comparison between music performance and poetry. I've been preoccupied lately thinking about how music performance, especially of amateurs, has become so devalued because we have recorded music available literally at our fingertips, while 120 years ago live performance was basically the only way to experience music. Of course it was easier to make a career as a musician! And of course a young woman could gain social status by being e.g. a decent pianist, because this helped her to be a hostess whose parties people would want to come to for the entertainment.
Poetry strikes me as similar, but the technology that transformed the genre (printing) predates recording technology by several centuries. Storytelling became less personal, something that could be received in private from a book rather than from a person in front of you. The form evolved in response to this - innovating directly on the page or else split into the separate art of songwriting. But that immediate need for stories was satisfied by a technological solution, and modern poetry is constrained by the fact that its initial purpose no longer exists in the society we have. If what you're after is a story, you read a novel (or watch a film or etc.). What's left is meter, language, feeling - which in my personal opinion is too abstract to be as popular.
just an observation / intuitive memory type of deep thought/comment, ...
re the opening poem, that before 'He' sang, women had been crooning to their babes for 'ever' .... but you made me interested enough to have a read of this book, so thank you.
Very interesting review! I came from a country where poetry as a literary genre was always held at the highest level. I don't know how it is now. But in 1960-1980, our poets- E. Evtushenko, B. Akhmadulina, and others gathered the stadiums of listeners, thousands of poetry lovers. We lived by poetry. I still live by poetry, so I write my essays, Russian Poets Before and After the Revolution. Russian poets were shot to death- Gumiliov; Mandelstam died in Gulag- because of their poems; Tsvetaeva was driven to suicide. Poetry has been a center of our lives. I noticed a huge difference in understanding poetry in Russia and here. Here, a poet is an individualist, writing only about him/herself, his/her personal feelings, nature, beauty, and what we call "art for the sake of art." Problems of country, people don't bother a poet. Problems of humanity and philosophy are absent from the poetry, too. Poetry becomes a narrow-minded vision. Why? Because of capitalism and market value? I am not the judge. I see a lot of demand for poetry on Substack. So, I hope for the Poetry from a capital letter.
Thanks for the Huizinga rec! I'm currently on the lookout for work that captures changes in the nature of human experience across time and place, particularly when those changes are so foundational that they're difficult to imagine or describe (because they've become the water we swim, the air we breathe). Like a change in our relationship to emotional expression. Have you read The Bicameral Mind, by chance? It puts forward a similarly unprovable but fascinating and well-supported thesis, this one about a change in how people conceptualized their own thoughts and decisions in antiquity. It might pair well with the Huizinga.
In a similar vein, I recommend Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre, which was published in the 80s. Like Bicameral Mind, I think it’s been criticized for not being able to support all of its assertions, but it’s thought provoking in a similar way too.
"Restoring the poet’s
social function will require, not new
poetic forms, but an entirely
new form of social organization."
LMAO. The number of things that are predicated on entirely new forms of social organization among a certain subset of artsy leftists is hilarious. I haven't read Context Collapse, but I sincerely hope he engages with hip hop artists, poetry influencers like Rupi Kaur, and the sort of Instagram doggerel that gains a following by being unabashedly dramatic and political.
No to hip hop, yes to Kaur, but the latter rather dismissively, saying she's basically a tool propped up by big tech (Instagram), designed to give them more data and eyeballs.
CAPITALISM!!! :D
I don't think Ruby *can* acknowledge hip-hop, because if he did it would mean that there *is* a new form of poetry that's super-duper-popular with the public, and it's 1) very much about juggling rhymes and meter, and 2) pro-capitalist (or at the very pro-hustle). Not what poetry MFAs want to hear!
"The reasoning seems to be: poetry is good; however, not enough people think poetry is valuable enough that they should pay for it; ergo a system where people pay money for writing is bad."
I loved writing poetry in college and even got paid (a tiny amount) for it. But it's extremely difficult to write good poetry: I was reading or writing it ~40 hours a week for about 6 months, and I had fellow students in the same program who were definitely partying all the time and the professor who was advising us wasn't quite willing to say that their unmetered, unrhymed, "provocative" free verse that mostly just sounded like Rae Armentrout that I knew they wrote in the hour before class was sloppy, not a response to technology and modernism or whatever. I wasn't trying to write in a classical style, but I was using forms and models and meters and reading it out loud to make sure it was musical, and sometimes they'd have a comma that made no sense in the middle of a sentence and it was infuriating!
I don't think that all the reams of sloppy free verse churned out in the last half-century or so are bad, or that if they were all more musical people would love poetry again, but it is definitely no surprise that no one wants to pay for it.
I guess Ruby's point is similar to yours, which is not that nobody wants to pay for poetry, but that the supply overwhelms the demand. He would argue that the supply even of good poetry is much higher than the demand, though. I'm not totally sure I disagree. I also prefer formal verse, but there is certainly more good formal verse being written today than I personally want to read or pay for!
This really is the problem right here. Not only is it very hard to write good poetry, it is very very easy to write bad poetry. Of all the art forms, poetry is probably the easiest to write a complete work of dubious value. It takes a long time to write a novel, a team to create a movie -- even to write a song, you need some baseline musical knowledge. But the baseline of a poem is "a few sentences written on the page." Making it good is the hard part!