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The Reaper: Essays
This first collection of literary essays by a founder and leading poet-critic of the New Narrative/New Formalist revival explores the relationship between poetry and religion, the legacies of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Robinson Jeffers, and poetry by contemporaries such as Donald Justice and Jorie Graham.
- GenresPoetry
250 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1996
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January 9, 2022
Who is the Reaper? What are the Reaper Essays? Here is the entire Wikipedia article:
"The Reaper was a United States literary periodical which played an important role in establishing
the poetry movements of New Narrative and New Formalism. It was founded in 1980 and ran
until 1989; a double issue of numbers 19 and 20 was the last. The Reaper was founded and edited
by Robert McDowell and Mark Jarman. It was started at Indiana State University.[4] For the earlier
issues the art director was Michael K. Aakhus; for later issues Thomas Wilhelmus served as fiction
editor.
Donald Hall contributed a review of the first ten issues in Issue 10. The piece was entitled 'Reaping the Reaper'. His first paragraph runs: "Most poems in the first ten issues of The Reaper are bad. Many are bad in familiar ways." But he went on to say the magazine "is an encouraging phenomenon because it howls with dissatisfaction."" (Wikipedia)
So what? Another literary magazine, this one defunct since 1989. The Wikipedia article's "important role" is belied by the brevity of the article. What is the "New Narrative" and the "New Formalism"? Do these "movements" still exist? Did they have an impact, change the course of American literature?
***
The Reaper and his magazine came into my attention in the early 1990s, a few years after he croaked. I was looking for an explanation: why was I having so much trouble with contemporary American poetry? So many names, so many giant reputations, and so few poems I wanted to read. And so I tucked into The Reaper Essays with gusto, only to find myself banging up against that problem I always run into with critical prose: a solution! This is always where contemporary criticism comes undone.
The Reaper's solution: narrative poems. The narrative would break the stranglehold of the vague, go-nowhere lyric, which had on American poetry and would make poetry relevant, readable, a real part of the culture again.
Even back when I first read this, c. 1997 I knew that can't be right. For sure, narrative poetry is a fine thing to do - The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy are hard to beat - but as a way for American Poetry to find its way back to relevance is no solution. If you don't believe me, look at the scads of American narrative poetry that has been produced by the metric ton for the last fifty years. Entire careers - C. K. Williams comes to mind - were built on this and like all the other "modes" of American poetry, nothing much of worth came from it (see my review of one of C. K. Williams' many books on Goodreads). It is a rare narrative poem that I read nowadays where I don't wish the poet had just written a personal essay or a short story. The "poetry" part of it (almost) always seems irrelevant (and often, and I mean often, not written as well as even newbie MFA prose).
***
Two junior creative writing professors, out in the sticks of Terre Haute (Indiana State University) take on the Poetry Establishment. On first glance, this seems like a risky move for McDowell and Jarman to make. But now, many hard, cynical years later, I think it much less risky as it was a shrewd career move. The state of American Poetry c. 1980 was pretty bad, and most of the poets knew it - the glut of creative writing programs and literary journals and the professors who staff them; even worse, the glut of undistinguished (and undistinguishable) poems! So many poems, so wanly "accomplished," so often so much alike within narrow little categories (Deep Image, post-Confessional Confessional, the New Formalism, the New Narrative, etc.). My guess is that many of the professor-poets (especially the younger ones) read the Reaper Essays with real enjoyment (so long as they are not mentioned, of course). When some dinosaur such as Donald Hall comes in for a drubbing, everybody is happy because everybody knows (even, dismayingly, Donald Hall) that Donald Hall, despite the fame and accolades, has never written a good poem in his entire career.
Although Donald Hall's feelings might've been hurt (see his comments quoted in the Wikipedia article above), no real harm came to him. In letting him reply, The Reaper gave Hall an opportunity to chastise the whipper-snappers while showing that The Reaper was a good sport - good will and collegiality all the way around! And no harm done: tenure makes Hall and all the other "victims" of The Reaper immune to real consequences; once in the system, there is no ejection of the professional poetaster. Which is to say nobody lost their job. In fact, the Reaper might've goaded Hall into his late, reformist's anti-establishment phase. He wrote what is perhaps his most famous essay "Poetry and Ambition" (published in 1982 I think) where he lambasted the establishment he was so much a part of (coining the word "McPoem"). That Hall was about as establishment as a poet can get (despite making much of leaving academia and moving to the family farm, he was nearly 60 when he made this move). He also wrote a lot of McPoems himself, nothing but, perhaps.
So, rather than a force tossing the moneychangers out of the temple, The Reaper served as a risk-free release for all the poetic bad faith that afflicted the American Poetry Establishment. By bad faith I mean that everybody but the youngest or most deluded knew American poetry had turned into a career dependent upon credentials (not poems), poets were now kept and fed and mated in the Academy Zoological Park. The bumptious, fractious Reaper let poets pretend they were fierce and free-range.
***
But this is not to say that The Reaper didn't make some good points. Below are a few of my favorite parts:
Robert Hass "Meditation at Lagunitas": One of the peculiarities of American poetry since c. 1970 (fifty years!) or so is that there are very few enduring poems. Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1973) and pretty much nothing else. For all the vast productivity of American poets in the past half century, what we have are careers, not poems. But Robert Hass managed to break from the pack with "Meditation at Lagunitas." It is a strange, how certain bits of art will become famous and other, equally worthy bits do not; a sort of Mona Lisa effect where this one thing represents all our artistic yearning. Why "Lagunitas"? I don't know, but The Eagles Greatest Hits is the best selling album of all times, so I heard, and "Lagunitas" is kind of like an Eagles song without the catchy tune.
The Reaper took a whack at "Lagunitas" in an essay called "Navigating the Flood" - it starts out wobbly:
"This poem deflects attention from character development by first abandoning the friend, mentioned in line 13, and then never fleshing out the relationship between the speaker and the woman introduced later. Instead , what we get is an incomprehensible relationship between the speaker and blackberries. Here is the crux of the poem's appeal to the reader: those blackberries signify that language is the real subject of the poem..." (p. 13)
That poetry need be concerned with "character development" and "relationship(s)" is a typical Reaper effort, trying to bring about a narrative poetry revolution. Sometimes these bits are so clumsy and obvious that I almost suspect the whole thing is a hoax.
But the Reaper does better later in the essay:
""There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words, days that are the good flesh continuing." Hass would like us to nod again and again over the first phrase, one of those arrogant generalizations of contemporary poetry which cannot be debated.. But we nod ourselves asleep over the rhetorical second half, a rhetoric Verlaine wished to see strangled. He was right, and this sort of writing, "the good flesh continuing," is typical of the worst of mannered American poetry. Who, as Pound insisted, would ever say that is the pitch of emotion? It was carefully thought out to conform tonally with fashion. Finally, Hass collapses into a sentimental heap..." (p. 15)
Yes! Although I do think "Lagunitas" is overrated, it is marred not by what it is, but by its execution - the line "I felt violent wonder at her presence" pretty much sums it up for me - the Confession Lite school of American Poetry (the word "presence" (and "absence") is often an identifying feature of this kind of poem). "There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words" leads us into the dying fall (and as The Reaper says, sentimentality) of the blackberry chant closer. For me the poem fails the way most poems fail; because of its diction. Or to put it another way, they fail one word at a time and blackberries cannot redeem "numinous" or "presence." But we Americans love a bungled theology, and read as a little prayer, you can see why nobody goes to church anymore.
Of course there is the problem of what fruit you can use in such a "numinous" poem. Grapes, grapes, grapes or the unrhymable oranges oranges oranges or even blueberries blueberries blueberries don't really work. Blackberries are sublime; nectarines are silly. So maybe it is all about language after all.
***
Big Names in American Poetry: The Reaper conducts a mock interview with poet-professor spouses Jean Doh and Sean Dough. It is heavy-handed and not as clever as it should be, but it has its moments. Something that slowly dawned on me over the years is that contemporary establishment poets cannot really bring themselves to have favorites poets, or, for that matter, be too critical. For the establishment to flourish, everything needs to be collegial - collegiality being, I have come to believe, the death of art. Sure there are animosities and jealousies and gossip and backbiting, I'm sure of it, but in interviews, American poets are smoothies, at least until they get old enough and bitter and cynical enough to say what they really mean (late, grouchy Donald Hall, for instance). Until then, they pretty much like everybody - this keeps the invitations to summer workshops and syllabi appearances coming.
My favorite part of the Reaper interview is when it starts naming names:
The Reaper: ...What living poets do you admire?
Sean & Jean: We like Daniel Halpern. He edits one hell of a magazine.
Jean: Red Warren, though people read him for the wrong reasons.
Sean: Donald Hall!
Jean: Chuck Simic, Chuck Wright, Chuck Bukowski.
Sean: Have you read M. I. Rosenthal's poems? They're very good.
Jean:; So are Dick Howard's. And Dick Wilbur's. And Dick Hugo's. And look at all the memorable people he's chosen for the Yale Series. They're all good!
Sean: Stanley Kunitz is good. He keeps going and going and going. And writing those good poems. The man amazes me. He should be dead. Of course you could say the same for Ken Rexroth or Ken Koch or Ken Hanson or Ken Rosen.
Jean: Let's not forget the women!
Sean: Right! Jorie, Marilyn, Sandy, Beth, Jane, Sharon, Mekeel, Louise, Diane, Carolyn (she's beautiful), Linda and the other Linda...
Jean: Hey, Sean! Don't you think that's sexist?
Sean: You're right, sugar. But everybody knows who I'm talking about. I know that doesn't excuse sexism though. No matter how good we are, it seems we're doomed to suffer.
Jean: That's OK, honey.
The Reaper: You mean to say you like all of these poets?
Sean & Jean: And more! We could go on!
This is the American Poetry establishment c. 1982 in a nutshell. The younger ones in the list are still with us, still producing forty years later - "Louise" noted above just won the Nobel Prize for Literature (Glück). Thanks to tenure, there is no winnowing of poets, no flame-outs ala Delmore Schwartz or Vachel Lindsay - just long, long zombie poet careers in academia. As for the few remaining pre-war non-academic poets, Robert Penn "Red" Warren was a fossil for decades before he died, a craggy ideal of what a poet should look like and live like if not really writing any enduring poems; he was to the 1980s what Robert Frost was to the Kennedy Administration. Stanley Kunitz lived to be 100, the last of the Robert Lowell-Elizabeth Bishop-John Berryman generation. Nobody really knew what to do with Kunitz in his old age ("He should be dead.") but acknowledge him perfunctorily (the New Yorker ran a large, yet tepid profile of him on the occasion of his centenary c. 2005). I was puzzled by the Daniel Halpern reference at the start of the passage above, but Halpern was, in the day, a very influential publisher and anthologist (Antaeus, Ecco Press) thus the sucking up. Dick Hugo's "memorable people" chosen for the Yale Series (of Younger Poets) is a howler ("They're all good!"), not that anybody since Auden has picked anybody memorable since then (though I'll never forgive Auden for W. S Merwin, also, decades later, an undistinguished YYP judge; how the tiny Poetry Establishment self-perpetrates and looks after its own). Some of the names I did not recognize, despite thirty-plus years of scratching around the edges of the American Poetry Establishment:
"Mekeel McBride (born 1950) is a poet and professor of writing at the University of New Hampshire. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Princeton University, and the McDowell Colony, as well as being a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants. She is the author of six books of poetry..." (Wikipedia).
Never heard of her, but maybe that's my fault. But even if McBride is a great poet, her work, like all American poets' work, has been buried under the mass of American poems published over the last fifty years or so. If not a great poet, she has had a very successful career, like so many of our poet-professors.
***
American Poetry Review: For over thirty years, APR has baffled me. How can such a thing exist? It is so unreadable; a kind of New York Review of Books but in verse. Acres and acres of poems in every issue, and a gigantic headshot on every front page. From the essay ""Thanatopsis" Revisited," perhaps the strongest in the collection:
"The American Poetry Review is a phenomenon: nobody likes it, but everybody reads it. Yet that dislike does not stem for any disagreement with its editorial principles, for it appears to have none. Since it is a glamour magazine, it invites jealousy. Those who have not appeared in it look at the poems and photographs of the poets who have, and hate them. And hate the magazine; and keep reading it. There it is. To argue the subtleties would be disingenuous. Everybody reads it, meaning poets and presumably people important to them. To the readers of APR everybody is the population of the world of poetry." (p. 89).
As with a lot of The Reaper's pronouncements, the prose is slovenly but the point is made and it is a point I agree with. APR has long struck me as a cultural-institutional trade journal for a trade that has no real business with American culture. But it endures. I have no idea how, but it does.
***
The Gigantic American Poetry Anthology: One of the signs of the runaway overproduction of American Poetry is the gigantic anthology. At this point there must be hundreds of them, most of them, I'd guess, unread.
In the essay "Forever Young, A Survey, conducted by The Reaper" two poetry anthologies from the 1980s (one from small Wampeter Press and the other from Morrow) are reviewed via mock reader surveys (I think they are mock, anyway). As with the mock poetry couple interview, the humor is too broad to be witty, but some good critical points are made, mostly along the lines of the quality of the poems is mostly poor, often because of a botched narrative, which leads to the usual call for more narrative poems.
Not altogether convincing in regards to a solution, but the anthology situation was ridiculous in the 1980s and is just as ridiculous now. Anthologies seem to serve as a CV opportunity; easy to assemble (so much to choose from!) and an easy way to award friends and influential professors with inclusion. A kind of literary pyramid scheme without any promise of a payout beyond a bump to your CV; you win just by appearing!
***
What about nowadays? In Jarman's case, he became a part of the Poetry Establishment, where he has thrived, a professor at Vanderbilt with the usual grants and fellowships and prizes and a dozen or so books published. One of the multitude of "big names" in contemporary American poetry, is he know for his New Formalist or New Narrative work? Nope:
"Jarman's early poetry reflects the influence of living by the Pacific and the North Sea at important times in his life, along with growing up in a strongly religious family. As he has matured, his poetry has remained invested in family experience, a sense of place, and the presence of God in everyday life. Though he is associated with the New Formalism, his poetry has always ranged widely in form and style, from narrative to lyric, free to metrical verse, verse to prose poetry." (Wikipedia)
This "ranged widely" is a very typical thing to say about American poets, known more for careers than actual poems. McDowell is a more interesting case; he works on the periphery of the American Poetry Establishment, a kind of career councilor art therapist motivational speaker (according to what I understand of his website; as a nod to his Reaper days, perhaps, he does something he calls "narrative healing"). Like all entrepreneurs, he needs to appeal to customers, advertising himself as "A voice of initiation, reconciliation, & gender intelligence."
The Reaper is gone, but the Poetry Establishment is not as secure as it was in the 1980s. Although tenure is still a shield from getting sacked, social media has proven to be a lethal weapon, far more lethal than the Reaper's scythe. Maybe Jarman's and McDowell's Reaper can provide an example for future efforts at reform, an imperfect example, often suspect, but better than nothing. However, going against the Poetry Establishment nowadays would not be a cheeky career move as it was in the 1980s - more likely it would be career suicide, especially if you're not tenured yet.
Meanwhile, American poems are produced on an industrial scale. Like the American fashion industry, product is cranked out, far too much for any plausible market, hoping to place a few things, the rest of it bulldozed into landfills. Environmental pollution is not the only kind; there is cultural pollution as well. For all his insider-trading aspects, The Reaper at least took a swipe at addressing the problem, not that it seems to have made much difference, but I'm glad he tried.
"The Reaper was a United States literary periodical which played an important role in establishing
the poetry movements of New Narrative and New Formalism. It was founded in 1980 and ran
until 1989; a double issue of numbers 19 and 20 was the last. The Reaper was founded and edited
by Robert McDowell and Mark Jarman. It was started at Indiana State University.[4] For the earlier
issues the art director was Michael K. Aakhus; for later issues Thomas Wilhelmus served as fiction
editor.
Donald Hall contributed a review of the first ten issues in Issue 10. The piece was entitled 'Reaping the Reaper'. His first paragraph runs: "Most poems in the first ten issues of The Reaper are bad. Many are bad in familiar ways." But he went on to say the magazine "is an encouraging phenomenon because it howls with dissatisfaction."" (Wikipedia)
So what? Another literary magazine, this one defunct since 1989. The Wikipedia article's "important role" is belied by the brevity of the article. What is the "New Narrative" and the "New Formalism"? Do these "movements" still exist? Did they have an impact, change the course of American literature?
***
The Reaper and his magazine came into my attention in the early 1990s, a few years after he croaked. I was looking for an explanation: why was I having so much trouble with contemporary American poetry? So many names, so many giant reputations, and so few poems I wanted to read. And so I tucked into The Reaper Essays with gusto, only to find myself banging up against that problem I always run into with critical prose: a solution! This is always where contemporary criticism comes undone.
The Reaper's solution: narrative poems. The narrative would break the stranglehold of the vague, go-nowhere lyric, which had on American poetry and would make poetry relevant, readable, a real part of the culture again.
Even back when I first read this, c. 1997 I knew that can't be right. For sure, narrative poetry is a fine thing to do - The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy are hard to beat - but as a way for American Poetry to find its way back to relevance is no solution. If you don't believe me, look at the scads of American narrative poetry that has been produced by the metric ton for the last fifty years. Entire careers - C. K. Williams comes to mind - were built on this and like all the other "modes" of American poetry, nothing much of worth came from it (see my review of one of C. K. Williams' many books on Goodreads). It is a rare narrative poem that I read nowadays where I don't wish the poet had just written a personal essay or a short story. The "poetry" part of it (almost) always seems irrelevant (and often, and I mean often, not written as well as even newbie MFA prose).
***
Two junior creative writing professors, out in the sticks of Terre Haute (Indiana State University) take on the Poetry Establishment. On first glance, this seems like a risky move for McDowell and Jarman to make. But now, many hard, cynical years later, I think it much less risky as it was a shrewd career move. The state of American Poetry c. 1980 was pretty bad, and most of the poets knew it - the glut of creative writing programs and literary journals and the professors who staff them; even worse, the glut of undistinguished (and undistinguishable) poems! So many poems, so wanly "accomplished," so often so much alike within narrow little categories (Deep Image, post-Confessional Confessional, the New Formalism, the New Narrative, etc.). My guess is that many of the professor-poets (especially the younger ones) read the Reaper Essays with real enjoyment (so long as they are not mentioned, of course). When some dinosaur such as Donald Hall comes in for a drubbing, everybody is happy because everybody knows (even, dismayingly, Donald Hall) that Donald Hall, despite the fame and accolades, has never written a good poem in his entire career.
Although Donald Hall's feelings might've been hurt (see his comments quoted in the Wikipedia article above), no real harm came to him. In letting him reply, The Reaper gave Hall an opportunity to chastise the whipper-snappers while showing that The Reaper was a good sport - good will and collegiality all the way around! And no harm done: tenure makes Hall and all the other "victims" of The Reaper immune to real consequences; once in the system, there is no ejection of the professional poetaster. Which is to say nobody lost their job. In fact, the Reaper might've goaded Hall into his late, reformist's anti-establishment phase. He wrote what is perhaps his most famous essay "Poetry and Ambition" (published in 1982 I think) where he lambasted the establishment he was so much a part of (coining the word "McPoem"). That Hall was about as establishment as a poet can get (despite making much of leaving academia and moving to the family farm, he was nearly 60 when he made this move). He also wrote a lot of McPoems himself, nothing but, perhaps.
So, rather than a force tossing the moneychangers out of the temple, The Reaper served as a risk-free release for all the poetic bad faith that afflicted the American Poetry Establishment. By bad faith I mean that everybody but the youngest or most deluded knew American poetry had turned into a career dependent upon credentials (not poems), poets were now kept and fed and mated in the Academy Zoological Park. The bumptious, fractious Reaper let poets pretend they were fierce and free-range.
***
But this is not to say that The Reaper didn't make some good points. Below are a few of my favorite parts:
Robert Hass "Meditation at Lagunitas": One of the peculiarities of American poetry since c. 1970 (fifty years!) or so is that there are very few enduring poems. Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1973) and pretty much nothing else. For all the vast productivity of American poets in the past half century, what we have are careers, not poems. But Robert Hass managed to break from the pack with "Meditation at Lagunitas." It is a strange, how certain bits of art will become famous and other, equally worthy bits do not; a sort of Mona Lisa effect where this one thing represents all our artistic yearning. Why "Lagunitas"? I don't know, but The Eagles Greatest Hits is the best selling album of all times, so I heard, and "Lagunitas" is kind of like an Eagles song without the catchy tune.
The Reaper took a whack at "Lagunitas" in an essay called "Navigating the Flood" - it starts out wobbly:
"This poem deflects attention from character development by first abandoning the friend, mentioned in line 13, and then never fleshing out the relationship between the speaker and the woman introduced later. Instead , what we get is an incomprehensible relationship between the speaker and blackberries. Here is the crux of the poem's appeal to the reader: those blackberries signify that language is the real subject of the poem..." (p. 13)
That poetry need be concerned with "character development" and "relationship(s)" is a typical Reaper effort, trying to bring about a narrative poetry revolution. Sometimes these bits are so clumsy and obvious that I almost suspect the whole thing is a hoax.
But the Reaper does better later in the essay:
""There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words, days that are the good flesh continuing." Hass would like us to nod again and again over the first phrase, one of those arrogant generalizations of contemporary poetry which cannot be debated.. But we nod ourselves asleep over the rhetorical second half, a rhetoric Verlaine wished to see strangled. He was right, and this sort of writing, "the good flesh continuing," is typical of the worst of mannered American poetry. Who, as Pound insisted, would ever say that is the pitch of emotion? It was carefully thought out to conform tonally with fashion. Finally, Hass collapses into a sentimental heap..." (p. 15)
Yes! Although I do think "Lagunitas" is overrated, it is marred not by what it is, but by its execution - the line "I felt violent wonder at her presence" pretty much sums it up for me - the Confession Lite school of American Poetry (the word "presence" (and "absence") is often an identifying feature of this kind of poem). "There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words" leads us into the dying fall (and as The Reaper says, sentimentality) of the blackberry chant closer. For me the poem fails the way most poems fail; because of its diction. Or to put it another way, they fail one word at a time and blackberries cannot redeem "numinous" or "presence." But we Americans love a bungled theology, and read as a little prayer, you can see why nobody goes to church anymore.
Of course there is the problem of what fruit you can use in such a "numinous" poem. Grapes, grapes, grapes or the unrhymable oranges oranges oranges or even blueberries blueberries blueberries don't really work. Blackberries are sublime; nectarines are silly. So maybe it is all about language after all.
***
Big Names in American Poetry: The Reaper conducts a mock interview with poet-professor spouses Jean Doh and Sean Dough. It is heavy-handed and not as clever as it should be, but it has its moments. Something that slowly dawned on me over the years is that contemporary establishment poets cannot really bring themselves to have favorites poets, or, for that matter, be too critical. For the establishment to flourish, everything needs to be collegial - collegiality being, I have come to believe, the death of art. Sure there are animosities and jealousies and gossip and backbiting, I'm sure of it, but in interviews, American poets are smoothies, at least until they get old enough and bitter and cynical enough to say what they really mean (late, grouchy Donald Hall, for instance). Until then, they pretty much like everybody - this keeps the invitations to summer workshops and syllabi appearances coming.
My favorite part of the Reaper interview is when it starts naming names:
The Reaper: ...What living poets do you admire?
Sean & Jean: We like Daniel Halpern. He edits one hell of a magazine.
Jean: Red Warren, though people read him for the wrong reasons.
Sean: Donald Hall!
Jean: Chuck Simic, Chuck Wright, Chuck Bukowski.
Sean: Have you read M. I. Rosenthal's poems? They're very good.
Jean:; So are Dick Howard's. And Dick Wilbur's. And Dick Hugo's. And look at all the memorable people he's chosen for the Yale Series. They're all good!
Sean: Stanley Kunitz is good. He keeps going and going and going. And writing those good poems. The man amazes me. He should be dead. Of course you could say the same for Ken Rexroth or Ken Koch or Ken Hanson or Ken Rosen.
Jean: Let's not forget the women!
Sean: Right! Jorie, Marilyn, Sandy, Beth, Jane, Sharon, Mekeel, Louise, Diane, Carolyn (she's beautiful), Linda and the other Linda...
Jean: Hey, Sean! Don't you think that's sexist?
Sean: You're right, sugar. But everybody knows who I'm talking about. I know that doesn't excuse sexism though. No matter how good we are, it seems we're doomed to suffer.
Jean: That's OK, honey.
The Reaper: You mean to say you like all of these poets?
Sean & Jean: And more! We could go on!
This is the American Poetry establishment c. 1982 in a nutshell. The younger ones in the list are still with us, still producing forty years later - "Louise" noted above just won the Nobel Prize for Literature (Glück). Thanks to tenure, there is no winnowing of poets, no flame-outs ala Delmore Schwartz or Vachel Lindsay - just long, long zombie poet careers in academia. As for the few remaining pre-war non-academic poets, Robert Penn "Red" Warren was a fossil for decades before he died, a craggy ideal of what a poet should look like and live like if not really writing any enduring poems; he was to the 1980s what Robert Frost was to the Kennedy Administration. Stanley Kunitz lived to be 100, the last of the Robert Lowell-Elizabeth Bishop-John Berryman generation. Nobody really knew what to do with Kunitz in his old age ("He should be dead.") but acknowledge him perfunctorily (the New Yorker ran a large, yet tepid profile of him on the occasion of his centenary c. 2005). I was puzzled by the Daniel Halpern reference at the start of the passage above, but Halpern was, in the day, a very influential publisher and anthologist (Antaeus, Ecco Press) thus the sucking up. Dick Hugo's "memorable people" chosen for the Yale Series (of Younger Poets) is a howler ("They're all good!"), not that anybody since Auden has picked anybody memorable since then (though I'll never forgive Auden for W. S Merwin, also, decades later, an undistinguished YYP judge; how the tiny Poetry Establishment self-perpetrates and looks after its own). Some of the names I did not recognize, despite thirty-plus years of scratching around the edges of the American Poetry Establishment:
"Mekeel McBride (born 1950) is a poet and professor of writing at the University of New Hampshire. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Princeton University, and the McDowell Colony, as well as being a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants. She is the author of six books of poetry..." (Wikipedia).
Never heard of her, but maybe that's my fault. But even if McBride is a great poet, her work, like all American poets' work, has been buried under the mass of American poems published over the last fifty years or so. If not a great poet, she has had a very successful career, like so many of our poet-professors.
***
American Poetry Review: For over thirty years, APR has baffled me. How can such a thing exist? It is so unreadable; a kind of New York Review of Books but in verse. Acres and acres of poems in every issue, and a gigantic headshot on every front page. From the essay ""Thanatopsis" Revisited," perhaps the strongest in the collection:
"The American Poetry Review is a phenomenon: nobody likes it, but everybody reads it. Yet that dislike does not stem for any disagreement with its editorial principles, for it appears to have none. Since it is a glamour magazine, it invites jealousy. Those who have not appeared in it look at the poems and photographs of the poets who have, and hate them. And hate the magazine; and keep reading it. There it is. To argue the subtleties would be disingenuous. Everybody reads it, meaning poets and presumably people important to them. To the readers of APR everybody is the population of the world of poetry." (p. 89).
As with a lot of The Reaper's pronouncements, the prose is slovenly but the point is made and it is a point I agree with. APR has long struck me as a cultural-institutional trade journal for a trade that has no real business with American culture. But it endures. I have no idea how, but it does.
***
The Gigantic American Poetry Anthology: One of the signs of the runaway overproduction of American Poetry is the gigantic anthology. At this point there must be hundreds of them, most of them, I'd guess, unread.
In the essay "Forever Young, A Survey, conducted by The Reaper" two poetry anthologies from the 1980s (one from small Wampeter Press and the other from Morrow) are reviewed via mock reader surveys (I think they are mock, anyway). As with the mock poetry couple interview, the humor is too broad to be witty, but some good critical points are made, mostly along the lines of the quality of the poems is mostly poor, often because of a botched narrative, which leads to the usual call for more narrative poems.
Not altogether convincing in regards to a solution, but the anthology situation was ridiculous in the 1980s and is just as ridiculous now. Anthologies seem to serve as a CV opportunity; easy to assemble (so much to choose from!) and an easy way to award friends and influential professors with inclusion. A kind of literary pyramid scheme without any promise of a payout beyond a bump to your CV; you win just by appearing!
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What about nowadays? In Jarman's case, he became a part of the Poetry Establishment, where he has thrived, a professor at Vanderbilt with the usual grants and fellowships and prizes and a dozen or so books published. One of the multitude of "big names" in contemporary American poetry, is he know for his New Formalist or New Narrative work? Nope:
"Jarman's early poetry reflects the influence of living by the Pacific and the North Sea at important times in his life, along with growing up in a strongly religious family. As he has matured, his poetry has remained invested in family experience, a sense of place, and the presence of God in everyday life. Though he is associated with the New Formalism, his poetry has always ranged widely in form and style, from narrative to lyric, free to metrical verse, verse to prose poetry." (Wikipedia)
This "ranged widely" is a very typical thing to say about American poets, known more for careers than actual poems. McDowell is a more interesting case; he works on the periphery of the American Poetry Establishment, a kind of career councilor art therapist motivational speaker (according to what I understand of his website; as a nod to his Reaper days, perhaps, he does something he calls "narrative healing"). Like all entrepreneurs, he needs to appeal to customers, advertising himself as "A voice of initiation, reconciliation, & gender intelligence."
The Reaper is gone, but the Poetry Establishment is not as secure as it was in the 1980s. Although tenure is still a shield from getting sacked, social media has proven to be a lethal weapon, far more lethal than the Reaper's scythe. Maybe Jarman's and McDowell's Reaper can provide an example for future efforts at reform, an imperfect example, often suspect, but better than nothing. However, going against the Poetry Establishment nowadays would not be a cheeky career move as it was in the 1980s - more likely it would be career suicide, especially if you're not tenured yet.
Meanwhile, American poems are produced on an industrial scale. Like the American fashion industry, product is cranked out, far too much for any plausible market, hoping to place a few things, the rest of it bulldozed into landfills. Environmental pollution is not the only kind; there is cultural pollution as well. For all his insider-trading aspects, The Reaper at least took a swipe at addressing the problem, not that it seems to have made much difference, but I'm glad he tried.
limbo-unfinished
March 5, 2011given to me by Rebecca Seiferle in 06, this book is kicking my lazy poetry ass in the best way.
May 29, 2018
Here are brilliant, detailed arguments for narrative poetry and against the meditative, solipsistic poem that goes nowhere. Do I agree that all non-narrative poetry is lazy and terrible? No. But this book challenges contemporary poetry to be better, and thinking about favorite poems I find that no matter how compressed they usually contain most of the elements the reaper finds essential to good narrative poetry.
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