I guess it just took a little time for the poetry blogs to realize that David Orr had been in the NYTBR smack-talking about the lack of greatness in poetry today, because this week, there were lots of responses, from suggestions for Orr to add to his reading list to negations of the importance of greatness to spit-takes. But my favorite response was still Barbara Jane Reyes’s take on it–yes, I know we linked it earlier this week. I’m doing it again.
This week’s image comes from Geof Huth at dbqp: visualizing poetics. It truly is dead tree literature.
Claudia from The Bottom of Heaven has an interesting look at the blues as black history that’s worth reading.
Here’s the latest installment of Translation and its Discontents from Harriet.
And finally, a new project of my own, which sprang from a link I followed right here at The Rumpus–I’m posting entries from my great-great-great grandmother’s 1895 diary, one per day. I haven’t read the diary through, so I have no idea where it’s going–it’s as much an act of discovery for me as it will be for anyone who follows along.
One response
Orr’s essay seems to me to be just as much about the poetry audience, as about poetry itself. “Greatness” isn’t just an extreme position on the scale of value, out somewhere beyond “very good.” If it were, all we’d need to is find some really good poets and wait around until they surpass themselves–if it were, recommendations for Orr would be relevant.
Rather, what makes a poet “great” is a function of what the audience needs. Orr is saying that that our attitude toward poetry has changed, and that we need it for different things. For one thing, it has become locked into a social and academic structure that stresses the middle while lopping off the peaks and valleys. The audience is failing poetry as much, if not more, than poetry is failing the audience.
I don’t think Orr’s essay is perfect, and it’s certainly incomplete, but he should be given credit for describing a situation a hell of a lot more complicated than “poets aren’t writing good enough poems.”
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.