Of lapdogs & loners: American poetry today.(Lengthened shadows: VIII)

When I was eight years old, and living with my grandmother near Miami, I received a copy of Walter Scott's book-length poem Marmion for my birthday. Perhaps my grandmother, English-born and raised in Victorian times, remembered the custom she and her sisters had of reading poetry aloud on winter evenings in those distant days when poetry was written to give pleasure; perhaps she even hoped that the book would persuade me to introduce my scruffy pals to the joys of verse. Not likely: this wasn't a gift calculated to thrill a boy already addicted to the pleasures of snake- and turtle-hunting in the Everglades, and tactfully I shunted it to the side. One day not long after, however, perhaps disappointed in my quarry, I picked the book up and began to read, drawn initially by the old steel engravings and the strange ticklish scent of the stiffly glazed pages. To my own considerable surprise I was hooked like one of my own terrapins after a stanza or two and read the verse-saga through from beginning to end. The forceful rhythms of the lines held me at first as much as the stirring tale:

 
   The guards their morrice-pikes advanced, 
      The trumpets flourished brave, 
   The cannon from the ramparts glanced, 
      And thundering welcome gave. 
   A blithe salute, in martial sort, 
      The minstrels well might sound, 
   For, as Lord Marmion crossed the court, 
      He scattered angels round. 

Powerful stuff, this, for an eight-year-old (even now, I confess, quaint and outmoded though Scott's manner may be, the verses can tingle my blood). For weeks I perched on our balcony in the blazing sun and declaimed whole stanzas to indifferent mockingbirds. I was drunk on the language which struck me then as valorous and charged in a way I couldn't comprehend. Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shakespeare, and others, followed soon after, but I have never forgotten that first impression which Scott's poem made on my childish sensibility. This experience was what I think of as my "Marmion moment" and it doesn't matter that the poem which inspired it no longer seems to me especially good or even memorable. I was infected, deliciously so, by the poetry bug, and to this day I haven't recovered from its bite.

I mention this because I believe that it is from such early encounters with the magic of words that a sense not merely of the intoxicating effects of language but of the secret power of poetry itself takes root; and furthermore, that the encounter is replicated and repeated ha a thousand different guises when we read poetry later in life. It is a sense of privileged intimacy, of delectable secrecy, which everyone who loves to read seeks to recover and prolong. In my own, no doubt partial, view, the experience occurs and recurs in its most concentrated form in the encounter with poetry.

Anyone who comes to love poetry from childhood as a pleasure in itself and who tries later, however hesitantly, to write it--who tries, that is, to recreate that pleasure in others which one received oneself as a reader--knows the strange almost trancelike sense of interior expansiveness which the effort can induce. How harsh then and unsettling the encounter with what is commonly called "the world of poetry" later proves to be! By "world of poetry" I mean the entire edifice of poetry as transaction: the magazines and publishing houses, the foundations, academies, and societies, the prizes and awards and fellowships, the workshops, the conferences, the colloquia, the cabals, and the covens. "The world of poetry is so tiny!" a distinguished editor once exclaimed to me. Not tiny enough, I thought. She meant, of course, that the networks, affiliations, lines of patronage, and so forth, were so closely and jealously monitored by those involved that the faintest ripple of repute in one corner would almost instantaneously produce a bulge of envy in another.

The institutions in North America that seek to sustain and promote poetry strive mainly to buoy up this factitious but not insignificant "world" however tiny it might be. And the shadows that they cast, while ever lengthening, are neither healing nor apostolic but thin and chill. By this I do not mean that foundations such as the Guggenheim or prizes such as the Pulitzer or any of the sundry emoluments, accolades, or entitlements which they confer are intrinsically, or even wholly, malign; but rather, that they exist to serve poetry as a purely exterior endeavor. They exist principally not to encourage or inspire the composition of great poems but mainly, and unashamedly, to further careers. (I cannot think of a single example of a grant or an award or a prize leading to the creation of a poem, or book of poems, that promises to have lasting value.) There is of course nothing wrong with poetry as a career, except that it rarely has anything to do with poetry as such, in its innermost essence. Poetry that has a chance of lasting arises from a sense of vocation. While a genuine vocation may coincide with a career, and often has (think of Edna St. Vincent Millay or Elizabeth Bishop), it is something quite different from, and fundamentally incompatible with, that "world of poetry" which institutions sustain.

The continuing institutionalization of poetry in North America with its concomitant proliferation of writing workshops, professorial positions, validating agencies, and award-giving bodies, not to mention such pointless offices as that of Poet Laureate, has had a stultifying effect on the creation of good poetry over the last few decades that has often been noted, sometimes by poets themselves. This isn't very surprising. After all, if you're writing in the hope of winning an award, you are liable to tailor your composition to prevailing tastes. This may account at least in part for the weird sameness of tone of so many contemporary poems. If I had to choose a single term to characterize this tone, I would be compelled to identify earnestness as its overriding trait.