Grr

John Barr's article is retarded.

It's the sort of thing you can set your clocks or calendars to. With a kind of seasonal regularity, some moldy white guy pops up to say how bad poetry is, how blinkered, how narrow, how dead, how etc. Without fail, a close reading will usually reveal arguments based on broad generalizations and even, unsurprisingly, outright ignorance. You'd think, by now, that this genre would be so well known, so readily transparent, that whoever sat down with their burp of discontent would recognize it for indigestion, that they'd realize they were the latest in a long line of boys crying wolf. If it did not cost the deaths of trees and if it would not be so deathlessly monotonous, an anthology of these types of proclamations might be, well, not interesting but could serve as a kind of remedy, passed out as a service.

He trots out the same dead old arguments, which by now are so truly dead they are barely bones at all, bemoaning the lack of readership, that poems once commonly appeared in newspapers. He does this without seeming to realize there's this thing called the internet and that sites like Verse Daily and Poetry Daily bring poems every day to thousands upon thousands of, yes, interested readers and that, this is amazing, don't end up in the landfill the next day. This is to say nothing of every good online journal, also reaching thousands of readers.

The great sin of these types of essays is that they make claims that are easily proven inaccurate, at best, and, at worst, grossly untrue. And this is usually due to a kind of willful ignorance. If you have not read a certain kind of poetry, that does not mean it doesn't exist. A joyous poetry? Try Ilya Kaminsky. Poetry of the moment? Try Brian Turner's Here, Bullet. No major American poet has come from academia? I suppose I should toss my Levis, Berryman, Hugo, Graham, Roethke. I'll stop because that's just picking on him.

And, really, when you can write a section header called "Live Broadly, Write Boldly," are we supposed to move to Lima or call in the next fifteen minute minutes because supplies are running out? It's the worst sort of facile understanding of the poetic impulse. As a sidenote, when you're writing an essay about the need for a new American poetry, I'd suggest you not reference Ernest Hemingway as some kind of life model. I mean, I love my pith helmet, don't get me wrong.

Poetry is much more varied and interesting today than these calcified critics ever seem to realize and they do a disservice to their readers by suggesting there is precious little out there.

Rant over.