Versed, UnVersed and ReVersed : or, How To Be a Bridge When There's a War On
By Jimmy Fishhawk
Attention poets : There's a war on, and I'm not talking about the current foreign (mis)adventures of the US government. I'm talking about the ongoing Culture War. We are all familiar with the broad outlines of this war, and most of us have been at least on the sidelines of one or more of its skirmishes, if not actual participants in its battles. It's in our ideas, attitudes, affinities, and the way we craft words.
This essay is not intended for the battle-hardened partisans of any faction. I'd rather speak to the rest of us, we who have watched with bemusement, confusion, or abject horror as the battles play out on campuses and in coffeehouses, in bars and basements, in pages put out by presses large and small, on the internet and even on teevee. I'm moving from the proposition, inherent in the lineage-listing, name-dropping evolutionary analysis that is endemic to literary criticism, that most poets writing today have at least a passing familiarity with, and appreciation for, a variety of different modes of prosody and philosophical perspectives on technique, and that their writing tends to reflect this, however easily they may be lumped by audience, critics, and other poets into one of the various factions in the Culture Wars. I think it is extremely important for the sake of each of us as poets, and for the general good of the art, that we familiarize ourselves with the outlines of the conflict, pick whichever of the intricacies involved are most vital and relevant to our own particular work, decide for ourselves what our stance is. At the same time, we must avoid being seduced into hardline partisanship for any of the various poetic causes that are actively recruiting today. A dozen years in the trenches of the grassroots poetry scene have convinced me that most of us creating poetry today are working more on building bridges, rather than walls, between the wildly diverse schools of thought that are available to us in shaping our wordcraft. A more focused and intentional effort at this bridge-building will enrich our work, and, thereby, the culture as a whole.
There are at least three major factions involved in this fight. For the purpose of this essay, I'm going to call them The Traditionalists, The Academics, and The Populists. I'm painting with broad brushstrokes here. Each of these factions has many subfactions, and, thankfully, the lines tend to blur, but these wide outlines will do for now to describe some of the walls that some poets would build around their personal and collective poetry fiefdoms, to the detriment of the art. The Traditionalists are well-Versed, steeped in the ancient science of metrics, bound by the laws of the High Canon, sworn to uphold its codes, in iron rigidity, if necessary. The Academics are Unversed, their poetry evolving beyond traditional and even Modernist forms and concerns at its outer frontiers, and solidly in the modern free verse/open form camp at its center. The Populists are ReVersing, moving postmodern poetry forward by taking it back, not only into more rhythmic modes of lyricism, but into the oral tradition from which all word art originally derives.
Jimmy Fishhawk
Waldo, Florida