Versed, UnVersed and ReVersed : or, How To Be a Bridge When There's a War On
By Jimmy Fishhawk
The Academics are the current masters of the American poetry universe. They are the tastemakers, the keepers and bestowers of the laurels. By the perverse and convoluted logic of the ascendency of quasi-leftist, post-modern critical theory to the heights of many of the nation's once-most-ivory towers, however, these same people are also our official national poetic handwringers and sometimes, ironically, among the fiercest critics of tastemaking and laurel-bestowing. By 'Academics' I mean not only those for whom poetry—studying it, writing it, critiqueing it, teaching it—is a full-time occupation, but also their fellow travelers in publishing, be it through the big corporate houses, small presses, or online. I also include in the Academic tribe those rebels-from-within, the avant-garde.
The Academics want you to write 'free verse' and they'll tell you all about what that means. They themselves write mostly in various types of 'formless' or open-form prosodies and prosaics, and have a theory for every new crop of variations on the modern mode, both as to why it is poetry and how to determine whether it is or isn't good. These days they'll allow for some more explicit employment of traditional formal prosodies, but they are definitely determined to keep us all free from the tightwound, hidebound, autocratic poetic systems—aesthetic and socio-political—of our Eurocentric past.
Despite having presided over a cultural revolution of sorts within the last forty-something years, the Academics are American poetry's elite, today and for at least the short term of the forseeable future. They have managed to incorporate, sublimate, and in many cases dictate some of the most critical 'outsider' positions levelled against the monolith of Official Poetics in the last half-century. Even some of the fiercest and most unconventional tradition-breakers, the self-proclaimed avant-garde, such as the Language Poets, really constitute a kind of cabal of rebels-from-within the ivory tower. The same goes for the academic multiculturalists, whose intense, many-splendored assault from the 1960s on has won them offical insider status.
Arrayed directly against the Academics are the Traditionalists. Most of these are in fact academics themselves, but are either literally or spiritually of the Old Guard deposed by the official poetic/academic discourse of the late 20th Century: Eurocentric, Classically-educated, fiercely anti-modern, proudly anti-pop. This camp ranges from the archetypal paleo-conservative, politically reactionary, (mostly) Old White Guys worshipping (mostly) Dead White Guys and their High Holy Canonical Verses, to more moderate folks who consider themselves poetic purists of a self-consciously unfashionable sort and feel threatened and disgusted by the excesses to which contemporary academia's "it's all good if it makes us feel good" and contemporary pop culture's "it's all good if we're makin' a buck" philosophies crown with laurels the heads of people—workingfolk, bohemians, rappers, and punks, to name a few—whose poetic output the Traditionalists consider base, vulgar, unschooled and unskilled, or, as they often put it, simply "not poetry." These people want you to write in iambic pentameter, and they'll be delighted to show you what that is, provided you are serious, scholarly, humble, and appreciative enough.
In the eighties and nineties, the Traditionalists launched a more or less organized (and fairly successful) counteroffensive against Modernism and post-modernism under the twin banners of "New Formalist" and "Expansionist" poetics. This included the usual slews of essays and poems that accompany any "serious" poetry movement, as well as a number of new publications devoted to "sheltering" and "providing refuge" for poor, downtrodden, "rebel-angel" formalist poets. The assault—while it did not succeed in prying the Modernist/post-modernist Academics from the throne to which they ascended, robed in the inky blood of martyred Masters, at roughly the midpoint of the last century—did have a considerable impact. It joined the reactionaries' stentorian squeals of go-back glee to the post-modernists' hell-choir chorus of jargon in pronouncing the death of Modernism as such. It elbowed open more room for contemporary poets working in more or less strict formal modes on the "official" poetry scene, where, to hear their most ardent partisans tell it, almost none had existed for well nigh thirty years or more. Perhaps most importantly, it inspired, coaxed, and harangued many younger poets into a deeper appreciation of prosodies ancient, tried, and true, and the Old Masters who wrote most famously in them, to the end that those younger poets started writing, if not in strictly formal modes at all times, at least with a strong sense of the traditional craft made manifest in their material.
The third major faction, whom I have dubbed The Populists, are the least cohesive as a movement, but the most popularly and commercially successful. These are the folks, from bohemian Beats to Black Arts agitators to Spoken Word performers, Rap poets, and Poetry Slammers, who have brought poetry back "to the people." They have done so in bars and coffeehouses, nightclubs and community centers, in libraries, in parks, and on the streets. The Populists, in their poetry and in their press packets, skewer and denounce the intellectual elitism and effete snobbery of the Academic and Traditionalist camps. Many of these Populists are working intently (though not necessarily in happy cahoots with each other, contrary to some New Formalist political conjecture) on liberating poetry not only from the thin cellulose chains of the page, but from its captivity in the gilded classrooms and ivory anthologies of the economic and social elites. To that end, the Populists generally don't care what kind of poetry you write, as long as it's bold, direct, and authentic.
Exactly what 'authentic' means depends on who you are and which genre of Populist poetics you adhere to, or can be lumped in. If you're a Charles Bukowski acolyte, it means working class, anti-academic, pro-alcohol, suspicious of politics, ugly in face and tender in heart. If you're an apostle of Amiri Baraka, it means radically political, experimental poetics rooted in African-American music and infused with the language of the Black street. If you're a Spoken Word artist in the Nuyorican Poets' Café vein, it means brash, often intensely confessional work that plays on the connections between popular culture, personal history, identity politics, and the wider politics of the historical moment. Of course, these are narrow characterizations. I put them forward merely as examples of some of the more familiar archetypes that are in play on the popular poetry scene today. The broader tendency of Populism in today's poetry world is to eschew and openly denigrate the preciousness with regard to form and technique of both the Academics and the Traditionalists. In reaction, the maligned factions both squeal: "anti-intellectual," "cheap," "devoid of craft" and suchlike, but these kinds of reactions ignore the practical reality of the intense work that many Spoken Word and Hiphop poets put into crafting their words, fine-tuning rhythms, rhymes, phrasing and diction. This is to say nothing of the mental discipline and blood sweat and tears required to memorize not only words but presentation: the performance as a whole. The culture clash at this point becomes a battle between an entrenched written tradition and a re-ascendent oral tradition. The Academics and Traditionalists perform on the page; the Populists, or anyhow a great many of them, perform on the stage.
Jimmy Fishhawk
Waldo, Florida