Versed, UnVersed and ReVersed : or, How To Be a Bridge When There's a War On
By Jimmy Fishhawk
This then is the Culture War: a situation, the broad outlines of which could best be described as a 3-way battle for the soul of poetry (in other words, the respect of the other practitioners of the craft and the attention of the audience). The Populists, particularly the urban-contemporary spoken word artists and their siblings, the rappers, have won the attention of the largest audience, by far. The go-backs, the New Formalists and their attendant tribes, have captured at least some of the intellectual high ground with their determined assaults on modernism. Largely culturally irrelevant in practical terms, they can (and do) content themselves with the notion that by pointing up the excesses and contradictions of Modernism and post-modernism, and re-fielding a fine-tuned analysis and practice of the traditional craft, they have rediscovered or revivified the 'true heart' of poetry in English. The Academics, keepers of the laurels, are a house divided indeed, with wayward tendencies struggling to drag the whole schmear off into one or the other of the aforementioned camps. They might herald and laud the ascendant noisy mobs milling in the courtyard at the Ivory Tower's root, but they might just as easily retreat up the steep stairs to the upper floors to pour boiling oil down on the barbarian hordes.
Most of those whose collaboration makes the uneasy amalgam that is the Poetry Establishment seem to be fence-sitters—probably it is the fence-sitting that makes collaboration a tenable position. In both their practice and their criticism they end up writing and endorsing mostly material that offers many variations on the theme of a general openness in form and technique honed by a more or less acute knowledge of the craft, but is nonetheless bland and boring. To the extent that the Culture War reflects other, more urgent conflicts—the class war, the battle of the sexes, the clash of civilizations and the debate over the nature and utility of civilization itself—from which many of us cannot and must not shrink because our lives depend on their outcomes, we may be compelled to keep fighting it, despite any good intentions about getting over it and getting together on this project of poetry. Despite, even, the practical reality that almost all of us churn into our own writing, a potent brew of influences that includes poetry written in modes that we ourselves may never explicity use.
Most of us, consciously or not, bridge these gaps. I remember seeing a young Black poet at an open mic get up and read a tender-hearted, powerfully imagistic love poem written in a very intentional high modern style, followed later on in his crew's set by his participation in a group piece that consisted of tightly rhymed and rhythmic hiphop-style raps. This is the kind of rough and ready approach that I believe will go farthest toward building bridges through the bullshit being bilge-pumped in and out of the bleeding body of Poesy by its self-proclaimed doctors today.
Jimmy Fishhawk
Waldo, Florida