Is the poet an endangered species?

The Weekly Journal





I wrote an article for this month's Poets & Writers. It's great to have something in such a prestigious magazine in the publishing field, but it was never my objective to be a writer's writer. I am a musician who also happens to write. Once upon a time, I was a music-business executive. Although it's nice to be appreciated by writers, I look forward to the day when my fiction reaches the hands of civilians, folks in the real world, people who don't deal with words for a living.

In college I was mesmerized by prog rock -- bands like Gentle Giant, Hawkwind, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and the Dixie Dregs. These bands were musician's bands. Technically these groups were flawless. They pushed the boundaries of modality, time signatures and arrangements. They often appeared to defy physical laws of nature in their speed and improvisational skills.

Today, most of that music is unlistenable to all but balding male musicians in their fifties.

Writers like Thomas Pynchon and Jonathan Safron Foer are the writer equivalents to prog rockers. There is no denying their technical skills, but their words fail to touch me in the way that Sadie Smith or a Lolly Winston does. Much of it, I can't comprehend; they operate on a different level, but that's doesn't make it better. Gravity's Rainbow was heralded by those in the know as one of the 20th Century's greatest novels. I couldn't get through the first hundred pages. Today, it's almost fashionable to come out of the closet to admit not liking it.

In this week's New Yorker, there's an article about the Poetry Foundation and the brouhaha over the drug money that now fills their coffers to the tune of two-hundred million (that's an insider's joke: it was a donation from one of the Lily Drug Company heirs).

The foundation's president, John Barr, a former Wall Street executive, wants to make poetry more accessible. He wrote an essay that created controversy by saying that poems are written only with other poets in mind.

He's right. Last year I heard the poetry editor of one of the country's leading journals state that he had no interest in expanding his paltry 4,000 circulation. Few others, in his view, would get it anyway. According to him, to expand his readership would require dumbing his poems down. He felt it was his responsibility, as one of the few keepers of the flame, to ensure that poetry upheld the highest standards.

In the days when I listened to Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, and Stanley Clarke, I snubbed my nose at those that didn't know these folks. I took pride in my chummy, closed circle. Today, you couldn't pay me to listen to an entire Return to Forever Lp. But what if the musical world had decided back in the 70's, that the only viable musical format was prog rock, and that the funding for all lesser forms, like the Village People, and Abba, even Bruce Springsteen, should be eliminated? Where would that leave the music today?

In some ways, this is exactly what the poetry community is doing. It's what the fiction world does when it says Harry Potter is derivative and bad for kids, or that Steven King doesn't deserve a national book award. I'm not saying Pynchon and elitist poets shouldn't be funded, of course they should, but when most of the world thinks going to the dentist is preferable to reading a book of poems, something's seriously out of whack.

I never would have discovered Weather Report if I hadn't first fell in love with the Monkees.

Must poets be forced to choose between writing for the so-called literates and the masses? Isn't there a middle ground? With a two-hundred million dollar base, the Poetry Foundation should be able to support the full-spectrum of voice, from the impenetrable to the whimsical. Broadening poetry's reach won't dilute its power, or its ability to push boundaries, but it will ensure that the poem doesn't become an endangered species, on the road to extinction.