It's always nice to see poetry in the news, but I assume I'm not the only one in this tiny corner of the house of literature who's suffering from mixed feelings in the wake of recent press about us. We had David Orr's first "On Poetry" column for the New York Times Book Review(Apr. 24), in which he considered our "superstar" Jorie Graham and found her wanting, along with an April 21 Times piece about the "Foetry" scandal, in which, Edward Wyatt reports, Graham's name was dragged through the mud by a Web site watchdog who doesn't like the way she judges poetry contests.
Let me state up front that I'm not a friend of Graham's; I've met her exactly once, and we exchanged less than 10 words. (Read: this piece is not the sort of internecine poetry-world "favor" that fascinated Mr. Foetry.) Like David Orr, I sometimes have complicated feelings about poets with large reputations, including those whom I most admire; there are so many other good ones who never get their turn in the limelight. But really, is it as easy as Orr suggests for people to scale Mt. Parnassus by using their MFA connections? He paints a picture of the hapless poetry reader dozing off with Elizabeth Bishop in his lap and waking to find that the reputation of another "Major Poet" has been "consummated" as ruthlessly, he says, as Banana Republic has replaced the local post offices.
Whether you like Graham's work or not, and regardless of her privileged background (really, who cares?), her close ties to the critic Helen Vendler (not surprising, given Vendler's abiding interest in Graham's work), and her much-commented upon fabulous appearance (would anyone discuss Paul Muldoon's seat in the West Wing of poetry in the same breath with his looks?), she's clearly been doing for years what most poets, be they Major or Minor, are doing: struggling to remain true to themselves on the page, teaching younger poets, and presumably just getting on with it. Orr, whose criticism I value highly, has some points to make about Graham's poetry, but it seems a stretch—not to say unfair—to equate what he sees as a vagueness in her poetic diction with our "fractured" field, a grinding cultural mill he calls "part profession, part gaggle of coteries, part contest hustle." Can one poet's slack line really stand for all that?
If Orr feels some Majors are undeserving, I hope he'll convince the TBR, whose interest in stirring the poetry pot is all to the good, to let him review a few lesser known poets he's enthused about. Patronage may be a powerful force in poetry, but criticism is an equally powerful one. And as for that "contest hustle": okay, if you're sleeping with someone, you shouldn't hand them a prize. We've all intuited the regrettable instance of logrolling in our midst. But is our field egregious in this sense? Don't people in every field form alliances based on admiration of each other's work, and help and promote each other on that basis?
I'm aware, of course, that a contest win, however small the purse or resulting print run, can mean getting a job and a future in poetry. But why waste our valuable Elizabeth Bishop—reading time blogging and gossiping about how people "get ahead"? The only way to get anywhere you'd want to go is to write, do your best work, publish in magazines—to put yourself out there. If there's a messy multiplicity of schools of poetry all vying for our ear—call them coteries, if you prefer—it's a rich mess, one that's alive and even, I'd argue, fun. No, I don't think our field is all good will and democratic fellowship. But I don't think we're as troubled as this recent spate of press suggests. Day after day I'm moved by the honest faith with which people send out their work, in an atmosphere of such little chance of reward. I feel constantly challenged to reconsider what our poetry is. And I don't plan on Googling this discussion in the coming weeks to see just how much trouble I've got myself into. My time is better spent reading manuscripts.
Deborah Garrison is the poetry editor at Alfred A. Knopf and the author of A Working Girl Can't Win. Recent poems have appeared in the New Yorker.
