Poetry - stale ?

April 2013 - The New Criterion

The bitter fool

by David Yezzi

Poetry has become sterile, but we can still find realism, humor, and intensity in the satiric impulse.

Burke

was right!

Robert Armin on the cover of The History of the Two Maids of More-Clacke

Dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool and a sweet fool?
—Fool, King Lear

It takes all sorts of in- and outdoor schooling
To get adapted to my kind of fooling.
—Robert Frost

Poetry has become so docile, so domesticated, it’s like a spayed housecat lolling in a warm patch of sun. Most poets choose to play it safe, combining a few approved modes in a variety of unexceptional ways: lyrical, pastoral, whimsical, surrealist, lyrical-pastoral, pastoral-surrealist, interior-lyrical, whimsical-lyrical-interior-surrealist, and so on. These poems feel at home in coffee shops and on college campuses; they circulate breezily among crowds of like-minded poems and all of them work hard to be liked. (They are also beloved of prize committees and radio hosts.) Not since the Edwardians has a period style felt so pinched, though, ironically, today’s poetry is offered as “new”—either ground-breakingly populist or transgressively avant-garde. As Joshua Mehigan puts it in a recent issue of Poetry:

In the end, poetry looks radical only to the outside world, which ignores it, while from inside it looks static. Poets got out of these situations before by doing something new, but novelty is superfluous now. There is no way to get into the game without upping the ante, and there is no way out without bluffing or folding or everyone agreeing on a new game. 

Mehigan is certainly right about the mug’s game of contemporary poetry, but why must everyone agree to change the game? And why must the game be new? Perhaps the way forward is, in fact, a way back. Perhaps the route into the wilderness will be charted by someone outside the game, who manages to reinvigorate, as Eliot did, a few little-known or neglected strains in poetry—what Hardy liked to call the old way of being new.

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