Poetry. What? Are you kidding?

Every so often some intellectual will go on a talk show and try to convert America to poetry. It always sounds condescending. “Look, you people in suburbia or wherever you are, even you can appreciate poetry. With my help, of course.”

Poetry is like beets. You can’t convert people to enjoying it or convince them with some florid argument.

Not to mention that a lot of poetry is bullshit. That fact is not helped by critics who proclaim that bullshit to be sublime. I was so happy to see the gutsy Mary Karr call out poet John Ashbery in the The New York Times:

“His seductive voice is the most poisonous influence in American poetry. You know those page-long pieces of his in The New Yorker you can’t comprehend? Neither can anybody else. A brilliant, modest guy, immensely charming, but the most celebrated unclothed emperor in U.S. letters today — an invention of academic critics.”

Mary Karr, truth-teller

Mary, I love you! But there’s more BS where that came from. Have you ever been in the presence of someone who said their favorite poet is Mary Oliver, only to have someone else say, “Yes, well, everyone loves her. She’s a feel-good poet.” I want to knee that person in the groin. As if feeling good is antithetical to quality. Speaking of calling out, I was grateful to see Ruth Franklin’s piece in The New Yorker, “What Mary Oliver’s Critics Don’t Understand.” There’s a lot.

Mary Oliver and fan

I would distrust, run away from, completely reject, anyone who makes you feel small or guilty about any artist or art you love. Especially a critic.

You can’t blame people for rejecting poetry when critics make them feel inadequate by anointing false prophets who write irresponsible, unintelligible stuff. Or by heralding poets who are simply dull. But what you will find is that poetry critics are very, very reluctant to call out a living poet.

Take the critic Helen Vendler. She wrote about poetry for The New Yorker for years. I read a lot of her reviews. The only poets she disparaged were dead poets. Surely, there were living poets she thought unworthy. But to call them out would have been literary suicide—unless you have the guts and the dedication to honesty of a Mary Karr. (Ashbery was still alive when Karr’s Times’ comments appeared, by the way.) How can you choose someone to be your guide when the only color they use is rose?

Let me quote the authoritative words of the baseball-loving poet Marianne Moore. This is the beginning of her poem, “Poetry”:

“I, too, dislike it.”

Marianne Moore

I like poetry. I love some of it. In fact, it has been a wonderful friend and companion my entire life. Sometimes, a lifeline. That’s just me. I’m not going to try to convert you.

Wait, let me just read you a few lines from a poem by Elizabeth Bishop…