The President's
Poetry
When the guy who does the poetry show on the community radio station
announced his bid for congress as a Green Party candidate, the Democrats
demanded equal time. Now every other week the poetry show is all Maya
Angelou. Regular listeners are pissed but feel too guilty to phone in
complaints.
Here in Urbana the Champaign-Urbana Arts Council, reportedly well-endowed
with state money earmarked for poets, is not listed in the phone directory.
Nobody I talked to at the chamber of commerce or public library knows
who serves on its board or what exactly it does. It is suspected by
some poets who have been around a long time that the UAC gives a private
reading now and again to which a few wealthy people are invited, and
that the poet who hosts these events owns a ten-acre ranch up near
Moraine View and has never been published except by small presses
whose identity remains forever obfuscated from scholarship. It's the
same story with the mysterious "44 North:" occasionally you might
read an article about them in the mainstream papers, but you will
never find their post office box or fax number. Whatever projects
these local arts organizations fund are closely-held secrets.
During National Poetry Month there was no accountability at the
state level for how poetry was promoted or pursued. Without looking
at the state's overall poetry needs, politicians might arrange for
a poet to give a reading here, or a book signing there, doling out
honorariums to constituents well-placed in influential universities.
There was no sense of the state's having a larger plan for poetry,
no broader vision regarding the state's poetry infrastructure. (The
situation downstate is especially bad nowadays, even though the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Book was once published there.) There have been allegations of bribery
and of poetic licenses being distributed to writers who have not sat
before the state's rigorous thesis committee. Poets gave readings
at closed-door sessions of congress, state money effectively being
using to fund readings closed to the general public. Now the state
has had to borrow several billion dollars and there is no sign of
any poetry anywhere. In public schools they are reading light verse
from the 1950s. With the budget cuts, the state's major research university
is no longer able to afford to retain their best poets, much less
hire new poets. Even novelists are leaving. This on top of another
tuition increase will make the university system no longer attractive
to prospective MFA candidates. Is there no accountability? Governor
Ryan should have his books confiscated by the state and donated to
public libraries. State planners involved in allocating the funds
for National Poetry Month should lose their positions and serve time
teaching poetry on death row to pay their debt to society.
At the federal level the situation is all but beyond hope. The President
of course has become poet laureate for a second term, the statute
that a laureate could serve only a single term having been overturned
by the new Office of Homeland Poetry (appointed not elected), which
is headed up by a major shareholder of the media conglomerate that
owns the publisher who publishes the President's poetry. In polls
taken of the legislature, more than half have stated unwaveringly
that the President's poetry is beyond criticism. It is worth noting
that the house's opinion of the President's poetry is divided along
party lines suggesting that bipartisan bickering is more at play then
any serious appraisal of literary quality, not that this is a surprise
really. Scarcely credible to my mind, polls of public opinion show
an "overwhelming majority" appreciate the President's poetry, though
there is more public skepticism with regard to the quality of his
painting. Well, nobody needs to be reminded of the circumstances of
the President's being awarded the Yale Younger Poets prize at a time
in his life during which he has all but explicitly denied not abusing
drugs and cheating on exams: the recount was eventually completed
but the results were suppressed. The major newspapers of course are
uncritical of the president's poetry, save an occasional angry editorial
buried in the opinion section. If the political cartoons can be taken
as meaningfully indicative of a popular consensus, it would appear
that few outside of the circles of poetry power would claim that the
President's writing is credible. In an election year, of course, the
President's poetry supplants discussions of any other issue, especially
an economy in which the average family of four made about as much
per year in 2001 as a Yale poet in 1970.
The President's poetry has been written about elsewhere, but it
is the stuff of death and broken dreams. The President's poetry mines
the bottom of oceans. Asphyxiation by poverty, exhaust, gas chambers.
Millions of new bombs. Fascism's cliche, the President's poetry is
closed libraries, unheated classrooms, prisons: ruined language.
Are we to accept as true that the average citizen thinks the President
is a good poet? Does anyone really believe that the President's poetry
represents our country? Are these the limits of discourse? Has literary
criticism failed?