Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age / Kevin Stein
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POETRY'S AFTERLIFE DIgITALCULTUREBDDKS is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Poetry's Afterlife VERSE IN THE DIGITAL AGE Kevin Stein The University of Michigan Press and The University of Michigan Library ANN ARBOR Copyright © by the University of Michigan 20IO Some rights reserved This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press and The University of Michigan Library Manufactured in the United States of America r§ Printed on acid-free paper 2013 2012 2011 2010 4 3 2 I A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stein, Kevin, 1954- Poetry's afterlife: verse in the digital age / Kevin Stein. p. cm. - (Digitalculturebooks) ISBN 978-0-472-07099-2 (cloth: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-472-05099-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) I. American poetrY-21st century-History and criticism. 2. Poetry-Appreciation United States-HistorY-2Ist century. 3. Poetry-Appreciation-United States HistorY-20th century. 4. American poetrY-20th century-History and criticism. I. Title. ps326s74 2010 811.509-dc22 ISBN 978-0-472-02670-8 (e-book) For Deb, with daisies, And for Kirsten and Joseph, who question everything. A modest flower, resembling a pink sweet-pea, you cannot help but admire it until its habits become known. Are we not most ofus like that? -WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, "The Pink Locust" Preface Poetry today enjoys a spirited afterlife. Its aesthetic hereafter has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as gravely moribund if not already deceased.! A little over twenty years ago Joseph Epstein's provocative "Who Killed Poetry?" ignited torch-waving debate between opposing camps of the tweed sport coat and the black beret. Three years later Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" and Jonathan Holden's sensible The Fate ofAmerican Poetry arrived on the scene, both proposing cures for what allegedly ailed our poetry. Even Donald Hall's impassioned defense of the art invoked funereal lingo, exasperatedly calling for "Death to the Death of Poetry." As a writer, I've literally grown up with the notion that poetry was knock ing on death's door-or was it, it la Bob Dylan, knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door? And all my teachers and most literary journals saw fit to remind me that I, as practitioner of said art, was bloodying my knuckles. Practicing a dead art was regarded as a literary badge of honorable dishonor. That poetry was unmarketable and maligned made it paradoxically the purest of art forms. Our small poetry circle, and the university culture into which it had retreated, elevated this isolation as redemptive not destructive of the art. My sense of poetry's near-certain passing was challenged in unexpected ways following my appointment as Illinois poet laureate in 2003. In short, I found myself sweetly flummoxed by the widespread public interest in poetry I encountered around the state. What fascinated me was the dispar ity between the profession's notion of poetry's mortality and the spirited reception poetry enjoyed when I presented well over one hundred readings in factories, nursing homes, churches, urban parks, and rural public libraries. Each foray I made into alternative means of promoting poetry was met with energetic approval. Goodly numbers of students, teachers, and the general public, for instance, visited Web sites I'd created to feature audio and video x / PREFACE poetry, and those same citizens welcomed an audio CD anthology featuring our state's poets reading from their works. Over time, it occurred to me that literary reading among the public was actually experiencing, as the recent National Endowment for the Arts research report "Reading on the Rise" sug gests, a surprising revivification. It struck me then that poetic art had not given up its literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools, universities, clubs, and online. Largely overlooked by national media, poetry flourishes among the people in a lively if curious underground existence. It's this sec ond life, or better, poetry's afterlife, that interests me. Poetry's Afterlife thus focuses on three issues intersecting poetry and the increasingly digital culture that receives it. This book surveys the current poetry scene, traces how we arrived here, and suggests where we're going. First, it considers the means by which a poet defines and necessarily rede fines the individual poetic self amid the pendulum swings of large-scale aes thetic history. Next, this book examines the manner in which technologi cal advances have changed how poetry is written, distributed, and received in American culture, focusing especially on poetry's changing relationship with both traditional print-centered and experimental computer-based modes. Finally, it scrutinizes poets' increasingly institutionalized roles as creative writing teachers and as public proselytizers of the art, assessing the classroom as the febrile site where students-our future poets-come to wel come or to reject the art. In short, Poetry's Afterlife considers the intersection of poets' private art across the culture's communal interchange. These essays are meant to be more investigative and propositional than doctrinaire. In form they are hybrids, blending the scholarly and the theo retical with the meandering pleasures of memoir. They are in turns aesthetic as well as social, theoretical as well as practical, and personal as well as com munal. The book's initial section, On Poets & Aesthetic History, maps the curi ous (often thorny) path by which American poetry arrived at its present aes thetic moment. "Paper or Plastic, Pepsi or Coke, Irony or Sincerity?" traces the virtues as well as the trials of American poetry's enduring tug of war between rival aesthetic poles. Extending this notion, '''The Only Courage Is Joy!': Ecstasy and Doubt in James Wright's Poetry" then examines one poet's career-long negotiation with a peculiar expression of these very dialectical extremes and exposes Wright's private wrestling with large-scale aesthetic history. "Playing Favorites: American Poetry's Top Ten-ism Fetish" reflects PREFACE / xi generally on the rousing if bookish process by which poets forge personal relationships to literary history and muses particularly on poets' current fascination with ranking their favorite books. Next, as its James Whitcomb Riley-inspired title suggests, "'When the Frost Is on the Punkin': Newspaper Poetry's History and Decline" investigates the heyday of American newspa per verse and its twentieth-century waning. Our nation's renewed flirtation with the newspaper as medium for public verse is the subject of "Aesthetic Dodo," particularly recent attempts to reintroduce this nearly extinct mode into the dwindling wilds of the country's daily rags. The book's next division, On Technology & the Writerly Life, considers poetic art's evolving practices in an era rife with competing traditional and innovative technologies. This section opens with "Poems and Pixels: The Work of Art in an Age of Digital Reproduction," revisiting Walter Benjamin's landmark essay in light of recent innovations in digital creation and distri bution of art in our Internet and YouTube era. Next, "A Digital Poetry Playlist: Varieties of Video and New Media Poetries" offers what is arguably the first -ever print-based poet's appraisal of digital poetry and theory. This essay explores electronic poetries that transport poems off the confines of the printed page and into the virtual world of the computer screen, also presenting an initial integrated discussion of video poetry and new media poetries. "These Drafts and Castoffs: Mapping Literary Manuscripts" then ponders paper-based poetry manuscripts' revelations about the poet's writerly process, the bewil dering swirl of personal and communal aesthetic pressures. The section's final essay, "Death by Zeroes and Ones: The Fate of Literary 'Papers,''' examines implications for hard-copy manuscript materials, given changes wrought by computer-based methods of composing, revising, and archiving poetry. On Teaching & the Writer's Workshop shifts the book's spotlight to the classroom where students directly engage poetry-in essence, the venue in which poetry's future resides. "The Hammer" addresses the poetry workshop scene, focusing on the volatile pedagogical and emotional landscape found there. "Voice: What You Say and How Readers Hear It" speaks directly to young writers seeking a workable understanding of the ever-elusive notion of poetic voice. "Why Kids Hate Poetry" then assesses how schools' current ped agogical approaches to teaching poetry tend to deaden rather than to entice students to the poetic arts. This section's concluding essay, "Whitman's Sampler: An Assortment of Youth Poems," amounts to just that-an ample sampling and consideration of poems written by American youth. The volume's concluding section, "After Silence," likens poetry's current xii / PREFACE afterlife to the beguiling because unanticipated music-after-silence offered by the compact disk's hidden track. The essay "(Hidden Track): Poetry in Public Places" thus considers my experiences promoting poetry as state laureate and suggests what results might reasonably be expected from such public outreach. In sum, this book responds to claims of poetry's unfortunate demise by examining poetry's afterlife-its revenant and sustaining music.