Tag Archives: poetry

The Poetry-Industrial Complex: Who Decides What Poetry Is?

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You can hear it in barrooms and coffee shops, that old gripe that poetry is run by gatekeepers. The real stuff, the guttural, late night truth, doesn’t live in magazines of MFA workshops. It lives on the street, in the unfiltered voices whose rhythm is a jackhammer that reveals diamonds.

And they would be right.

There is a strange little ecosystem, a poetry-industrial complex so to speak. It is made of small magazines, university presses, and workshop networks. It follows fashion and rewards proximity.

The right editor at the right reading and you might get the nod. That old cliché about who you know has become the invisible submission guide. If you want recognition, and who doesn’t, this is the sanctioned road, the tried true way of carefully crafted, worked over until nothing unpredictable survives poetry forged in workshops. It can be electric, but it is more often than not so well behaved it loses its truth.

Academia asks the poet to translate them self into something publishable, full of language theory, perfect iambs and workshop norms.

But there is another side, another scene, like the pirate station you can find if you turn the dial just a little and let the static bleed. It is the poems that spill out from the feedback of an open mic night on a half broken PA. It is the words that fill the backs of junk mail and little notebooks walking home from a 10 hour shift.

These verses don’t care if they’re publishable. They stick like a song you can’t shake. Think Patti Smith with three chords and a confession that hits like a sledgehammer, or Gil Scott-Heron detonating thought bombs mid-line.

The poetry that refuses to ask permission to exist. The defiant poetry that shows up and dares you to look away.

The problem is that no one sees these poems. The system that decides who gets published also works as a system to filter voices. The record kept is incomplete, magazines are archives of what a small insulated group thinks is poetry. People who I am sure are trying to, imperfectly, make sense of what matters, but only hear echoes.

Not making this into some mustache twirling villain situation. It is just the system doing what it does, narrowing. That is where the tension swirls, somewhere between saying what matters and having the poem be something that might last.

You end up with a disconnect. Poets smoothing the edges of their voice to get in the door or refusing to compromise and risk their voice being unheard.

Poetry isn’t owned by magazines or collected anthologies of the ‘best new poets,’ but magazines do act like a style book defining what is considered a poem at the current moment. The real stuff, the messy, unrepeatable, blood and sweat poetry happens elsewhere, off the page.

If you listen close, somewhere between a whisper and a scream, you can hear it, where nobody’s asking for credentials to have your voice heard.

The Problem With Spilling Ink

Poetry,

It’s Thursday night, one of those nights when I remember I can find the words, be they crumbled and barely legible or bold and screaming from the tree that allows night to creep up from behind the sun. I don’t know if I believe in poetry anymore, if there are songs that can speak out the innermost feeling. I think they often just flutter along the outskirts and we assign some deeper meaning with a comfort only found at the edge or when lying ravaged.

When I was a child I knew, at seven, or eight, that I wanted to be a poet; I didn’t know what a poet was, but it seemed that the rhyme and reason went so hand in hand that there wasn’t much of a choice. When I was in highschool I thought a poem was they key to a girl’s heart and her pants; highschool boys spend a lot of time thinking about sex and how to get it, poetry was my answer. When it didn’t work and as I ‘matured’ I found another truth; poetry became a vehical to both avoid and express the myriad of emotions my outward self tried to hide and compress. I pursued it, took the words and wrestled through forms and years at university; I was going to be a Poet, known from coffeeshop to bookstore from coast to coast. That didn’t work out so well either. I am older and know now that I just want the poetry, not to necessarily be the medium. I want to see it rise from some benign catalyst and come flooding out as I try to stand and control it only to get lost in the ecstasy of the image; like a faucet, a hot and cold running love affair —– ON & OFF, ON & OFF, ON & OFF — over a sink in a basement, installed and forgotten except when you venture down.

I often think of Sara, the woman who never speaks in The Eolian Harp, how she plots the latent’s manifestation in a world populated by archetypes and gods; where biology, religion, line, and melody are fused to create a landscape, this strange dark where we chase our shadows beyond the street in exhaustion. Her silence is where all words dwell, where we can pick a few, give them form, a shape, and a name. It becomes a poem that now will rest, for a day or a month, and then tell me whether it is real, that will offer up salvation in the tiny pool of water I cradle in my hands.