A Proposed Solution to the American Poetry Problem

Where once the poetic community bemoaned a lack of readership, recently the problem has shifted—too many Americans are now endeavoring to produce poetry of their own. In a world where everyone considers themselves capable poets, artists with actual merit risk finding themselves subsumed in static, or worse, demonized as being no better than these poseurs. The poetry community hasn’t experienced such crisis since Frost came across a fork in the road (forgive the joke, I simply can’t help myself) and it is clear that a solution must be found, as this sudden zeal on the part of amateurs has already proven to be at best a nuisance, and actually dangerous in the most extreme cases.

For example, just the other day I was forced to endure an interminable wait in the check-out line at my local grocery store while the clerk, inspired by the image of two cantaloupes in a plastic sack, attempted to extemporize in free verse about the commodification of female flesh. All that his insipid mutterings accomplished was backing up the line so that by the time it was my turn to pay the ice cream in my cart had melted, Rocky Road reduced to debris strewn pond. And of course this example pales in comparison to the fact that the US Department of Labor has recently announced surges in both the jobless rate and the number of unemployment benefit applications arriving in Pantoum form, and especially in regards to the tragic tale of Flight 160, which ended abruptly in an Illinois cornfield after its pilot was suddenly overcome by the urge to compose a sestina describing the buttons on a first-class passengers overcoat, the scrap of paper containing these six clumsy lines being the only survivor of the crash.

Last month, in response to the crash of Flight 160 and the ensuing public outcry, the Institute for Higher Poetics released their list of approved poetic topics in an attempt to codify actual poetry and differentiate from amateur work, and while this was a valiant attempt I must agree with those who found the list sorely lacking. For example, the IHP lists ‘faded polaroid pictures of your former lover as a child’ and ‘sunlight breaking against a windowpane in your grandfather’s cabin’ on their approved list, but make no mention of ‘rusted combine tractors in an overgrown field’ or ‘inclement weather as metaphor for failed love.’ There are other major omissions as well, the most boggling perhaps being a complete dearth of entries regarding orchards of any kind. Can you imagine American poetry without any orchards? Would you want to? Perhaps this omission might be credited to the difficulty of the task and the limited amount of time they were given to complete it (the IHP was under some pressure from the White House, after all) but nevertheless many believe that the IHP’s attempt was ultimately futile, a glancing blow in place of the necessary total evisceration.

FOR THE REST, PLEASE CLICK HERE: http://failbetter.com/newsandnotes/wordpress/?p=1145