A Thought for National Poetry Month

Who says poetry makes nothing happen, or that it doesn’t matter?

People write poems, therefore poems do matter. And people read poems, and there they learn the most important of lessons: what it means to be human.

To wit–a short passage from an interview with poet Robert Hass:

Q: How can poetry affect the imagination of government?

Hass: There are instances: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people’s imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

And later:

They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature, the ability to look at paintings, the sense of connectedness to the land, the sense of community that comes from people taking care of their own. The market doesn’t make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there’s more than enough to go around.

(Source: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/haas/onlineinterviews.htm)

Sometimes it’s difficult to focus on the important stuff in the face of the never-ending maelstrom of the market and commerce and Walmart culture.

Only Connect! said E.M. Forster. Poetry connects.

–MJH

 

Unlike Subaru, humanities profs follow the trends

Not a big surprise to anyone who’s been working (or studying) in universities, but I’ve never seen it in black and white before that folks are seeing an irreversible trend.

The best evidence for this is the shrinking number of tenured and tenure-track faculty and the corresponding rise of adjuncts, part-timers more akin to itinerant workers than to embedded professionals.

Humanities professors like to think that this is a temporary imbalance and talk about ways of redressing it, but Donoghue insists that this development, planned by no one but now well under way, cannot be reversed. Universities under increasing financial pressure, he explains, do not “hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only 35 percent of the pedagogical workforce and “this number is steadily falling.”

Once adjuncts are hired to deal with an expanding student body (and the student body is always expanding), budgetary planners find it difficult to dispense with the savings they have come to rely on; and “as a result, an adjunct workforce, however imperceptible its origins . . . has now mushroomed into a significant fact of academic life.”  More here…

 

Here they come: The “Bail Out the Writers” articles

and just in the nick of time!  We all just finished explaining to our children why Santa skips every few years. From this weekend’s Book Review:

I am not suggesting that a Rooseveltian approach to the writing crisis is inappropriate. Rather, we should look elsewhere in Roosevelt’s legacy for a modern solution. A good place to start would be the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. This entity recognized that an overcapacity of farms and farm produce was driving down crop prices, and that elimination of that over­capacity was needed.

Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in “being a writer” than in writing itself. “There are too many of us, and M.F.A. programs graduate more every year, causing publishers to suffer snow-blindness, which has resulted in everyone getting lost,” she lamented. That Ann Beattie must now compete on Amazon with a self-published author named Ann Rothrock Beattie is proof of how enormous the blizzard has become.  Read mas.

Perhaps not the best time ever for anyone to quit their day jobs, but when was it?

 

3 reasons to publish a book by me, not Joe the Plumber.

Yesterday morning I woke up to this fantastic, sassy guest column in the NYT about Joe the Plumber’s book, intended to be out this month. The author of the column, Timothy Egan, asks Mr. Plumber…er…Wurzlebacher:

Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet? I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a censor’s gate.

The column later goes on to discuss the $7 million Sarah Palin will be offered to pen a memoir, don’t-cha know. So all of it got me thinking that I should write a humble appeal to publishers as to why I should be considered to be the recipient of these hearty advances. To vet myself, I have not finished my first novel, nor do I have quite enough essays to do a collection. Which leads us to the first reason, after the jump:

 

Watch the karma, dude…

In the past I’ve gotten myself in trouble spouting off my unfiltered (often unreasoned) reactions to the daily paper. (What can I say? I get in moods.) But this review of Christian Wiman’s collected essays, Ambition and Survival, struck me as so unnecessarily cruel, so blistering, that, well, I had to blog about it. (With advance apologies to our three readers…) Encountering this review with my Sunday coffee in those tantalizing moments before I gave myself wholeheartedly to the Sunday crossword, I read someone who put me in the mind of Tobias Wolff’s Anders: “a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed.”

First I should say that I’ve only read a few of the Wiman essays in this collection, back when they appeared in Threepenny Review, and I thought all of them excellent, surprising, smart, honest, and exemplary enough that I used them in various classes I’ve taught.  One of them, “Milton in Guatemala,” gets raked here (for reasons I find completely wrongheaded, as the “mock” humility he reads in it is news to me, but whatever). Another of his essays, for those who haven’t read Wiman’s prose, can be found here.  The part that really got me was the grand finale to the thrumping:

About the final piece in this book, “Love Bade Me Welcome,” the less said, the better. It’s the author’s own “mush of me, me, me,” an exceedingly personal essay about three subjects: Wiman gives up writing poetry and then starts writing it again; Wiman falls in love; Wiman receives a diagnosis of ‘an incurable cancer in my blood.’ The effect is to close off all further responses other than to have any reviewer of his book say:

I wish him the best life he can have.

Wow.  That’s almost unbelievable in its callousness, and I’m not sure how to read that last line. If it’s sincere, it departs tonally from everything that precedes it.  If it’s… well, what else could it be? Sarcastic?  I’m baffled.  If he really means that the piece leaves a reviewer incapable of reviewing it, then why did he review it? Maybe someone could enlighten me.  He uses Wiman’s own phrase ”mush of me, me, me” (which, incidentally, referred to a certain kind of confessional poetry, NOT memoir or personal essay, which—I’m no expert, but—kind of relies on ”me, me, me,” doesn’t it?), to frame a criticism of the essay.

The essay referred to appeared (perhaps in significantly different form) in American Scholar and can be found here.  Is it worthy of such scorn? Maybe he’s saying a personal essay that’s actually personal should not be written or published or read? If that’s what he means, Tucker’s gripe is much larger than (and dare I say misplaced on) Christian Wiman. I hope no one takes his word for it.

–AD