About a decade ago in the LA WEEKLY, Brendan Bernhard wrote an article about whether poetry still mattered. Bernhard got a quote from now-former NEA head and Northern California literary poetry icon Dana Gioia; Gioia moaned about how "you can't have great poetry without great standards" and accused Los Angeles poetry of being deficient on both counts.
Perhaps Gioia was espousing an occaisional Northern California prejudice about how Southern Californians are too superficial and not intellectually rigorous enough.
But the damage was done in Los Angeles. Varied poetry circles complained about Bernhard's article and Gioia's comments--mostly that they ignored the vast majority of L.A. poetry. Within a couple of years after the quality bomb dropped, one then-prominent Los Angeles male poet/powerful venue host pretty much abandoned his "folk music" approach and made an effort to become Academia-friendly before his departure from the city.
In the year 2009, a lot of Los Angeles poetry is Gioia-friendly--conservative in form, aesthetics and subject matter. Like other parts of the USA, it matters A LOT in L.A. literary circles about who you've studied with, whether you received your MFA, what workshops you've participated in, what Prominent Poet gave you a rhapsodic rave to use on the back of your book/in your press kit, whether you've been Published, whether you've been published by someone with Prestige, etc. etc. And some venues and local critic/tastemakers seem to value poetry control over even mild abandon (i.e. "diversity").
This can have some disastrous effects--I can think of at least one local poet who started out writing relatively accessible, thoughtful material before becoming more contorted and pretentious.
To me, Los Angeles' poet literati need to stop their self-imposed, rather constipated campaign to "improve" local poetry through homogenization and become more appreicative of multiple artistic voices/points of view--and not be filled with tasteful people who long to tamp their artistic visions down to achieve what may well be tenuous and temporary acceptance at best.
Jeepers! Ridiculous! I don't know any poet who has tried to please Dana Gioia or anybody else for that matter. I don't know any poet in L.A. who gives a rat's ass or arse about whether or not somebody has an MFA or whether or not their poetry is safe or not. And I certainly do not know anybody who is chasing after prestigious poets etc for blurbs. If somebody happens to get a blurb by another poet who is a friend or colleague who happens to be maybe more "known" in poetry circles or more established or a mentor or teacher, that is done not superficially. Also nothing wrong with networking and making contacts. This is how all business including in the arts is done. If nobody networked or talked to people then nothing would ever get shared or published or read aloud.
ReplyDeleteRe Annette's rebuttal--
ReplyDeleteNo, there's nothing wrong with networking and making contacts.
The hazards arise when poets feel they have to change the way they write to impress people. And, yes, it does happen. One of the people I mentioned in the original column wrote poems about being a "sexy librarian" and living in Echo Park that were a damn sight better than the pretentious twaddle she's "grown" into--for the sake of impressing the right people, even though sometimes they reject her and she throws public fits about those rejections (in some ways, I can empathize except for when she dumps on people not as clued-in as she is i.e. at Beyond Baroque last summer).
To be honest, a lot of the people who pass for literati in Los Angeles would have wanted to tar-and-feather James Joyce if they had lived in the times when ULYSSES and FINNEGAN'S WAKE were published. Or they would have reached for smelling salts when Allen Ginsberg first unveiled "Howl" to the public.
In short, I don't see a lot of out-of-the-box radical poetry being embraced and/or endorsed locally.
hmmm - I see this as a perpetual issue with Terry - There is such a thing as standards - in every other field - sports - music - dance - even the visual arts (though they're pretty plastic). The artists are judged according either to 'street' standards or academic standards. Street is what slam is all about. The 'journals' is what academia is all about. The academic gatekeepers as in the 'Red Hen Press' promote bad poetry. The once editor Kate Gale is a bad poet. That claim is easily proven by reading any of her poems - the following being a particularly salient example
ReplyDeletePraying Mantises and Missiles
You have an idea.
You're going to change the world.
Take that same idea.
Let it stand up.
Let it walk backward.
Let it change you.
Big world full of people, pine cones,
pizza, peacekeeping missiles,
praying mantises eating their spouses,
pedophiles, preachers, pick-up sticks.
When the whole world envelops you,
close your eyes,
lie down where your whole body
touches the soil,
feel the chicken,
feel the egg.
feel stuff growing,
your hair, the soil,
trees could grow there
you could become a tree
any day now.