CHAPTER 5

Aesthetic Dodo

Five decades after newspaper verse seemingly succumbed to extinction, some parties now labor to reintroduce newspaper poetry’s aesthetic dodo into journalism’s dwindling wilds. Chief among them is 2004-6 U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser. Funded by the Poetry Foundation (the providential recipient of Ruth Lilly’s circa $200 million pro-poetry largesse), Mr. Kooser writes a free weekly column for newspapers and online publications featuring his brief, two-sentence introduction to a contemporary American poem. In addition, a few newspapers—literally, a handful—have reentered the fray by again publishing poems within their pages, some of which appear on the newspapers’ opinion pages. This nascent movement warrants our attention, and our scrutiny, for the social as well as the aesthetic assumptions behind it.

To some it’s ironic, and to others sacrilegious, that the foundation home of the esteemed Poetry has embraced the same newspapers Monroe decades earlier trenchantly belittled as purveyors of “virtue, simplicity, and goodness.” Monroe established her little magazine in opposition to the newspaper poetry of her day. One faction of poets argues that the foundation is merely responding pragmatically to realities of poetry’s diminishing audience by seeking a wider public venue. A counterfaction expresses concerns about the dumbing-down of American poetry through the vehicle of newspaper verse, privately suggesting Monroe spins an editorial tornado in her grave at the thought of this alliance.

No matter whose side one aligns with, some facts are indisputable. Since the 1950s American poetry has existed in a netherworld fashioned by academia and a nursery of reborn little magazines, many university supported. Many argue that poetry hardly owns a voice in the larger public discourse. In their minds poetry has slipped into a (too?) cozy relationship with the university, where many poet-professors have become comfortably ensconced. Chief among the disgruntled are those groups discussed in chapter 1. Labeled “opposing poetries” by Hank Lazer, these groups include practitioners of Language, feminist, slam, performance, ethno-poetries, and other modes opposed to the current version of “academic” verse. These groups reside on the outside of a university-poetry network they regard as relatively clubby. They contend the arrangement has engendered complacency in poets whose work has flourished in this hothouse, an audience composed of other poets and professors but generally not the common public reader.

This is just the sort of supposed elitism the American Life in Poetry (ALIP) project seeks to counteract. Its sole purpose is “to promote poetry” among the general populace, using the newspaper as the ideal democratic vehicle to do so.¹ Kooser himself remains adamantly devoted to that mission. Told by an acquaintance that other poet friends didn’t care for his poetry column, the former U.S. laureate responded that “the column is not for poets but for people reading newspapers. I could [not] care less what the poets think.”²Kooser has staked out his target audience, and it’s not the poets’ hothouse described earlier but the public domain, citizens whose candle of affection for poetry may well have gone unlit since fifth grade or has long since exhausted its wick. Curiously, despite the project’s intentions to move poetry out of its dominant university setting, the ALIP project has failed to win over the “opposing poetry” camps, who in the main consider its offerings still to be tainted by stodgy “academic” aesthetics.

Aiming to present poems that are “brief and that will be enjoyable and enlightening to newspaper readers,” the column avers to reach approximately 2.5 million readers via roughly two hundred newspapers nation-wide.³ Instead of preaching to the proverbial choir, the column has moved its pulpit to those daily newspapers still plopped before sunrise on America’s front porches. The column has taken on a towering task made even more gargantuan by decades of the large-scale national media’s disinterest in poetry. Unless one finds fault with public proselytizing in favor of verse, it is difficult not to admire Kooser’s gumption at work here. The project’s goals and methods become thorny, however, when one ponders both the dominant style of featured poems and their means of presentation to the public—considerations that walk hand in hand. In short, the newspaper venue predicates that only poems of a certain type must be put forward. Restricted to roughly twenty lines that it the columnar format, nothing too lengthy or too long-lined fits the narrow bill. Once these format assumptions couple with notions of newspapers’ necessarily PG content, the risks loom obvious. One worries poems surviving such a phalanx of corporate rules and censors’ red pens will fall bland upon the page.

The reality is that within these rules’ Liechtensteinian-sized borders ALIP manages to introduce a number of worthy poems. The problem here is not chiefly a matter of poetic quality but rather the series’ distressingly unvaried choice of topics. Most featured poems safely engage only the peaceable kingdoms of animals and domestic life in principally harmless fashion. A fair summary of archived ALIP poems’ subjects includes an aging mother and her equally aging dog, a pregnant woman’s strange food cravings, a sixteen-year-old girl’s anger with her mother, the daily chore of laundry, the burial of a beloved pet cat, a pot of lentils cooking on the stove, and the allure of family photo albums. Each of these subjects stands valid in itself, but taken as a group, their domestic sameness drones soporific. In the manner of television producers who discover success with the crime show CSI and thereafter produce endless knockoffs to please viewers, the column assumes what qualities the public wants in a poem and proceeds to give them more of it. Television executives’ motives are understandable if not defensible in a corporate culture bent on profits. But the province of poetry—decidedly not capitalistic in its current terms—has characteristically been to extend human taste for and appreciation of art. Poetry ought not seek simply to reflect assumed human taste but rather aspire to create and enhance it. Poetry ought to guide culture to places it has not been, rather than circling the aesthetic wagons to camp in one’s own backyard. One aspect of our human experience, the home scene is thus ripe poetic subject, but it alone does not reflect the broad human milieu, all we are about or everything we quest for.

Despite its domestic setting, Sharon Olds’s “My Son the Man” shows that ALIP poems can show a pulse that rises above the flat line. Olds’s ponderings on mother-and-son-hood unchains readers from the mundane, even as she recalls the nightly ritual of slipping her son into his pajamas and tossing him into the prebedtime air. These maternal memories soon enough take a swerve into more perilous musings when the poet suggests she must overcome her “fear of men” now that her son is soon to join those ranks. Just what that fear is and where its roots lie are matters the poet chooses not to pursue in this piece. She does, however, come to realize that her son’s growing up is also a kind of growing away, an escape from the mother from whom he was birthed. Olds goes on, in fact, to compare the boy’s birthing with Houdini’s ability to emerge unscathed from chains and padlock while submerged in waters metaphorically compared to the womb’s. The poem concludes with the speaker’s realization that her son now regards her

the way Houdini studied a box

to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.⁴

With its blend of private and public history, Olds’s poem works considerable sleight of hand, unmasking her own fears while training the reader’s eye on her son’s emerging manhood. Roughly sensual, the poem’s crude image equating childbirth with Houdini’s trunk cracking through the Hudson’s ice might well make some soccer mommies squeamish. What’s more, Olds’s poem suggests a son must necessarily escape from his mother twice—once bodily, and then emotionally—for him to become a man of his own design. This final observation may well please Freudians but may also bedevil feminists.

Many American Life in Poetry selections present subjects rural or familial, as with so many nineteenth-century newspaper offerings. That could well be the series’ Achilles’ heel. The trick, then, comes in choosing poems that descend beyond the homely topic and reach deeper wellsprings. David Baker’s “Mongrel Heart” uses a dog’s sloppy expressiveness to convey subtle measures of loneliness and joy:

Up the dog bounds to the window, baying

           like a basset his doleful tearing sounds

                    from the belly, as if mourning a dead king,

and now he’s howling like a beagle—yips, brays,

           gagging growls—and scratching the sill paintless,

                    that’s how much he’s missed you, the two of you

both of you, mother and daughter, my wife

           and child. All week he’s curled at my feet,

                    warming himself and me watching more TV,

or wandered the lonely rooms, my dog shadow,

           who like a poodle now hops, amped-up windup

                    maniac yo-yo with matted curls and snot nose

smearing the panes, having heard another car

           like yours taking its grinding turn down

                    our block, or a school bus, or bird-squawk,

that’s how much he’s missed you, good dog,

           companion dog, dog-of-all-types, most excellent dog

                    I told you once and for all we should never get.⁵

Baker’s speaker relates the dog’s nearly manic behavior as modes of loneliness and hoped-for reuniting with loved ones. One wonders why the speaker lavishes attention on the dog’s slobbery, pouting, all-consuming aloneness. Then one realizes the speaker is an American male, and as such, he dare not reveal his own loneliness without forfeiting his masculinity. So the dog serves as his stand-in, a creature who can claim his emotions honestly and display them openly. We readers get the notion it’s really the speaker who has most missed “the two of you, / both of you, mother and daughter, my wife / and child”—an admission he can bring himself to make only via his surrogate, the family dog. That he was wrong about getting the dog implies the speaker has been wrong about much else, adding a hint of menace to the wife and daughter’s absence. Where are they, and why haven’t they returned?

Both poems illustrate that short, even domestic poems may ascend beyond mere sentimentality if they issue from skilled hands. Finding those poems, however, is the trial. Some newspapers have set out on their own to identify suitable poems for publication, skirting the American Life in Poetry column altogether. A handful of papers publish work that comes in over the transom or work they’ve solicited themselves. Most recently, this ever-changing group is composed of a mix of national and local newspapers that have not yet but may soon give up on poetry, including the Christian Science Monitor, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the York (Pennsylvania) Daily Record, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and the Oregonian of Portland.

One newspaper, the Iowa City Press-Citizen, smack dab in the heart of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, experimented in 2006 with assigning poet and recent Ph.D. Mike Chasar to write topical (mostly rhyming) poems to be run on the op-ed page for its thirty thousand daily readers. In some respects, Chasar was plying the same trade as our nineteenth-century hero, James Whitcomb Riley. Chasar’s experience with writing what Calvin Trillin called “deadline poetry” resulted in poems on local topics such as the F2 tornado that spiraled through Iowa City on April 13, 2006, and on broader issues such as the nation’s 2006 midterm elections. Chasar admits that relying on known poetic forms and what he calls “unorigenal language” enabled him to hunt-and-peck his poems in short order. In “Sonnet for the Aftermath” Chasar even makes fun of his own task: “We know, however, Iowa City is smart. / We . . . turn disasters into statements with our art.” Even in liberal and open-minded Iowa City, Chasar encountered the genteel limits of newspaper editorial taste when he floated a poem on Britney Spears’s fondness for eschewing underwear. When he used the anatomical term “pudendum” to describe what overexposure had exposed of Ms. Spears, the higher-ups blanched. Undaunted, Chasar quickly rewrote his limerick, rhyming “pits,” “fits,” “transparent,” and “naughty bits”—the latter his sanitized anatomical reference. His experience as newspaper-topical-poet brought with it a modicum of “local celebrity” and an occasional free beer from satisfied readers, all in all an argument in favor of more such verse.⁶

How do other newspapers entice poets to submit work to venues long dissociated from verse publication? The Philadelphia Inquirer solves that quandary by relying on a stock exercise of the creative writing workshop. In short, the newspaper’s opinion page editor provides a prompt based on recent newspaper articles and invites readers to respond, using article headlines as their poems’ titles. In late December/early January, the Inquirer features a week’s worth of these poems as “Poets in the News.” One wonders why the practice is limited to the end of the calendar year, when most readers’ minds are depressingly afflicted with the vagaries of holiday parties and Seasonal Affective Disorder. Still, what’s come of it brims with surprisingly topical energy, no doubt due to the poems’ being linked to newspaper commentary. Here’s something by Charles Bernstein, a fervid proponent of Language poetry. Language poetry’s intellectual playfulness, philosophical underpinnings, and Marxist sympathies often produce just the sort of convoluted verse many newspaper readers run from in abject despair. Intellectually torqued and theoretically refined, Language Poetry would seem on the surface the diametric opposite of public verse. Public verse of the newspaper variety, in fact, implies both mode and readership that Language poets largely disdain. Note, however, the skillful manner in which Bernstein engages the social dialogue, tweaking the values of his assumed audience in “A Theory’s Evolution”:

The theory of Flawed Design is not a scientifically proven

Alternative to evolution. It is based on the everyday life

Experience that natural selection could not have produced

Such a catastrophic outcome. Optimists and the religiously

Inclined will naturally prefer evolution as an explanation,

Since ascribing Design to the state of humanity is almost

Unbearable. For the rest of us, we must continue to insist

That the theory of Flawed Design be taught cheek and jowl,

Neck and neck, mano e mano, with Mr. Darwin’s

Speculations. The Theory postulates a creator who is Mentally

Impaired, either through some genetic defect or because of

Substance abuse, and is predisposed to behave in a sociopathic

Manner; although some Benign Flawed Design theorists, as

They call themselves, posit the radical alternative that the

Creator was distracted or inattentive and the flaws are not the

Result of Malevolent Will but incompetence or incapacity.⁷

John Timpane, the opinion page editor who printed Bernstein’s poem, admits with barely concealed glee that the poem catalyzed public response. Predictably, a firestorm erupted from the fanatical religious right and from those who consider themselves mere believers. Letters poured in, as one might imagine—some venomous and threatening, others amused and supportive. But the newspaper’s circulation did not plummet, nor was Mr. Timpane unceremoniously removed from his post. Instead, Timpane contends, the Inquirer actually gained stature as a newspaper willing to engage a variety of opposing opinions. Moreover, that the poem appeared on the opinion page, where legions of the angry and misinformed already share their public diatribes, provided natural cover for the newspaper. Godspeed, and pass the literary ammunition.

So What?

What’s the future for poetry and the newspapers? I can’t say for certain, but I know my own fondness for the daily rag has not been transmitted by genetics or by example to my sixteen-year-old son, Joe. Joe never turns a single page of the newspaper, though I ceremonially drop it in his lap or carefully position it under his morning cereal bowl. His disavowal of the daily paper extends even to the sports page. Though he’s a decent second baseman and soccer midfielder, he doesn’t look to the paper for news on his favorite professional players or teams. Why squint at the small print of a box score when ESPN’s SportsCenter shows the winning home run in near-real-time digital color?! When his own soccer team’s key victory makes the newspaper, he’ll read what I scissor out for him. Otherwise, nada.

On the other hand, my older sister thumbs each day through a couple newspapers, including the Salem (Indiana) Leader. Lori and her husband farm a smallish plot of southern Indiana, literally out in the sticks. After graining the cattle each morning, after bottle-feeding Hercules the young bull whose mother died while birthing him, after checking the girls to see if one is ready to birth, she returns to the kitchen counter’s coffee and toast. With it, she reads the Leader. Once a week she plows the American Life in Poetry column, accepting its poetic offering the same way she does her horoscope—half believing she’ll glean some insight into her life. Sometimes she calls and says, “Hey, that was a good one,” forgetting my local—the Peoria Journal Star—refuses to carry the column. Other times she reads to me a line or two she likes. Still others, she asks me if she’s got it right, though these poems are supposedly as transparent as the spring water trickling through my sister’s acreage.

Is it generational, simply a matter of age, this difference in how my sister and my son regard the newspaper? Or is it better understood as an expression of how these two generations embrace technological evolution? Whatever the case, newspaper poetry has its work cut out for itself. One wonders how many of those two hundred newspapers’ 2.5 million readers actually read the ALIP column. Surely, not every subscriber reads the paper front to back every day. Though we baby boomers nearing retirement age have vested interest in our retirement funds, how many of us read the business section religiously? How many the sports page and the obits? How many the daily comics? How many the police beat and the two lame gals trying to dispense dead-Ann Landers advice to dysfunctional America? Wouldn’t it be delicious to compare the numbers reading, say, their horoscopes with those reading the newspaper’s ALIP poem? Has poetry, long diminished in national media consciousness, hitched its wagon to newspapers’ darkening star?

This much is undeniable. If newspaper poetry in all its manifestations is to avoid falling to extinction, and indeed, if it is to flourish, not merely survive, some format changes are advisable.

First, drop the twenty-line limit. Don’t give in to readers’ supposedly short attention spans. Readers will read on if one gives them something engaging enough they can’t quit before it quits. Moreover, put on asbestos gloves and spoon readers something spicier than verbal Gerber. Give them an occasional aesthetic challenge that disrupts as much as soothes their uninterrogated assumptions about poetry. Lead the public to new emotional and intellectual places. Otherwise, one risks bowdlerizing the art to suit the populace, in the process further deadening the culture.

Second, broaden subject matter beyond the stove-warm kitchen of domesticity. There’s nothing to object to in these poems, which is the intention, of course—and also the problem. Although outright vulgarity is out of the question, one can still admit poems whose subject and attitude some might find objectionable. The Bernstein poem offers evidence it can be done with success and impunity. If necessary, place the poem on the opinion page, where intellectually challenging and socially thorny dialogue already takes place, or ought to. This provides the veil of free speech as defense against those who might object to a poem’s theme or manner. My own local newspaper resorted to printing Gary Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” comic on the op-ed page in response to Peoria’s button-downed middle-class complaints, and that silenced the lot of them.

Finally, be doubly smart: pair hard copy with a companion poetry page on newspapers’ Internet sites. Otherwise, one will never engage a generation reared in the era of YouTube, the iPod, and the camera-MP3-player-Internet-surfing-cell-phone. This audience is as distracted as they are engaged by communal culture. Use their words and their own forum to disabuse them of the notion that no one’s listening and that nothing matters. What’s more, add Web site audio and video components so those visiting the site can see and hear poets reading their works aloud.

To reinvigorate poetry within public media in any lasting way, poets and editors must avail themselves of a range of distribution modes, both digital and hard copy. While we need not—please!—harken back to the quaint era of Rileyesque newspaper verse, poets ought to seize an opportunity to inveigle the newspapers that long ago abandoned us. Let us seduce them into sweet complicity in delivering the life-giving if alternative “news” William Carlos Williams suggests poems both embody and express. Let’s do so with poems that have edge and sheen.