The question of “the audience of poetry” is one that vexes poets and critics endlessly in our country. There are, on this as on so many other issues, two camps, and over the past twenty years or so, the same arguments keep cropping up. One camp insists on insulting American poets as being too academic, too obscure, out of touch, and so on. Poetry’s audience in America is so dismally small, in this camp’s view, because of the poets themselves. The other camp, always on the defense, insists that poetry is alive and well in America! Because we’re writing about pop culture and regular everyday folks in language they can understand! And we’re not obscure at all! And there are thousands of poetry books published every year! And tens of thousands of poems on the internet! So there!
Such is the broad outline of a debate with which I think most poetry-people are familiar. I believe that the attack is flawed–but I also think the defense is flawed. And this relates to the whole attitude toward the fact (and it is a fact) that very, very few Americans read poetry. Is our inability to appeal a bad situation? And is it remediable?
Because we are unable to appeal—even the most pop-culture-ridden, chatty-informal, “accessible” poems don’t quite go viral. And our bestselling poets—writers like Mary Oliver and Jacqueline Woodson (the “Y.A.” poet who wrote Brown Girl Dreaming)—write an unpatterned, straightforward verse that is nearly indistinguishable from prose anyway. Last year’s bestselling poetry book, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, dropped all such typographical shamming; it actually was in prose, and accordingly won poetry awards on two continents. Yet even these “bestselling poet” sales figures fall drastically below those of middle-tier novelists.
Considering the history, it seems that page poetry has always been an utterly, unabashedly elitist art. Notice how much poetry got written, in the old days, in the courts of kings and dukes and rich patrons of the art like Maecenas or Lorenzo de’ Medici. Low literacy rates in Europe and Asia ensured that only a tiny percentage of the population could access the stuff in the first place. (I exclude hybridized art forms like the Shakespearean play, which reached a larger audience that included the illiterate.)
In some countries, this held true even of the novel: In Tolstoy’s Russia, only 20% of the population could read. That is why he refers, quite casually, to the pictographic signs above stores and eateries in his Sevastopol Sketches—the same sort of signs that used to be current in 16th century England. (The Mermaid Tavern had a painted mermaid for its sign, not the words “Mermaid Tavern.”) Tolstoy’s abandonment of the novel grew out of this sense that he was writing “for St. Petersberg”–that is, for the tiny Europeanized Russian intelligentsia of the cities, and not for the Russian people themselves.
The rise of universal education and universal literacy, coupled with the 20th century’s population explosion, resulted in a vast number of people entering the pool of readers. “Genre” and other kinds of fiction took off as commercial commodities, and the industrialized mode of book production, centered in New York City, arose in response. The same kind of “literature” that dominates bestseller lists to this day: stories told in language that doesn’t tax the attention. This last is a key element; you praise a prose storyteller highly when you say that his or her language “disappears.” Even literary-fiction writers are praised for “spare, economical” prose, which usually means no metaphors or Cormac McCarthyesque flights of purple description, and few subordinate clauses.
What happened to poetry during this time? It got weirder and rhymed less, as if actively trying to lose a popularity contest. The Modernists do get blamed a lot; but the truth is that the Modernists were the last batch of poets to own their elite status and savor their small, select company. For this was the fate of the rest of the 20th century’s major poets and movements, too—yes, even the Beats, even the plainspoken accessibles—but these others operated under various delusions: That poetry could effect foreign policy (we left Vietnam when we left it, not when the poets told us to), say, or that poetry could “speak to everyday folks.”
Poetry may not gravitate to moneyed patrons anymore, unless one considers the Maecenas-like function of the NEA or the Guggenheim Foundation; but an elite is still the sole producer and consumer of page poetry. It is an elite of education, not of wealth. While I don’t have statistics on this, I am fairly sure the majority of people who buy poetry books have a college education; certainly the majority of people at all the poetry readings and festivals I’ve been to (granted, there haven’t been many) were college-educated, at least. It makes sense that most American poetry production and publishing takes place through universities. These journals and programs are the equivalents of princely courts, where the tastemakers are not Renaissance Dukes but editor-professors.
Most recent iterations of the attack on poetry draw rap into the discussion—well, if rappers attract huge audiences with their hard-hitting hard-rhymed verses, why can’t you? This comparison represents a category error, pure and simple. Rap incorporates poetry into a hybrid art form that includes music, fashion, stylized delivery, and stage spectacle. To contrast rap’s popularity with page poetry is meaningless. Page poetry doesn’t even incorporate the poet’s spoken voice into the experience; the poem is “performed” either by the reader’s voice or by the voice in the reader’s head, depending on whether he or she is reading aloud. Chances are, no matter how much you revere Kendrick Lamar’s skills (to take the rapper generally considered rap’s most advanced lyricist), you don’t prefer the printed lyrics of “King Kunta” to the actual track. You’re not supposed to. With page poetry, it’s different. Most poetry readings are terrible because even one’s favorite page poets frequently read their work terribly, or just not how your inner voice reads it. Some of my favorite poets, like A. E. Stallings and Don Paterson, I prefer on the page, not behind a podium.
Naturally most poets are vain and would prefer a mass audience to the approbation of a tiny elite. But the inherently elitist nature of written poetry is troublesome only in a society like ours, with its egalitarian ideals and respect for The People. Whitman was the first to see this dream (and the first to be disappointed—Leaves of Grass never had the effect on his countrymen that he had wished). In other, aristocratic societies, The People were considered “The Mob,” and its opinions were not revered as The Will of the People–but disdained as untrustworthy, fickle, and vulgar. This is a wholly different way of looking at the majority of one’s countrymen—not as people whose approval is to be written for, but as a mob to be written off.
This might seem like the quintessence of elitism, baldly articulated–the opposite of Whitman’s open-armed, open-hearted approach. But does it have to be? Contrast Dickinson, whose Soul selected “her own society” and “shut the door.” Dickinson, who sought out a handful of readers in her lifetime–a few friends and family members and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and that was it.
Only elitism of poetry makes possible this poetic intimacy. As a poet, you transmit at a certain frequency, and even the other poetry-lovers out there often aren’t on that exact frequency. But out of every hundred people, there might be one person who is receiving on that exact frequency; you have made a connection, sometimes a connection for life. The poet has found a reader. The reader has found a poet.
A practicing poet cutivates a literary intimacy with his or her devoted readers that may not be different in intensity than what fans feel for the pop icon. But the difference lies on the artist’s end—those readers mean more to you. The feeling is mutual. That isn’t the case with pop icons, no matter how many public demonstrations Taylor Swift stages (and records, and posts) with her fans. There are just too many people out there in that stadium; and many are quite willing to scream for the next star, and the next.
As a spouse, your intimacy with your partner is one-to-one; as an American poet, your intimacy with your readership is one-to-ten, or one-to-twenty–but it’s a relationship frequently permanent, and always mutual. Rather than bemoaning this, or daydreaming about a mass audience for my elite art, I relish poetry’s isolation: It gives me, with my fit-audience-though-few, a relationship just a gradation or two below love.