Why Contemporary Poetry Is Not Taught in the Academy

Abstract

Poetry has become irrelevant. Even those of us who write poetry, a group as prone to self-delusion as any, recognize and lament its passage from the tale of the tribe, from “a traditional means of self-knowledge and a potent challenge to the decrepitude of habit” (Doreski), to just one more tiny wave of noise in the omniwave of information that washes endlessly over us. At best poetry, as it is represented in the mainstream, has become a careerist vehicle to tenure and, perhaps, to some morsel of prestige. At its worst a contemporary American poem in whatever guise (school, tradition, etc.) is a supercilious rant by some small, alienated version of an “I” whose purview is utterly domestic and approaches absolute solipsism, which is to say it is masturbatory in as much as it assumes no other. Ezra Pound told us long ago that “it is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself ” (Literary Essays), that the poet’s role in the culture is to bring to the level of consciousness, to make manifest in the form of a poem, what the race would otherwise not know about itself. The present version of a poem does this in a perverse fashion, by enacting our confusion as regards subjective being and the viability of meaning generally; but beyond its actualization of these deadliest of postmodern feedback loops, it is merely an artifact of this debauched age and as such an abdication by the poet of his/her traditional role for the race as hell-raiser and courageous chartmaker of the unknown. Consequently, the results of my unscientific poll of colleagues around the country who teach contemporary American literature was not very surprising, although certainly disheartening. Many admit that they do not teach poetry at all, even in non-genre-specific survey courses. Those who do teach poetry mostly offer up canned responses to the staid standbys from literature survey textbooks, which