On Wednesday, The New Ledger published my article on the decline of contemporary poetry in America. Brian Spears over at Incertus takes exception to my argument. His piece and mine were both linked over at Ron Silliman’s blog, and so I think a brief response is in order.

In my original piece I cite Tom Bethell’s recent article in The American Spectator in which he suggests that there is perhaps too much money in poetry for its own good. Spears, however, laughs off Bethell’s suggestion:

Bethell can be dismissed with a laugh, because anyone who looks at the actual money involved in poetry these days, especially on the avant-garde side of things, can easily tell that Bethell is full of it.

But Bethell was largely retracing (as he noted in his article, and as I noted in mine) Joseph Epstein and Dana Gioia respectively. Gioia, of course, was the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts between 2004 and 2008 (he resigned his post on January 22, 2009).

The fact is, if you add up all of the lectureships and professorships at creative writing programs at universities, and add this figure to fellowships and prizes, there are more institutional funds (both private and public) devoted to poetry than ever before. The effect of this, as Gioia argues in his landmark essay on the topic, is that it has increased the separation between poets and the public:

Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward.

Rather than engaging any of these critics, Spears claims that poets are poorer than ever and assumes that this settles it. Spears also takes exception to my argument concerning philosophical materialism, again making heavy use of ad hominem:

All I can really say is that Mattix needs to read more contemporary poetry, rather than sticking to only those poets who confirm his biases. He mentions Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein and June Jordan by name, and they are, to say the least, a narrow sliver of contemporary poetry. Don’t get me wrong–L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (and its descendants) is still a powerful force in the poetic world (though not one I feel a part of), and there are still lots of poets who rail against oppression the way Jordan did, though perhaps not with her ferocity, but pick up nearly any mainstream journal and you’ll find pages upon pages of poems which engage on deep, meaningful levels–and sometimes they even do it in traditional forms. Shocking, I know.

Contrary to what Spears implies, I think there are indeed some very good poets writing today (as I thought I made clear in my original piece). I have written reviews on some of them myself (even in so-called post-avant publications such as Octopus Magazine), and think that poets such as David Shapiro, Adam Kirsch, Scott Cairns, Franz Wright, Mark Jarman, Theodore Worozbyt, Timothy Steele and Peter Porter, to name a few pell-mell, are writing some of the best poems out there. These poets, it seems to me, do not reject narrative progression or formal devices for simplistic ideological reasons, but use (as well as bend) them because such things are part of what makes lyric poetry poetry — and not, say, a painting.

The problem with contemporary American poetry, however, is that there are also a lot of mediocre poets. One of the reasons for this, I think, is the influence of philosophical materialism. Silliman was an example of the effects of materialism on the arts, but its effects can be seen in non-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets as well.

I chose Silliman for two reasons. First, I think he is, in many respects, working out the implications of materialism for poetry pretty carefully, and so, in that sense, he served as a quick exhibit A. Second, he is indeed a rather important figure in contemporary American poetry, despite Spears’s breezy dismissal. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is probably the most widely known experimental poetry movement in America since the 1960s, and as of January 2009, Silliman’s blog on contemporary poetics had received two million visits. That’s right, two million. Not too bad for a poet no one ever reads.

Having said all of this, however, my original point was on the effects of philosophical materialism on poetry, not on Silliman. So, in very schematic terms, let me expand a bit. Following the decline of religious belief in the West, materialism or naturalism has taken the place for most elite (again, certainly not all) as the worldview of choice. According to philosophical materialism (or at least the rather simplistic one popular today), things such as the self, love, good and bad do not exist in any real sense. These things have been central to lyric poetry since Petrarch; however, as Silliman and Bernstein have argued, if there are no non-material things, what does the lyric poet mean when he or she uses “I” to refer to a center of consciousness that is somehow different from the material body of the poet? What does the poet mean when he or she evokes love? What does the poet mean when he or she evokes feelings of loss? This is the point, it seems to me, of their critique of poetic voice.

Again, this is all rather general. There are of course, a number of other influences on poets, but I do think it is pretty clear that philosophical materialism has been one of the more important ones in the last fifty years or so. In the context of this, the contemporary poet is often left with the choice of following the example of the hard-nosed L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, or seeming like a fluffy, nostalgic Longfellow. The latter is often the charge leveled against so-called “popular” poets, who evoke things like the self and love uncritically. Sometimes this charge is warranted, sometimes not. While there are certainly some very good poets out there who have managed to avoid this false dichotomy, the effects of philosophical materialism on poetry have not been positive.

In fact, I think it has proved to be a drag on poetry generally, most notably on the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets (though I am sure they would disagree) but also on other poets trying to chart out a space in this environment of skepticism.

Micah Mattix is a lecturer at the University of North Carolina.