Micah Mattix has followed up on this piece here.

At Barack Obama’s inauguration, Elizabeth Alexander read a poem that she had written for the occasion. It was called “Praise Song for the Day,” and it was a flop. The New York Times posted the poem online, but did not comment on it. At The New Republic, Adam Kirsch called it “bureaucratic.” For David L. Ulin at The Los Angeles Times, it was “less than praiseworthy.” Even the Brits got in on the criticism. At The Guardian, Carol Rumens noted that Alexander seemed to be shooting for an African praise song, which traditionally “celebrates the life of an individual” in a “rhythmical, incantatory, call-and-response style.” What Alexander wrote, however, was a poem that was cumbersome, cluttered and clichéd. Rumens writes: “To use this ancient form was an idea with exciting potential, but, as it turned out, the title…was more inspired than the poem itself.”

In fairness to Alexander, official poems are not easy to write. While Kirsh argues that Alexander’s poem does not compare with either Horace’s Carmen Saeculare or Virgil’s Aeneid, both of which were written for official occasions, they are, it seems to me, more the exception to the rule than the rule itself. Both Milton’s and Donne’s official poems are a bit wooden, Mayakovsky was shouted offstage (though perhaps wrongly so) when he read a poem that he thought expressed fairly safe Communist propaganda to a group of young Russian university students, and Robert Frost’s “The Dedication,” which he wrote for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, is no where near as good as the poem he actually recited, “The Gift Outright,” which, of course, he had written almost twenty years earlier.

There’s no escaping the fact, however, that Alexander’s inaugural poem was not very good; and for Tom Bethell at The American Spectator, it is an occasion to stop and reflect on the plight of contemporary American poetry in general. Why are there, Bethell wonders, so many mediocre poets today? Following Joseph Epstein and Dana Gioia, his answer is prizes, subsidies, grants, lectureships and professorships. There is too much money in poetry. It offers poor or mediocre poets too many opportunities to write and publish, and it encourages many otherwise good poets to pose as avant-garde artists–to write against their audience rather than for it–because it increases their chances of getting such fellowships and prizes.

Indeed, one of the ironies of art today is that there is little financial risk involved in being avant-garde. Unlike the first avant-garde artists who supposedly created works to challenge the commercialization of art, such a move today is very much the first step in making it commercially, in terms of fellowships and grants. Cut back on the cash, Bethell claims, and purge the country of a legion of Miles Coverdales.

Epstein, Gioia and Bethell are all on to something here. While I think that there are more good poets than Bethell allows, there is no doubt that eliminating subsidies and fellowships would help to eliminate the less accomplished ones. However, it wouldn’t eliminate all, and it wouldn’t necessarily help to produce better ones. Bethell writes that “Creativity unaccountably waxes and wanes at different times and places.” This is not entirely true. There is a reason it is waning now and, it seems to me, it has to do with the sterile ground of philosophical materialism for the arts.

Philosophical materialism is the belief that the material world, as the word “material” is currently defined, is the only thing that exists in the proper sense of the term. It reduces the spiritual to the material and universal morals to mere politics (often leftist politics). Love, for example, becomes nothing more than a word we use to refer to certain chemical reactions in the brain. It does not exist in the materialist sense of the term. The materialist poet, therefore, does not write about love qua love. Instead, he flirts with language, writing poem after poem of mere surface language play that produce superficial frissons without engaging us at a deeper, more meaningful level. The political poet, on the other hand, rails against the oppression of a particular group. The stronger the outrage, the more effective the poem at accomplishing its political purpose, and, therefore, by the implied theory of poetry at work here, the better the poem.

Examples of these kinds of poets include Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein and the late June Jordan, to name but a few. Silliman’s most recent publication, The Alphabet, is a thousand page behemoth of materialist posturing that goes nowhere. Andrew Ervin at the Philadelphia Inquirer says the point is to sit back and “enjoy the ride.” And what are we supposed to enjoy on this ride? Well, according to Ervin, “the physical shapes of the words on the page and the sounds they make in our heads” and decidedly not “any accumulated narrative or meaning.” Sounds riveting.

And, I should add, self-defeating. For, there is a meaning in The Alphabet, even if it is just one meaning, repeated, parsed and repeated again ad infinitum–and that is, of course, that there is no meaning. This is but one of the many precepts of materialist poetry.

Bethell bemoans the lack of “rules” in contemporary American poetry, and I see what he means, but the fact is there are rules. It is just that they are not very compelling ones, based, as they are, on a far too limited, ultimately unsatisfactory, materialist view of the world. Going back to the old rules, moreover, as Bethell seems to suggest, and following them for the sake of the rules alone (while still rejecting the Judeo-Christian and neo-Platonic worldview from which they were extracted), will not help. Following rules for the sake of rules leads to a dead art. It produces art that is nostalgic and ritualistic–full of formal artifice, but lacking in any real meaning.

So while I think that Bethell is right about the subsidies, there is also a larger problem at work here–one that is not easily solved by policy changes. Yet, I am also somewhat more optimistic than Bethell regarding the future of American poetry. In other countries where the reigning ideology and particular governmental policies have been much worse for real artists, those artists still continued to work and produce compelling art, even if those works were not fully recognized until later. After all, Stalinist Russia gave us Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and a fascist Italy gave us Eugenio Montale. To compare the situation of American artists to that of either Solzhenitsyn or Montale is ridiculous. However, it does serve as a reminder that valuable art is produced by artists everywhere and at every time. We can’t always see it, but it is there.

Parallel to pushing for policy changes, therefore, I think critics need to do more to discover those poets and artists who are, indeed, doing good work. While it is the job of the critic to tear down, it is also his job to build up–even if he has to search far and wide for a poet that is worthy of praise.

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