Against National Poetry Month

Charles Bernstein is not impressed . . . as such . . .

National Poetry Month is about making poetry safe for readers by promoting examples of the art form at its most bland and its most morally “positive.” The message is: Poetry is good for you. But, unfortunately, promoting poetry as if it were an “easy listening” station just reinforces the idea that poetry is culturally irrelevant and has done a disservice not only to poetry deemed too controversial or difficult to promote but also to the poetry it puts forward in this way. “Accessibility” has become a kind of Moral Imperative based on the condescending notion that readers are intellectually challenged, and mustn’t be presented with anything but Safe Poetry. As if poetry will turn people off to poetry.

A related discussion can be found at The Reading Experience, wherein Dan Green responds to Eric Selinger’s assertion:

I would say that some poets don’t have many readers because of the sorts of poems they write, but that the reason most poets don't have many readers is because of the ways that poetry gets taught in this country—or not taught, as the case may be—from grade school onward. If poetry were taught, for example, as part of the national patrimony, with the assumption that elementary students should know their Whitman and Dickinson, Hayden and Hughes, because these are our great national poets, just as French students and Italian students learn Baudelaire or Petrarch early on, there would probably end up a wider audience for poetry.

Says Green: “I’m continually surprised by how thoroughly the idea that literature is ultimately something to be taught in schools has become unexamined wisdom.” What follows is, as you might guess, an examination, and although my own attempt to participate is pretty hopeless, it’s an interesting discussion. Check it out.

Speaking of Green, he also takes issue with Terry Teachout on what constitutes criticism.