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About ArmaVirumque ( AHR-mah wih-ROOM-kweh) In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil sang of "arms and a man" (Arma virumque cano). Month in and month out, The New Criterion expounds with great clarity and wit on the art, culture, and political controversies of our times. With postings of reviews, essays, links, recs, and news, Armavirumque seeks to continue this mission in accordance with the timetable of the digital age. Recent posts
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Apr 06, 2005 11:59 AM by James Panero
The other day I attended a memorial tribute to the poet Donald Justice hosted by the Poetry Society of America. The event was beautifully done: readers included Debora Greger, William Logan, Mark Strand, and NEA chairman Dana Gioia; family slides and a music performance of some of Justice’s piano works rounded out the evening. So, what gives with the PSA? It seems an appropriate question to ask coming out of an evening where one of the readers wrote ’Can Poetry Matter?"--because the answer I get from PSA is: not if we can help it. From the moment I looked into this event, the Poetry Society seemed to embody the closed-world clubbiness infecting poetry today. When I enquired about the tribute by telephoning PSA, the answer was not one of welcome but a fraught ’how did you hear about this?’ When I asked if members of the National Arts Club could attend the event, the answer I got was: ’we haven’t had one here in a while.’ Now, PSA is in the National Arts Club, and this event was at The National Arts Club. The line from ’Cool Hand Luke’ came to mind, in that what we clearly had here was a failure to communicate. For an event featuring not only top readers but no less than the Chairman of the NEA to have more than a handful of open seats--this event was maybe half full, and we’re not talking large auditorium here--something’s wrong with that. So, what gives with the PSA? One might question the wisdom of Alice Quinn taking on director duties at PSA while serving in one of the more powerful positions in the poetry world, as poetry editor of The New Yorker. Everyone acknowledges that Quinn is a good person and poetry today is often one big conflict of interest, but you might think that both jobs require full-time energies, and you have to wonder how Quinn does it. And of course with every poet applying for contests at PSA and hoping to get published in The New Yorker no poet is about to complain about Quinn and PSA, least of all Dana Goodyear. But the problem most likely goes deeper than that. I’m sure Quinn wants poetry to matter. I’m not sure that some of the younger poets who work at institutions like PSA and edit hermetic magazines like Fence agree. What’s clear is that the institutions of poetry need to start thinking big if they hope, or even want, poetry to matter. Eric Ormsby said as much in "Of lapdogs & loners: American poetry today," his superb contribution to ’Lengthened Shadows’ last year, which by the way much of the poetry world considered not incorrect but rude. As if this response didn’t just prove Eric’s point: The institutions in North America that seek to sustain and promote poetry strive mainly to buoy up this factitious but not insignificant ’world,’ however tiny it might be. And the shadows that they cast, while ever lengthening, are neither healing nor apostolic but thin and chill. By this I do not mean that foundations such as the Guggenheim or prizes such as the Pulitzer or any of the sundry emoluments, accolades, or entitlements which they confer are intrinsically, or even wholly, malign; but rather, that they exist to serve poetry as a purely exterior endeavor. They exist principally not to encourage or inspire the composition of great poems but mainly, and unashamedly, to further careers....
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