The Business of Poetry
In the business world, similar discussions surround craft. Business people often speak frequently of their devotion to discipline, accounting principles, sound decisions and the like. The billion dollar bailout authroized by the core accounting firms, Wall Street, and the masters of business contextualizes the assertion perfectly, and the similarities still stand. These sound business principles could just as sure be a euphemism for craft. If there is a difference, it is in the businessman’s devotion to money which to reference the great warrior and thinker Musashi, who wrote The Book of the Five Rings, is the way of the merchant. The oddity with poets is what purpose does “the craft” actually serve. One cannot doubt the reality of the concepts invoked. Precision in language, study of the canon, discipline and knowledge of form are obvious necessities. One must be serious about their job to be successful in it. Yet, the question of audience calls into question the idea. While the businessman creates a business which serves customers who value the product with or without knowledge of their craft, poets are often misunderstood by the larger population. Even the best of craft often seems to come in conflict with the average reader’s attention span. Most people don’t read poetry, let along buy it. From an industry perspective, this is hard cold reality, facts and numbers; but within the poetry world, depending on the day, it is a question of the relative ignorance of society-i.e. their inability to comprehend the work of the masters or an attack upon the work poet’s engage in.
It is important to note that I am merely mapping my own development within the world of poetry. Much of the poetry I read fails to excite me, though the observation must be reconciled with the vast volumes of poetry that do. In essence, the world of poetry is like any other world full of the good, the bad, and the ugly. The difference of my opinion with others, may only be how many presses I own. Much poetry does not entertain me, or seem to add to my collective sense of consciousness as a human being. Yet, I also know to wait. I know there is patience in the world; patience in the world, revelation, and matriculation through the school of life. You graduate into some things. I have studied long enough to experience this. I tell me students often to simply mark poetry they cannot experience as unread-attempting to link experience with reading as compared to understanding. I do my best to follow the same approach myself. I respect poets and their work, and this respect requires a clever appreciation of the work it takes to produce it. My point is, in spite of my love of poetry, I understand why the average citizen may not be able to penetrate much of it.
But on the other hand, I am not convinced that the codes of the empire-its changing trends and shape shifting reality is always a question of the best of humanity. I have studied long enough to rely on other considerations-to sometimes withdraw, to recoil, not give a damm, not mind the talk. I was born into the symbolic negative of the black in the empire’s code. I know they get somethings wrong; and that wrong is capable of sticking around for a long time.
There is a strange experience which occurs often in my relationship with African American poets. Often times, we can agree on a host of Black Arts Poets as major influences in our early writing career. The frayed edition of the mass paperback Black Poets seems to be a common theme in many of our lives. Yet, as we grow older, we distance ourselves. We pick our favorites. We love Hayden for his mastery of the language and discard so many of the others. The issue is not simply one of personal taste, it is also a question of the uncomfortable idea and the reality of black speech, black language, and more importantly the way in which these tools carry implicitly within their structure black ideas. Many of these Black ideas, techniques and skills are yet to be recorded in the majority of Academia(or acknowledged and embraced by the publishing world) in spite of the diligent work of numerous scholars. If there is a racist idea or a colonialist idea there most certainly can be a black idea, not one confined by the color of someone’s skin, but one dictated by the yin position of being the one subjected to the abuses of power by the yang cats. However, as careers progress and we spend more time in the “craft” it seems these early poets somehow become dictators and rhetoriticians whose poetic skills get them regulated to the back of the bus in our poetic journey. We soon learned that they really did not have craft and that their work was too often full of homophobia, grandstanding, and reverse racism. What is ironic about the narrative is its suggestion that our attraction was simply part of our youth. For example, I rarely hear folks say the same thing about other fancies like comics or for that matter the ludicrous nature of the pledge of allegiance and the Star Spangled Banner; but these of course are beyond our ability to change and henceforth comment on with any degree of power. Racism implies the absence of Black skill. Negroes have to learn this. In this post-integration world, it seems we learn to hate our youthful appreciation of the rhythms, skills, techniques, nuance, and craft of those early poets. The gateway to the long hallways, the awards, begins here.
It is only fair to mention the employment possibilities for poets. The economics of the profession have everything to do with how one develops into the career track. Poets must have jobs, or make some money to survive. How one views Negroes’ skills, assets, nuance and sense of craft has everything to do with one’s interaction in a lily white environment. While this consideration is obvious, it is of course rarely spoken in those long hallways. And even if it is spoken-so what? What difference does it make when you come up for tenure?
Whether people should want to read poetry is a totally different question than whether poetry is important. The prior has inherent in it’s fabric, a sense of the gospel, a sense of educating the uneducated, a sense of bringing knowledge to the lost. To suggest that they should not read poetry is of course, another issue. As a former bookseller, my approach is informed by my years spent promoting poetry to folks who were extremely resistant to reading it, unless it was accompanied by some celebrity status. The truth is, in this way poetry mirrors the larger book industry. Books need something significant attached to them in order to convince people to buy them. Celebrity culture is ideal. The awards, and prizes of the poet’s trade are substitutes for this mass appeal.
The other oddity, which much be noted, is people like poetry, at least on the surface. In some ways it seems similar to the way African Americans like Black History. If one knows anything about the African American community’s relationship with its own history and culture, one knows how glamorized, eulogized and admired African American culture can be while at the same time viewed as impractical, didactic and distancing. Those who dare to wear dashiki’s, change their names, practice African religion, wear a suite and bow-tie or talk about the struggle for liberation are admired from a distance, if at all. In reality Tom Joyner’s morning show is much more palatable and profitable than all the Black History in the world for most African Americans. Poetry is viewed through a similar gaze as impractical.
These simple truths parallel the world of poetry where we love poetry but don’t buy it, admire it, but rarely read it. The added advantage poetry has is that millions of children are forced to be exposed to it within the educational system as a core requirement. These requirements differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but in the end demand folks at least know what poetry is, in contrast with the almost epidemic nature of the chronic amnesia associated with African American history. Nevertheless, the deference to poetry as a genuine art form is almost schizophrenic given how many people actually read it and engage it in their lives. For all the poetry written and all the mastery of the craft a majority of the poets will never be read, or read only by their contemporary devotees to the craft, or spend most of their time teaching young people and others who after years of being trapped in the straitjacket of American culture would like to express themselves and view poetry as a way of doing it. Many poets do workshops and teach poetry to young people whose relationship to poetry is in stark contrast with the mastery required, according to the masters, to even appreciate the craft, and discipline of the art they are exposed to.
