American Poetry in 2018 has received an infusion to its rather anemic status as a subculture in United States literature. With its MFA poetry mills churning out thousands of eager, but inexperienced in real-life, twenty-something university graduates looking for the publishing creds they were tacitly promised, the US poetry apparatus, fueled by Academia, resigned itself to existing only for the Frankenstein-like system it created.
That mill system was, and continues to be, flawed. Academia failed to foster or teach their students an ability to be acknowledged by the general, reading and buying, public. Instead of petitioning for better contest awards and pay and providing a broad, challenging, promotional program for their unseen young poets, they hit the automatic pilot button.
Academia then allowed the entire system to slowly grind for several decades. It passed through the same literary journals, magazines and publishers in an as-is status but with tuition costs steadily rising. The established agreement between Academia and the publishing apparatus was to publish 90% of the mill graduates and their poet-instructors. That high percentage left the approximately 10% of “other” aka independent, and frequently older poets with few opportunities or recognition.*
Of course, Academia will object to the above statement. Rather than waste their efforts on some strange, antiquated literary behaviors, they should direct their activities toward joining the world at large and correcting their atrophying of American poetry.
Oh, but wait Superwoman or man, no both, were spotted in the clouds over Poetry City. Who are these beings that have provided option oils for everyone in love and committed to the writing of poetry. Why, it’s the devoted late night writers, readers and poets of the literature Tweet lines and other social media. It’s the editors and staff of independent, on-line magazines and journals. It’s the no-paying Amazon that always gets the numbers wrong, but actually and inadvertently promoted those who would have forever been marginalized by the decrepit Academic system. It’s also a philosophical theory called post-structuralism, now neo-post structuralism in some quarters, that predicted as early as the 1960’s, that the old structures would begin to crumble, that eventually academic boxes would be crushed and the ivy covered walls would tumble down.
Post structural poetry has arrived, complete with discussions of social problems and solutions, different tones, different formats, the lack of elaborate punctuation or capitalization and, perhaps, rhyming in strange and unexpected places.
Academia, the genie ain’t goin’ back in the bottle, baby dolls. Oh, and watch out for that haiku and #mpy.
“Within the last two years, we’ve witnessed a true resurgence of American poetry.”
--e. smith sleigh, poet and author
* Academia vs. Poetry: How the Gatekeepers of Contemporary Literature might be Killing It
By Rosemarie Dombrowski, PhD
... I could accept this premise if the writing products of academia were limited to publications in the hard sciences
and the social ...
Publishing tip - TheReviewReview - 2014-12-30 16:33