By Christopher D. White, Editor-in-Chief, Rager Media.

Most poetry is unreadable–some because it's just badly written, and some because, even if expertly written, are just plain boring. But this has always been the case, as you'll see if you investigate the archives of our nation's best litmags. Try reading the other poems in the issue of Poetry magazine where T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was first published, and you'll see what I mean. Eliot's poem is a case of one poet stumbling upon writing an eternally relevant and excellent poem. He went on to write a handful of other excellent poems, and then proceeded to churn out a lot of worthless drivel for the rest of his life, including a horrible and over-rated, though historically important poem called "The Waste Land," a poem whose best lines were written by Shakespeare, not Eliot. Granted, "The Waste Land" was greatly improved by Ezra Pound's liberal editing, as the surviving manuscripts show, and it has exerted enormous influence on poetry for many decades, but it's an example of a poem that just doesn't matter much nowadays. Prufrock, on the other hand, remains one of the greatest poems ever written.

For me, the poetry of A.R. Ammons fits into the category of hopelessly boring, even when it's well written. Never mind that Ammons won the National Book Award and has been put on a pedestal in American Letters, his poems are almost universally dull. The poet Jean Valentine
once wrote an essay on Ammons' poetry which is useful for understanding this, though I can't recall the name of the essay off the top of my head.

Speaking of Jean Valentine: here's an enlightening case study of the politics of publishing. In an interview, Valentine was once asked about how she had a hard time breaking into the litmags for years, and what it was that finally made her fortunes change. She said that the answer was simple. One day her manuscript was selected as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and that she had no problem getting into the litmags after that. Many of the litmags pay lip service to being dedicated to showcasing the best writing around. But there's a guild mentality with the mags, part of which likely arises from the fact that poets and writers who wish to work in academia are desperate to publish in magazines with the best reputations in their field, so understanding this makes the publishing of lesser-quality poems by serious poets a little more excusable in my estimation. After all, can I really hold it against people for trying to secure a professional future for themselves? So though I find it aesthetically distasteful to read many of the poems in the quality mags that seem to be written by tone-deaf poets, many of the poems which cater to the most current literary fashions and trends, I am more tolerant of this than when I was a young poet and contentiously contemptuous of all this brazen hand-wringing.

This is not to say that one won't find some excellent poems in the most highly regarded literary journals. The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Parnassus, The Antioch Review, The Missouri Review, etc.. These are still the go-to places to find the best in up-and-coming literary talent. But Ezra Pound's pronouncement from about a century ago remains true to this day: "The supreme weeder is needed" if the the garden of the muses is to remain a garden. The assessment and re-assessment of what constitutes excellence in literature is an ongoing task. Often it's easy to know what's unquestionably without literary merit. Where it becomes more difficult is choosing what's essential reading, and discerning the difference between what's good and what's great. This part will always be debatable. But that which is unquestionably unimportant is usually fairly easy to determine.

Does this mean that we've got a glut of bad poets? No, I don't think so. We just have a glut of bad poems. If one, like Eliot or Wordsworth, manages to write only a handful of poems of everlasting importance, then she/he will have secured a place in literary history, and this is more than most can ever hope to accomplish. You'll still be well served by reading the litmags. You just can't take off your thinking cap and allow yourself to be convinced of the value of something just because an influential editor tells you that it's important, or because that author won the Pulitzer Prize, or anything like that. Reading the litmags, in fact, is a good exercise in applying your critical principles and impulses. Besides, the appreciation of literature is about more than always practicing one's principles of selection and assessment. I'm so happy to discover the occasionally exceptional poem that I'm willing to continue reading the little literary reviews, and to do my own weeding.

The ongoing question is not Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter." The real ongoing question is DOES it matter at any given time. Of course it always has the potential to matter, but the overabundance of bad literary work being passed off in the most influential literary sources can have a corrosive effect. Say someone who has never read the litmags picks up a copy of The Paris Review at a local bookstore, because someone told him that if we wants to see good contemporary poems being written today, that The Paris Review would be a good place to start. Well, if he reads a series of unremarkable poems in there, he might, understandably enough, think that contemporary poetry is suffering from a crisis of relevance and quality.

There are, however, poets that I return to when I'm looking to restore my faith in poetry–master practitioners from whom we can learn a lot about technique and aesthetic strategies, regardless of whether or not we may be tempted to imitate them. Wallace Stevens has this effect on me. I hope someone will punch me in the face if I ever write like Stevens, but I appreciate his poems and draw inspiration from them. But I would never send a new poet to his work, nor can I ever spend too much time at any given time reading his poems, as they are strange, dense, sometimes difficult, and I'm not sure that even he understands what he's doing all the time. But then, the poet Charles Simic once said that it took him years to understand that his poems are smarter than him.

My latest favorite discovery: Rae Hallstrom

I ran across the following poem by an award-winning Ohio writer whom I'd never heard of before. I was startled by the poem, which I found on Author's Den when I Googled her name. It was such an excellent poem, singularly accomplished, imaginative and very rich with sound-and-word-play. It's not a surprise, then, that's she's not a product of an MfA creative writing program. Excellent work comes out of the MfA programs on a regular basis, but sometimes poets working more in isolation are likely to develop a unique voice, and there's always the danger of being overly influenced by one's influences and writerly peers. Occasionally I will run across a poem that strikes me as being perfectly executed. It's not an easy task to pull off technical excellence while maintaining a confident and naturalistic tone the way this poem does. I come across native, untamed genius from time-to-time, and sometimes I see poems that demonstrate uninspired technical excellence, but it's a treat when you see the two of those elements combined. In an age when so many poets seem to have no ear for the music of language, this poem sings from beginning to end, starting with the dramatic assonance in the opening line: "Granite…dragged on flannel," the subtle alliterative soundplay in the third line "table…teeters on stilts, and followed up in the fourth line with the juxtaposition of soft, sustained, voice nasals (the letters 'n' and 'm') against the gently percussive interdental and glottal unvoiced and voiced stops (the letter "t" and "g"). This is a poem that will reward re-reading for those of us who like that kind of thing. I love the phrase "hot buttered nerves," which is just the sort of imaginative, playful, and surprising use of language which is often missing among our contemporary poets. And it's a good example to show that poetry can be excellent without being complex and inaccessible.

"Lathered," a poem by Rae Hallstrom

I am the granite of dry elbows dragged on flannel,
a porcupine with a cleaver,
a low table that teeters on stilts.
I am burnt toast, embers fuming for no good reason,
the pot that never boils.
You can taste me in the raspberry seeds
sucked from jam into a mouth ulcer,
feel me in the metal spatula of every step in tight underpants,
sense me in the snare drum in the bathroom.
I am not a walk in the park when the sky is blue.
Look for me in a cave of stomach acid,
in the cat locked in a closet after falling asleep on a shoe,
in a tangle of knots at the edge of hot buttered nerves.

Upcoming Rae Hallstrom event: Rae Hallstrom will be reading at Muggswigz in Canton on Friday, April 4, 2008, from 7-9 PM with several other poets.

About Rae Hallstrom:

Rae Hallstrom took home 3 awards last year in the Wayne College Regional Writing Contest. Her essay, "Grinded" won Third Place in the nonfiction category. Her short story "In the Cow Belt" and her poem "Apartment Complex" each received honorable mention. "The Tomato and the Dragon" appeared in the May 2006 issue of Releasing Times. Rae's horror story, "Tea for Two," might pass for a cozy in the mystery genre–none of that "in your face" blood or gore. "Tea for Two" debuted in January 2006, as the feature story in the 32nd issue of Outer Darkness. Rae's feature on dandelion wine appeared in Akron Life & Leisure in the May 2005 issue. Rae's poem "Floating into Tomorrow" appeared in 2002 in "Chances Are…, a Chrysalis Reader," published by the Swedenborg Foundation. Her poem inspired the cover art for the "Chances Are…" issue. "This Ancient Disappearing Act" won one of Ohio Poetry Day's First Prize awards and was published in the 2002 awards book. Another poem, The Elder, won a First Prize award in the 2000 Ohio Poetry Day competition. Her poem "Last Blush" found print in Volume 38 of Pudding Magazine. Her nonfiction essay, "The Age of Addiction," was published in "Rocking the Ages, a Chrysalis Reader," which was the foundation's millenium (2000) volume.

Click here to visit Rae Hallstrom's "Ameriku" haiku blog.

Click here to visit Rae Hallstrom's website.

Rager Media is a nationally distributed book publisher from Akron, Ohio.

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