The humor section of most bookstores is the last place one would look for enlightened views on gender. From Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche to Everything Men Know About Women (SPOILER ALERT: it’s a blank book! Geddit?) humor books rival TV commercials and greeting cards for male-bashing and gender policing.
The latest thing in humor books involves anything to do with MANliness, which is usually defined as being an asshole a la Tucker Max or a PUA a la Barney Stinson.
In that vein is Broetry by Brian McGackin. The cover features a cute parody of William Carlos Williams’ “This is just to say,” but the humor goes south when you read the jacket copy:
“As contemporary poets sing the glories of birds, birch trees and menstruation, regular guys are left scratching their heads. Who can speak for Everyman?” Broetry apparently is about “manly” things like Xbox, Star Wars and frozen pizza.
In tribute to E.E.Cummings, let me write
O,
for fucks
sake
Never mind that Cummings drove an ambulance in the First World War. Never mind that Byron fought for Greek liberation. Never mind that the Beat poets drank, smoked and fucked their way into the literary canon. Never mind,even, that some female poets like Anne Sexton and Diane Di Prima wrote stuff that would make most frat boys blush. No, poetry is for angsty teenage girls and Emo boys. “Backward” Arabic countries hold poets in such high regard that they feature poetry contests on national TV, but we’ll have none of that here, thank you very much.
Poetry used to be a major part of Western culture; in Antiquity “poetry” was pretty much synonymous with creative writing, encompassing everything from heroic epics to erotica. Poets were the chief entertainers of the day, as well as occasionally political pundits and satirists. These roles have been supplanted by other forms of literature (Homer was the George R R Martin of his day) and poetry has fallen off its pedestal.
Yet as late as Victorian times people would read each other verse as after-dinner entertainment. Byron, Shelley and Oscar Wilde were treated like rock stars. However, it was probably the Romantic poets that cemented the reputation of poetry as “flowery.”
The Beats reacted to this by being overtly masculine, writing about the aforementioned drinking,smoking and fucking. Even the queer Beats had a No Goils Aloud attitude. William Carlos Williams’ introduction to Ginsberg’s Howl ends with “Hold back the edges of your gowns ladies, we are going through Hell.”
With a few exceptions (Charles Bukowski, who made up for any “sissyness” about poetry by drinking smoking and fucking with the best of them) poetry is no longer considered a “manly” form of writing. Part of this is obvious femme phobia about expressing feelings, but there’s more to it than that. Men are not only deterred from expressing feelings, they’re discouraged from contemplating them at all. Heck, even the very idea of metaphor is considered wishy-washy,
This is a shame, because in addition to being moving and enlightening, poets often say things more effectively than others. Robert Frost’s “Out, Out-” is a frightening example of how men (in this case a teenage boy) must do dangerous work. Wilfred Owen, a casualty of the First World War wrote eloquently about how men are served up as sacrifices in battle. As the world becomes more prosaic, men shouldn’t abandon poetry.
(Note: in the comments, please feel free to post links to or quotes from your favorite poems)
As if women don’t recognize the face of Hell.
I am late to commenting on this post, and I wish I had the time to do much more than offer my own book, The Silence of Men as one that you might find relevant to this discussion and point you in the direction of an anthology that I think you’ll find worthwhile. The whole question of poetry and gender is so endlessly fascinating, from the publishing and reading series bias that has men outnumbering women by an unforgivable margin to the ways in which both men and women, queer and straight, cis and trans, use poetry to name and… Read more »
“I find it much more satisfying to focus on what makes a poem successful, which for me is if it does what I want it to.” – Precisely. What makes someone a ‘better’ poet is a familiarity with the tools needed to make the poems communicate their messages effectively.
Aaron: I must explain thAt after years of writing prose I have recently tried poetry. I have no idea if it’s good. I have a blog but I was reluctant to post a link here.
Monkey, I’ve never felt like “good” is a particularly useful term. It’s so subjective and caught up in external validation. I find it much more satisfying to focus on what makes a poem successful, which for me is if it does what I want it to.
A lot of the erosion of poetry in the modern Western consciousness is a result of the gradual erosion of formalism. Forms have power, and even if you’re trying, you can’t quite shake the ghost of metered verse (just ask T.S. Eliot). The issue is that, similarly to modern art, when you deconstruct the forms, you wind up with a brilliant piece, like Prufrock or Starry Night, or you might get a basketball in a fish-tank instead. Too, most young men and women would rather watch TV or play video games than read poetry.
I think it’s true that most young men & women would rather watch TV or play video games, but I think that has more to do with the ubiquity of those media and what seems like a generally decreased cultural attention span than it does about the move away from formalism in art & poetry. Forms have power, but uninspired metrical lines or rhyme schemes are a lot less gripping to me than the more freewheeling lines of, say, Ted Berrigan or Bernadette Mayer – to say nothing of the “formal” but not traditionally metrical work of someone like Robert… Read more »
Aaron: That’s not really fair… Several of them may be classed that way, but that doesn’t stop them being bloody good! Perhaps it highlights the problem of coverage of other poets even further, but I’m not going to toss my favourite books in the bin just because they don’t fairly represent poets in the UK and US today. Incidentally, my absolute favourite poets are women (Pascale Petit, Polly Clark, Vicki Feaver, Jackie Kay, Sharon Olds, Maxine Kumin). Also, I wouldn’t say Simon Armitage was middle-class – his earlier stuff almost certainly wasn’t. Neither was he middle-aged when he started out!
Hope I didn’t offend – I was just teasing, but maybe didn’t take time to do it properly. The perils of being online at work!
Monkey, I think we’re on the same page. Though speaking of poetry & xbox, there’s an amusing collection out there called Blue Wizard is About to Die on just that theme.
Trichquestions, glad you liked what I had to say! (Most of my favorite poets these days are from the UK, incidentally). But I was surprised that the favorite poets you mention are all white straight middle aged middle classed men!
Aaron: I actually said ‘Woo hoo!’ after reading your comment 🙂 As a poet myself, I identified 100% with everything you said. In the UK, the poetry scene is heavily dominated by men, )usually white, straight, middle-aged and middle-class). There are some excellent magazines with fair representation but it’s slow going. Slam or performance poetry often has better representation. Myself, I’m totally mystified by anyone who sees poetry as ‘feminine’. Female poets are often criticised for sounding too much ‘like women’ when they write! Many of my favourite poets are men (I even like Bukowski’s poems, despite the fact that… Read more »
Poetry was composed in verse, and often with rhyme, to make it easier to memorise in a pre-literate age. The bards who could recite poetry from memeory were the repository of culture in a society that had no written language.
‘Free verse’, non-rhyming poetry is mainly art for its own sake, written chiefly for critics and other poets.
I wonder if in some people’s minds that a man can not like reading poetry for reasons other than “me macho uggg” or having a dullard mentality? Anyway for me, I can listen to poetry and lyrics just fine, but reading it is a painful waste of mental energy. I’m much more of an information type person. I like charts, graphs, and information dense styled writing. I also like reading things that are written clearly and concisely. I find poetry and most forms of fictional writing (in addition to magazine styled writing) to be meandering, to beat around the bush…just… Read more »
I’m not much for poetry, per se.
But there’s alot of music I listen to mostly for the lyrics.
TVTropes knows everything. 😉
“What happened to the tradition of the Warrior Poet?”
Who knows? But thank god it’s no longer with us.
Aaron: you make a lot of good points. I was really writing based on my own observations of mainstream culture, not to mention my experience as a bookseller. While there are many male poets currently writing, for many poetry is considered a feminine thing, kind of the way cooking is perceived even though a lot of chefs are male. By “pedestal” I did not mean its status as high literature. I meant that poetry used to be considered mainstream entertainment (I’m talking over 100 years ago) I thought that this attempt to make poetry palatable to men was silly and… Read more »
(or pretty much the book of Psalms… “Saul killed his thousands, David his tens of thousands” intermixed with writing the vast majority of a book of poems?
What happened to the tradition of the Warrior Poet? http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Vivec_(god) They say The Iliac Bay Is the place to barrel around Without a bit of apparel on, As advertised in that carol song A tune that’s sung as the west wind blows About it lovely not wearing any clothes. Ladies singing high notes, men singing lows, Implying that the most luscious depravity And complete absence of serious gravity Can only be found in the waterous cavity Of Iliac Bay. If you are the type who is more a sinner than a sinned, You’ll find it all in Morrowind. But the… Read more »
I’d like to say (I’m speaking as a slam poet with a huge interest in hip-hop) that while hip-hop deserves the same respect as any other poetic form, most rappers I’ve talked to seem quite happy to have hip-hop referred to separately from poetry. Poetry and rap imply two different formats for writing (the rhythms and rhyme scheme of most rap follows a different set of”rules” than either traditional rhyming poetry or free verse).
This is one of my favorite blogs, and I’ve been meaning to comment for awhile now. I only wish I wasn’t so grumpy about this post. I have to take issue with a lot of the assumptions and assertions here. If poetry has fallen off its pedestal, I think that can only be a good thing. More people are writing than ever before, and thanks to the relative ease of access to cheap publishing software and the internet, it’s easier than ever to find new and interesting poets writing in a variety of different modes. For example, CAConrad, Tim Peterson,… Read more »
No discussion of sexual poetry would be complete without Catullus 16 (probably deserves a trigger warning for implied rape):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16
My favorite, I dunno the term, narrative poem I guess, is The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser, who was the man. It was written around Shakespeare’s time, so it’s modern English, but Spenser idolized Chaucer so much that in his prose he tried to imitate the style of Canterbury Tales, while still keeping it readable for his audience. The result is a weird yet somehow awesome hybrid of modern and Middle English. So yeah, it’s challenging (also long as shit, and incomplete) but I’d seriously recommend it. I’m of the opinion that every high school student should read the Odyssey.… Read more »
Pat: perhaps I should have phrased it differently. What I meant is that often it seems to me that some people object to the idea that a work of art or literature can have more than one meaning. I’ve had dozens if not hundreds of arguments with people over what a particular movie “really” meant. If you disagree, no problem, it wasn’t my main point.
Good post. Yeah, poetry became too gay or at least was associated that way-too bad. Although to be honest poetry in general bored me. I know, I’m probably a philistine. Best poem, I still can recite, by a young pilot in the the raf, an American via Canada that lasted 3 weeks on the flight line. “High flight”. Heard his mother deliver the poem at the wright-patterson afb dedication to her son and a subsequent display of his gear. I’m not ashamed, I cried like a baby. Used to hear it on tv sign off in the late 60’s and… Read more »
I agree with the sentiment of your article, but “the idea of metaphor is wishy-washy”? Really? There are plenty of actual examples of gender norm enforcement out there for you to call out without making things up.
This, on the other hand, is just fun:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Jabberwocky
Here’s one of my favorite poems. The imagery is so strange, but the line about “the best lack all conviction…” is spot on:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(Yeats)