In light of the recent death of Val Kilmer and the recent announcement that I will be appointed Santa Barbara Poet Laureate for 2025-2027 (with no guarantee poetry, the country, or you and me will be here for the full two years), I recalled an op-ed I wrote while I was a lecturer in the English Department at Penn State way back in 1991. Thanks to the internets, everything you've ever written can eventually surface. I was young(er) then, so excuse my impudent tone, but I think this holds up.
Groove to the Beat, But Don't Call Rock Stars Poets
originally published May 1, 1991
Ah, for the days of yore, when exams smelled of fresh mimeograph fluid, and the end of the semester had, as it should, its own distinct stink. To recapture some of the magic of those long-gone days, I thought I'd give Collegian readers a pop exam.
Name three living poets.
I'm waiting.
One living poet?
OK, I heard somebody whisper Jim Morrison. One: He's not living. Two: He never was a poet, so even if he is alive on that island of the Dead and Famous, it doesn't matter. In fact, Oliver Stone and The Doors movie did more to misrepresent poetry than anything since Dead Poets Society, which proffered the mind-numbingly regular metrics of "O Captain, My Captain" as the peak of Whitman.
As for The Doors, believe it or not, most poets don't see Native American dancing about when they write. Most poets do not do enough drugs to make their hearts explode at 27. Most poets don't have naked honeys groove to their words (yeah, here I'm bitter, as a sometime poet myself.) Most important, most poets don't write endless drivel to their diddle; Morrison was as phallocentric as a Maypole.
Yet, it's not surprising a director as heavy-handed as the aptly named Stone would find Morrison a worthy successor to Blake and Byron. Stone, who in Platoon reduced Vietnam to a facile struggle between good and evil father figures, only to decide that "we have met the enemy, and he is us" (too bad we killed lots of Vietnamese to find out.) Stone, who in Wall Street reduced the greedy grabbing of the 1980s to a facile struggle between good and evil father figures, only to decide that "we have met the enemy, and he is us" (too bad trickle-down economics left more people poor than at any time since the Depression).
Stone is simple-minded, and Morrison is a poet for the simple. Sure, he was a Sure, he was a magnetic rock star, and the band helped open up rock music to the influences of jazz, but to call Morrison a poet is ridiculous. Such a claim makes lines like "we need great golden copulations," "death and my cock are the world," and "mute nostril agony" something they aren't.
And, no, I'm not just saying rock lyrics are hackwork and poetry is ethereal. Rock lyrics can deepen music, can create emotion and mood, can even sparkle. But it's enough to call them good lyrics; we don't need to elevate them to the haughty level of poetry to bestow greatness upon them. It's fine for Elvis Costello to do his thing, and for Wallace Stevens to do another. (Costello is much better singing about blue chairs than blue guitars, and as for Stevens . . . well, studies have shown no insurance salesman can rock out.) As a teacher of mine once said, "The term art merely means 'I like it a whole bunch.'"
But, as Raymond Chandler wrote, "All good art is entertainment and anyone who says differently is a stuffed shirt and juvenile at the art of living." Following Chandler, I want to suggest something much more revolutionary -- that poetry is entertainment. That living people write it. That it takes work to do and isn't the product of lightning bolts or chemical muses. That if more people read poetry, the world might be a better place.
While the violins warm up in the background, and I climb a soapbox taller than Mount Nittany, settle on in. I'm going to make a pitch for poetry.
Poetry attests to complexity; as Valery said, "All lofty thinking ends in a sigh." Poetry is honest exploration in a television world where the only question is How to get laid and the easy answer is Have the brightest smile and the driest underarms.
Poetry is difficult; that's why we run from it. It allows for lines like Bill Knott's, "Ancestor-silencing is difficult when you you're the one/ who forgot to patent the dodo." The syllables pile up so that we are forced to slow down, to halt our rush to evolution.
Poetry not only makes us re-think, but think. Instead of chowing down Pentagon-pushed myths of heroism, we get Jack Gilbert telling us "the abnormal is not courage: The marriage, not the month's rapture." Instead of the America first military mentality that makes football another form of ground war (of thee Whitney Houston lip-synchs), we get Rodney Jones dreaming up death as the ultimate fullback in the poem "Sweep," in which he writes, "I have been home three days, listening to an obituary."
Poetry is a mirror in which we see ourselves in the brightest light. In a poem about something as everyday as a radio request, Maria Flook writes: "It is difficult to humiliate desire;/ that in itself is important to note,/ if it is late at night/ and someone is saying, 'This is for that girl/ on the island, God bless her.'/ The sea is the same. I am the same. Fish swim/ to the false surface of the searchlight." Poetry lets Flook embrace pop music and all its pathos, while seeing through the bathos, lets her hold love up to hope, yet lament.
Yet lamenting poetry is what this column must do. Now, only poets read poetry; everybody else reads Kitty Kelley. Somewhere in too many minds hides the ghost of a high school English teacher who was nearly a ghost himself, reciting Verse in a trebly voice. (He's the same guy who taught you the five paragraph theme -- hunt him down and kill him.) And read some recent poetry; it might be a moment like this one described by Denis Johnson: "As the record falls and the snake-band chords begin/ to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones."
