Ambition and Survival by Christian Wiman

Author:Christian Wiman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

2004

*Here and elsewhere I’m not referring to art images, which certainly do have depth, interiority, etc., but which have no more purchase on our collective imagination than poetry does.

In Praise of Rareness

Every time we print an issue of Poetry that has more prose than poetry in it, we get at least one letter of complaint. These complaints vary in tone and temperateness, but inevitably there are sentences that run something like this: “Given the nature of your journal, and given its very name, what’s with all the prose? Couldn’t you use those pages for more poems? Shouldn’t poetry be your emphasis?”

Well, yes and no. Yes, poetry should be (and most definitely is) our emphasis; but no, that does not necessarily translate into publishing more of it. In fact, I think a strong case can be made that the more respect you have for poetry, the less of it you will find adequate to your taste and needs. There is a limit to this logic, of course, or else Plato would be the patron saint of the art. But still, an overdeveloped appetite for poetry is no guarantee of taste or even of love, and institutionalized efforts at actually encouraging the overconsumption of poetry always seem a bit freakish, ill-conceived, and peculiarly American, like those mythic truck stops where anyone who can eat his own weight in rump roast doesn’t have to pay for it.

Reading through old literary journals is not an activity I would ordinarily recommend, but it can be instructive in this context. People who know the history of Poetry usually point to a couple of indisputably high moments: the first under Harriet Monroe, who published the early work of just about all of the major Modernists; and the second under Henry Rago, who was on the whole more eclectic and adventurous than Monroe. It’s interesting, then, to look at a couple of memorable issues from those times.

In June of 1915 Monroe, in a now-famous story, took the advice of Poetry’s foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound, and printed the first published poem of T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The other contributors of verse in that issue include Skipweth Cannell, William Griffith, Georgia Wood Pangborn, Dorothy Dudley, Bliss Carman, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Ajan Syrian, all of whose work sounds pretty much like this:

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