Ambition
Added 2024-08-13 09:41:22 +0000 UTCSpoken word poetry has changed the way we see literature today. It’s served up easy, digestible poems that require little of us. They’re entertaining and fun to watch. I love them as much as the next person, but poetry slams are annihilating poetic ambition. Most spoken word poetry isn’t poetry at all, so the art is dying. Donald Hall calls this work “the McPoem.” Just like a McDonalds Burger, it’s made in under five minutes, eaten in one, then forgotten long after we’ve grown fat on it.
We write what we read. If our reading doesn’t challenge us, we never grow.
Gus Ferguson once said, “Poets outnumber poetry readers three to one.” He was right. There is no market for our art, and yet we are drawn to it. The trouble is that we’re drawn to easily digestible work that requires little of us, so we’ve lost our ambition.
This week, we’re writing homages to some of the best poets in history. They are great monuments, and they have a lot to teach. I spent much of my first decade breaking up those poems in order to understand them. I’d write homages because it forced me to really grapple with the components that made them great. That’s why I’m asking it of you this week—to work those muscles so that you don’t have to write McPoems.
T.S. Elliot said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
None of us are at the point of making great poems into something better, but we are learning how because it matters, because once you have all the tools at our disposal, we will feel free to achieve exactly what we hope to achieve. Many of us will never get there, but we do it in pursuit of good art and in respect of good art.
