Poetry is the crown of literature. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

– W. Somerset Maugham                    

1.

Poetry doesn’t earn you a cent in the bank. It is not an agent of political change. It doesn’t even get you girls anymore. The thing that Pound called “news that stays news” is dead and Auden’s oft misquoted “Poetry makes nothing happen” reinforces all of the above. In the eyes of today’s power-players - politicians, CEOs, and media moguls - poetry does not get you votes, does not generate revenue, and does nothing to change the world in a material way. Poetry, they would argue, is a colossal waste of time.

So if these shapers of thought and life feel this way, who can blame the “masses” for not giving poetry its due? Even the literary community sends mixed messages about poetry’s utility as a respected art form. It is not unusual these days to find fiction authors, publishers and reviewers - literary gatekeepers - basking in the limelight, while poetry is relegated to the back of the literary bus, lip-serviced perhaps, but out of sight, and marginalized.

It is hard to pin the blame on any one thing or group. Poets themselves are not exempt from criticism: Some take pride in perpetuating the inequity, particularly those whose second home is the hermetically-sealed ivory tower, those who work hard to make poetry a cerebral art, something that will set them apart from the dim-witted masses. This is especially true of the formalists and the so-called language poets, both of whom seem more interested in being published, reviewed and archived in the annals of obscure or unread literary magazines than engaging in the here and now.

Poets, today, are the poor cousins of fiction writers, despite the recent proliferation of poetry slams, poetry blogs and e-zines, open mic nights, and creative writing programs breathing new life into the form. Poets are not readily recognized at galas and award ceremonies; their works are not featured in newspapers or discussed at book clubs. Rarely are they studied in depth in high school. In Canada, the media further exacerbates the problem by giving the winners of fiction prizes top billing over those who write in other genres. Newspapers are exuberant in their reports of who won the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award for fiction while other GG winners, including poets, are attributed a polite mention somewhere in the final paragraphs of a news report.

There is no doubt that the gamut of poetry is vast; some of it is great; most, not so great. This is also true of other genres. Poetry ranges from intensely subjective (some might say confessional) explorations of the self to a more prosaic poetry of the world to explorations of new forms and theories but, essentially, all of it involves the formidable task of harnessing the raw imagination in order make the reader “see a world in a grain of sand” as Blake so aptly observed.

Good poetry is a lot more than navel-gazing; in fact, poetry makes nothing HAPPEN, to contextualize Auden:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Simply put, poetry is the journey. Fiction, on the other hand, takes people on a journey, connecting the dots for readers from start to finish. Its most celebrated authors are masters of characterization and adroit engineers of structure. Just about anyone with average intelligence and wit can read competent prose and extract the main ideas (or narrative) therein.

It takes a superior mind¹ to read poetry. It takes a superior mind to read poetry in the same way it takes a superior mind to “read” an abstract work of art (as compared to figurative and representational or realistic art whose goal is verisimilitude). Consider Cornelius Krieghoff’s habitant scenes of mid-19th century Quebec with their brilliant colours and remarkable attention to detail. These works made him the most popular painter in Canada in his day. Although most academics would claim that perfect representation in art is elusive, no one would argue with the fact that the landscapes and portraits depicted in his canvases were clearly derived from real object sources, making Krieghoff’s renderings easily recognizable. It was and still is the perfect art for Everyman.

In the case of Krieghoff, one can be a passive recipient and still get a great deal out of the splashes on the canvas. That is because realistic art is easier on the palate. Works that are abstract, non-objective or nonfigurative, on the contrary, showcase a departure from accurate representation using the visual language of form, color and line. They exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world and therefore require more engagement on the part of the viewer. The subject or theme of such works is not easily discernible on first glance. A viewer has to work harder to make sense of abstract paintings by artists like Pierre Gauvreau and Jean-Paul Riopelle.

Extending this analogy to the literary realm, I would suggest that writers of poetry have a greater challenge on the page than writers of fiction— for a number of reasons. Poets are insatiable seekers of the right word, the right turn of phrase. Not only do poets choose their words for clarity and concision – as all good writers do – they also consider each word's emotive qualities and musical value. Poets have the added responsibility of attending to the work’s spatial appearance on the page. And unlike fiction, poetry often has a purpose that extends beyond the literal: nudging (or shocking) the reader into revelation, insight, and a deeper understanding of Truth and Beauty.

For the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, poetry is what “makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing." More recently, Canadian scholar and poet A.F. Moritz argued that

Poetry is, above every other human endeavor, the place where person and society are not merely joined but revealed in their original unity. Poetry is the place where the strange, painful division we have created between person and society is suffered, despaired over, denounced, subjected to comparison with memories and dreams and myths of better times, and given the gift of a prophecy: that the proper unity still and always persists, and that it can become the world we actually live in, not just in verse, but on both sides of our front door.²

Moritz is clearly advocating for the universal, dynamic and cathartic properties of poetry. Sometimes you have to work for its “prophecy” the way you have to work to get the lobster out of the shell. One way or another, poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom, as Robert Frost noted.

In dictatorships, where people face political persecution for their writings, poets are often called upon to capture the horror and suffering of the place and to make it truly visible. Here, brevity (in contrast to fiction) is a plus. A few words can become the rallying cry of the people. In the eyes of the masses, they are the voices of the witness as well as Shelley’s unacknowledged legislators of the world. In peaceful countries such as Canada, on the other hand, poetry serves no such purpose.

In the early years, Canadian literature was mainly poetry. It shaped our vision of place and time and self. It gave us a mirror into which we looked for our real identity. But, alas, history is selective— because those who write about history are selective. This is especially true of the literary custodians of CanLit – agents, publicists, publishers, booksellers, book reviewers and editors – who act as mediators between writers and the public. They write the narrative for the literate “masses.” They are the ones who keep fiction front and centre. When Toronto became the literary capital of Canada back in the 1960s, it behaved toward the rest of the country as though it were always thus. Its fiction writers – Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Robertson Davies and others – as well as influential literary theorist Northrop Frye came on like gangbusters and in no time this was the work that dominated the Canadian literary landscape. Much of it was deserved.

But where does that leave poetry? Each year, major literary festivals in Canada – The Harbourfront Reading Series in Toronto and Blue Metropolis in Montreal – devote a greater number of their events to prose (fiction and non-fiction) in their programming than to poetry. They do this because prose draws the people and the drawing of people determines the size of the grants that festival organizers are able to obtain from granting agencies. And size does matter.

Where does that leave the literary presses, many of which were started up by poets (e.g. Anansi, Coach House, Véhicule), who wish to be featured at these festivals? It is not unusual for such presses – some with barely enough to stay afloat and far fewer resources – to allot more of their promotion budget to their fiction writers than to their poets. Who today remembers that poetry put CanLit on the map? More accurately, poetry hailing from Montreal. Who remembers that many major modernist English language writers either grew up, lived, or spent time in Montreal during his/her formative writing period? Of course, a good many of these were poets, among them Frank Scott, A.J.M. Smith, A.M. Klein, P.K. Page, Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, Raymond Souster, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, and Milton Acorn.

And yet, somehow, poetry has moved into the dark recesses of our collective cultural consciousness. Things are pretty much as they were in Auden’s time when a poet could “earn much more money writing or talking about his art” than he could by practising it. In English Montreal, in spite of a vibrant scene, poetry – with its limited or non-existent media coverage – still gets short shrift, apart from the short-lived buzz surrounding an annual prize awarded by the Quebec Writers’ Federation every November. And even then, The Gazette, the local newspaper, focuses its attention primarily on the prose winners. On the bookstore front, Chapters-Indigo, which takes its orders from Toronto, does little to promote poetry, let alone the poets of Montreal. The chain has managed to kill off most of the independent bookstores and with it, the main venue for poetry book distribution. The poets themselves further contribute to the problem through their own lack of cohesiveness as a group: The various personalities and cliques – spoken word, university-based, formalist, feminist, language-based, etc. – rarely cross over to support each other or discuss the larger problem of invisibility.

2.

I spend a great deal of the school year visiting Canadian students in their classrooms, many of whom are boys with little or no interest in literature let alone poetry. The teachers who invite me are usually innovative ones who understand the educational value of inviting local authors to meet their students. I have done these poetry workshops for nearly two decades now. The main task I set for myself during these visits is to explain why poetry is such a sublime art. This after my startling confession that, despite having published seven volumes of poetry and edited a dozen others, as a youngster, I hated it.

On the whole, students don’t really get how a poem differs from prose. One or two usually trot out the misconception that one rhymes and one doesn’t. I no longer ask them the question. A couple of years ago, I came to the realization that students might acquire a better understanding of the heart and soul of each of the literary genres if I deconstructed for them what it is that writers do with their time. In some ways it is an oversimplification, but it certainly puts them on the right track. Much of it has to do with “surface” area. My explanation requires getting them to visualize each of the genres – novel, short story, and poem – through the simple analogy of the “shrinking” canvases of art.

The novel, I tell them, can be compared to the sprawling floor-to-ceiling oil painting you would find in a museum. Such canvases are vast in terms of the space they cover, in the same way that a novel is a sweeping story that involves numerous characters and a proliferation of subplots. A fat Charles Dickens novel like Bleak House effectively drives home the point. In a senior high school class, I might mention some examples of contemporary Canadian fiction like Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes or Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees. In truth, any novel fits the bill. Novelists can afford to wander off on tangents; can spend an entire chapter describing the mole on a character’s face.

I draw a smaller box on the blackboard and introduce a new visual into the equation, something that might fit onto a half wall in the museum. See how the space is reined in? I ask. The artist here has less room to spread his paint. This is the short story, I tell them. With fewer pages, the author has far less space to tell his story. Less space means one main plot, possibly a subplot, and only a handful of characters. The short story writer has to be choosy about what tangents he goes off on, what places and things he describes for the reader.

They are nodding. They see where this is going.

The poem, I conclude, is a very small painting on the wall. Maybe it is only a pen and ink. Maybe there is only one thing to look at – a lone autumn tree, for instance. Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials, said Ezra Pound.

Does anyone know what a haiku is? A few uncertain hands go up. They know it is a special kind of poem. The Japanese form is an even smaller small painting on the wall. The great challenge for the writer of haiku is employing an economy of words, a mere 17 syllables, to paint the elemental Beauty and Truth of a particular universe.

The great challenge for any poet is to make nothing happen.

And the great challenge for the reader to develop a mind that can experience that.

3.

Language is standard fare for the writer. All writers must attend to diction, to concrete specific detail. They must breathe fire into their words. Writers of all genres must rein in (and retain) their audience. They must avoid, at all costs, having the reader stop and wonder why s/he is reading this. This is the litmus test.

It still surprises me (though I don’t know why) that so much underwhelming prose – both fiction and non-fiction - gets published in this country. (The same might be said of poetry but at least when a poetry book is bad, only a small segment of the literate public ever gets wind of it, thanks to its virtual invisibility in the real world).

Most people, especially fellow writers, are shocked when I tell them that I am a reluctant reader of fiction, in particular novels. They assume that for now I am a poet, but that surely one day I will wake up and smell the coffee. Even my own publisher has said it to me. This is not to say that I haven’t read my fair share, having attended university in the days when getting an Arts degree meant having to read the moderns and the classics (not, as one teacher recently told me, by “texting your way” through).

Truth be told, I prefer to sit down with a book of non-fiction. Too many times while I am reading fiction, I stop and wonder why it is that I am reading about the imagined world that I am reading about. More often than not, the writing is flat or uninspired and the story isn’t compelling enough to make up for it.³

Perhaps poetry, for all that it is, has ruined fiction for me. Perhaps it is because, as Robert Lowell argued, poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event (emphasis mine). It takes phenomenal skill to make the record of an event an event. So-and-so who has been in the public eye for this or that reason is not automatically a compelling writer of prose. Furthermore, a writer’s somewhat eventful life lived out in an assortment of cities around the world does not a riveting memoir make – unless of course, the language is so superb it takes your breath away. Or unless the work is imbued with the writer’s unique voice or eccentric nature, is literally dripping in it. Montrealer Joel Yanofsky is a wonderful writer of prose because of his wry sense of humour and his meticulous eye for detail. He makes me want to keep reading. The much praised Neil Bissoondath, on the other hand, makes me want to give up reading altogether. And he is not the only one.

Contemporary works of fiction that truly excite me are those which come closest to poetry on one level or another. Toni Morrison’s novels do it for me. In terms of language, she has the sensibility of a poet, and this is in addition to being a wonderful storyteller. Michael Ondaatje, with his poet’s eye, also has this sensibility. Closer to home, Denise Roig, the author of two collections of short stories and a memoir about her year in a Montreal pastry school, is an accomplished but underappreciated prose writer who would probably get her dues if she ever published a novel, especially if she published that novel in Toronto. Roig’s voice is confident and unwavering, and over the years, she has developed an uncanny knack of mining the poetry of Life with a few deft brushstrokes. Other notable short story collections include Julie Keith’s The Jaguar Temple and other Stories, nominated for a Governor General Award, Neil Smith’s Bang Crunch, and Ann Diamond’s Snakebite, a powerful sequence of stories set in contemporary Montreal. Diamond is, not surprisingly, also a poet. While there is a dearth of pretty bland, nondescript novels coming from the city that produced Mordecai Richler, Brian Moore, Hugh MacLennan, Clark Blaise and others, Fall by Colin McAdam and De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage are two fine novels that work as hard as poetry does to move the reader. So does Gail Scott’s densely poetic 1988 novel Heroine, about a woman trying to negotiate a personal journey from Quebec's politically turbulent 70's to the threatening bleakness of the 80's. These writers’ narrative skills are so refined or their language is so edgy that their fiction approaches, if not approximates, poetry.

4.

Poetry requires an engaged mind. It requires a willingness on the part of the reader to spend time with it. It requires contemplation. The average reader sprawled on a beach towel or riding the crowded Métro would just as soon plough through a work of fiction and move onto the next 700-page doorstop. Poetry does not lend itself to instant gratification. Its perceived impenetrability has caused immeasurable damage to our society: “The exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind, ” Octavio Paz said. It is high time, in my view, for poetry to assume its rightful place in our collective consciousness.

Two things need to change in order for poetry to become truly embedded in the fabric of our culture. The first step involves the general education of the population. High school educators who teach poetry as part of the curriculum of English Literature need to believe that poetry is an integral part of our cultural heritage in order to be effective instruments of change. They themselves need to be readers of poetry. They need to genuinely embrace the fact that poetry is, as Paz argued,“the best of humankind.” Despite recent efforts by a small percentage of forward-thinking teachers, our education system has perpetuated the myth that poetry is solely the output of a select group of “dead white males.” Studying the works of Blake, Poe, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and others, devoid of any kind of meaningful context, has succeeded in alienating too many of our students, who are often left perplexed and hanging on every word of the teacher, the only one they believe capable of unearthing the “mystery” locked within.

Teachers as a group must begin to consider the educational value of inviting real live poets into the classroom to discuss the aesthetics of their practice as an effective complement to the dry study of canonical works. Students and teachers alike must be convinced that the words of poets – past and present – resonate and will continue to resonate in their lives. They must subscribe to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s view that “the poet not only articulates the consciousness of his time but also becomes its conscience⁴. In his essay “Can Poetry Really Change the World?” Ferlinghetti also notes that “The greatest poets not only change the way we see the world but also cause us to question our perception and interpretation of everyday reality.”

The second necessary change will happen once poetry’s intrinsic value is recognized, once there is a major shift in popular thinking. Once it is understood that poets, as free agents, operate from a privileged position of knowing, one that has little to do with extrinsic considerations like commercial profit or political gain. Once it is understood that poets are, as Ferlinghetti asserts, free spirits “dedicated to truth and beauty.” This may sound idealistic given the televised, hyper-connected, consumer world we live in. It may well take generations for any change to come about but this doesn’t make it any less true. A population raised on Whitman and others will play an active role in ensuring that poetry becomes part of the literary infrastructure of the nation. It will ensure its visibility in the media and on existing public and social networking sites. It will ensure its viability.

The media has an important role to play in this. For now, the literate public of this country has allowed the media - including the CBC, our national broadcaster - through its glamorization of fiction prizes and gala award dinners, to determine whose books should be on the nation’s bedside table. Initiatives like Canada Reads – the annual "battle of the books" competition organized and broadcast CBC Radio in which five personalities extol the merits of a chosen title – perpetuates this view. Since it was launched in 2002, the championed works have been top-heavy in the fiction category even though works of drama and poetry are permissible.

The public has been a willing participant in the perpetuation of the myth that, somehow, poetry is good for us, like cod liver oil, but that after high school, fiction is only the real yardstick by which to measure the literacy of a nation. Well-intentioned elementary and high schools have introduced independent silent reading programs into their curriculum, but generally tend to privilege novels over other forms. In Canada, we have let the big publishing houses of fiction, mostly centred in Toronto, dictate what kind of work (usually the novel) generates worthwhile returns. It has fattened the pockets of Chapters-Indigo founder Heather Reisman whose “picks” for the best reading in Canada dominate the book pages of our mainstream national newspapers.

Poetry is not simply something we dig up (like a dusty book) when we want to say something profound about our loved ones at a wedding or baptism or just before we bury them. Poetry has power – to return to Auden – to create something, an event, a happening, out of an apparent void. Poetry breathes life into what was once nothing. It does it with élan. It does it nimbly with a few choice brushstrokes. It does it in a way that prose cannot.

Like the difference between a realistic painting and an abstract one, prose exists in the lines on the page while “poetry exists between the lines,” to quote Ferlinghetti. Poetry is the “voice of dissent against the waste of words and the mad plethora of print.”⁵

 

---

• 1 Such a mind may be cultivated; one is not necessarily born with it. It simply requires a willingness to be curious, and a desire to actively engage with the work.
• 2 Moritz, A.F.. What Man Has Made of Man. October 30, 2009. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=238054
• 3 The fiction I have been reading these days is mostly that which is penned by my friends in the literary community (mostly Montreal writers), and occasionally that from other regions of the country which has had wide appeal and a good recommendation from those I consider to be reliable sources. Because this essay is principally about poetry, the few digressions into prose – by no means exhaustive – will focus on my contemporaries in Quebec.
• 4 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, Can Poetry Really Change the World? San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 1999.
• 5 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. What is Poetry?: A Non-Lecture (rough draft of an ars poetica delivered on the occasion of his receiving the frost medal, 2003.) http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/awards/frost_and_shelley/frost_medal_lectures/lawrence_ferlinghetti