For today’s post we at Generation Bubble hand the reins over to a guest editor, a certain individual who came to us looking to air his opinion on contemporary poetry. Emboldened by our tangle with poet Annie Finch a month ago, we were eager to jump back into this subject to see what further controversy we could stir, so we gladly availed him of our forum. Our guest editor’s credentials check out. He knows of what he speaks. We should, however, add that his opinion is not necessarily ours.

The German philosopher and cultural critic Theodor Adorno may have claimed that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, but, were he alive today, he wouldn’t worry. For writing poetry — good poetry — seems nearly impossible these days, if the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century is any indication, especially when it comes to practitioners who belong to my own generation. I used Legitimate Dangers recently in a literary analysis course I teach. My assumption was that, because poetry grows an ever more specialized and obscure mode of literary expression, the only thing which could offset such a drift toward irrelevance was to teach poetry written by my students’ near contemporaries in the hope that at least the often racy and timely subject matter would capture their attention.

The results of the course were uneven, because the anthology itself is terribly uneven — something I should have expected, since the contributors are, as the anthology’s subtitle indicates, “poets of the new century.” I’m not suggesting that ce jeune siècle is without matter to be poetically treated; it’s just that the poetry in this anthology tends to be … well … a bit predictable, and, in many cases, more than a bit puerile. Much of it seems workshopped to death, membra disjecta of some MFA program that have had all the expressive marrow sucked from them, leaving only the hollow bones of contrived formal novelty — evidence of possibilities lost as opposed to opportunities seized. And others seem a bit too precious and shallow for my taste: identity–political catechisms of an annoyingly petit-bourgeois sort, as if the guilty poets deliberately set out to confirm my suspicion that poetry has become a boutique industry, a playground of the mind for New–Urbanist bohos as they absently wipe lattè foam from their iBooks and survey their not-as-remarkable-as-they’d-have-us-believe psychic panoramas.

The song of myself: a Legitimate Dangers contributing poetaster.

Not all the poetry is bad, though. I recommend Dave Berman’s contributions (full disclosure: I’m a Silver Jews fan), as well as Mark Bibbins’s and Jeffrey McDaniel’s. And there are a few others that stand as nimbly executed exercises in PoMo self-consciousness. But, all in all, the “poets of the new century” represented in Legitimate Dangers suggest to me the only real danger is the creeping decline of poetry itself.

Part of the problem, I imagine, is that poetry these days represents an item of consumption, a geegaw to marvel at for its technical sophistication. The public, especially when it’s exhorted to celebrate the mandated “Poetry Month” of April, is expected to cast an appreciative if not entirely understanding eye upon poetry as a feat of engineering virtuosity, much the same way magazine ads for a Mercedes Maybach caress us with its list of technical specs, or the way wonks at Wired rhapsodize over an Apple iPhone (“It’s a cell phone and mp3 player … and so much more!).

I guess what I have in mind is poetry as a spectacle that engenders a class of experts to mediate its masterful performance for the rest of us; so much criticism these days seems fit more for technical specialists than true scholars — “author-period-genre” compartmentalization and highly specific interpretive procedures in the interest of individual advancement. It may just be that our engagements with poetry and ad-copy are fundamentally not so different after all. Each involves a complex tangle of knowingness, naïveté, envy and attraction, among other things.

This sounds like some limpid New-Critical insight, I know, but perhaps its in the unique configuration and intensities of the encounter between a particular poem and a particular reader that constitute authentic experience. Authenticity resides in the event of reading the poem, not in how we digest it the poem for our own purposes or for the edification of others.