THE MORNING RANT: Let’s Be Done with Bad Poetry by Reviving Masculine Poetry

A poet named Anne Carson was just awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her writing is everything you would expect it to be – pretentious yet unintelligible, with just a hint of the tender eros you might find in a lesbian biker bar.

The New Yorker has long been a fan of Ms. Carson’s work, and in an article celebrating her Nobel Prize, the magazine noted that Carson (along with 2022 winner Annie Ernaux) ”have pursued forms of writing that constrain a terrible excess of feeling—that give shape and weight to the maelstrom of passion.” I actually admire the ability to write nonsense like that. It sounds deep while being comically vapid, impressing faux-intellectuals.

Among Ms. Carson’s literary talents is writing “poetry” lacking both rhyme and meter.

Back in 2001, the New Yorker featured one of Ms. Carson’s “poems” in an unironic way, even though this could be the poster child for awful poetry. A spilled bowl of alphabet soup would be more poetic than “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions.” Here is a snippet of it:

It’s good to be neuter.
I want to have meaningless legs.
There are things unbearable.
One can evade them a long time.
Then you die.

The oceans remind me
of your green room.
There are things unbearable.
Scorn, princes, this little size
of dying.

The art of poetry has been lost to the same cultural destructors who have done so much damage to the fine arts. Poetry lives on mainly in music nowadays, since the elite poetry crowd now fully rejects the language structure that once defined poems.

Because I like to write, I admire good writing. It’s why I’m always curious who the songwriter is when I hear a great song, because the lyrics in music are a form of poetry. In fact, under a different alias I have done some songwriting and even earned some royalties from it. That also means I’m a poet. And if you’re a guy who likes music with lyrics, you’re a guy who likes poetry.

Having now established that poetry can be masculine, I’d like to lament the loss of great masculine poetry. Below the fold are a few paragraphs from a recent David Marcus piece titled “Why We Must Make Poetry Manly Again” which addresses this specific topic. But first however, I’d like to share a few stanzas from the great poems that we once learned as children:

Casey at the Bat

I had to recite a poem at school as a child. Being a baseball nut, I chose “Casey at the Bat.” Decades later I can still recite that entire poem. (But I can’t remember what my weekend plans are.) Here are the final two stanzas:

The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate;
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville - mighty Casey has struck out.

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

In my early adult years, before I started re-reading American history, I had already forgotten much of what I had learned about the American Revolution. But I never forgot about the midnight ride of Paul Revere, because my classmates and I had to read and recite Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” in school. That is the power of telling a story by poem or song.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

----------------------------------------------------

One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.

Robert Service

Robert Service’s poetry is very frequently about tough men fighting to survive in harsh conditions, especially the arctic north. I first discovered his poetry on a whiskey sign, of all places. I was at a college party and there was a metal Yukon Jack sign hanging on the wall inscribed with these lines from “The Heart of the Sourdough.”

I have clinched and closed with the naked North,
I have learned to defy and defend;
Shoulder to shoulder we have fought it out
Yet the Wild must win in the end.

It made me want to learn more about Mr. Service, so I bought a book of his poems at a mall book store. Robert Service’s most famous poem is The Cremation of Sam McGee.” It tells the tale of a Tennessee boy who is gold mining in the Yukon and succumbing to the cold. His dying wish is to be cremated upon his death so that his body may finally know warmth again. (It is regrettable that the meaning of the word “queer” was appropriated for other meanings since this poem was written in 1907.) Here are the opening lines:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

In closing, here are a few paragraphs from that David Marcus piece I referenced: “Why We Must Make Poetry Manly Again.” I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Throughout English-speaking history, up until about 50 years ago, there had always been men famous in their day for writing beautiful poetry, from William Shakespeare, to Lord Byron, to Robert Frost. Yet, sadly today, our society does not see the poet as a manly figure at all.

This erasure of male voices in poetry was not an accident. Like so many of our society’s woes, it was created by a leftist elite in the academy and publishing who thought that women’s voices had been too long ignored, and men’s too widely celebrated.

Suddenly, over the past year, we have seen a slew of articles and think pieces asking, what happened to the literary man?

What happened, more or less, was a disastrous decision to tell young men there is nothing masculine about literature, and especially not about poetry.

----------------------------------------------------

You want to raise a good son? Give him Kipling for backbone, Yeats for heart, Eliot for wisdom, and Frost for common sense, and he will be fooled by nothing in this world.

Real men read history, literature, and poetry. It’s time for some new artistic channels to open up for modern poetry containing rhyme, meter, and testosterone.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

| Access Comments