There are times when a revelation comes along and knocks you off your donkey. With apologies to St. Paul, my particular moment was when I realized how much we all want our poems to be liked. Social media has a lot to do with this. How many “likes” did your poem get? How many “loves”? Then, there are those idiosyncratic folks who click “care,” which usually suggests to me that they may think my poem shows psychological suffering. If we didn’t want to see these responses and the comments that often go with them, we wouldn’t post links to our poems on Facebook or photos on Instagram. We are fooling ourselves, though, if we don’t connect what we’re writing with the responses we want to receive.
Many of the poets I like most are distinctly unlikeable. Some, like Lawrence, Pound, and Larkin, were, when alive, apparently detestable. It is much harder to think of poets you would actually want to invite to your home than it is to check off the ones you would go out of your way to avoid. But, what about their poems? Even a quick glance shows that often the best poems don’t want to be liked—they want to challenge us. Some of our greatest poets, such as Frost, Auden, or Christina Rossetti, go out of their way to present an innocuous, calm surface in certain poems, while a darker vision swims sharklike just underneath.
Perhaps great poets don’t want to be liked. I studied with Joseph Brodsky, and I truly don’t think he gave a damn whether readers “liked” his poems. Wisława Szymborska? While a charming personality comes through in her work, the poems themselves are tough and relentless. T.S. Eliot is pilloried on a regular basis these days for embodying personal and social values that most of us reject as quickly as possible, and for good reason. Certainly, Mr. Eliot did not care one bit whether I would like his extraordinary and aggravating poems. A walk along my bookshelves confirms it for me. Few of the poets that matter the most to me care whether I like them. They do not solicit my sympathy or affection.
This is not to say that we should all attempt to repulse the reader by writing poems full of ugly opinions and behaviors. Sadly—or maybe not sadly—that will not make us great writers. However, we should examine what response we’re looking for from our readers. Poets have always had friends to whom they showed their work and sought responses. For sure, they wanted those responses to be positive, and often they wanted to hear what worked and what didn’t. Ben Jonson’s remarks suggest that Shakespeare, though, may not have listened to his friend much regarding all those lines that remained unblotted. Before there were printing presses, there were manuscripts that were circulated among an elite audience of readers. For courtiers, a manuscript that received favorable attention from persons in power could result in social and financial success. They certainly wanted to be liked, or at least they wanted to be admired.
Skip ahead four or five hundred years, and the world is a different place. Literacy is no longer a privilege of the relatively well off, and poets in the United States are participants in an industry where thousands of students enroll in graduate programs to receive degrees that entitle them, assuming they can create a certain reputation, to teach incoming students who want the same careers. We don’t have to be critics of capitalism to discern that this system requires an ever-growing base of aspiring poets in order to survive. In the business and legal worlds, this is called a Ponzi scheme: the first investors are paid from investments made by new investors, not from actual profits. As long as there are new investors, everything seems fine, but if for any reason, the new investment stops, the whole system collapses.
This situation exists in poetry because of the nature of our product. Poems are infinitely reproduceable. If you can download it, scan it, memorize it, or write it down on the back of a napkin, you own a copy of that poem. Unlike a painting or a sculpture, a poem has no financial value as an aesthetic object. In other words, there are no auctions where poems are sold for millions of dollars. And, poems can’t be made into action movies. This translates at the publishing level into a situation where readers do not buy a book of poetry the way they may buy a best-selling novel. The people who read literary journals are, by and large, the same people who write for them and, of course, their relatives and close friends. These publications, with the exception of those with university financing, usually exist by virtue of publishers and editors who personally finance the journals and/or by charging reading fees to those who submit work for publication.
Back to the graduate programs. If the product made by the graduates is poetry, which has little or no financial value, then the programs can only be kept running and the graduates employed by continuous growth. The salaries of new graduates in the industry must be paid by students more newly matriculated. We could argue that this would be fine as long as it went on forever, but it can’t. Like any Ponzi scheme, it eventually reaches saturation of its market. The graduates have learned the skill of teaching students how to write poetry. The MFA is a studio degree, not a scholarly degree. Even a PhD with a creative dissertation is unlikely to help a graduate find a job in any area but the teaching of creative writing. There is a limit to the number of students who want to study poetry and a limit to those interested enough to get a degree in teaching it. The consequence is that the mechanism of the scheme slowly collapses, and the poets find themselves unemployed.
When Byron published The Corsair in 1814, it famously sold 10,000 copies in one day. That was then. Nowadays, as poets we inhabit the outskirts of financial society, scavenging what we can in the way of honors and publications. This is why “likes” have become so important. They take the place of material remuneration. Instead of payment, our satisfaction for the work that goes into our poems must lie in their reception. Are we liked? More importantly, what are we willing to do to be liked? Who are we willing to be?
Poets create identities in their poems. The best poets create the most distinct identities, but existing in poems as a distinct identity may cut off a part of the audience that rejects this identity. As a thought experiment, let’s imagine a spoken word poet who posts a link to a video of her performance. A formalist poet listens to this and keeps scrolling. The formalist poet may be rejecting the identity of the spoken word poet as presented in the performance as much as any possible flaw in the work itself. If we reversed the situation, with the formalist posting a dramatic monologue in blank verse, we could well see the same result. Neither is probably going to be “liked” by the other. If you are a devoted formalist or spoken word poet, this is something you probably accept, and you retreat to the castle walls of your own group where you are more likely to be appreciated.
The characters in our thought experiment fall at the extremes. Most of the poets published in literary journals write in free verse or roughened forms. The response to their poems will be based in a more nuanced reading. Are we willing to lose readers who may reject our subject matter, our references, our politics, or our cultural background? Are we willing to be unlikeable?
The algorithms and design of social media encourage support, encourage likes, but this may not be doing poets a favor. We need disagreement. We need poets to allow themselves to be distinct voices, ones that may make us uncomfortable. The same problem emerges in book reviews. The contemporary book review in a literary journal is supportive and well mannered. This is not a bad thing per se. It’s preferable to its opposite. But, if every book of poetry that’s reviewed is treated as though it’s a fragile child, then what is the purpose of the review beyond advertisement?
Let’s go to another thought experiment. If you knew the poem you were working on was never going to be published in your lifetime and would never be posted for responses on social media, how would that poem be different? I’d guess everyone’s first reaction would be to proclaim, “It wouldn’t,” but given more consideration, this response might change. The audience for your work would be in the future, not subject to current fashions whether good or bad. This poem would exist like the hieroglyphics painted on the walls of a pyramid giving those future readers a sense of what life was like for us, conflicted subjects of a twenty-first century empire, beings nostalgic for verities that weren’t actually verities even when they were thought to be true, beings living in confusion because the more we discover and learn the less we know and trust. This poem never to be read by friends, in any sense of that word, might find itself making judgments on our experiences, and might even despair of its own ability to describe the utter strangeness of our lives. Whatever else, the author of that poem would not care about being liked. The author would only care about creating the reality of ourselves and our experiences.
Why aren’t we writing more poems like that?
