"I'M ED, AND I'M A POET"

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

Any robust art form will often have its health called into question. Take English theater, for example. American visitors to London commonly discover that theater there flourishes as in no American city--and that newspaper reviewers are constantly issuing mournful prognoses and wistful elegies for some dim golden age. Conversely, when an art form is regularly praised for its strength, you naturally grow a little apprehensive.

By this measure, American poetry must be ailing. Is there any other art form in this country whose vigor is more dependably extolled? Literary organizations both large and small are forever "celebrating" someone or something--Midwestern poets or Latino poets, farmer poets or cowboy poets, formal poets or rap poets. It all feels sometimes like an extended, floating party. Celebration is certainly the aim of Bill Moyers' eight-part PBS series The Language of Life, whose airing coincides with the publication of a companion book, predictably subtitled A Festival of Poets.

Actually, the contemporary poet's situation isn't altogether grim. What it is is complicated, in ways that Moyers rarely plumbs. Poetry readings and workshops, as he triumphantly points out, are flourishing; poetry as a communal, spoken experience--something to be shared with other listeners--seems far more vibrant today than a couple of decades ago. On the other hand, the market for poetry on the page remains dismal, and many trade publishers have abandoned it altogether. (This has led to a surreal situation in which talented poets sometimes find themselves wishing for rejection; they can't even manage that when publishers refuse to consider their manuscripts.)

Surely, the life of the contemporary poet ought to seem as interesting as, say, that of the typewriter repairman--with whom the poet shares both a link to antiquated technology and a need for fineness of touch. But to get at what's really interesting means digging into a number of unsettling questions. Is the poet's embrace of academia (even more than fiction writers, poets are likely to teach for a living) a bad thing? In an age of computers whose memories dwarf our own, what is the fate of the old-fashioned practice of learning poems by heart? Does that easily brandished term Postmodernism in fact herald anything new, or are we seeing the mere aftershocks of the modernist earthquake that erupted three-quarters of a century ago?

Much of the fault of The Language of Life lies with Moyers' decision to "go soft"--to play the genial, wide-eyed interviewer who encounters a revelation at every turn. He's fond of faux-naif questions (at least one hopes the faux is genuine) such as, "So politics is not only a matter of revolution?" or "Mysticism wasn't meant to be public, was it?" The result is a series of earnest one-on-one interviews that promote just those traits the contemporary poetry scene least needs to encourage: its solemn exhibitionism, its squishy mysticism, its self-absorption of the I-prefer-pencils-to-pens sort.

Moyers might well have drawn more telling responses from a group that ranges from well-established poets like Sandra McPherson, Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich to such lesser-known practitioners as Daisy Zamora, Sekou Sundiata and Coleman Barks. But by ignoring specifics--by avoiding the poet's daily business of weighing word against word--he finally divorces most of the poets from their poems. Ideally, when the poet sits down to write he or she is claiming a kinship, however collateral, with Dickinson and Donne, Chaucer and Virgil. What Moyers too often gives us is the poem as self-therapy, and the poetry reading as a blend of A.A. meeting and encounter-group session.

The TV series has some appealing moments, including scenes of poetry workshops that capture the fervent ingenuousness of young people who, in discovering poetry, feel they have found a new continent. But Moyers makes virtually no attempt to place the poet in a larger social context--to view poetry as a profession (or, perhaps more to the point, to analyze what it means that ours is a culture where it's all but impossible to be a professional poet). Ezra Pound once pointed out that history without economics is bunk. To which one might add that poetry without economics--without some sense of the ebb and flow of the megamercantile society surrounding the poet--is bunk too. Behind Moyers' many questions lurks one that goes unasked: Are we "celebrating" so hard because otherwise someone might point out that the party's a bust?