Tyranny

I have been thinking allot about what President Bush said in his State of the Union address- that the age of tyranny is over. President Bush is obviously deluded tyranny has just shifted Tyrants, from big governments to big corporations. One thing however that comes out of a market economy which is predominant in all of life, business, Fiction Writing, Film, and Visual Art is that the chaff is cut by the market and while it is harsh there is no room for weak unmarketable art. This may be a profound problem for art in general but it is not a problem for Poetry.

Poetry is an artform which functions like an aquarium rather than a real artistic ecosystem with all the conditions regulated and not effected by the outside world. While in fiction or business or visual art a critical structure exists which serves as a kind of governor Poetry has such a small audience that the artform is controlled by-other poets no matter how mediocre.

Mediocrity is the problem.

The reality is that getting a poetry book published is not that hard if you have friends who have a press, which is often the case for poets. The poetic life is also dominated by groups and camps but these do not make a real difference. What really takes the place of critique in the poetry world today are blogs, like this one- but some blogs are more important than others and this is again of problem of excluding the wider audience.

The most important Blog in poetry in the US today is Ron Silliman's. This is not because the blog is that interesting there are many others that are more insightful but because of marketing and duration he sits like the 1000 pound elephant in the room.

The problem with the focus on blogs is that Poetry again in this country is not reaching out to a wider audience and it is because of the fact that poets only talk to other poets, poets do not really dialogue with other artists and poets listen too much to the likes of bloggers and not to a public which loves the artform and is not part of the artform. Poets writing books for people who dont read them is not a recipe for relevance.

Poetry as an artform is becoming like Fox Hunting or Irish Curling or the Palio in Siena a curiosity. The reality is that Poets should dialogue among themselves in community but we should be directing our poetic voices towards our society and searching for an audience that is outside our own world.