My friends laughed when I said, “Everybody is a dentist until proven otherwise.” I told them I can pull all sorts of things, but strangely they balk at the thought of me pulling their teeth! Why then is it so believable when someone said, “Everybody is a poet until proven otherwise?”
The time artists spend in advancing their skills is no less than someone who goes to school and earns a degree. Just as law students have to pass their bar exams before becoming lawyers, the arts have standards too.
It is of course important to share the joy and encourage others to create. But empowerment is not the same as entitlement.
John F Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.” Substitute “your country” with “poetry”. Isn’t advancing the course of poetry the job of every poet?
Image taken from: Boycott Bad Dentists.
The main problem I have is the analogy between Artists and people who do one on one work. Artists reach many people, Craftsman do not.
Very much agreed. I had someone on my radio show some years ago. She had read very little poetry but had had an intense experience she wanted to talk about–so she self-published a little book of poems. They weren’t bad, but it was clear from them that she had little knowledge of the possibilities of the art. I had a fantasy of asking her this: “You’ve had an experience and you’d like to express it. There’s a piano, why don’t you express it musically?” “Oh no, I never learned to play the piano.” “Well, there are some brushes and a canvas. Why don’t you paint a picture about it?” “Oh no, I never learned to draw.” “Then why do you think you can write poetry? You don’t know anything about that either!” I did ask her a modified version of that question, but my experience with her made me realize that there is a historical point when people began to stop thinking of poetry as any sort of “craft”–something you have to learn how to do–and began to think of it as, let’s say, in Wordsworth’s wonderful phrase, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” (Earlier, Sir Philip Sidney had written, “Fool, said my poem to me, look in thy heart and write.”) Both Wordsworth and Sidney were reacting to what they believed was an over emphasis on form (and so on craft), but at this point, currently, their position has lost its reactive aspect and has become for many simply a truism: all you have to do to write a poem is to “feel” something. Alejandro’s statement was really nothing more than a statement that he would try to work with everyone to get them to produce poetry–which is what an official poet laureate is supposed to do: don’t worry about whether you’re a poet, you’re a poet, everyone’s a poet. But, Clara, you’re right to question what he said. Alejandro didn’t say he would teach everyone about poetry, encourage them in the art. He said something quite different from that. It’s interesting to note in this connection that, though he has certainly written poetry, most of Alejandro’s published output over the last several years has been prose, not poetry. Very fine prose, but prose, not poetry. Everyone’s a poet even though I’ve been mostly writing prose? Even though I haven’t written anything at all? Really, it’s politics we’re talking here: not art. The post of poet laureate is a political appointment; Alejandro was making a political statement. And like most political statements, it was, to say the least, questionable. Glad to see that you noticed, and questioned it.
Hi Clara, Lately hearing some fellow poets lament the glut of writers wanting to be poets, and feeling swamped by the sheer numbers. One told me: “when I was in high school writing poetry no one wanted to have anything to do with it. Now everyone wants to be a poet.” How true, “n’est-ce pas?” We have run into this in music also. Sometimes think it’s sheer numbers of people on the planet. Also, less focus on jobs when employment has become a problem. More people have time to try to be a poet. It seems good on the surface. The status of poetry as art has been demeaned, I agree. At the same time, I appreciate how it will help us gaining more readers. We could have a conference on this issue, so much to say about it. I loved Jack’s insights, Wordsworth’s statement etc. Good blog, thanks.