The signs of the coming apocalypse are many, but none are starker than this Web headline in the April issue of O: The Oprah Magazine: “Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets.”edited by the noted verse aficionado Maria Shriver and including interviews with “all-star readers” like Bono, Ashton Kutcher, the gossip columnist Liz Smith and someone named James Franco, who is apparently an actor. Yes. Spring fashion. Modeled. By rising young poets. There follows a photomontage of attractive younger women — some of whom are rising poets mostly in the “I get up in the morning” sense, but all of whom certainly look poetic — in outfits costing from $472 to $5,003. This is all part of O’s special issue celebrating National Poetry Month,
Let’s get a few things out of the way. First, only a snob or an idiot complains when the magic wand of Oprah is flourished in his direction. (I have a book about poetry for general readers out next month, and my publisher broke land speed records attempting to get copies to the Oprah people before their issue closed. Alas, we were too late, which means the world will never know how I look in a Kiton suit — for the record, the answer is “grateful.”) Second, O has been running an intelligent and professional book section under the direction of the former Publishers Weekly editor Sara Nelson for some time now, using excellent critics like Francine Prose. You could do considerably worse than get your book news from O. Finally, it’s all too easy for Important Literary Folk to sneer at anything involving fashion. It’s so girly, you know, and real writers are never girl — ah. So the lingering gender biases of the literary world are often at play when readers cringe at the pairing of poetry with the stuff of women’s magazines. There is also a regrettable tendency to underestimate the wit and perceptiveness of the fashion industry — which is a silly business, true, but certainly no sillier than publishing, as anyone who’s read “The 4-Hour Body” should be aware. (The Times’s own T Magazine has seen fit to outfit the poet Terrance Hayes in Dolce & Gabbana.)
And yet. “Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets.” The words are heart-sinking. For some readers, this will be because poetry represents a higher form of culture that can only be debased by the commentary of Oprah Winfrey and the pencil skirts of L’Wren Scott. But this isn’t quite right. Any critic knows there are dozens of poetry collections published every year that are considerably less culturally valuable than Winfrey’s many enterprises and that could only be improved by pencil skirts, preferably by being wrapped in several of them and chucked in the East River. The problem is that poetry can’t approach the world inhabited by O and fashion design — that is, the world of American mass culture — with the same swagger as other fields do. When Terrell Owens holds forth on poetry in O (yes, he does), much of the audience knows that Owens is a football player, and has at least a vague idea of what football is, what it means and why it inspires otherwise reasonable people to put Styrofoam cheese slices on their heads. But poets and poetry readers . . . we can’t bring our context with us. We’re at the mercy of someone else’s display. The sad thing about “Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets” is not that the photos are a debasement of Art. The sad thing is that they capture an inevitable and impossible yearning. The chasm between the audience for poetry and the audience for O is vast, and not even the mighty Oprah can build a bridge from empty air.
But at least her magazine makes an effort, sort of. Sure, the issue includes plenty of stuff that does credit neither to poetry nor to readers of O — there’s a bunch of talk about using poetry to overcome personal challenges (if it worked as self-help, you’d see more poets driving BMWs); there’s the aforementioned Ashton Kutcher; and roughly a fifth of the coverage is devoted to Mary Oliver, about whose poetry one can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it. But there are at least two admirable features. The first is a profile of W. S. Merwin by the magazine’s editor, Susan Casey. Casey obviously likes Merwin, has read him and makes a genuine effort to talk about one of his poems despite her lack of expertise. If more journalists would try things like this, the chasm would still gape, but maybe less widely. The second is a list of “20 books no reader’s library should be without.” The list is idiosyncratic, to say the least — Rumi but not Shakespeare or Yeats? — but as a starting point it’s not bad.
The magazine also encourages a number of poets to discuss the art, although mostly in one- or two-sentence asides. Unfortunately, they’re opining on topics like “where poems come from,” and this is exactly the kind of abstract speculation that summons forth Magical Poetry Talk — comments that make poetry sound like God’s own electric Kool-Aid acid test — from even the smartest writers. Easily the most peculiar remark in the “all star” section comes not from any of the bold-name celebrities but from the only actual poet, Margaret Atwood. She declares that “the question ‘What is the role of poetry?’ is like asking, ‘What is the role of eating?’ ” I’m both an Atwood fan and a poetry critic, but even for me, it’s hard not to notice that people who don’t read poetry seem generally to be healthy and happy, whereas people who don’t eat seem generally to be dead.
Yet one must fill the yawning chasm with something: Magical Poetry Talk, a fashion shoot, some lists, the wisdom of Sting, whatever. I wish, though, that they had found space for someone — not a critic, necessarily, just someone willing to be honest — to talk about the actual experience of reading a poem. Not why poems are good at rehabilitating people. Not where poems come from. Not what they can help us do, or forget, or remember. Not what the people who write them are wearing. Just what reading one of them is like to one person. If the chasm is to be ever so slightly narrowed, it seems to me this is how it will be done. I find myself turning again to the fashion shoot: there is Anna Moschovakis, whose work I know. She’s a fine writer, a translator, an editor at the thoroughly admirable Ugly Duckling Presse (publisher of the dryly antic Eugene Ostashevsky, among others), and she’s wearing a “supple suede jacket (Haute Hippie, $995).” It’s impossible to say what Moschovakis was thinking during this shoot — I certainly hope one of her thoughts was “I better get to keep this damn jacket” — but perhaps we can guess. Here is the end of her poem “Untitled”:
I wish I could be inanimate,
banged-up and appreciated
for all my surface qualities
without ethics getting in the way. I seem to remember
being ethical. I seem to act along some kind of line
albeit a kinky one. I wonder when kinky became
pornographic and whether that aspect is
subtractable. I don’t remember my grammar
rules. I don’t think English is very good
for a certain kind of inventioning. I gather
some readers don’t like being
confronted with the language in every word.
I want to be a word. I would be abstract
with an inscrutable ending.
But that’s precisely the trouble: for an overwhelming majority of the culture, almost every poem has an inscrutable ending, even the ones that aren’t actually inscrutable. How can we seem inscrutable when we are inscrutable? The chasm is vast; it yawns. All poets and their readers can do is stare half-longingly, half-fearfully across that great divide at the golden palace of mass culture (portcullis, Fendi, $4,500) and sigh. Oh, Oprah. Oh, poetry.
David Orr writes the On Poetry column for the Book Review. His book “Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry” will be published in April.
