This is why some writers, like Emily Dickinson, avoided publication, which she famously called “the Auction / Of the Mind of Man.” She left her poems in a drawer, but only after meticulously copying them out and sewing them into pamphlets. That such care went into their presentation suggests she was carefully orchestrating her legacy — and that her ego was big enough to lead her to assume that she would have a public legacy. Though she withdrew from the world, her arrogance was still stupendous.
Dickinson’s lines announce that she pooh-poohs publication — or at least assumes the pooh-pooh pose — so as not to be soiled by poetry’s commercial aspects. For even if no money changes hands, the poet incurs a debt through publication. Publication is an anti-barter, a negative exchange, so eager are poets (Dickinson included, at least early in her writing life) to be published that we are willing not only to give away our work for free but also to become beholden to whoever will disseminate it. The Internet has lately democratized this transaction by making publication available to all. This shifts the poet’s debt from publisher to reader, the desire for publication being easily satisfied. Instead, we are in debt to the reader’s time and attention, more than ever now that the whole world is reciting round the clock via weblogs and electronic “zines.”
In Dickinson’s day, poems would appear in the local paper — they were not just the froufrou artifacts of a fringe subculture. But no longer is poetry considered an appropriate companion to the spooning-up of oatmeal, and poets receive many signals from many different quarters that their work is trivial. More correctly, I should say that, though some types of poetry are bestowed with a large value by our present culture (I’m thinking of popular song lyrics and the spoken words we could corral under the heading of rap) (of course there will always be debate about whether these forms qualify) (I mean qualify as “literature” though I don’t know exactly how I personally would draw the Venn diagram for the sets “poetry,” “literature,” and “song”), what has lost its cultural worth is the kind of print- and page-directed arrangement of words that expects a sustained engagement from its reader. When this kind of poem is read out loud in bookstores or college lecture halls, the environment created is unlike any natural one except maybe a Unitarian church service.
If looked at without any romantic attachments to the art, one might say that this kind of poetry has a negative value in the esteem of most citizens. Were even the most idiotic reality TV show to be interrupted by a public broadcast of T. S. Eliot reading The Waste Land (recently voted — by poets — the greatest poem in English of the last century), mayhem would ensue. I’ve seen many eyes glaze over when some festivity is kicked off by the public reading of a poem, and even members of my own family will not come to hear me read. To be charitable, let’s say they stay away because they’re afraid I’d bore them, and they do not wish to break my heart by drifting off to sleep.
My embarrassment about being a poet comes partly from the narcissistic aspect of publication but also partly, I confess, from poetry’s having so little value in the marketplace, my brain possessing a tiny lobe that desires economic rewards. My father was always mystified when he phoned and asked what I was doing and I answered that I was working, work being something you get paid for. When the Lilly drug company heiress left her money to Poetry magazine, my mother, like many other Americans I’m sure, felt that it would have been more conscionable for the money to have been given back to all the people who were overcharged for their drugs.
My parents’ trouble stems from the fact that the value of even the most famous poems cannot be assessed, their worth being nil to much of our culture partly because their medium, language, is so ephemeral and cheap — and has been suspect almost as far back as its inception for being capable of pulling the wool over our eyes. In the past, sometimes an advertising agency would glom onto some fragment of poetry’s high rhetoric — this happened to T. S. Eliot’s lines “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future” (which were used to sell cars) and also to W. H. Auden’s “We must love one another or die” (which was used to sell the nation LBJ). But lately our culture has lost its habit of respecting instances of graceful speech. It has been almost forty years since we’ve admitted lines from orators like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King into our daily conversation.
Usually poetry proves too elusive to be of much use as a commodity. By way of example, because it’s short, I’ll use the famous poem, originally an untitled section of a mixed-form book-length work by William Carlos Williams, that goes
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
On the Internet I find that a rare-book dealer is asking $2,500 for a signed first edition of Spring and All, the book in which this first appeared, but of course it is the paper itself that wears the price tag. The value of the poem itself can’t be assessed, unless we could figure out how many people have been employed teaching it, or we calculated the other subtle social functions of the poem — like how many teenagers read the poem and decided to become writers instead of petty criminals (though in one survey, college freshmen reported that this was the poem that, having been forced to analyze it in high school, they hated most).
Even poets would concede that the actual words of “Red Wheelbarrow” are of little value in aesthetic terms. They are pedestrian, and most of them fall — with the exception of the verb glazed and the somewhat archaic upon—within the range of grade-school language. It is the mysterious equation set up by the first line that gives depth to the poem, which was little noted until a good thirty years after it was first published. It then won its throne because of how neatly it summarized the complex idea that not only helped create Ernest Hemingway (the idea insisting that complex ideas can only be rendered though concrete things) but also the painter Edward Hopper, who turned back to realism despite the twentieth century’s abstract vogue.
The poem nudged the culture. How much is this worth?
In 1979 a poet named Lewis Hyde published a book called The Gift, which wrestles with the value of intangibles. (One section discusses the Ford Motor Company’s calculating the worth of a human life as $200,725 in 1971 after the car named Pinto repeatedly exploded. More recently, the Department of Transportation has assessed a life at $3 million, though the Environmental Protection Agency calculates its worth at more like $6 million.) For its central project, the book tries to make a connection between poems and the gifts that many cultures, like the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest, exchanged as part of the annual cycle of living. Sometimes valuable gifts were also destroyed by their recipients, a gesture insisting that the gift was not to be converted to personal wealth.
Instead, the circulation of gifts cemented the tribe the way ions flowing through a magnet will bond other metals to it. Gift-giving was largely restricted to the confines of the tribe, who understood the rituals of the exchange. Outsiders didn’t, such as when Native Americans gave the European settlers gifts with the expectation that these gifts would then be passed on, this circulation a mandatory aspect of the ritual (hence the origin of the expression Indian giver).
These ideas can easily be applied to the way poetry is received, here in the American now. Poets are said to be an insular tribe who exchange their gifts mostly with one another, the readers of poetry being poets themselves. (Though I did go to a yard sale last year where a woman recognized me from the picture on my book. “You must be a poet,” I said, and she answered no, she just happened to read poetry. “So you are the One! The One nonpoet reader of poetry in the land!” I shouted. But from the way she rolled her eyes I could tell it was a familiar joke.)