Jim Harrison: Don’t Feed the Poets

Photo by John Schulz/source NYT

Jim Harrison published an essay called Don’t Feed the Poets in the NYT Book Review (012807). He re-considers Karl Shapiro’s long prose poem, The Bourgeois Poet, musing on the lean and the fat in academic poetry careers. Harrison recalls salad days in the 60s when he necessarily fell into the lean camp, evidenced by the 1969 photo from his Michigan farm. Reading Shapiro’s kvetching then about the daily travails of the existential; university professor “sounded like a man who had had a huge porterhouse and half a cheesecake for dinner and was complaining about indigestion.” With age and sustained literary success, Harrison has now moved on to the more august side of the career/calorie continuum.

Two succulent quotes:

I suspect Shapiro’s evident misery started early in his life with a heroic notion of the poet. Any poet knows that to become immortal all you have to do is write a single great poem. This is unlikely indeed. Perhaps there are tens of thousands of mules and draft horses across the countryside who dream of winning the Kentucky Derby. Better yet, a bartender in Seville told me last March, “We have thousands of aspiring Lorcas but only one Lorca.” Very early on a poet is struck by the cruelty and lack of democracy in the arts — so few get it all, and the hordes receive nothing but the pleasure and pain of an overdeveloped consciousness. Ted Kooser, the former United States poet laureate and a friend of Shapiro’s at the time “The Bourgeois Poet” was written, told me Shapiro was obsessed with the French symbolist poets. This explains a lot, since Shapiro’s notion of what a poet was implies the outsider, the outcast, the outlier, one who purposefully deranges his mind to write poems like Rimbaud, or one who could not walk, so borne down was he by his giant wings, to paraphrase Baudelaire. I must here imagine myself an English department chairman, who has to deal with these troublesome creatures, and say that a poet is hubris through and through in the same manner that an unruly pig is solid pork.

Perhaps as a corrective and a cautionary, “The Bourgeois Poet” should be taught to the thousands taking M.F.A.’s in creative writing who wish to become poet-professors. As I said I tried it myself but found the work too hard. There’s a subdued but relentless hurly-burly in academia that swallows up discretionary time. It’s like living with a slight backache, not fatal but enervating. Besides, academic salaries are falling behind and it’s become questionable if poet-professors have truly achieved bourgeois status. Maybe lumpen bourgeois.