Writing Problems: What's Wrong with Poetry?

Spicer, Mlinko, Borges, Rilke

Everyone I speak to who reads or writes poetry lately is dissatisfied with poetry. Privately, people react to poems with a statement similar to: “That was hardly worth doing,” or “why is this getting attention?” What the hell is going on?

There is a sense of a flatness or sameness in poetry that some people trace to the proliferation of MFA programs, or that a certain style is more acceptable than others. This style, a kind of offshoot of the confessional approach, has become the practice, eschewing almost all other concerns. But this hasn’t always been the case.

Jack Spicer (1925-1965) perfected poems about the act of poetic composition. In 1957 he taught a class at San Francisco State University he taught a workshop called Poetry as Magic, which included the students Helen Adam, Robert Duncan, and Jack Gilbert, among others. Around this time he began writing After Lorca, a series of imitations, translations, and “letters” to Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) which he claimed he dictated from an unknowable source called “Martians.”