A great post from John Guzlowski at Everything’s Jake: Can American Poetry Be Great Again?

My friend Elizabeth Oakes, author of The Farmgirl Poems, sent me a New York Times article that she saw posted on the Women’s Poetry List about whether or not American poetry will ever be great again. It’s a good article that raises a number of important questions about poetry and reading and the audience for the written word.

He then points to the NY Times article from its On Poetry column: The Great(ness) Game

The problem is that over the course of the 20th century, greatness has turned out to be an increasingly blurry business. In part, that’s a reflection of the standard narrative of postmodernism, according to which all uppercase ideals —” Truth, Beauty, Justice —” must come in for questioning. But the difficulty with poetic greatness has to do with more than the talking points of the contemporary culture wars. Greatness is —” and indeed, has always been —” a tangle of occasionally incompatible concepts, most of which depend upon placing the burden of —greatness— on different parts of the artistic process…

What does greatness mean? What should it mean? How has poetry evolved within American culture? The article is an interesting exploration of those topics.

The author also takes a shot at the intrigue and exoticism of foreign poets living in the United States, particularly Czesław Miłosz. For all of their “greatness” a lot of their “not-so-great” gets glossed over. Using Miłosz as an example is particularly funny because Miłosz’ “greatness” occasionally exhibited itself in pseudo-class warfare, pitting him, and his ring of Polish intellectuals, against his base of support, the people who were forced to call him great, because he was one of us. For an investigation into that issue read Stanislaus A. Blejwas’ letter: Polish studies in America from the January 1995 issue of The Sarmatian Review.