Read Time and Understand

This week Time magazine devotes two pages to the state of contemporary American poetry. The Poetry Foundation's John Barr gets to see his call for poets to write more for people who don't like poetry pretty well summarized in an otherwise poor article. The writer does manage to mention two of Barr's many critics, which would be great if one of them (the only one with a direct quote) weren't simply "a blogger." Ten seconds of research shows the quote to be from a MFA student named Jane. Nothing against Jane, but come on, a professional journalist has to do better. The writer implies that Barr wants poets to write more epics, because if there's anything that a reading public that doesn't want to read a sixty-four page volume, much less a one-page lyric, does want to read, it's a 500-page epic. (It's unclear if this is Barr's position or just the writer's clumsiness in not choosing a more precise term appropriate to the context, like "narrative".) Finally, ignoring the fact that the pages of Poetry magazine are typically littered with the same professors and MFA graduates that Barr disparages, and that the poems published have generally been the same textureless poems for at least a generation now, the writer closes the article with a silly prescription/preposterous scenario: "What poetry really needs is a writer who can do for it what Andy Warhol did for avant-garde visual art: make it sexy and cool and accessible without making it stupid or patronizing. When that writer arrives, cultural change will come swiftly, and relatively effortlessly. And Barr will be waiting, with a check." There's a better chance of Terrell Owens being voted SI's Sportsman of the Year.