he current issue of Poetry (April, 2004) contains a debate between Dana Gioia and August Kleinzahler over Garrison Keillor's book, Good Poems, a selection of poems Keillor read on his daily Writers Almanac program.
A number of my friends have written poems which have been read aloud by Garrison Keillor. The most recent of these was Robert Sward's "God is In the Cracks" from Rosicrucian in the Basement:
"Just a tiny crack separates this world from the next, and you step over it every day, God is in the cracks." Foot propped up, nurse hovering, phone ringing. "Relax and breathe from your heels. Now, that's breathing. So, tell me, have you enrolled yet?" "Enrolled?" "In the Illinois College of Podiatry." "Dad, I have a job. I teach." "Ha! Well, I'm a man of the lower extremities." "Dad, I'm fifty-three." "So what? I'm eighty. I knew you before you began wearing shoes. Too good for feet?" he asks. "I. Me. Mind: That's all I get from your poetry. Your words lack feet. Forget the mind. Mind is all over the place. There's no support. You want me to be proud of you? Be a foot man. Here, son," he says, handing me back my shoes, "try walking in these. Arch supports. Now there's a subject. Some day you'll write about arch supports."
Keillor's smooth baritone was equal to the task of Sward's poem, and he read it quite well. And, indeed, Sward's odd, funny poem is a "good poem"; Sward was later told by Keillor's staff that the poem received many favorable comments.
I came upon Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion a good many years ago. I liked it at first but found myself growing increasingly bored. People often compare Keillor with Fred Allen, but Keillor has none of Allen's bite—none of Allen's surprises. And, unlike Allen's, Keillor's show is suffused with nostalgia—not just nostalgia for the "good old days when life seemed simpler," though that is certainly there, but nostalgia for old radio itself. Why, do you remember the days when people used to listen to the radio?... It was a "theater of the mind!" Keillor's celebrated Lake Wobegon monologues began to seem more and more predictable, more and more soporific. In addition, the relentlessly even tone of his voice seemed to suggest a kind of smugness, a sense of self-satisfaction. (Kleinzahler insists that "Keillor embalms whatever...he reads within the burnished caul of his delivery....'") Finally, I just gave up on Keillor.
Now, in addition to the weekly variety show, Garrison Keillor has been reading poems on the radio. Since, under the auspices of Berkeley station, KPFA, I do that too, I was curious to hear what he was doing. I listened to a few of his programs; he didn't read badly, but he didn't do anything stunning either. Anyone who has heard the unforgettable sounds Antonin Artaud made in his "radiodiffusion," Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu, knows that there is another world of "poetry" out there which Garrison Keillor never comes near. Gioia quotes, approvingly, this passage from Keillor's remarks:
I expected to include plenty of Whitman here and discovered, reading him, a sort of seasickness at all those undulating lines of Uncle Walt's perpetual swoon over grass and leaves and camerados. There are good poems there, and it's a mistake to omit them, but Walt is the Typhoid Mary of American Lit: so much bad poetry can be traced back to him (and not brief bad poems, either), he gave so many dreadful writers permission to lavish themselves upon us.
It is not surprising that Keillor reads nothing but short poems on his show ("and not brief bad poems, either"—ha ha). Keillor's remarks here are not only inaccurate, they are actively stupid. It seems to me that if we are going to talk about someone being "the Typhoid Mary of American Lit," Garrison Keillor is a lot closer to being it than Walt Whitman is. (Oprah Winfrey, perhaps Keillor's model in literary endeavors, might be another candidate.) I read aloud Whitman's magnificent, "not brief" poem, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" on one of my KPFA programs. I know what an extraordinary experience it is to perform that poem. After hearing the program, some listeners phoned in to tell me they hadn't realized what an amazing poet Whitman was until they had heard me read him aloud. Keillor is not offering amazement; nor is he offering the listener a way of entering Whitman's sometimes difficult poetry. His remarks suggest that he himself is unaware of the deep music of Whitman's longer work. (On another show I played a recording of Orson Welles reading selections from Leaves of Grass; it too was an extraordinary experience.) What Keillor is saying here is not good criticism and it is not intelligent writing: it is simply the presence of a unexamined prejudice which the author is happy to hand along to his readers. He'll be glad to read you some Whitman so long as Whitman conforms to Keillor's understanding of what constitutes a "good poem." Thank you, Mr. Keillor, for one more stupid thing said about Whitman; I guess they won't be reading much of him—or of the "bad poems" Keillor says he has fostered (by Ferlinghetti? Ginsberg?)—around Lake Wobegon. Oh, "the perpetual swoon over grass and leaves and camerados." Is there a touch of homophobia in those words "swoon" and "camerados"? Are there any gays at Lake Wobegon? Are there any Italians?
As for Marianne Moore, Keillor says she is "a dotty old aunt whose poems are quite replicable for [by?] anyone with a thesaurus." Will any of Keillor's fans be likely to read a Marianne Moore poem after reading that? Are these lines from Moore's "What Are Years?" the ravings of "a dotty old aunt"?
What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe. And whence is courage: the unanswered question, the resolute doubt,— dumbly calling, deafly listening—that in misfortune, even death, encourages others and in its defeat, stirs....
One can ask: Is what Keillor's doing genuinely "expanding the audience for poetry"? Or is he merely expanding (or cementing) an audience for Garrison Keillor and for the kind of writing Keillor chooses to call "poetry"?
For Keillor clearly espouses a kind of writing. "I find it wise," he says, "to stay away from stuff that is too airy or that refers off-handedly to the poet Li-Po or relies on your familiarity with butterflies or Spanish or Monet." Adds Kleinzahler, "'So I'll be feeding you mostly shit,' is what Garrison could well go on to say." "Good Poems," writes Gioia in a considerable understatement, "is not a volume aimed at academic pursuits":
The book Good Poems most closely resembles is Hazel Felleman's once ubiquitous and now unspeakably unfashionable Best Loved Poems of the American People (1936), which sold 1.5 million copies to our parents and grandparents.
Memorability is the core of Keillor's aesthetic, but significantly, he does not invoke the traditional mnemonic powers of rhyme and meter. On the contrary, he has a decided preference for the plainspoken free verse of writers like Raymond Carver, William Stafford, and Robert Bly. If not verbal music, then what makes language stick in the mind?...Keillor locates memorability in storytelling. "What makes a poem memorable is its narrative line," he asserts. "A story is easier to remember than a puzzle."
If Keillor is insensitive to "verbal music," preferring "plainspoken free verse," and if he believes that the essential thing about a poem is its "narrative line," then how are we to tell a poem from a brief short story? Are the poems he reads nothing more than Lake Wobegon monologues in another guise? For his audience, I suspect that they are. Certainly Keillor does not adjust his persona to the poems; rather, he adjusts the poems to his persona.
Gioia and Kleinzahler are in a sense writing about exactly the same thing—except that their points of view differ on the value of that thing. "Everything Keillor does," writes Kleinzahler, "is about reassurance, containment, continuity": "Gentleness and good manners are the twin pillars of the church of Keillor." Gioia points out that his "working-class mother had a well-worn copy [of Best Loved Poems of the American People] on the bookshelf next to the almanac, and she literally did love a great many of the poems that Hazel Felleman provided." Kleinzahler points out Keillor's resemblance to Edgar Guest (1881-1959), who also had a radio show and whom Gioia's mother might have listened to or read. (Unlike Guest, Keillor does not write his own poems.) Edgar Guest's most famous poem begins, "It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home"—more home-fed nostalgia. Guest's poetry sold extremely well during his lifetime, but no one reads him now. Gioia makes a reference to Ezra Pound: "Despite having been born in Hailey, Idaho, Ezra Pound is absent from Keillor's pages for reasons, I suppose, having to do with the poet's subsequent travels"—and goes on rightly to describe Pound's "Homage to Sextus Propertius" as "magnificent and mostly forgotten." I suspect that Keillor wouldn't touch Ezra Pound with a ten-foot pole!
There is a kind of "domino theory" sometimes expressed about poetry. At least they're reading poetry; maybe they'll go on to read BETTER poetry. Billy Collins today; tomorrow, Gertrude Stein. But the domino theory is no more accurate here than it is in the realm of politics. Rilke was surely right when he said that, in order to read poetry, you must "change your life." American mass culture seems to foster the illusion that if something is good, it must be good for everybody. But not everybody is willing or even able to change their lives—and that's perfectly all right. Kleinzahler is most amusing when he announces that poetry is not good for you. And his vision of "poetry workshops presided over by a dispirited, compromised mediocrity," with students "critiquing and being critiqued by younger versions of the same" certainly rings true. But I don't think he's right that "the better animals in the jungle aren't drawn to poetry anymore." Poetry's unique relationship to consciousness will always bring people to it—including "the better animals in the jungle," god help them. But Gioia is right, too: given Keillor's limitations, and given the limitations of his sense of "poetry," he is doing a pretty good job. He is reading some poems on the radio, and some of them are undoubtedly "good poems." If he reads them well, more power to him. If Keillor's were the only understanding of poetry available—and for some people it is—woe for the art of poetry. But, happily, it is still possible to stumble upon something else, something better, something that will tell you that poetry allows you to enter a "new life," a vita nuova, and that, because of it, you will never be the same; something that will cause you to understand that poetry, like all really powerful things, is not only reassuring but dangerous:
Just a tiny crack separates this world from the next, and you step over it every day.
Like August Kleinzahler, Poetry's editor Christian Wiman also takes up the theme of poetry's possible (even probable) death when he writes, "Poetry as we know it in twentieth-first century America can die, will die without a committed audience that is larger than its practitioners, and those of us for whom the art is important must ask ourselves hard practical questions about its survival." This sounds to me oddly political—rather like the exhortations people make when they are trying to convince you to vote for someone. Unless you vote for X, look at all these horrible things that are likely to happen. (The phrase "Poetry as we know it" sounds suspiciously like the cliche "Civilization as we know it.") "A culture might evolve or devolve," writes Wiman, "to the point where its poetic impulses and appetite are completely satisfied by pop songs and advertisements." There are people who say things like that, but they are not usually people who have experienced poetry very deeply. (I don't mean this as a comment about Wiman, whose work I have reviewed favorably.) Speaking personally, I began with "pop songs and advertisements"—until someone had me read a real poem, Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. At that point I realized the genuine limitations of pop songs and advertisements. Deconstructed, Kleinzahler's "the better animals in the jungle aren't drawn to poetry anymore" is really nothing more than the familiar complaint that "poets aren't being read enough—I'm not being read enough." Certainly Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac is not the place in which "hard practical questions" about the survival of poetry will take place. Keillor doesn't even begin to suggest the imaginative possibilities of poetry on the radio—not least because the only voice Keillor presents is his own. (And it is not even "his own" voice; it is, as Kleinzahler says, his "poetry voice.") Garrison Keillor does have an audience, however, and it may be that poets are so desperate for an audience that they are willing to take Keillor far more seriously than he deserves to be taken. Why can't poets be American Idols too?