Fault Lines

The recent PBS documentary on the life and poetry of Mary Oliver has brought her work to a wide audience and also laid bare the fault line in contemporary poetry and by extension, all the arts. Her admirers take some of her lines as words to live by. While her detractors sneer.

It is a conundrum that poets who gain a large public audience lose their standing in the poetry community as if accessibility is some sort of betrayal.

Some poetry is so opaque its readers turn away with a feeling of being confounded into condescension. No wonder Billy Collins and Mary Oliver have found a wide audience. 

There is a vast territory between the too easy and too obscure. My own preference is a poem that approaches its subject with obliquity; it makes some demands on the reader and yields more rewards. As Emily Dickinson wrote, Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

Mary Oliver’s weakest poems settle for exhausted words like mystery or spiritual. Sometimes she tells rather than evokes. While her strongest, stay within the observed life of the insect or small creature out of which a larger exclamation happens as our sensibility has been stretched.

This dichotomy seems to hold up in other arts as well. Norman Rockwell didn't get much respect from the mid-century art world in NYC. Was it art or illustration? In capturing Americana he lost the respect of the contemporary critics, or rather he never had it. However, Willem de Kooning, the abstract expressionist, thought otherwise. He declared Rockwell's The Connoisseur better than Jackson Pollack's and particularly admired his brushstrokes under magnification.

When Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was first performed in 1924, it was panned by the N.Y. Herald Tribune's art critic as being derivative, formless and disjointed. Sometimes, academia acts as sentinels at the gate with a nose for transgressions and worse.

Popular acceptance is not necessarily the final arbiter nor should it be the kiss of death. The mass audience is so vast and varied, we need to make room for the balm and cri de coeur, the lyric and the gasp.

In the arts as in our political sphere, the populist movement now finds advocates on both poles. What moves the masses is little understood. Perhaps the greatest mystery is the zeitgeist. Who owns it? How does it change?