117. He doesn’t like it

Tonight, Will Oldham, aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, is performing at Town Hall. Among other things, he is an enemy of poetry.

His sharpest and most prominent attack came in an essay in Poetry, in the June 2012 issue, in one of my favorite sections of the magazine—a feature each month in which non-poets write about poetry. I suppose it was generous of the editors of Poetry to allow what could be called a dissenting voice. Faith, after all, necessitates doubt. But it was not so much a dissenting voice as a voice that said we should shut down the proceedings. It made me ponder canceling my subscription but that would be giving in to an anti-poet and, further, might seem harsh to Poetry.

What did he say? He said poetry is stupid. In most cases condensing an argument would mean simplifying that argument and analyzing but in this case it will mean that I must expand on it somewhat, because there isn’t much to it to begin with. Poetry, he argued, makes him feel dumb because poetry doesn’t make sense. Poetry is just words on paper, and when read aloud it is worse:

Even recited, words expressively coded and adjacented are like a miracle of phonetics but do not mean what they should. It’s about the structure, but a poem holds nothing up and nothing in. It sits there. And in a public space, a read poem fills the air with signs that I cannot use to direct myself anywhere except the restroom or the sidewalk, or inside of myself.

Poetry, he „argues,“ fails in the face of, for example, a song. (By the way, Oldham uses „quotes“ in his „essay“ so when I use them, I’m merely taking it to his level, that’s all.) The songwriter is—guess what?—OK with songs:

Give me a melody—give me, better, a harmonized melody—and those words will become a part of me. This is what I, a child of the age, need.

Poetry, he continues, is intentionally obscure and thus worthless. He quotes a Shakespeare sonnet then dismisses it:

Unfortunately, the full sonnet made no sense to me, and even that quoted couplet became scrambled and indecipherable without the guidance of a critic to give it meaning—because it is poetry, and poetry is something that points to something else.

/ The awl