This spring the Virginia Quarterly Review ran an essay on the state of poetry, "Has Poetry Changed?" It provoked this blistering response from William Childress, who laments the dominance of free verse poetry in America, reserving particular contempt for the Beats and "Allen Ginsberg’s nihilistic free verse oral diarrhea":
Beat poetry went far toward making ordinary Americans see poets as drug-crazed society-wreckers who wrote only for themselves. By definition, that makes them elitists.
I researched a large stack of Beat poetry magazines from the 1970s and 1980s for this post, ranging from Doug Blazek’s Olé Anthology to Kumquat 3 and E.V. Griffith’s highly touted Hearse (“A Vehicle for Conveying the Dead”). Not only were 95 percent of the poems free verse, many of them hewed to a core of societal destruction that in another era would sound like fascism. It was an argument for too much freedom encouraging anarchy. Vitriol was plentiful, but ways to improve things were not.
While encouraging more respect for formal verse, Childress sees the dominance of free verse as paralleling the disorder of contemporary society – and points to well-written poetry as a form of resistance to this:
A blind person can see that American society is in turmoil, with a fractured government and enormous debt. Both political parties are to blame—but shouldn’t poets be trying to change things instead of writing chaos-poetry or “woe is me” diaries? Who will read poetry when they can’t find a common bond in a poet’s writing? Who likes ruptured grammar, twisted syntax and what my grandpa called flapdoodle? There’s at least a partial consensus that free verse these days consists of a lot of bad writing. I forget who said, “Poets should learn to write before they try to write poetry.” Many of today’s poets don’t seem to realize that all writing is connected.
The Dish 