I always seem to find poets bemoaning the unrealistic and detatched nature of poetry today. Take Harold Monro’s article from 1912, for example, published online by poetrymagazines.org.uk:

Poetry is uninteresting to-day in that degree only that it is remote from life. It need not treat necessarily of events, deeds or episodes, but it must be fundamental, vital, innate, or nothing at all. It must be packed and tense with meaning; no line may be thin, no link may rattle. And in the future, when it has become natural and keen, there will be improvisatori again, who will lavish us their poems carelessly, like a plant its flowers.

So, has anything changed or are does the latest generation of Monro-like critics still complain that poems are too remote from life? After all, who really gets to inventory and count the poems of the world in order to determine their remoteness from life? Do we count lyrics of songs, or is that somehow a lesser form as Monro suggests in his timeline:

the minstrel became poet, and the poet became man of letters

Perhaps a new API for web search engines is in order. Or maybe poetry sites should have a “remoteness” warning on their poetry pages? Here’s Monro’s suggestion:

The poets of the present and the future must re-define, through their work, the true function of poetry. For, though it has become partly, and will become wholly, intellectualized; in spite of innumerable experiments in subject, rhythm and form, straining of metre, novelties in cadence, in spite of fluency, technique, originality, it still must be said that modern poetry is devoid of any real function or aim.

Have you noticed that people always seem to say something like “devoid of purpose” when they dislike expressive works? I think it particularly interesting that Monro calls out Whitman, of all poets, as someone guilty of losing touch with reality:

The reason must be sought deeper; in the fad, namely, that modern poetry fails to express the real aspirations of life. Just as the jargon is distinct from normal language, so the substance is alien to life. Moreover, these two characteristics are interdependent, and the use of a normal vocabulary will not be possible with dignity until poets learn again to represent with dignity and naturalness every aspect and manifestation of life. The experiments of Whitman and Carpenter solve nothing. These authors, and their imitators, have shirked the problem by simply dispensing with metre, and their work, however fluent and rhythmical, nevertheless cannot be called poetry.

Naturalness as dignity? Who really gets to define where nature starts? To me this sounds like a classical composer criticizing hip-hop for being a crude form of structured sounds, when in fact hip-hop has more fundamental and grounded roots than classical…

The Boston Research Center poses an alternative (modern) view of Whitman:

Modern literary scholars now agree that Whitman’s poetry was “a watershed in American literary history,� Myerson explained, noting that by rejecting the formal structures of traditional poetry in favor of free verse and replacing commas and periods with ellipses, Whitman opened the way for later poets to experiment stylistically.

Myerson elaborated by suggesting that Whitman’s verse was a far cry from the poetry of the day that ignored sex, rarely dealt with contemporary life, and was written in highly formal and prescribed poetic language. He pointed out that Whitman was a man of enormous physicality who introduced eroticism into mainstream American poetry, thus making his verse sensuous in an age of decorum. Referring to Whitman as “the great poet of democracy,� Myerson noted that his writing contains elaborate catalogues of Americans, their occupations, and their lives, all presented with a spirit of egalitarianism. This interconnectedness of citizens was intended to evoke the equality of all.

Great poet of democracy? Ironic then that he cheated at the polls to overcome resistance to his work and lubricate (pun not intended) public acceptance:

Leaves of Grass received lukewarm acclaim. The book was assailed as immodest and “quite out of place amid the decorum of modern society,� according to Myerson. In fact, the only positive reviews were written anonymously by Whitman himself.

Whenever I hear a song with a guy laying down a deep and rough bass rhyme while girls sing a liltingly melodic background, I remember the hits of Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens (some of the best music ever made, IMHO). The similarities are very striking. Thus, I was not surprised to read that Zola’s success is bringing some to realize that “American” forms of music are rarely an invention at all, but rather an evolutionary step:

“Maybe hip hop does not come from the States,� Zola proposes. “Rhyming over a beat? Zulus and Xhosas have been doing that for a long, long time.� If that is indeed the case, then kwaito has thrown hip hop just about the most raucous homecoming bash imaginable.

And this translation shows a bit of humor in the darkness of poverty and violence, if I’m reading it correctly:

You need to be fluent in tsotsitaal, the street slang of South Africa, to understand so much as a bar, but you quickly get the gist. Like the cratered streets he grew up on, Zola’s music is littered with the scree, broken glass, spent bullet casings and other detritus of recent township wars. The music is a collection of sonic snapshots taken under fire. Umdlwembe sets the tone:

Always looking for more booze
When we leave the only people left standing will be widows
Real men die and left will be the gangsters
The gangsters will die and leave the beers