A Mainstream Manifesto

Mainstream poetry is not dead.

This seems to be a minority opinion -- who knew? But I have been talking to other poets for the first time in my life (which does not include an academic background in literature or writing), and more and more I hear grousing about "the same stuff people have been writing for seventy years," and "pale dried up Pound-imitations," and more and more praise of highly experimental work, "generated" and "transtextual" pieces, hypertext as form, and the like. The result is that I find myself -- for the first time in a life at the left fringe -- a troglodyte reactionary defender of the status quo.

But here I am, anyway: cave-dwelling, unrepentant, unapologetic, mainstream poet. And I'll go further. I think mainstream poetry is the arterial blood of poetry, the place where all the vital stuff and oxygen is. It's the other stuff that's flourishing -- briefly, I suspect -- in an overheated sealed-up dead-end room.

For instance, here in Canada there's a lot of buzz around aleatory writing. As I understand it, that's writing generated with computers or mathematical systems, by chance -- every third word of a preset text, or something. And in stricture -- for instance, the best-selling book in Canadian poetry history is the recent Eunoia. And in found work.

I find this interesting and occasionally surprising -- but I think it's ultimately a dead-end. I am impressed with the skill and ingenuity, but I can't see why it's deployed in this direction. Or � if poetry is a machine made out of words (yuck!) then Eunoia is a beautiful machine that does nothing. This is the anaerobic hothouse stuff I think will go the way of language poets. It is preaching to the choir -- it is poetry only of interest to other poets and to theorists of language. It has nothing to say.

So here is my manifesto: let poetry have meaning and emotional depth. Sure, yes to the play of sound and the great game of language. (Anyone who knows my work knows I love close enjambed rhyme, for instance.) But not for its own sake. That's merely clever. I want something more.

What? This is where things get highly personal. Both as a reader and a writer, I am interested in compassion, in the nature of memory, and in the commonplace both domestic (dishes), wild (sparrows), and historic (combat boots). Other people's interests are different, and I have no argument with that. But I think most readers do want something.

I dislike deliberate obscurity. I don't mind strangeness: It helps me see truly , since "most of what we call perception is merely habit." But I like to be able to recognize, say, the objects described. If there's a story, I like to be able to tell what's going on. My ideal poem opens to one reading but rewards many. The perfect but mysterious clarity of "River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" is a good illustration of that ideal.

The more I learn about modern schools of poetry -- and I admit I came late to school and don't know what table to sit at -- the more I think I am dead centre in the old-fashioned mainstream. And I am glad to be there.