MTV Selects an 80 Year Old as the Voice of Poetry for a New Generation?

Jump to Comments

[This post, in a modified form, runs as an arts piece in the current issue of the The Villager. Check it out if you are in NYC - for the rest it's here in pre-edit form]

We’ve heard people bemoan the influence of MTV on the nation’s young for few decades now. Whether indicted for pushing sexuality on kids or (especially in recent years) programming towards a sort of teenage lowest common denominator, MTV’s sonomniety with youth culture is prevalent to the point of cliché. But the network retains its astronomical ratings and so the pressure to pander to naysayers isn’t too penetrating. This said, MTV does occasionally go pro-bono. Quadra-annual “Vote or Die” campaigns and relevant if sensational programming like “True Life: I have an Eating Disorder” come to mind. But MTV’s newest scheme is considerably more confounding.

In August MTVu (the MTV channel broadcast in college dorms) announced that it has selected 80 year-old John Ashbery to fill the channel’s newly created post of “Poet Laureate.” That the network is fostering an interest in poetry that surpasses a shallow ‘music lyrics are poetry too’ sort of way is surprising enough, but their paring with Ashbery, initially, makes about as much sense as, well, Ashbery’s poetry.

Ashbery, the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, is an unimpeachable choice as far as literary merit if concerned. His Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) remains maybe the most enduring and celebrated volume of poetry written in English in the last 40 years. It was also the only volume of poetry ever to take home the trifecta of major poetry awards – the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award – and has left a deeper impression on contemporary literary poetry (especially its more experimental strains) than perhaps anything since the high modernists like Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and T.S. Elliot. But the appearance of being such a hit might be misleading for those unfamiliar with the work. Contemporary literary poetry doesn’t have “hits” — at least whose impact stretches too far from the academy or poets themselves — for a reason: it’s not that easy to read. Ashbery, rather than providing some accessibility to challenging contemporary poets, is seen by many to be the apex of opacity and difficulty. (For an introduction check out the new selection of his later poems, Notes from the Air, which is released this week from Ecco Press.)

His arrival on the scene in the late 50’s/early 60’s was met with fiercely divergent critical opinions. Frank O’ Hara declared him the best American poet since Wallace Stevens but Harold Bloom met Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath (1962) with “outrage and disbelief.” Such a reception should not have been wholly unexpected. Ashbery’s work eschewed what had been popular — the confessional work that of the “New York School” poets such as Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara (both of whom he befriended) and under-edited litanies of the Beats like Allan Ginsberg, whose Howl was enormously popular.

Ashbery’s work has always resisted both classification and interpretation. Emotional clarity is lost in what seem to be extended language games that require a certain mental flexibility and a willingness to reconsider what sort of meanings written language can carry in every possible light. But more crucially his work requires a virtue that seems increasingly rare given the speed of cultural diffusion in the new millennia: patience. This sort of challenge is what makes Ashbery, in a sense, the perfect choice for MTV. As the critic Laurence Lieberman wrote of Self-Portrait, “How desperately, today, we need a poetry that will shame the slovenly readership out of us.”

But it’s going to be a hard sell. MTVu is honoring Ashbery’s appointment as Poet Laureate by running a series of 18 30-second television spots. The spots consist entirely of lines from Ashbery’s poems. The letters gently patter onto the soft white screen (like the “typewriter” animation on Microsoft Power Point) and stay just long enough to be read. Then words flutter off and the spot is over. It’s like a little poetry break the length of a commercial. And it is indeed the model of commercials to which these spots are necessarily molded. But the implicit ideology of a commercial – that a 30 second bit of media can persuade a viewer to become a consumer – is a less than natural fit for the poems.

The only remaining shared cultural language is that of publicity and one can’t really fault MTV for operating (as it always has) within this terrain – but poetry, with its desire to flummox, mystify, and unsettle, can hardly be expected to reconcile with it. It is believed that a smaller sliver of the population reads poetry now than at anytime since its inception as a formalized genre. In the age of instant infotainment and on-demand multimedia satiation, an art form that requires a significant frontloading of energy and time before much pleasure can be culled (as is the case with experimental poetry) wouldn’t seem to have much appeal.

Perhaps there are few better suited to elucidate this contemporary predicament better than Ashbery himself – who is often credited with being the chief instigator of the postmodern turn in poetry. He is at his most incisive in the title poem from Self-Portrait:

We don’t need painting or
Doggerel written by mature poets when
The explosion is so precise, so fine.
Is there point even in acknowledging
The existence of all that? Does it
Exist? Certainly the leisure to
Indulge stately pastimes doesn’t,
Anymore. Today has no margins the event arrives
Flush with its edges, is of the same substance,
Indistinguishable. “Play” is something else;
It exists, in a society specifically
Organized as a demonstration of itself.

But it is just this fact – that poetry offers something so other to the prevailing cultural landscape – that makes the genre so valuable. When so much of our collective encounter with language is its use to promote, to vie for our dollars and attention, the task of wresting language from capital is as timely as ever.
This is why MTV deserves credit for selecting Ashbery. Someone like the spoken-word poet Saul Williams would have been an easier and less surprising choice. Williams is probably the most popular poet among the MTV crowd. But what Williams does — and he does it well — is essentially hip-hop without a beat and with a more varied and often conversational flow. He would hardly be a productive introduction to literary poetry. Ashbery is just the kind of poet who could actually turn young people on the pleasure of the complex worlds that poetry can create – if they can be convinced to stick with it for a bit.

Ashbery’s friend and fellow gay New York poet Frank O’Hara once said that, “only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the Americans are better than the movies.” One wonders how many how many MTV-watching youth can be persuaded of the possibility that there is, in fact, something that is, if only sometimes, better than the movies.

1 Comment

Filed under Here

Tags: poetry, publication