Let Poetry Die?

24 January 2010

A thought-provoking piece on the financial structure of the poetry market by Patrick Gillespie, a Vermont poet.

I don’t agree with everything that Gillespie says, but he certainly gives one a lot of food for thought. The string of comments at the end are well worth reading too.

What I think is wrong about his contention that poetry should be set loose into the commercial market of populism is that poetry has never been a popular medium; it’s always been the pleasure of and a pursuit by elites. Few poets have ever--and I mean ever--made a living from their poetry outside of patronage. Chaucer was a bureaucrat; Lydgate (probably the most-read English poet of the Middle Ages, but roundly criticized as awful ever since) was a monk; Wyatt received the patronage of Henry VIII’s court; Shakespeare was an actor and theatrical producer; Emily Dickinson had family money; William Carlos Williams was a physician; Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon are university professors; and so on. When we think of the “poet,” we conjure up a vision of Allen Ginsberg, who did indeed manage to forge a living from his poetry while avoiding patronage, but Ginsberg is the exception not the prototype.

About the only place where there is a large and sustainable popular market for poetry is in song lyrics. Rap, in particular, is an enormously inventive and exciting poetic genre. True, there are a lot of really bad song lyrics too, but that’s the case with any genre of literature. And of course, the commercial music industry is more concerned with what is marketable than what is good, so there is a certain selling of the soul for anyone who treads this path. But outside of music, the popular appeal of poetry is, and always has been, quite limited, as is the ability to make a living from poetry outside of acquiring a patron.

So what Gillespie seems to be really objecting to is that the modern patron (the university system) has bad and outdated tastes. But that has been the complaint of poets and writers about patrons since time immemorial. Not that the complaint isn’t valid, but it’s the nature of the beast.

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish.)

Movie Misquotes

16 January 2010

Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, has an “On Language” column in the NY Times on cinematic misquotations.

American Rosetta Stone?

15 January 2010

The National Geographic reports on a slate writing tablet found at Jamestown, Virginia that has clues about the early settlers’ communication with the local Algonquin Indians.

Hat tip to the DSNA blog.

More on ADS WOTY

10 January 2010

This Washington Post article really captures the spirit and atmosphere  of the American Dialect Society’s word of the year selection. Dan Zak obviously has a keen eye for the human aspects behind a story.

It has a couple of faults. Normally, any article that quotes Paul J.J. Payack as some kind of expert isn’t worth the reader’s time, but in this case the strength of the rest of the article overcomes this lapse in judgment. And he gets the title Jesse Sheidlower’s excellent book wrong. It’s The F-word, not F***. (I’ll bet someone told him the book was titled “the F-word” and he took that to be a euphemism on the speaker’s part, and then there was a failure to check his facts. One of the problems with laying off copyeditors is an increase in factual errors in reporting.)

The accompanying video is kind of interesting. It’s various linguists talking about their personal choices for word of the year.

2009 ADS Word of the Year

9 January 2010

On Friday, 8 January, at its annual meeting in Baltimore the American Dialect Society voted for tweet as the word of the year for 2009 and google as the word of the decade.

The “word” in word of the year is interpreted as “vocabulary item,” and phrases are also in the running. The word does not have to be new, but only newly prominent or notable during the past year. While informed by academic expertise, the selection is done in and for fun and is not an official induction of words into the language, but as an appreciation of the diversity and inventiveness of the English language.

ADS defined the word of the year as tweet, n., a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and v., the act of sending such a message. Other nominees for word of the year were:
• -er, suffix, used in such words as birther, someone who questions whether Obama was born in the United States
• fail, n., A noun or interjection describing something egregiously unsuccessful. Usually used as an interjection: “FAIL!”
• H1N1, n., the virus that causes swine flu
• public option, n., a government-run health insurance program
• Dracula sneeze, n., the covering of one’s mouth with the crook of one’s elbow when sneezing, seen as similar to popular portrayals of the vampire Dracula in which he hides the lower half of his face with a cape.

The word of the decade is defined as google, v., to search the internet; generic form of the trademarked Google, the world’s dominant internet search engine. Other word of the decade nominees were:
• blog, n., a web site for publishing a chronological and ongoing series of related entries, especially when they are all by the same person(s) or on the same topic. Also a productive combining form: blogosphere, blogerati.
• green, adj., relating to ecological or environmental conservation or protection. Also a productive combining form: greenwashing, green collar.
• text, v., to send a text message via a mobile phone; n., such a message.
• war on terror, n., a global effort to prevent terror and terrorist attacks.
• Wi-Fi, n., abbreviation for wireless fidelity, a group of technical standards enabling the transmission of data over wireless networks.

The society also selected sea kittens, a euphemism for fish promoted by the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as the “most unnecessary” word of 2009, beating out birther, micronumerosity (the state of having too small a data sample), Octomom (nickname for Nadya Suleman, mother of octuplets), and salahi (to gate crash, after Tareq and Michaele Salahi who did so at a White House state dinner).

Taking the honors for “most outrageous” was death panel (an imagined panel of doctor and bureaucrats who make treatment decisions based on cost). Other contenders in this category were sexting (sending sexual messages and pictures by mobile phone), teabagger (derogatory name for attendees of conservative “tea party” rallies, after the name of a sexual practice), and underpants bomber/pants bomber/crotch bomber/panty bomber/eunuch bomber (after Umar Abdulmutallab, who boarded an airliner with explosives hidden in his pants).

To hike the Applachian Trail (to commit adultery, after a statement about the whereabouts of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford who was in Argentina visiting his mistress) was voted “most euphemistic,” easily winning over public option and sea kittens.

“Most likely to succeed” is the pronunciation of the current year as twenty-ten. Other contenders were charging station (a place where electric cars recharge their batteries), green shoots (signs of economic recovery), and the suffix -er.

Voted “least likely to succeed” was any name for the past decade, such as naughties, aughties, oughties. Other nominees were Poliwood (politically active movie stars), slow media (newspapers and other print media), tether (to connect a laptop to a mobile phone for internet access), oh-ten (name for the year 2010), and sea kittens.

Many organizations run “word of the year” votes, but the American Dialect Society’s is the oldest and one of the few that is not connected to commercial interests. The ADS, founded in 1889, is an association of linguists, lexicographers, editors, and writers who study the English language in North America and languages and dialects elsewhere that influence it. ADS also publishes the scholarly journal American Speech and has been choosing words of the year since 1990.