Who's the boss?

There was a Website called Foetry that devoted itself, in the words of its founder, to "chisel[ing] a small crack in the facade of the academic poetry industry." Mostly this meant savaging the reputations of various poets, some distinguished, some barely known outside the industry's branch-offices. Foetry had little to say about its targets’ work but spoke at length about their personal failings, their self-dealings and adulteries, their back-scratching and log-rolling .

Well, as Bill Wilson

once said in another context “We are not saints.”

For all their bile, these attacks barely registered outside the academy. In this way, they were like poems themselves. They were anti-poems, for a poem is something made from nothing, or almost nothing, and the attacks in Foetry were something reduced to nothing. More accurately, they were nothing heaped on something in an attempt to obliterate it.

The striking thing about Foetry, which shut down in May, 2007, is the disproportion between its bile and its subjects’ status in the larger world. Check out the Amazon ratings of books by Marie Ponsot , Paul Muldoon , or Philip Levine .
Take a walk outside and ask the first 10 people you meet who Jorie Graham is.

No fair if “outside” is the hall of a creative writing department.

The same phenomenon was apparent when I was an arts administrator in the 1970s. Nothing equaled the savagery with which our clients snapped and ravened for $200 grants and $50 reading fees. The scarcer the resources, the more savagely people will fight for them, and to read through the character assassinations in the Foetry archives is to envision two skeletal wretches in a freezing room in Leningrad during the Siege clawing each others’ eyes out for possession of a filthy heel of bread made from a few grams of rye flour bulked out with floor sweepings and rat dung.




But I wonder whether this savagery might also be a measure of something else. Almost 300 years ago,Shelley wrote that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Maybe this is still true. Between Shelley’s time and our own, the acknowledged legislation of the world has passed from kings to presidents to bankers and hedge-fund managers, with occasional interceptions by popes, ayatollahs, and chairmen. (At the moment we are witnessing a renewed struggle between representatives of the political and economic spheres, with the same bankers who rifled the world’s pockets holding a gun to its head and threatening to pull the trigger.)

But what if, in some secret dimension folded to infinitesimal thin-ness inside our own, the poets are still in power? I’m not sure what this power consists of. It may be the power to invest words with a meaning that in all other quarters has been stripped from them. The power to shape the dreams of people who still have dreams, or maybe just enter them, appearing as a cigarette glowing in an unlit doorway, the silver bark of a crepe myrtle, a cat perched magisterially on a fence, gazing at the dreamer with its topaz gaze.



The bankers and hedge-fund managers claimed they could make something from nothing, that is, from debt. In the end, they turned something into nothing, pouring trillions of other people’s dollars down a drain whose terminal point is still unknown to us, though maybe not to them.

The poets live up to their promise, though most of them promise very little. They still make something from nothing. That's why some people hate them.