First, it is not enough to ask poets to police themselves. The fact that a relatively small group of folks (representing whatever clusters of our Balkanized poetic landscape dominate discussion) judges the most important contests, sits on the boards of the most respected journals (frequently enough publishing their own work therein), and pulls down the biggest grants year after year suggests at least a hint of nepotism at play in the world of contemporary poetry. Certainly it is necessary, and increasingly difficult, to make a living, but the well-being of poetry dictates that poets should be prevented from judging any more than three contests per year, from sitting on the boards of more than two journals simultaneously, and from applying for the same grant more than twice in a lifetime. While I would stop short of calling for the formation of some regulatory body to oversee the doling out of poetic manna, we have our critical voices to work with; surely we can make clear to the more hoggish of our poetry elite that if their needs are truly so great that they require both a MacArthur and the income generated from judging twenty contests in addition to their reading fees, then they may need to rethink their priorities, or else begin to use their small celebrity to publicly question why their children must pay forty thousand dollars a year for tuition, and why their own health-care costs threaten to suck their IRA's into the void. In addition, more contests should be judged by the vote of a more substantial group of people: subscribers of the journal holding the contest, say. This sort of suggestion inevitably invokes the image of a mob of Philistines storming the castle gates, but I for one believe that if the lay reader cannot adequately judge the quality of a poem, the blame lies with us. Which brings me to my second suggestion:

MFA programs need to engage the greater community with greater consistency. While some Comp/Rhet folks may disagree, I think creative writing students and teachers have the greatest potential of any part of English Departments to reach the public through service learning initiatives and performance. Readings of from the book of Adorno will not pack them in the way open poetry readings will, and many more MFA programs should embrace such service learning initiatives as poets in the schools programs, workshops for prison inmates, and the guidance of community poetry circles. Money earmarked to pay for readings by famous poets could be diverted to help fund such initiatives.

Poets of all aesthetic stripes need to learn how to value one another’s' work. No one should presume to call themselves a 'trained' poet who hasn't studied formal scansion techniques, the rhetorical modes of free verse, the aesthetic of the political polemic, the studied incomprehensibility of LANGUAGE poetry, and every other damn thing they can get their hands on. Favor what you favor, but strive to appreciate why other modes exist, and if you have trouble valuing other modes, well, try your hand at writing poems using their aesthetic criteria. Which leads me to my final example:

Poetry that holds dialogue with the greater culture in higher regard than assertions of its own aesthetic value needs to be encouraged. If you cannot abide heroic couplets, then read historical prose about the way Alexander Pope's work was devoured by the public, or seek out Lucretius' "On The Nature of the Universe" to understand ways in which contemporary knowledge can be discussed, analyzed and debated using the techniques of poetry. That is not to say that poets should favor a simpler, more chatty style of verse so that more people can understand them; our public discourse, which at this point seems almost entirely comprised of the sententious and the anaphoric, could stand a good shot of stylistic complexity and good old poetic diction. To facilitate greater acceptance of poetic forms of discourse, poets should begin submitting work to journals that do not, as a rule, publish poems, along with an explanation of their reasons for doing so. Most publishers will reject these submissions out of hand, of course, but persistent effort in this regard may well help widen the audience for poetry, and the well-earned ability of poets to deal with constant rejection should prove quite useful in such a daunting, long-term project. In addition, by reinstating this other, more immediate goal for poetic discourse, perhaps fewer poets would strain to create that perfect, timeless work of art, and so the existence of so many mediocre poets would be tempered by an increased variety of forms of mediocrity. Artistic beauty should be the primary goal of poetry, but in making it the only goal, we have lost sight of its usefulness as a means of persuasion regarding matters extra-poetic.

This essay is meant to help foster a conception of contemporary poetry as intimately connected with the sort of greater culture poets so often feel isolated from, a culture that, to a rather alarming degree, is suffering from the delusion that everything human is reducible to the economics of self-interest. Certainly, there are few more apt forms of discourse with which to combat this sort of economic determinism than poetry; we only need to apply our skills in new directions. At least part of the blame for the continued presence of so much well-crafted, yet ultimately mediocre poetry must be placed on a general refusal by the poetic community to encourage verse whose primary goal is dialogue with other communities--why should the skill of saying something as well as it can possibly be said to an audience primarily concerned with the content of the utterance not be as worthy a goal for poets as making object d'art for the appreciation of a small group of connoisseurs? Such an expansion of what is considered an acceptable poetic goal would, I presume, lead to increased quality overall, and may even launch a few practitioners toward a new sort of Parnassus: one comprised of an entire mountain range stretching as far as the eye can measure, rather than one bleak little peak thrust madly toward heaven.