Laying it out for the laypeople; poetic popularity and the page-versus-performance debate

One reason I wanted to add an editor's blog was to create something of a lively, less formal companion to our website. Among other things, this will (hopefully) also help Rager Media to connect with those who might not be deeply familiar with the literary publishing industry, but are interested in knowing more about it. For this reason, I hope that those among the initiated who read these entries will be patient when I discuss topics that might seem obvious to them; what's obvious to the specialist may be a revelation to the average reader. There are any number of Frequently Asked Questions which I will address along the way. I also hope to stir some passions; my tastes in literature are exacting but specific. I'm bound to provoke some rage. If so, EXCELLENT--please feel free to leave ranting comments on this blog for the amusement and/or edification of others.

Sometime around 2004, at an Oberlin College booksigning, U.S. Poet Laureate and "literary rock star" Billy Collins talked about the need to open what he called "the closed circuit." In other words, the future of the print poetry institutions (and by logical extension, "literary fiction," though I don't believe that he factored fiction into his literary equation) depends upon poets reaching beyond the relatively closed circles of those who are already plugged into the literary establishment to find an audience beyond the English Departments of America.

Obviously poetry has seen a resurgence in recent years. There is no shortage of popular literary events--poetry slams, etc.. The fact that there's a show on HBO called Def Poetry Jam testifies to the potential for poetry's mainstream appeal. Unfortunately, there is a LOT of bad poetry (particularly on HBO's Def Poetry Jam) being shouted out on stages everywhere; but then, there are quite a few notable examples of very talented "performance poets." "Page poets" tend to be just a tad smug about their poetic roles, often feeling superior to "performance poets," whom they perceive to be all histrionics and subject matter and no real poetic talent. This is a remarkably unsubtle attitude, especially considering how many really bad poems find their way into print in some of the best national literary magazines.

That said, the really bad performance poets do tend to give poets a bad name. But then, so do the really bad print poets. I think of Ezra Pound's contention (something along the following lines) that the main advantage of the public's neglect of poetry is that censors and legislators also pay little attention to it. Similarly, the damage done to the public perception of poetry by bad print poems is minimized by the fact that most people don't read them. So because performance poetry tends to be more publicly conspicuous, the effusion of really bad performance poetry promises to accomplish an estrangement of poetry and the public on a scale that bad page poetry could never aspire to.

I've never undertaken a longitudinal empirical comparison of ratios of horrible poems to good poems between poetry for the page and poetry for the stage, but if I were a gambling man, which I'm not, I'd wager that there are more excellent poems recorded in our nation's best literary journals than have ever been composed exclusively for performance in the last couple of decades. But I'd also like to make a distinction between rap and performance poetry, which are largely different forms. Much of the best oral poetry to be found today is in rap music. Anyone who witnessed Mos Def's or Snoop Dogg's freestyling on MTV's now-defunct Lyricist Lounge Show would be hard-pressed to deny the potential for literary genius (yes, genius) in the hip-hop movement. It's obvious that critics will one day cease to fawn over the mostly forgettable work of Langston Hughes, for instance, in favor of the verbal masterpieces of Mos Def at his best. Langston Hughes will always remain important historically, but those with discerning tastes for truly accomplished poetry will one day summon the courage to sweep out the dusty specimens in the literary canon in favor of real working models from which contemporary poets can learn. Gone from the introductory anthologies, hopefully, will be Wordsworth, whose work should be studied as history (of course English majors should read Wordsworth--for the same reason that they should probably read the later work of T.S. Eliot: it's largely drivel, but has been inordinately influential), some of which will be seen as decent-enough for its time, but none of which poets writing today could learn anything of value from. With any luck, Shakespeare's sonnets will go, and the real poetic accomplishments of Shakespeare, which are to be found in his plays, will still be relevant.

It always surprises me when intelligent people dismiss an entire artistic mode. Performance poetry is often dismissed by the literati for the same reason that many people reject poetry produced by the literary establishment. The fact is that bad art is bad for art, if only because the preservation of the arts is a difficult thing, and if the serious arts weren't so endangered, the glut of bad artistic examples wouldn't be so dangerous and frustrating. Institutions which already thrive need no defenders or apologists; most people won't dismiss Jazz just because of the pseudo-jazz hack Kenny G. People don't generally give up on film as an artform just because they spent ten dollars on Rocky VI. Just because most of the poetry you'll hear on the stage is terrible does not mean that it's somehow an inherently flawed mode of poetic expression. After all, if I weren't a poet myself, and I didn't know that one will find excellent poems in the literary journals if you look hard enough, I might pick up a respected literary journal and conclude from that magazine that print poetry is crap, that contemporary poets have no ear, and that prosody died and went to Pandemonium. Or perhaps it took the slow boat down the River of Forgetfulness and Oblivion.

Why the Name Rager Media? Some naming FAQ's

I'm frequently asked why we have the name that we have. For one, the CEO and publisher of Rager Media's name is Eric Rager. Not to be confused with Eric Racher, a Rager Media author.

How is 'Rager' pronounced?

Rager is pronounced with a hard 'g,' though everyone will likely continue to pronounce it with a soft 'g,' because it's the pronounciation that makes better phonetic sense in English and some other languages.

But Rager Media doesn't sound like an independent literary venture. It sounds dreadfully corporate. In fact, it doesn't sound in the least bit literary. Shouldn't it be called Something-or-other Press or something. Please explain yourself.

Yes, well there are a number of reasons why we're named this way. For one, the name Rager Media is very searchable. If we called ourselves High Art Press, American Literary Press, or something like that, it wouldn't be as easy to find in a search engine. Also, we want it to sound corporate, to signify that we're an entrepreneurial literary venture. We're not a big corporation, but we're in business to make money for our authors and us. So though I believe that we're providing a valuable public service, we intend to continue to do so without being beholden to any institutions. We believe that demonstrating the marketability of literary work will ultimately benefit the entire literary industry. Also, we chose "Media" instead of "Press" to keep our options open, and because it's a little different than what most other publishing companies are doing.