Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Steve Shoemaker
Subject: what does it do?
Maria Damon writes:
I’m interested in this recurring formula, the hallmark-card verse, invoked as
anathema to all serious modernist/postmodernist sensibilities. when i ask
students to research "micro-poetries," i include greetingcard verse as an
example of a micro-poetry. how can these despised, commercial fragments –or
the paradigm of poetry-as-therapy, as in psychiatric-ward workshops –be
understood in terms of the "cultural work" they perform? rather than dismissing
them out of hand as trite and derivative, how can we use them to understand, as
shoemaker suggests, the multiple "purposes" of poetry.
I think you’re right, Maria, that this kind of poetry can do useful cultural work.
And also right that my schematic formulation risks a too easy dismissal of that
work and participates in a history of such dismissals, which have, importantly,
often been strongly gendered (e.g. Pound and "Amygism"). But what i was
objecting to was not the existence of this kind of poetry or its uses, but the
dominance of that sort of definition of poetry in mainstream culture. That
dominance often precludes "serious" considerations of other sorts of poetry (i
guess we shld watch out for too exclusive definitions all along the spectrum).
There are, for ex., always some, often many, students who, with the poetry-aspersonal-expression
model in place, initially resist any in-depth consideration
of the form of the poetry, on the assumption that such considerations are too
ingenious, too self-conscious, not-what-the-author-was-thinking- about. It’s
that sort of reductive approach to poetry that i often find myself needing to
work to move beyond by suggesting other goals and possibilities. This
movement "beyond" usually involves some intensive "close reading," but a
larger sense of other possibilities-for-poetry seems to be necessary for such
reading to take place….