You should read this even if you weren’t an English major, because you may be at a party sometime where someone says people don’t read poetry (or books, generally) anymore. You can raise your index finger and opine, wisely, “Au Contraire. . .”
First I return to 2009, an article in The American Scholar that described the precipitous drop in English majors, (as well as philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history.) The study of business, it pointed out, has risen proportionately.
The article supports what I said before: the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.
An aside: most of us became English majors, if we did, during the heyday of English departments. You should read this article if you want more on this. https://theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/#.XjVvQRdKheM And also, we should remember that public institutions have always been more interested in the more practical skills, like business, accounting, astronomy, etc. People need jobs. It’s been the small, often expensive, liberal arts colleges that have championed knowing books as a human good in itself.
In my day (Did I have a Day? Do I no longer have a Day?), inside English departments, there was always tension between the creative writers and the scholar/critics. (I being one, Jerry being the other.) 😌 I could go into why, but the point is that we saw those as separate things.
Studying the novel, for example, within the context of history is different from studying it from the perspective of a writer—how can we DO this, ourselves? What are the turns, the strategies, that make a reader love or lose interest in this? Back then, though, there was no question that both camps loved the books, wanted to concentrate on reading them with love, rather than what followed: a kind of semi-detached analytical dissection, concentrating on identity studies, complex theory, sexuality, film and popular culture, for example. I’m being a bit unfair, maybe. Maybe.
But, what I’m seeing now, from out here, is a wild and beautiful proliferation of writing, hundreds and hundreds of books of poems and memoirs and novels being published, by hook or crook, by traditional presses or self-published. No matter. It’s a cacophony. The big trade presses and university presses are flailing around trying to find their center. Small poetry presses have sprung up everywhere, often run by some passionate lover of poetry who’s willing to spend long hours at almost no pay, to bring out books. Not just poetry, I should say.
Some of these books are good; some of course are not. As is always the case. These things sort themselves out. The point is, people are reading like crazy. They’re writing like crazy. They’re buying books in bookstores, on Kindle, or from Amazon. Young writers are traveling from city to city as cheaply as they can, staying with friends for free, to get a chance to read their poems/stories/whatever in front of small but passionate audiences. They’re building their own websites to promote their books.
They are not narcissists (oh well, no more than anyone else). They love this. They support each other and buy each other’s books and read them. They’re Black, LGBTQ, Asian, Puerto Rican, Ghanaian, and so on. They’re writing about sexual abuse, drunk mothers, poverty, and so on. But as the many sort out, good writing rises to the top. It is not enough to be marginalized and write about it. You have to learn to be a good writer. You have to read a lot and study other people’s writing.
It might be easy to think that that the collapse of the superstructures—English Departments, big publishing houses, (We could extend this to other public institutions)—means the collapse of literature. Simply not true. What I am sorry about, though, is that young writers are not grounded in history very deeply. They know some classic poems and novels, but they mostly haven’t read enough to help them see where their work fits into the history of humanity’s literary speech. Knowing the past tends to make us humble.
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
But come to think of it, until I got a Ph.D., my reading was random and assignment-driven. I didn’t know beans. All I knew is that I loved words in some mysterious way I couldn’t say.
The world as we knew it is crumbling, but there will be plenty of good writing to document it. In the long trajectory, who knows? Nothing will look the way it does now. Not even now looks the way it is now.