Four deaths in and around the poetry community in one week feels like a lot. Three of the deceased were poets, one a critic. Two of the poets also had substantial roles as critics and as translators. Yet what struck me, more than anything, was how each operated within a social world in which the other three were more or less completely absent. If you read the responses to the notices on the blog, it would appear that the death of Franklin Rosemont was the most significant, but it has been entirely unacknowledged in the daily press in this country, while obits for Deborah Digges have started to pop up there, though not as widely nor as quickly as those for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In France, the death of Henri Meschonnic is being treated as a similar big deal.

All of these I take as signs just how large the literary community has become. In a city of 50,000 (to use Seth Abramson’s figure for the number of poets publishing in English), one would anticipate 12 deaths on an average week, even if everyone lived to be 80, which not one of these four did. Of course, neither Sedgwick nor Meschonnic would be included in a strict counting of Abramsons’s census. And most poets don’t begin publishing until they are 20 (David Shapiro & I were precocious), so that 50,000 figure really has to be amortized out over 60 years even if we all make it to 80 – actuarially, you would expect 16 such deaths a week.

This leads me to think (once again) that Abramson’s number is too high, though his underlying point is well taken. And one could respond that my calculations in the paragraph above presume a relatively even age distribution of the 50,000, which I think Abramson & I would both agree there is not. At least half of the 50,000 are under 35, possibly much more than that.

But what I think this suggests is that weeks like the past one will become much more common as time goes on, not only in the numbers, but in the fact that the poets who pass may well appear to operate in entirely different universes with very little overlap. As this becomes more apparent, the fiction that there is such a thing as poetry will become increasingly transparent. Instead there are poetries, a word that perhaps should never be used in the singular without a hyphen in front of it.

Seth Abramson

The other day, when I wrote about Marjorie Perloff, anthologies & critical assumptions in a changing context for writing, Seth Abramson responded with the following comment:

Hi Ron,

You really need to revisit that "10,000 publishing poets in the U.S." figure. I know you've used it before, and believe in it, but honestly – given that 10,000 poets have graduated from MFA or Ph.D. in Creative Writing programs in just the past five years – there is absolutely no possibility of it being correct. Likewise, if you consider the number of print and online poetry journals in operation being close to 1,000 (or perhaps over it), and each publishing several dozen (or many more) poets per year, it becomes clear that the number of publishing poets is around 50,000. If by "publishing" you mean only poets with collections, I think that's an incredibly (with all due respect) wrong-headed way to look at how poets publish poetry. Those without books deserve to be counted, lest we – and I won't dwell too much on the fact of it being you doing this – seriously, seriously underestimate the breadth and depth of the poetry community.

Be well,
Seth

Seth’s note made me happy, because (a) I already see people all but faint when I make the claim that there are 10,000 publishing poets in the U.S. and (b) I concluded some months ago that my estimate was low – my only real question is how low. I came to my conclusion working from the fact that my blogroll has swollen to over 1,000 names – and is becoming less & less complete all the time – when I know full well that less than one in ten poets currently has an active blog that discusses poetics (indeed, this would still be true even if I included all the poets who have blogs that only print their own poems, or simply quote poems that they like, two groups I generally do not include here because I don’t see them as furthering discussion between poets, which has always been my primary goal).¹

And I’ve also thought about the ongoing impact of creative writing programs. I don’t think these programs create any poets whatsoever, tho they may encourage more people who write poetry to try & publish who otherwise might not do so. So in that sense they do add to the total. However, when I think through the numbers, I don’t get a figure like 10,000 poets having graduated over the past five years. I don’t know what percentage of the creative writing programs offer graduate degrees, but last I noted there were still somewhat under 500 such programs in the U.S. Being graduate education, these are not huge departments: on average, how many students matriculate from one in any given year. 20? I think the actual average is closer to half that. And at least half of those graduates are focusing on other, more remunerative genres, from fiction to drama or screenwriting to the “creative essay.” So you would need 500 programs graduating 40 students every year each to yield 10,000 poets over a five year period. There is no way this is happening.

Further – and this is the other key dynamic here – what percentage of recent MFAs publish in their first year or two after graduation? Not just books, but anything. The figure is well under 100 percent. More important, what percentage of them are still trying to publish five, ten years post graduation? I would argue that this number dwindles fairly quickly. The gap between college, where you have a ready context for your writing, and the “real world” where you have to make one up, especially if you don’t already happen to live in New York or San Francisco, is the largest single barrier young poets tend to confront, tho having children has a pretty significant impact as well. Those MFA grads who get at least marginally decent teaching jobs – 50 to 60 a year manage that feat – may be professionally goaded into publishing just to keep their positions and move toward tenure. But I’ll wager that the percentage of MFAs that never get a teaching gig who are still publishing five years after graduation is under 50 percent. In practice, this means that we would need 500 schools graduating between 60 & 80 students per year to reach something like 10,000 new poets to add to those already publishing. How you then get from that to 50,000 I can’t begin to imagine.

Now I’m aware that the number of people in the United States who actually write poetry must easily exceed that higher figure. You could persuade me that it exceeds one million, just based on my experiences running a community writers workshop in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. During any given year that I ran that workshop (1979-1981), we had roughly two percent of the adult population of that inner city community show up, half of whom were writing poetry. Spread out over the entire nation, such a percentage would get you to seven digits, but there are reasons why the Tenderloin might well be (or at least have been) a disproportionately writerly population. And the number of poets there who were actively trying to publish was barely in double figures.

All of which is to say that I don’t think 50,000 passes the “smell test” – it just doesn’t sit right. But I do agree with Abramson when he suggests that 10,000 increasingly doesn’t pass it either. An actual figure, which would take an enormous amount of labor (and fairly significant cost) to track down – and which would then be instantly obsolete – falls somewhere in between.

 

¹ Where it might exceed the one-in-ten threshold would be if we also added in the most numerous of all categories: Dead Blogs. Including those embryonic ones that never get past the third or fourth post. But since Lynn Behrendt has been helping me with the blogroll, we’ve been diligent about getting Dead Blogs off that list.

Mario Merz died last Sunday – to those of us who have used the Fibonacci series in our art, this is not minor or distant news. While every one of the artists I’ve come across who have explored & exploited this series – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 etc. – each number always the sum of the two previous numbers – seems to have arrived at it by him or herself independently (William Duckworth to his compositions for piano,  saxophone or web, Inger Christensen to her poetry, Merz to his igloos often composed of found objects or otherwise anti-aesthetic materials), there seems no question that Merz got there first.

What you can do with number in art is pretty damn near anything, if you simply think about for a while. None of these artists are much like one another, though each is representative of the more avant (or post-avant) tendencies in their forms. I don’t think Inger Christensen’s poetry is at all like my own, even though her booklength poem based on Fibonacci is entitled Alphabet!! Merz’ use of the series is all about ratio, an argument for scale & livability. There is an air of precision in Duckworth’s music that seems a far cry from Merz’ ragged edges, or those of my own poetry as well.

Yet I do think there is a deeper shared sensibility at work here. It’s no accident, for example, that Duckworth’s influences can be traced back to the work of John Cage, or that Christensen has been consistently the most formally innovative of Danish poets.  

Arte Povera, a visual arts tendency from 1960s Italy – the work dates from the beginning of the decade, the critics finally “named” the school around ’67 – was both formally innovative & made a point of using materials from the world itself, rather than merely what might be purchased from an arts supplies vendor. Its closest kin in the United States is Pop Art, I suppose, although Arte Povera always strikes me as being implicitly political, or at the very least social, in ways that most Pop – Warhol would be the exception* – does not. Merz was a medical student jailed for anti-fascist activity when he first began to draw.

There is a 21-year range between the four of us. Merz began using Fibonacci in 1971 & within a decade all four of us had produced at least one work of some size using the form. Looking at the work of the others & how different they seem, not only from my own poetry, but from each other, what strikes me most is a sense of all the other ways in which Fibonacci has yet to be explored. But I wonder if, a century hence, somebody won’t come along with a theory as to why four diverse artists from one generation broadly defined (“too young to fight in WW2, yet touched by it in some fashion”) would turn to number as a way to open up the world.

Why Fibonacci is that key series I have no doubt. Its ratios are distinct enough to both convey a sense of shape, movement, development. Much of poetry is expressed historically in terms of prime numbers – iambic pentameter rather than the ten-syllable line, or the construction of a haiku out of 3, 5 & 7 – yet primes very quickly dissolve in terms of such ratios. There is no way for a reader, viewer, listener, whatever to get any sense of shape or direction from 191, 193, 197 & 199, for example. And it gets worse the higher one goes. The 12^th number in the Fibonacci series happens to be 12², yet it comes equidistant between the 34^th & 35^th prime numbers. When taken as a ratio, Fibonacci is literally the Golden Mean: 1.6180339887499…. Φ.

Knowing how Fibonacci functions & knowing how one might use it in any given medium are two very different things. Here’s to Mario Merz, who saw it first.

* And would deny it! Yet consider that Guston’s turn back toward a more overtly political content was precisely what drove him to the iconography of comics.