The 31 March New York Times Book Review had two letters about an essay published in the 24 February issue.
Here is the first letter:
David Orr's column On Poetry (Feb. 24) may be right about alcoholism and the dangers of drunk driving but Orr's attempted ticketing of Charles Bukowski would have greatly amused the poet. The opinions of respectable literary critics were of zero interest to him, but the fact that someone at the New York Times is attacking him 25 years after his death is evidence that he is having the last laugh. That his current publisher should exploit his popularity by reissuing much of his prodigious output is mere marketing.
Bukowski's entire project as a writer was in opposition or indifference to the standards of poetry deemed worthy of prestigious publications. He published in obscure little magazines and in John Martin's independent Black Sparrow Press. He thrived in those marginal places and was embraced by countless readers bored with most of what passed for accomplished verse. His writing will outlast the complaints of scandalized mandarins.
Here is the second letter:
David Orr writes eloquent, amusing and circuitously disapproving commentary on the retching doggerel by Charles Bukowski, whose reputation far exceeds his literary accomplishments. I agree with almost everything Orr describes so well, and his placement of Bukowski's modus operandi within a certain tradition - however dishonorable - is useful, up to a point.
But I do wish Or had simply said more bluntly what needs to be said: that Bukowski remains a thoroughly self-indulgent and odious degenerate whose drunken excursions into the world of poetry were grotesque abuses of the literary form. That we have publishers mining the dregs of his work for another book because he has this roguish reputation further degrades serious literature and insults those who care about poetry of real merit.
So was Bukowski a good poet or a bad poet? Are Bukowski's poems good or bad? You can tell good engineering from bad engineering. Good engineering works. Bad engineering doesn't work. You can tell good mathematics from bad mathematics. In good mathematics, the theorems follow logically from the axioms. In bad mathematics, they don't. You can tell good science from bad science. Good science explains natural phenomena or experimental observations. Bad science doesn't. This is true in almost all of STEM. The exceptions tend to be on the cutting edge. Like whether a mathematician accepts the axiom of choice seems to be a matter of taste. Like is there a ninth planet far out in the Oort Cloud? Unless Charles Bukowski is an outlier, poetry is different.
Poetry may be just a matter of taste, like the axiom of choice. Or like food and drink are matters of taste. Many people like alcohol. I don't like alcohol. I don't like what it does to my brain. Now, there
are poems that I like. A therapist once asked me if there are any poetic writings (the Hebrew word was "שירה") that bring me to tears. I named The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and על כל אלה. The specific verses of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
I also admit unashamedly that my favorite poet is Dr. Seuss. My main criterion for judging poetry (and all art for that matter) is that good poetry has to be fun. Everything else is secondary.
So if the only criterion for good art vs. bad art is do you like it or don't you like it, why do we force students to learn the literary subset thereof? Or, more precisely, why do we test students on it if there are no right or wrong answers? What is there to test for? The only answer I can come up with is cultural literacy. Take some works of your own culture that are generally considered great (they need not be universally considered great) and teach the students the tools to understand them. This is hard to teach properly. Beyond understanding the basic literal meaning, there are no right or wrong answers, unlike in
e.g. arithmetic where the number you get at the end is either right or wrong. For anything interpretive, the student has to be tested on how well his/her interpretation matches the text and how well s/he defends his/her interpretation. The teacher has to grade the student according to rhetorical skill, and ignore whether the student agrees with the teacher's own interpretation.
This assumes that teaching cultural literacy is valuable. The value of cultural literacy to the teacher is totally subjective. Teaching cultural literacy is valuable to the extent that perpetuating the culture is valuable. I should return to this topic in the contexts of teaching Judaica to Hiloni students in Israel and not requiring Haredim to learn the full core curriculum, just English and mathematics (or maybe English and STEM; biology can be taught to Haredim the way young Earth creationists do it in the US).
