Poetry Event Seeks to Foster Young Writers

“I would rather have a more marginal poetry that was more dynamic and diverse than a poetry that had a more central place in our culture, but was more monolithic,” says Robert N. Casper, editor of “jubilat.” On October 13, the Woodberry Poetry Room will host a discussion with Casper and Jennifer S. Flescher, poet and editor of the literary magazine, “Tuesday; An Art Project,” that addresses the question of diversity in poetry today. The talk, titled “Five Minutes with the Editors: Locating Your Voice in the Literary Zeitgeist,” will illuminate the process of submitting work to literary journals. Last year, Newsweek reported that poetry readership has fallen by half in the last 16 years. Flescher and Casper’s presentation will concern not only how young writers can be heard, but also what being heard means in today’s literary culture.

Getting heard, according to Casper, often begins with publications like his own. “Literary magazines,” he says, “are the first straight step writers make to reach an audience they don’t know.” According to Casper, a poet may hope that publishing a poem in a literary magazine will enable his work to reach a community of contemporaries.

The world of American poetry that Casper describes is not so much a cohesive “zeitgeist” as it is numerous fragmented communities of poets. These communities tend to center around Master of Fine Arts programs in specific geographical regions, with little communication between them. “It’s a little bit frightening,” he says. “If tomorrow, someone writes the next ’Wasteland‘—can we be sure that it will be canonized, that people in 20 or 30 years will know about it?”

“No one gets rich and famous writing poetry,” Casper says, referring to the isolated nature of these groups. But far from despairing the future of poetry, he instead emphasizes the importance of these small communities. Casper believes that the mass participation in poetry through smaller venues has allowed many new, diverse voices to emerge. It is a craft, he says, which can never lose its audience or its relevance. “When there’s a tragedy, or something wonderful, people look to poetry as a source of insight,” he says.

Both Casper and Flescher emphasize the importance of situating their journals in contemporary poetry. Flescher says that she is interested in publishing a wide variety of writers in “Tuesday,” especially by juxtaposing the work of already established poets with that of burgeoning artists. “I like to think about the arc of a writing life,” Flescher writes in an email. Though she publishes many voices, she tries to seek out an “emotional core” in the work she publishes, partly, she says, as a reaction to the nature of poetry today. “There is a dwelling in too much irony,” she writes. “There seems to be a backlash to feeling.”

“[The decline in poetry readership] speaks to a larger concern that we have as a culture—we are more interested in our own expression than getting our own information,” he says. Casper compares the trend of poetry authors outnumbering readers with how individuals are more interested in blogs and opinions than newspapers and facts. He points to the “American dilemma,” how “more people want to participate in culture than experience it.”