All right, my fellow Americans. The Pill has had it with countrymen and countrywomen dissing what the world (rightly) calls football because it is, as they say, "boring." This is especially rich coming from a) fans of baseball (among whom I count myself), which might with more justice stand in the dock accused of the selfsame offense, and b) fans of things like symphonic or chamber music, avant-garde art, and, ahem, poetry.Why do I number the latter among this company? Because, Gentle Reader, I have heard the philistines calling each to each when the Superior Genre celebrated on this lyriophilic blog is mentioned (I do not think that they will call to me), and the sound borne on the breeze from where they gather before American Idol is this: "bo-ring, bo-ring, bo-ring."
Here's the thing: "boring" is always code for something else (typically the bovine refusal to
engage), and in this case (these cases -- what I'm saying of soccer I'm also saying of poetry) it's code for "I don't get it." And haven't we all, those of us who proselytize for soccer or for poetry (or both), confronted the dismissal of our beloved part of culture as boring by those who simply haven't yet learned the moves? Both matches and poems often offer easy surface pleasures, I think, and a moment spent absorbing those is fun enough all by itself. But both soccer games and sonnets open up in pleasurable and interesting ways when we spend the little time required to learn the basics, when we learn the pattern so that we can see the meaning in a deviation from it.And what's true of poetry in general, I think, is true of particular kinds of poetry as well. Am I the only one who has heard from readers who claim to enjoy the genre that they simply can't get into, say, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, because, unlike the poems of Shakespeare or Keats or Mary Oliver or Spencer Reese, it's "boring"? Isn't this, though, simply a way of saying (as those who complain about a goalless match full of brilliant midfield play will say) "I don't get it and am unwilling to put any effort into trying to get it"? Any reason why we should listen to such people, to say nothing of making them directors of the NEA or having them edit anthologies for classroom use?
