The Trouble With Poetry

The Anchoress linked to this interesting NRO column by Mark Goldblatt. In it, he describes what happens when a writer reveals he supports Bush in a room full of poets.

But the most interesting part for me was Goldblatt's theory on why poets are so homogenously left wing. i find his reasoning persuasive:

How could a room full of published poets, wannabe poets, and poetry fans — in other words, people of average to slightly-below-average intelligence — turn out to be of a single mind on the subject of politics? Even in Manhattan, the mathematical odds against such a gathering would seem astronomical.

The answer, I suspect, has to do with groupthink and with the state of poetry in the United States. It is an absolute rule of aesthetics that as the formal constraints of a genre are cast aside, judgment within the genre becomes more and more subjective. Think of it this way: If I set out to write a Petrarchian sonnet and mess up the rhyme scheme, you can point out the error. But how can you tell if I’ve screwed up free verse? As judgment becomes more and more subjective, recognition depends less and less on inspiration and technique. Brownnosing, rather than craft, becomes the poet’s stock and trade. What is the common characteristic of the dozen most notable American poets today?

Their ability to work a room.

If you’re a struggling poet, therefore, right-of-center politics is not an intellectual option; it’s bad manners, a social faux pas. The propositions that George W. Bush is a miserable excuse for a president, that Republicans are evil money-grubbing bastards, that religious conservatives are actively seeking to establish a legislative theocracy . . . these function as conversational currency. If you cannot agree to them, you cannot shmooze; and if you cannot shmooze, you cannot gain entry into the brownnosing, pal-publishing, blurb-spewing universe of American poetry.