Bidding Adieu to the Academy of American Poets
Why would any reasonable lover of the Arts want, finally, to be done with the Academy of American Poets?
Well, here's ONE good reason. POETRY has become an appallingly ELITIST movement within the larger community of people who write in any genre. I mean, when's the last time you saw yet another nauseating, self-serving plea--a shameless, highfalutin, Mega-Beg, Gimme-Gimme--for enough money to keep novelists writing NOVELS? (Oops, I almost forgot. What was I thinking? The MFA in creative writing! As if one can’t conceivably write well without the help of a college crammed full of twill-suited, butt-sucking literati, charging an outrageously high price to tell you how a novel "should" be written.)
But back, now, to the world of stanzas and pentameters. Where has this idea--that poetry is at the very top of the writerly hierarchy--come from? That and the disgustingly arrogant, astonishingly ill-informed idea that Opera is superior to all the other musical genres combined? Might it not be from deeply imbedded Social Darwinist ideas about what--and who--are the “best," while all the rest of us are yearning for even one tiny wedge of the literary pie?
As far as I'm concerned, the Academy of American Poets appears to have been hatched--and continues to be governed--by a narcissistic presumption that poets and their poems are Gifts from the Gods, while all the rest of us mere writers are down here on our knees, groveling like desperately hungry concentration campers--fighting, to the death if necessary, to get their hands, tongues, and tastebuds on even one little crumb of the Sacred Elixir that is poetry.
I'm neither novelist nor essayist--journalist nor poet. I'm a WRITER--a human who WRITES--who does interesting things with WORDS. While poetry is among the many kinds of writing I do every day, I don't then run around like some super-privileged, Heaven-Anointed, self-proclaimed genius Word Rooster, crowing on and on, Morning til Midnight, about how absolutely essential my poems are to the survival of the human race.
I really don't need the nanny-like, breast-suckling assistance of the Academy of American Poets to help me find--and even WRITE! Imagine that!--a poem that some well-informed word-enthusiast might actually deem to be a culturally relevant, unpretentious, straight-from-the-heart expression of the human condition.
So Alas: I regret to inform you that I'm cutting loose from your website.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go to my kitchen table--the one covered with catsup smears, utility bills, and breaded, over-broiled chicken crumbs--and try my damnedest to put something--ANYTHING--down on paper that someone might wish to read in the hope that it will be interesting--and maybe even GOOD--without having gotten the nose-in-the-air imprimatur of the insufferably La-de-Dah “Academy of American Poets.”
Academy, my ass! All you have to do, aspiring poet, is find a pleasant place to sit, then work down to the bone on a poem based on a passionate conviction in need of expression and send it, bird-like, up into that welcoming, chance-taking sky where it will then have a fighting chance to be read, appreciated, and even cherished.
And all of this with no fancy credentials or prestigious associations required. Think of that!
So rejoice now! Then roll up your sleeves, sharpen a couple of red pencils, and get your writerly self down to some serious business. The rewards you'll then have a chance to earn for your effort may just turn out to be beyond your wildest dreams.
And remember: poets and their poems--and of course every imaginable kind of creative work--can come from anywhere--not just the Halls of Academe and the Pockets of Privilege. One does not need a fancy address, a privileged upbringing--or even an Ivy League education--to produce the kind of significant, lasting, beloved personal expressions that can enrich the world. If a homeless person can write a poem--and many of them do--then why can't you?
— Ross Alan Bachelder — www.artsaplenty.ME — April 27, 2023