Poetry and Pop
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Writing in the same piece about attending a spoken word performance, Gates
says about one man's poem: "I don't see it making the Norton Anthology, but
it has a certain vigor, and the crowd cheers and whistles its approval." The
poems collected in Sweet Nothings are likely to have the opposite appeal.
That is, while it is hard to imagine these poems eliciting whistles from the
academic crowd for whom they are intended, given the Norton's politics and the
traditional nature of these poems, some may indeed make it into a future edition.
Regardless, it is exactly this sort of question about canon-making -- is rock and
roll an important enough subject for serious poetry? -- that informs Sweet
Nothing's project.
While some poems romanticize the cultural space that sixties rock opened to adolescents (and continues to open
in the nineties), other writers in Sweet Nothings who are less nostalgic
find ways of testing rock-related cliches.
While at least one popular music critic has celebrated the
publication of this anthology as an example of how deeply rock has penetrated
into the high culture of poetry, it's important to look in more detail at what's
being said in these poems. There are some terrific poems in Sweet
Nothings; there are also many that reinforce the usual clichés about
rock, especially sixties rock and its supposed counter-cultural purity and
powers. The responses by poets to pop music in this particular collection are
part of the larger story involving intellectuals' love-hate relationship with
popular culture. In Sweet Nothings, of course, it's mostly love -- but,
also, mostly an unexamined love. Many poems are less a form of cultural criticism
than a form of starry-eyed praise.
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