T.S. Eliot, in the middle of this century, could attract enough of an audience to fill, it was said, a football stadium. Since that time, poetry has suffered a bit of a decline in the eyes of the public. The reasons why are too numerous to list fully. And, to be frank, it would be insufficient as well as boring to compose (and to read, I imagine) yet another catalogue of reasons why poetry has fallen into so innocuous a desuetude. Yet the subject needs to be discussed, and the best way to discuss it is not to draw an argument from the etiolated, almost spectral, condition of poetry in America. Perhaps we should examine poetry as it takes place, in its current home, the academy. After all, didn’t Clayton [J.] Eshleman of Eastern Michigan University say that part of what makes American poetry American is our belief in the nutritive effects of institutional life upon it?

About a month ago, my friend S. and I left Manhattan for the wilds of industrial New Jersey to attend a conference at William Paterson University. The university, surprisingly, is not located in Paterson, the town made famous by William Carlos Williams, but in the neighboring town of Wanye. The University hosts an English department conference once a year, in April. This year’s conference-theme: “Emerging Writers.”

We arrive in Paterson. The scrub pine, abandoned buildings, highways, and weathered suburban houses of which the town consists possess a strange and forlorn kind of beauty. It is not hard to see why Williams felt the need to eulogize it. After the brief cab ride to Wayne, for which we are mercilessly overcharged, we come to the campus. Broad vistas of concrete and a few swathes of grass, low buildings of dull red brick, apparently of the Eisenhower era, and a total absence of the abundant and nubile beauty common on certain college campuses. Miraculously, the cab has dropped us off only a few yards from the building in which the conference is being held. We stride to the glass doors and into the atrium where we have been instructed to go by an acquaintance of ours, Z., a fairly well-known poet and the editor of a small and largely unread magazine. We are attending the conference largely for his sake.

The atrium is empty. Long trestle tables draped in white cloths and piled with bagels and coffee-cisterns line the long sides. In the area between these are arranged small, round formica-topped tables and resin chairs in various shades of orange and yellow. The effect is that of a middle-school lunchroom. On a table near the entrance we find a schedule of events. We have arrived in the middle of the first round of readings. Z. is, according to the schedule, reading in Room 106. We cannot find Room 106; we settle for Room 135. We slip quietly in and take seats as a dowdy woman finishes answering someone’s question: “I had read a lot of young-adult novels on the subject. And I had decided that I wanted to write fiction about it, too. But until I went to Salem, I never really felt the urge to write poetry about it. Writing this book has helped me to conjoin fiction and poetry. Next question?” Apparently there aren’t any. The woman takes out a small sheaf of paper. S. and I look at each other. By previous agreement, we whip out our notebooks, sensing that the fireworks are about to begin. While she reads her poem, we scribble furiously.

After she is done, we walk purposefully outside. I light a cigarette, and we compare notes. “LOVE IS FEAR”, I have written in all-caps, to show how emphatically and profoundly she delivered the line. I read it to S. in a strained baritone, with a dramatic hand-flourish. S. has gone me one better — “A sensuous poem about the Salem witch-trials!” he exclaims, grinning sunnily. “Box-stich, double knot!” we quote, ecstatically and simultaneously. This poem was written from the perspective of a young servant girl, a seamstress, seduced by a married man who later condemns her to death as a witch to keep the secret of their liaison. She would signify the end of one section and the beginning of another by naming a sewing technique — “box stitch”, “overhand stitch”, “single satin stitch”, and so forth. The influence of the young-adult novels the poet cited as a source of inspiration was much in evidence.

We go back inside and finally locate Room 106. We manage to catch the last bit of the last poem our acquaintance Z. is reading. It contains the phrases “on the coast of a concept” and “he can start again/can start… again.” But after LOVE IS FEAR, these fail to impress us. When Z. is done, Timothy L., a professor at Paterson, a poet, and the organizer of the conference, drawls in an effeminate bass: “Well, poets are very strange creatures. It’s been wonderful for me to float with them up here for a while.” He then gives instructions on where Z.’s books can be purchased (the atrium, next to the refreshments table.) We return to the atrium, and chat with Z. for a while, who is in danger of losing his funding. “What will you do?” I ask. “Well, I’m not going to ask my parents for money,” he says in the tone of one making a great and noble sacrifice. “I’ll probably just have to get a job.” While we are talking to Z., his co-editor and collaborator Brian H. hangs palely in the background, muttering to Timothy L. Brian H. has terrible posture, hipster glasses, and a soul patch. He teaches English, and has just written a book on James Tate, called “On James Tate.” S. and I once declined to publish H.’s poems in our college magazine. Being an established and important figure, and ten years our senior, he was rather huffy about it. He has not spoken to us since.

It is now eleven-fifty; time for us to go. We have a 12:30 train to catch, and the conference is barely half-over. S. and I skim the schedule and decide to miss the publishing workshop. I wolf down a few bagels; S eats a danish. And we are soon trundling back to Manhattan on the PATH, leaving Parnassus behind.

You may, in reading this, notice a conspicuous lack of actual poetry. This absence stems from an absence of poetry at the conference itself. I do not mean this merely in the facile sense that the poems we heard were only allegedly poems, as it were. That is part of my meaning, but not all of it. There was a literal absence of poetry, as well. Much of the schedule was given over to publishing and career workshops; much of the readings themselves consisted of explanatory or prefatory lecturing. The lunch tables and coffee-cisterns took up their share of time as well.

Poetry, as is too often the case at such conferences, took a back seat to the phenomena that grow up around literature when it is ensconced in the humid air of an institution. This is a great crime, in my opinion, although to bemoan it excessively would be romantic and naïve. But the networking, self-justifications, infighting, the whole social apparatus, in fact, are themselves just as bereft of passion and intelligence as the poems they have arisen around. They are prosecuted in staid and reserved tones appropriate to a middle-managers’ conference; the politics of academic poetry are as petty and boring as any office politics. It is enough to make one long for the ecole practique des hautes etudes of the nineteen-thirties, when Alexandre Kojève, having delivered his lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, anointed his astounded colleagues as gods, this one Poseidon, that one Apollo, “because he is very handsome.” All we postmoderns have is Brian H., timidly skulking behind our backs, looking fearfully and resentfully over our shoulders.