May 1989 
Poetry & Mediocrity
Charles Simic
This piece by Epstein is just plain silly. Anyone who comes and tells you how he loves poetry so much, but just can't find anything worth reading since the early moderns, etc., is an arrogant fool. What makes it comic is that Epstein thinks he's saying something wise.
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Elitism & Rebellion
Toi Derricotte
What strikes me immediately about Mr. Epstein's list of all-time greats is not surprising. It is 100% white and 99% male. I love, as Mr. Epstein does, those great voices of our past; however, aesthetics cannot be separated from the values of the prevailing culture, and I do not lament the passing of standards which perpetuated elitism-racism, classism, and sexism in our literature.
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The State of the Art: Contemporary Poetry I: Dead Languages
Bruce Duffy
Joseph Epstein may not speak for poets, but then that's precisely why poets should heed what he's saying and not resort to the usual cries of "Philistine!" Epstein doesn't just speak for conservatives here. He speaks for the rare bird that contemporary American poetry seems to have long forgotten- the general, serious reader.
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Unhappy But Important Subjects
Robert McDowell
I doubt that Joseph Epstein's "Who Killed Poetry?" will inspire much affection in your newsletter, but that will not detract from its general soundness. In fact, Mr. Epstein performs a great service for poetry and poets by carrying out the honored function, exercised repeatedly in the past, of deflating the self-importance of the current Scene and goading poets to be more ambitious and responsible.
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The State of the Art: Contemporary Poetry
A Note from the Editor
The essay below, "Who Killed Poetry?" by Joseph Epstein, originally appeared in the August, 1988 issue of Commentary. The essay, we thought, forcefully reiterated many perennial complaints about contemporary poetry, and about the role of colleges and universities in American letters. Since AWP is dedicated to cultivating a fruitful relationship between writing programs and American letters, and between writers and their audience, we did not take Mr. Epstein's arguments lightly.
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Poetry & the Golden Age
David Lehman
"A friend who teaches at a prestigious midwesternuniversity told me I am the only person she knows who reads literary quarterlies in which his own work doesn't appear." We expect the statement to be the prelude to a complaint: poets are the only audience poetry has, yet even they, terminally self-absorbed, aren't paying attention, so is it any wonder that no one else is? We may even expect an accusation to follow; the discourse on this subject is often charged with a reproach, or fueled by a resentment.
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Some Scattered Responses to Joseph Epstein
Henry Taylor
There has always been much more bad and mediocre poetry than excellent or great poetry. The apparatus currently in place is, unfortunately, better able to maintain that situation than any other. It would be discouraging, maybe, but possibly useful, if every poet who teaches were to pause in the workshop at least once each semester, and say, "We have said that this is a nice poem; we have not said that there are several dozen poems by Emily Dickinson, for example, which are considerably better."
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Wheels of Fortune
Terence Winch
As a non-academic poet-my work comes more out of an anti-academic tradition and I make my living as a musician and editor-I share some of Joseph Epstein's misgivings with the current state of poetry and with its literary-political context. But I also have some serious problems with Epstein's analysis of the state of the art.
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The Bear Who Cried Wolf
Stephen Dunn
There was a bear, a very intelligent bear, though mostly versed in bear matters, not in birdsong and bird business, who started a rumor in the forest. It was a rumor the other animals had heard before, but this time a few of the squirrels and some of the chipmunks were inclined to receive it as fact. It was this: the birds couldn't sing as well as they used to. They hung around together too much, and in the same kind of trees, and somehow it had become difficult to tell a big bird from a little bird.
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Sermon in a Weed-Choked Garden
Robert Peters
Hurray for Joseph Epstein! He's smeared his palms with skunk grease and wiped them all over the smug, self-congratulatory poetry body-politic, that colossus that fills most of the landscape of contemporary verse and leaves little space for the true originals and iconoclasts to be seen amidst the greenery. No one that I know has better delineated the issues: the stifling domination of writing programs throughout the country.
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Play It Again, Sam...
Robert Creely
The preoccupations of Joseph Epstein's essay are valid certainly, and presume a care about poetry as a possible fact of people's lives. But Mr. Epstein is real too, so to speak-and one is reading a definition more of his own life than of any poems relating. During the heyday of his examples, the late 30's and 40's, a book of poems by Stevens or Williams was fortunate to sell five hundred copies and that was the usual size of its edition.
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Surgery With Bulldozer
Michael Ryan
Mr. Epstein's essay is like eye surgery with a bulldozer. The character of poetry is very much influenced by its audience, its culture, and its technological role (central in preliterate societies, nonexistent now); and it is very important, I think, for poets and critics to try to understand these influences and the pressure they exert on taste.
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The World's Best Kept Secret
Maxine Kumin
Every six months or so another critic of the contemporary culture parachutes among us with the bad news that poetry is dead. Joseph Epstein's Who Killed Cock Robin? essay employs so much ammunition in the service of cramping us poets even deeper "into the dark comer poetry now inhabits" that I can only throw up my hands and agree with him. Things are indeed bleak, but we women poets can hardly be held accountable.
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"What Though Lovest Well..."
Edward Hirsch
Some professors prefer their poetry (and their poets) safely dead. Every era has its philistines disguised as intellectuals, its conservative prophets of doom, its reactionary upholders of "standards." Such nostalgic critics typically appoint themselves the policemen of poetry; they are busy making pronouncements and threatening to arrest contemporary poets for not conforming to some imaginary halcyon past.
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The State of the Art: Contemporary Poetry I: An Editor's Response
Arthur Vogelsang
There are three piles I have kept-one is my poetry and materials related to it, one is manuscripts and etcetera in connection with my job as editor of a magazine, The American Poetry Review, and one is a pile of manipulations, illusions, and diversions not without power over me.
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The State of the Art: Contemporary Poetry I: Who Killed Poetry?
Joseph Epstein
I am not about to say of poetry, as Marianne Moore once did, that "I, too, dislike it," for not only has reading poetry brought me instruction and delight but I was taught to exalt it. Or, more precisely, I was taught that poetry was itself an exalted thing. No literary genre was closer to the divine than poetry; in no other craft could a writer soar as he could in a poem.
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The State of the Art: Contemporary Poetry I: The Myth of a Single Canon
Bill Tremblay
Joseph Epstein charges that contemporary American poetry is paradoxically thriving and sick (vacuous) because it is given sanction and sanctuary in academia and that nothing really wonderful-except for a few poems by Robert Penn Warren and Richard Wilbur- has been written since Wallace Stevens laid down his pen. His nostalgia for High Modernist poetry is, finally, a matter of personal taste.
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The State of the Art: Contemporary Poetry I: Response to Joseph Epstein
Dana Gioia
Let me begin by applauding the editors of AWP Chronicle for sponsoring a symposium on Joseph Epstein's "Who Killed Poetry?". I suspect that the decision to reprint Mr. Epstein's provocative essay will prove unpopular among the journal's general readership since the article openly criticizes the writing programs from which most readers make their livelihood.
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Boundless Poetry
E. Ethelbert Miller
These programs helped nourish the growth and appreciation of Black poetry. Many people from all walks of life understood and identified with the content and purpose of this "new" literature. What also occurred at this time was the motivation of people to attempt to write poetry and express their own feelings.
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The State of the Art: Contemporary Poetry I: Introduction
D.W. Fenza
The essay, we thought, forcefully reiterated many perennial complaints about contemporary poetry, and about the role of colleges and universities in American letters. Since AWP is dedicated to cultivating a fruitful relationship between writing programs and American letters, and between writers and their audience, we did not take Mr. Epstein's arguments lightly.
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The State of the Art: Contemporary Poetry I: The Grand Cacophony
Askold Melnyczuk
I would like to say some things about two of the matters Mr. Epstein raised in his article "Who Killed Poetry?" One is the much-discussed business of poetry's audience. The other is the question of memorability as a criterion for poetry. In both cases, Mr. Epstein seems to have built his arguments on assumptions which are not precisely inevitable.
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Songlines: Downunder, USA
Walter Bargen
Joseph Epstein laments that there is no dominant poetic school, no generally accepted set of standards, and no cult of personality (my words) to pontificate so the rest of us can follow; and because of this poetry has died. Yet poetry seems to be written on nearly every street comer and every school, blasting forth on radios and records (withholding any judgment on its quality); it's as if poetry has become too democratic an art, and that is what upsets him: but it is just this democratization that is a sign of its health.
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