…or so he says in his National Poetry Month column, “Write a Poem. Get the Girl.” But why do people like Garrison Keillor?
Is it the worn-out jokes about caveman times? (“Back when our hairy-legged ancestors were living in mud huts and smelling of rancid grease and wood smoke, men were not attractive to women at all. Fighting with rocks and clubs made unsightly marks on men and left putrefying sores. They squatted around the smoking fires, put ashes on their wounds, exchanged myths, and felt a terrible ache for love and affection.”) The way he tries awkwardly to make rape comical? (“They longed to see women exhibit an avid interest in them for their own merits and not have to go marauding against enemy tribes and stand toe to toe with their warriors and hack at them and eviscerate and decapitate them and drag their women away screaming and sobbing.”) Or maybe it’s the sexism and heteronormativity? (“That's the real message of Poetry Month […] it's the month when you should write a poem and see how powerful this can be in winning the favor of women.”) Pshares readers, if any of you are Keillor fans, help a blogger out: what’s the appeal?
May 11, 2009
Garrison Keillor likes poetry because it gets him laid…
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I'm not a big Garrison Keillor fan (although I'm partial to Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, thanks largely to the performances by Meryl Streep and John C. Reilly), but he is a humorist, worn-out perhaps, but certainly not guilty of trying "to make rape comical", any more than Wanda Sykes, at the correspondents dinner, was trying to make kidney failure funny; he sides, after all, with those cavemen who don't find rape appealing. And "heteronormativity"? You quote his advice accurately—"[Y]ou should write a poem and [win] the favor of women"—but there's no indication of the "you's" gender. Could be you, Kathleen Rooney! (Admittedly, he doesn't suggest writing a poem to win a man—but has such a thing ever worked for anybody of whatever persuasion?) While I share your mystification over Keillor's popularity, at least he's attributing a positive value to poetry, and he continues to make room for poetry on his radio show. Why look a gift comic in the mouth?
I guess I don't see it as looking a comic gift in the mouth because it's severely unfunny (unlike Wanda Sykes), and therefore kind of a lame gift. Not just the rape thing, but the entire column, which seems like a tired re-tread of "jokes" that weren't really that good the first few times around. And as for the hetero thing, even attempts to read it really charitably so that the "you" is a female person fail because ultimately Keillor is revisiting the trope that men invented civilization as a trick to bag women. As he says in the last lines: "Cummings wrote, 'springtime is my time is your time is our time for springtime is love time and viva sweet love,' and Cummings got the girl."
I feel like Garrison Keillor is an NPR personality that makes people think NPR sucks. Before this starts a blog shit-storm I personally love NPR --except for Garrision Keillor--but know that not everyone out there does. That said, Keillor is not funny and his "old-fashioned" humor is completely lost on me. I think his opinions about poetry are bunk and don't do much to help your cause as poets.
As for Keillor's popularity, it has to do with his voice, I'd say. He has a comforting, wise-sounding voice; the sound equivalent of sitting by a fire. Yet, after a while, sitting by the fire becomes tiresome, and I want something else to do.
As for his heteronormativity and sexism, Keillor is a pre-feminist, pre-sexual-otherness dolt. He was raised in the era before these social movements empowered these groups and thinks it's ok to act within and concur with the old mentality. His caveman melancholy (and his whole career, possibly) is built upon this yearning for idyllic bygone times. I've seen this kind of behavior from other sixty-somethings who think race, gender or sexual (in)equality is a big joke that no longer need be engaged in a meaningful or complicated way.
I also think Keillor's promotion of poetry is overrated. While I like many poems in Good Poems, for example, the guild or collective mentality that the promotion of poetry, generally, is good for all poets is essentially bogus. In fact, I would argue many people who do not regularly consume poetry would use an anthology like Keillor's as a substitute for reading or buying other books of contemporary poetry. Likewise John Lithgow's Poet's Corner. These books are only good for the author/editor, poets and kinds of poetry chosen to be included within their pages. I have no issue with the poems or poets chosen, but I don't like how these books are marketed with "good" (as opposed to bad aka not included herein aka everything else) or using "one-and-only" as Lithgow's subtitle does.
Keillor operates with a critical sleight of hand that has become commonplace in poetry: a good poems is you know it when you see it. This critical mentality does nothing to describe: what poetry is; how it works; or the richness offered by the elegance, complexity, or difficulty of art-in-language.
OK, Steve: why don't you suggest an anthology whose contents meet with your approval which would find readers among "people who do not regularly consume poetry"? American Hybrid? Lyric Postmodernisms? Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology? The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry? Be honest, now: you're trying to attract readers who don't regularly read poetry....
I think you have to look at--not Keillor--Good Poems in contrast to Matthew Stepanek, or other, similar, very very popular books of poetry. Is Good Poems better than Heartsongs?
AS for Keillor, I don't find his opinions about poetry *that* much more offensive that a lot of Carmine Starnino, or Adam Kirsch.
Keillor works primarily within the forms that come out of the radio show/music hall tradition. That tradition is deliberately retrograde. Everything he does is an exercise in gently nudging some ancient joke or another. Not to everyone's taste, but kind of hard to get worked up about.
Comfort is the name of the game.
For my part, I think Keillor runs afoul of the fact that he's locked into being more prolific than almost any other word-producing individual of comparable notoriety.
I would argue that some of his best monologues transcend his nostalgia (and even work against it, remember that in Keillor's milieu there is always a wink with the bad joke). Some of them actually do some interesting stuff.
I don't care for any of his books that I've ever looked at, but then again I think August Kleinzahler is pretty over-rated as well.
As for his anthologies: poems, poets, and Poetry need anybody and anything they can get. Keillor's taste isn't awful, neither is it stunning...
As for NPR, Keillor is much sharper than most of the toothless goons they have commenting on politics and culture. The recent Slate piece on Cokie Roberts makes an individual indictment better than anything I care to write here.
Where is the Slate piece? Can you post a link?
This should be the Slate Cokie Roberts piece:
http://www.slate.com/id/2216890/
Thanks!
Just never found the man funny. Don't have any grand insights beyond that -- it's none of the reasons that people listed above, just it's not humorous. It's hard enough to dissect why a joke works, much less why a joke doesn't work.
i adore garrison keillor. he has a great way of giving contemporary anxieties to archetypal figures. here it's cavemen, but lake wobegon is the same thing. the townspeoples' nordic reserve is a nobler-seeming version of his urban aesthete listeners' shyness and snobbery. it's so comforting!
and by picking him apart like this i've made myself hate myself. i'm so his target audience!
I've always found him to be one of the more vile human beings on earth...
Ahhh, people, don't hate him because he's Smart and Witty and Unabashed! After reading all of these comments, I have to give a cheer for Mr. Keillor!! I was fortunate a couple of years ago to take a Comedy Writing Class with him at the University of Minnesota. It was pretty much 3 hours a week of laughing until we cried. The radio voice is the same as the speaking voice and he is so quick with his wit. It was fun to try and keep up. Mr. Keillor was a generous, kind, encouraging teacher.
As a Brit. I first heard him serialised on BBC radio 4. His voice was like maple syrup filtered through sharp gravel and the stories were for me such sharp observations of humankind.
Subsequently I have bought quite a few of his books. There is a story in "We are still married" about an ironmonger who can't sell his paint and who goes fishing to relieve his frustration. But "an angry man cannot catch fish"- even when he goes to get the dynamite to drop down the ice hole.
I read this to some colleagues at work but was crying with laughter so much I couldn't finish it - the man is an exceptional writer.
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