None of the minor prophets knew that he was minor, of course

From From Poesy to Carrot Carnations by Michael Lind. An interesting thesis.

At one end of the spectrum are major arts, defined not in terms of cultural superiority but in terms of large audiences. At the other extreme are crafts like making carrot carnations. These are arts that have no audience, other than practitioners of the art itself. Another word for a craft is a hobby. In between the major arts and the crafts or hobbies are minor arts, which have a small audience whose members do not themselves aspire to practice the art.

The assignment of an art to one or another category has nothing to do with its quality. It is merely an assessment of the relationship between artist and audience.

I am intrigued by this idea of, essentially, a "net" audience. The number of consumers of the art form who are not also producers.

The two obviously go hand-in-hand. Great writers are often, though not always great readers as well (consumers of other's writings).

Lind begins to classify between major arts (many consumers who are not also producers) and minor arts (many consumers are also producers.)

In the 1920s, the cultural critic Gilbert Seddes wrote a book entitled The Seven Lively Arts, defending vernacular art forms despised by the literati like movies, jazz and comic strips. My somewhat similar list of the major arts with mass audiences would include cinema and television, pop music, genre fiction, and punditry or political commentary (the heir to the art of political oratory).

Today’s minor arts, I think, include theater, ballet, opera, symphonic music and literary fiction. These still include small audiences whose members are not also creators, audiences who patronize these arts in part out of an inherited feeling that these are superior to movies or genre fiction.

Then Lind gets to arts where most the consumers are also producers.

With the exception of rap, which has a mass audience, poetry has moved from the category of a minor art to a craft. In the course of numerous readings of my own published verse, I gradually came to the conclusion that almost everyone in the audience at a poetry reading is a poet or aspiring poet. My guess is that a majority of people who read poetry also write poetry.

Poetry in the twenty-first century is like pottery, woodworking, or the making of carrot carnations. Sophisticated verse was never a major art, and having lost even a small non-practitioner audience, it has lost its status as a minor art. At hobbyist conventions, celebrated practitioners of a craft address an audience made up of other practitioners of the craft, who will then go home and work at the art themselves. Poetry has more residual cultural prestige than carrot carnation making and other hobbies, but that is only because most of the poet-hobbyists are professors with MFAs, while there are no professors of table-setting.

I don't think he is wrong though it is regrettable. Absent standards and given the almost non-existent barriers to entry, there is a huge amount of unreadable drivel of a poetic vein. We can long for the days of Housman, Kipling, Newbolt whose poetry conformed to some set of standards and which, not coincidentally, was read broadly and deeply. There are no like writers today.

Lind believes that the shorty story may have already slipped from minor art to craft. His argument is solid but I am not convinced that he is right.

The short story, like poetry, already may have gone from being a minor art to being a craft. When I worked as an editor at Harper’s magazine in the 1990s, many acquaintances would comment on our essays and features, but I never heard anyone mention one of the short stories we published. The short story writers whom we published were almost exclusively MFAs who made a living by teaching short story and novel writing at liberal arts colleges. I may be mistaken, but I suspect that the same group that writes short stories today makes up the majority of those who read the short stories that are still published out of a sense of cultural responsibility in magazines like The New Yorker and Harper’s.

When it comes to literary novels, I think Lind is off in his absolute measures but perhaps right in terms of the trend. He pegs literary novels as a minor art slipping into craft but my assessment is that it was a major art which is now pretty firmly ensconced as a minor art. In some of the children's literature listservs to which I belong, the enthusiastic readers of YA literary fiction are almost all also writers of YA literary fiction. Obviously that is not a random sample but I suspect that it is indicative.

Lind finishes up with:

This is a horizontal ranking based on audience, not a vertical ranking based on quality or importance. As a political commentator, I write for an audience in the hundreds of thousands, sometimes more. As an author of nonfiction, I can expect an audience of informed readers in the tens of thousands. As a published poet, I have a much smaller audience made up almost entirely of other poets, when, that is, I have an audience at all. The only exceptions have been the times that Garrison Keillor has read my work for an audience of millions on NPR’s “Writer’s Almanac.” Poetry is the original digital art; its audience tends to be in the digits.

Michael Lind is a gifted intellectual functioning effectively and productively in many fields: journalist, pundit, editor, author, policy civil servant, think-tank leader, etc. It is interesting to see his observations of the different patterns given his different writing activities.

With poetry in particular, I wonder if the fault lies not with the readers but with the writers and the technology. Specifically, there is an opportunity cost to reading, it takes some of your limited time. Our poetry writing MFAs seem to have drifted away from the reading public but between foundations and on-demand printing, virtually anyone can put out a book of poetry. I think most of what is written does not resonate with the reading public as illustrated by poetry book sales in the dozens or low hundreds of copies in a nation of 310 million. The reading public is probably burned out as well. Given the overwhelming number of aspirant, but often very bad, poets, the probability of finding a poet whose poems you enjoy is very low. It creates a disincentive from trying new contemporary poets.

But there are good poets out there. Here is one of Lind's from his collection Parallel Lives.

The Minor Prophets

None of the minor prophets
knew that he was minor, of course. Habakkuk, I imagine,
thought that his visions earned him
standing as Ezekiel's peer, if not indeed Elijah's.
Then there was Obadiah,
who could be forgiven if he thought he might be a Moses.
How they would be remembered
Providence concealed from them all, though they could see the future.

Maybe it doesn't matter.
If you're on a mission from God, sent to rebuke a city
or to redeem a nation,
where by canon-makers you're ranked may be inconsequential.
Nor is the voice within you
any less authentic for not having a distant echo.
Seers of the world, be heartened.
Even minor prophets can have genuine revelations.