Ah, the jeremiad. You know this tired trope, a conservative railing against a world that just ain’t what it used to be. The decline of this. The fall of that. The end of the written word. The demise of journalism. The downfall of popular culture. We’ve had beef with this way of talking from the beginning.

A recent and especially disappointing entry in this genre is the essay “Poetry Slam” by Mark Edmundson in July’s Harper’s. The gist of the article is this (it’s trapped behind a paywall, so unless you’re a subscriber, take our word for it): Robert Lowell and Emerson and the great American poets of yore really nailed it. They could talk about the big issues, the things that matter, make an argument about the condition of the world. Contemporary American poets, on the other hand, are playing small ball (“there’s too little at stake,”) too concerned with a sort of quietist interior world and not saying anything about what’s happening in the big world around them.

People have griped about this piece already. And yes, he might be missing the point of some of the poems he discusses. But the huge, gaping problem with Edmundson’s argument is what he thinks of as “contemporary American poetry.” Here are the poets he quotes to make his case: W.S. Merwin (age 85, publishing for 61 years); Seamus Heaney (Irish, age 74), John Ashbery (85); Anne Carson (62); Jorie Graham (63); Paul Muldoon (Irish, 62); Adrienne Rich (died last year at age 82); James Merrill (died in 1995 at age 68); Robert Hass (72); and on and on.

Notice a trend? Old white dudes, and a few old white ladies.

These poets, he complains, are hopelessly out of touch with the world around them. “The TV shows, the video games, the ads, the fashions, the Internet, movies, popular music: to read a good deal of contemporary poetry you would imagine these things never existed and don’t make up our collective environment.” Well, if you walked into a nursing home, you might feel the same way.

Edmundson brings up a couple of exceptions, only to dismiss them as outliers. He mentions Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America,” describing it as “rather bizarre” and “a strong attempt.”