my poetry illiberalism
When Jordan recommended this book to me a couple of months ago, I had reservations; I’m not always a fan of the Marcus approach, for reasons suggested here (e.g., “Depending on your tastes, this is either spellbinding secret history or a rote exercise in épater le bourgeois…overeager to replace piety with kitsch”). Jordan then emailed a pdf of the entry on Hank Williams to persuade me. It was good. So when I saw the book fresh on the shelves of the AUB library—an improbable sight to be sure—I got my husband to borrow it for me.
This post is not about the book, but about the way two essays re: poetry glanced off each other and illuminated something awfully depressing for me. First, this disclaimer: the writing in NLHA is good, and when you have this much fine writing by so many disparate authors, it is not an occasion to be depressed. (What was that line from St. Augustine—it’s a sin to be sullen in sunshine?) From Christian Wiman’s essay on Robert Frost (filed under “1915″): “From Herman Melville to Cormac McCarthy, from Emily Dickinson through Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath, one can trace a spiritual energy that is both passion and plight, a metaphysical compulsion as fervid as it is unfixed. But this is perhaps not so surprising, since if one American impulse is toward a kind of spiritual vertigo, an equally strong one is the impulse to disguise this feeling with optimistic personae and evangelical enthusiasm. So much of American literature is about buried intensities because so much of American life is a mask.” An adrenaline injection, that passage.
Also well written and argued: Stephen Burt’s entry on twenty-first century free verse (filed under “2001″). He begins where essays on free verse usually begin: with the question as to whether anybody reads it. The answer is, duh, yes. Yes they do. The sales figures for Billy Collins and Mary Oliver alone assure us that hundreds of thousands of people are buying and enjoying inspirational free verse. (Not so formalist verse, if what he once told me about the estimated sales figures for James Merrill’s final book is true.) Steve is obviously wistful about the loss of traditional prosody in American poetry (we are “probably right to lament … a diminished attention … to inherited techniques of meter and rhyme”—a casualty, too, of diminished education). But things aren’t all bad: “the decline in rhyme and meter as techniques has meant no decline in the total resourcefulness, the set of sounds and approaches to language, in recent American verse.” His exemplars of new ways of writing, for the purposes of his article, are C.D. Wright, Rae Armantrout, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Only one of them—Rae—could convincingly occupy a space on Chris’s list above, among writers with a “metaphysical compulsion,” or “spiritual vertigo” (and also—is this a coincidence?—an unusually rigorous sense of containment). Instead, Steve identifies other advantages to 21st century free verse: “Regional, ethnic, and idiosyncratic attachments have made possible … an unprecedented variety in the kinds and sounds of American free verse.”
That’s what depressed me—the reduction from Chris’s exhilarating “metaphysical compulsion” to the bland “regional, ethnic, and idiosyncratic attachments.” Whether the turn from rigorous form is a symptom of this reduction is another matter. But Steve sees Armantrout’s style, for instance, as a reaction to her upbringing (conservative Christian parents) and region (soulless San Diego). I feel diminished by these materialist explanations. Maybe it’s not even Steve, and I’m shooting the messenger when it’s obvious to everyone but me that we’re beyond the trope of “soul-making” now.
Steve is a wonderful critic and generous reader. I read everything he writes, on the spot. But his tendencies make contemporary American poetry seem not so much democratic as demographic, or even technocratic.
And on the other hand, he does offset my own tendency to be a perfect Poetry Illiberal. I acknowledge that.
I remember Steve’s reading of Rae proceeding from the bitter sting of realizing that the culture falsifies experience? Which, yes, could be reduced to reaction to upbringing and region, but which also sounds to me a lot like spiritual vertigo.
“culture falsifies experience”
Meh. If there’s one thing I don’t believe, it’s that art precedes culture.
Whoops. Make that “do believe”–
All I ever do anymore is qualify qualify qualify. This is to say that I agree that most prose could use a little salt.
I’m generally of the sin/sun feeling about NLHA, but I’m going to have to look at those essays again tonight after reading this, which stirs the brainpot nicely.
A first-blush, half-formed response, which is maybe a way to give a non-materialist explanation for what Burt describes: in competition for an American poet’s allegiance with Chris’s metaphysical compulsion is a compulsion to contain multitudes. Not just to live in a democracy or represent a demographic, but to bring democracy and demography to the heart of your poetry. I think of Pound, Williams, Pinsky, some of Revell, maybe Silliman in this way. It’s the American version of the “ancient prerogative” I mention at the end of this review. In rare cases those two compulsions can cohere—Whitman made them stick, Olson tried—but usually not, as the metaphysical compulsion almost inevitably sends the poet inward, while the democratic compulsion spins out, ever wider. A different kind of vertigo.
sin/sun: ?
I understand what you’re saying, BB, but it also seems to add another demo- to democratic and demographic: that is, demogogic — a kind of totalizing urge to include, include, include! I don’t believe it really — I for one am much too selfish for that.
sin/sun = “when you have this much fine writing by so many disparate authors, it is not an occasion to be depressed”
Yes, absolutely that second compulsion can be demagogic, but when you say you “don’t believe it really” do you mean you don’t believe that it’s out there or that you don’t accept it for yourself?
BB, I find all kinds of problems with the democratic compulsion; on a fundamental level I don’t find it credible. I’m not sure I want to carry on an argument about it without referring to specific poets, and I just don’t want to do that willy-nilly on a comment thread. But a lot (not all) of the poets Steve has reviewed recently seem to me long on “democratic compulsion,” short on actual poetry.
Jordan cheated by sending you the HW entry: everything Hickey touches turns to rhinestones. If you really want to be depressed, read Gaitskill’s entry on Mailer.
“So much of American literature is about buried intensities because so much of American life is a mask”– seems neater than it does true–about poetry, anyway. Where is this sunny optimistic art of conviction beneath which roils a secret sea of metaphysical terror? Did Walt Disney write poetry? Or Gene Roddenberry?
Can we make that much hay of Vachel Lindsay?
Speaking of which, on point is Peter Viereck’s neat 1960 “Crack up of American Optimism” (calling Lindsay “The Dante of the Fundamentalists.”
Here’s a nice bit at the opening:
“To call Lindsay a mouthpiece of Fundamentalism, is nothing new. What will here be suggested as new (and as fruitful for future application to other writers) is a conservative hypothesis about the threefold interaction between Lindsay’s human crack-up, his Ruskin-aesthete mission, and his self-destructive attempt to maintain, against his increasing qualms, his Rousseau- Bryan utopian faith (the faith of his Fundamentalist religion and Populist politics). To explore such non-lyric straitjackets of his lyricism, is, be it stressed, not the same as that totalitarian philistia which judges art by its politics. And what will last of Lindsay is a few dozen lines (to be cited presently) of great lyric art.”
I’m with you, Ange, on Steve’s assessment (both in appreciation for its scope and grudging at the width of the door he opens). Also, I’m not sure how one measures the “total resourcefulness” of American verse, but I’m willing to countenance its diminishment, even as I happily acknowledge that there’s no shortage of good poets writing.
Before Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry “sold stories to flying magazines, and later poetry to publications, including The New York Times. When the war ended, he joined Pan American World Airways. During this time, he also studied literature at Columbia University.”
Poetry publications including The New York Times! Well, I guess they did publish poems once in a while. Cue Kenny and Kent!
> Cue
Shhhhh! They’re sleeping.
Hi Oren: I’ll have to take up the Viereck at such time as I have a real library.
>I’m willing to countenance its diminishment, even as I happily acknowledge that there’s no shortage of good poets writing.
Me too.
Why wait?
http://www.mmisi.org/ma/04_03/viereck.pdf
p.s.– While on the subject of illiberalism, check out the sponsoring website: It is no wonder!
Gotta love an intercollegiate institute whose president is named Cribb. Twice the liberty in half the time.
“I think of Pound, Williams, Pinsky, some of Revell, maybe Silliman in this way. It’s the American version of the “ancient prerogative” I mention at the end of this review. In rare cases those two compulsions can cohere—Whitman made them stick, Olson tried”
- see Jeffrey Walker’s important book “Bardic ethos & the American long poem” (Louisiana State UP, 1989). He argues that the ethos stemming from Whitman, through Pound, Olson & others, is actually quite anti-democratic – an attempt to establish a special sacerdotal authority for poets, to correct democracy’s supposed faults & limitations. The Olson chapter compares the consequences for Olson’s rhetoric with the motives & purposes of Martin Luther King’s.
…but my own view is that Whitman is not that simple, & his experience of suffering (his family, the Civil War) & his sense of compassionate brotherhood takes him beyond the egotistical-metaphysioal afflatus of his sometime-master Emerson.
I bring this up because I think there is actually a matrix where the metaphysical & the democratic impulses share common ground. It’s an ethical ground, addressed by Levinas, wherein the metaphysical per se is set aside; reality is absorbed into the Person, the Personal, & the relation of lovingkindness established from the beginning (before the beginning) between persons. Inalienable human dignity, underwritten by the ontological primacy of “Imago Dei”. Thus the scriptural intervention of Yahweh into history actually establishes the law of equality & reciprocity & forgiveness, since the divine Person mediates between equals (everyone is an Imago). “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”
The “metaphysical impulse” in American poetry, no more no less, is the pathos of the free consciousness seeking this elemental justice & elementary rightness in ordinary life (expressed in earlier ages as to “work out your salvation in fear & trembling”).
“a rote exercise in épater le bourgeois” — I hadn’t heard of the book, and I’ve reserved it from the library (as a number of the topics sound intriguing), but the sampler-style approach to cultural history is the opposite of a provocation — it’s an invitation, it’s pop, it’s bourgeois, it’s au courant, it’s fashionable. The editor’s claim that the book is “a provocation” — well, that sounds like a perfume advertisement. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Just saying.