digital emunction

1/ From “Late and Soon,” Dan Chiasson’s review of Robert Hass and Mark Strand in this week’s New Yorker:

The zero-sum fluctuations of Hass’s material, some intellect followed by some feeling, coolness here, warmth there, at times become a formula—more a recipe for soup than soup—but at other times yield work that, exquisitely receptive to actual happiness, has opened up new territory for the personal poem.

2/ From “The Cat Went out for Good,” Charles Simic’s much-lamented review of Robert Creeley’s Collected Poems:

The aesthetic theory—and there is always a theory behind such reductive views—may sound persuasive, but it was foolish on Creeley’s part to believe that it could ever validate a poem. If poetics were like cooking and one could write down a recipe for all of one’s future poems, that would be true. However, great cooks rarely bother to consult cookbooks.

2.5/ A bonus View, from Chiasson again:

Being a poet doesn’t help you cook a meal or bathe your three-year-old daughter…

Yesterday Ron Silliman jumped into the discussion of Charles Simic’s review of Robert Creeley’s Collected Poems. Not surprisingly, Silliman comes down firmly on the side of those who saw the review as an attack on a whole tradition of poetry. Echoing Mark Weiss’s original sentiment, Silliman writes “[Simic] uses Creeley to make a larger—and much more pernicious—argument. His real target is the post-avant.”

Nothing in the discussion on the POETICS listserv that followed my original post convinced me on that point, though Simic’s hand in this year’s National Book Award nominations has certainly made me reconsider it. But since no one seemed especially interested in the point I was actually concerned with—the effect of Creeley’s social standing in certain circles on the reception of his work—it didn’t seem worth carrying on, especially since I wasn’t much in the mood to defend a poet (Simic) whose work I don’t particularly care for and whose idea of good poetry seems blinkered at best.

Silliman’s post takes apart the Simic review paragraph by paragraph, [Read more]

First reports had it that the new New York Review of Books includes a “hatchet job” by Charles Simic on Robert Creeley’s two-volume Collected Poems. “Let no one think that the other side merely ignores us out of carelessness,” said Mark Weiss in a post to the Buffalo Poetics List, “This is true venom.”

But with the article now available online (albeit for a fee), it’s hard to see what’s so upsetting. Simic is anything but spiteful, and his basic judgment—that Creeley did his best work early on—seems pretty accurate.

Simic, taking refuge in “broad agreement,” calls For Love Creeley’s best book. He finds Words “uneven,” says Pieces “doesn’t amount to much,” and thinks things go quickly downhill from there.* Still, he makes several efforts to qualify his judgments on the later books. For instance, “On rare occasions, when he comes out of himself and remembers William Carlos Williams’s injunction ‘no ideas but in things,’ to actually look closely at the world around him, he is a far better poet.” And: “In the last years of his life Creeley recovers some of his old touch.”

The disjoint between Simic’s article and the vituperations that it has already prompted might seem mysterious to an outsider. But it points to the legendary quality that Creeley’s life took on during his years teaching at Buffalo. [Read more]

The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess, John Wikinson’s book of mostly-collected criticism, is now out from Salt. The essays’ main subjects are poets who came of working age during and just after the British Poetry Revival: John James, Denise Riley, Douglas Oliver, J.H. Prynne, and Tom Raworth. A few American poets (John Weiners, Robert Creeley, Mina Loy) attract his attention as well, and the book includes two essays (on Marjorie Welish and Andrea Brady) that made their first appearances in Chicago Review.

(The next issue of CR will include Wilkinson’s response to Peter Riley’s letter about Wilkinson’s review of Simon Jarvis’s Unconditional. For Robert Archambeau’s jaunty summary of that debate, see here and here.)

The question Wilkinson returns to time and again in his criticism has to count as one of the central questions facing any poet working today: can there be lyric poetry that is not somehow Romantic? What both worries and thrills Wilkinson about Romanticism is its excess, an excess capable of both frustrating and inspiring the dream of political justice. But what is poetry without excess? In a sense, this is the same question that American visual artists were grappling with forty years ago, when modernism gave way to minimalism and, in Michael Fried’s terms, art yielded the stage to objects.

(For a clear and convincing demonstration of the political implications of Romantic attitudes about art—also a useful summary of one of the Frankfurt School’s favorite arguments—see Wolf Lepenies’s Tanner Lectures, The End of “German Culture.” [PDF])

Wilkinson’s subjects are not mere props for his own theorizing. As he writes in the introduction, one of the essays’ major objects is to satisfy “an intense need to argue, for myself as well as for others, the value of poets scarcely heard of when I was writing. This is the kind of thing poets should do, and which the academy should better appreciate and promote.”

The Lyric Touch is available from Salt and from Amazon, as is his recent book of poems, Lake Shore Drive (Amazon | Salt)