Natural Style?

"Easy to read and melodious prose" has been the ideal since the creation of the professional writer: it's not far a field to say that humans generally prefer clarity over confusion, and to develop methods, developed through experimentation, to achieve those goals. Because we are a species that's smart enough to demonstrably learn new habits through different kinds of training or learning--whether mechanical or in the acquisition of cultural topsoil-- my thinking is that that a clear style is really a natural expression of human habit, determined however that habit might be.

Culture ,the abstract idea condensed histories gathered along a relentlessly twined strands, is indeed artifice on the face of it, but the formation of culture and its aesthetic distinctions is hardly unnatural to anything one might think is alien to some wordy definition of man's "natural" state. It's all natural, in other words: most everything we do, whatever our convolutions as a species carry us to on whatever tide of rhetoric, ideology and religious infamy, is the result behavior that is , of course, animal, species related, but also quite human, quite "natural" .

We are not outside of nature, but rather our expressions are quite natural within an all encompassing sphere, and the development of a musical style in order to express some sense of an individual experience of one's environment, the poetry of the moment, falls handily into the categories of "natural" acts. More useful, perhaps, might be to consider the word "natural" with regards as to how a writer can create a plausible, believable voice within and without their narrative technique: DeLillo and Hemingway, stylized as they are, created powerful voices that compel response. The styles are connected to ideologies that themselves define a poetic/philosophical superstructures that lay final claim to the progress of history, and it is here where discussion as to the use of the voice becomes "natural" in sound and tone, in it's as it outlines a world view. "Natural" ought to mean an idiom that's believable for narrators and characters to be speaking in, an idiom whose success depends on how well the author constructs the fictional world they're entertain.

"Poetry" by Marianne Moore: the craft for the Sisyphus in all of us

Slate poetry editor Robert Pinsky gives readers Marianne Moore's widely anthologized "Poetry" as a topic discussion a few months ago. It was a a joy to read again/It shouldn't be a mystery as to why this poem among the hundreds she wrote is the one that an otherwise indifferent audience remembers: it's a poem about poetry. She rather handily summarizes an array of cliches, stereotypes and received misgivings about poetry a literalistic readership might have ,feigns empathy with the complaints, and then introduces one crafty oh-by-the-way after another until the opposite is better presented than the resolution under discussion.

This is not a subject I warm up to in most circumstances--poets, of their accord, have demonstrated the sort of self-infatuation that many of them, left to their means-to-an-end, would remove themselves from the human scale and assume the ranks of the divine, the oracular, the life giving, IE, develop themselves into a priesthood, the guardians of perception.

Moore's poem, though, presents itself as a contracting string of epigrams that seem to quarrel, a disagreement between head and mind, body and spirit, and a larger part of her lines, as they seemingly across the page away from the statements preceding the line before it, is that no really knows what to make of poetry as a form, as a means of communication, as a way of identifying oneself in the world. It frustrates the fast answer, it squelches the obvious point, poetry adds an ambiguity that would rile many because of lines that start off making obvious sense but which leave the reader in a space that isn't so cocksure. Little seems definite anymore once a poem has passed through the world, and the reassembling of perception required of the reader to understand a bit of the verse (the alternative being merely to quit and admit defeat) is bound to give a resentment. It's a headache one would rather not have. Moore's poem seems to be a response to Dorothy Parker's ironic declaration declaration "I hate writing. I love having written". The reader may hate not understanding what they've read, but love the rewards of sussing through a poem's blind alleys and distracting side streets.

POETRY
Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician—
nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination"—above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

The agony, the contradictions, the dishonest sleights of hand that deceive you in the service of delivering a surprise, an irony, an unexpected image , all of this is worth resentments a readers suffers through. One is , after all , made better, made stronger by the exercise of the will to read and confront the poem on it's own terms. Moore is a shrewd rhetorician as well as gracefully subtle poet.Clever, witty, sharp and acidic when she needs me, Moore is clever at playing the Devil's Advocate in nominally negative guise, saying she dislikes it but mounting one exception to the rule after another until we have an overwhelming tide of reasons about why we as citizens can't exist without it's application.

It works as polemic, indeed, crafted as she alone knows how, and it adds yet another well-phrased set of stanzas that want to turn poets into more than mortal artists, but into a priesthood, a race of scribes attuned to secret meanings of invisible movements within human existence. It sort of stops being a poet after the first jagged stanza, not unlike all those pledge breaks on PBS that tirelessly affirm that network's quality programming while showing little of it during their pleas for viewer money. It's not that I would argue too dramatically against the notion that poets and artists in general are those who've the sensitivity and the skills to turn perception at an instinctual level into a material form through which what was formally unaddressable can now find a shared vocabulary in the world-- egalitarian though I am, there are geniuses in the world , and those who are smarter and more adept than others in various occupations and callings--but I do argue against the self-flattery that poems like Moore's promotes and propagates.I wouldn't regard this as a polemic of any sort, nor a manifesto as to what the writer ought to do or what the reader should demand. Reading it over again, and again after that makes me think that Moore was addressing her own ambivalence toward the form. After one finishes some stanzas and feels contented that they've done justice to their object of concentration, some lines appear contrived, other words are dull and dead sounding aligned with more colorful, more chiming ones,an image seems strained and unnatural, an analogy no longer seems like the perfect fit.

She too dislikes it, I think, because poetry will always come up short of getting to the world without our censoring buffers; Wallace Stevens solved the problem of cutting himself from the gravity of his real life by no attempting to launch his persona , via metaphor, through the imagined barrier between our perception of events and what is there, sans a mediating ego, and landed himself among his Ideal Types, his Perfect Forms and Arrangements, but the strength of his language. The metaphor he would have used to address qualities otherwise unseen of a thing her perceived became, in his method, the thing itself, a part of his Supreme Fiction. William Stevens voided the decorative phrases and qualifiers that he felt only added business to the world a poem tried to talk about and made a verse of hard , sharp, angular objects. Moore, though, seems to insist in Poetry that however grand , beautiful and insightful the resulting poems are in a host of poetic attempts to resolve the problem the distance between the thing perceived and the thing itself, we still have only poems, words arranged to produce effects that would appeal to our senses that are aligned with this world and not the invisible republic just beyond our senses. Poetry is a frustrating and irritating process because it no matter how close one thinks they've come to a breakthrough, there is the eventual realization of far one remains from it. Poetry as Sisyphean task; one is compelled to repeat the effort, and not without the feeling that they've done this before.

The commotion of the animals, the pushing elephants, the rolling horses, the tireless yet immobile Wolf, seem like analogues to restless mind Moore at one time might have desired to have calmed by the writing of poetry. There is the prevailing myth, still fixed in a good number of people who go through various self help groups, that the writing of things down--poetry, journaling, blogging, writing plays or memoirs--is a process that, in itself , will reveal truthful things one needs to know and thereby settle the issues. Writing, though, doesn't "settle", finalize or cement anything in place, it does to set the world straight , nor does it resolve anything it was addressing once the writing is done with. It is, though, a useful process, a tool, one may use as a means to get one out of the chair, away from the keyboard, and become proactive in some positive way.

The expectations of what poetry was supposed to do--create something about the world that is permanent, ever lasting, reveal a truth who's veracity does not pale with time, whether a century or hour-- are crushed and a resentment when realizes that the world they're attempting to conquer, in a manner of speaking , will not bow to one's perception, one's carefully constructed stage set where the material things of this earth are props to be arranged on a whim, and that the mind that creates the metaphors, the similes, the skilled couplets and ingenious rhyme strategies is not calmed, soothed, serene.

The world continues to move and change, language itself changes the meaning of the words it contains, the mind continues to tick away, untrammeled. Moore's animals, in the restless paradise , are themselves restless, non contemplative, instinct driven toward species behavior that is about propagation and survival, creatures distinct from the contemplative conceit of the poet who thinks he or she is able to sift through the underbrush for secret significance. I've always heard a weary tone in Moore's poem; a mind that in turn wrestles with matters where poetry doesn't reveal what's disguised but only what the poet can never get to. Her poem echos Macbeth's famous speech rather nicely:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

She seems not a little dismayed that poetry is only part of our restless species behavior and that the language we write and expound to bring coherence to the waking life are only more sounds being made in an already noisy existence.

Choosing your parents wisely

A sweeping statement from an old conversation, followed by more sweeping states from myself:

Writers do not decided who their influences are, scholars do, and scholars have to come to a consensus as to how to go about doing that and a consensus as to who influences whom.

This statement is too thin a blanket to be spread so broadly:it's backwards. Writers do decide who their influences are. The act of preferring one writer over another with regard to value , style and impact constitutes a choice, choice being a decision. This personal canon-formation, a nascent writers' set of examples of what writing can be, ought to be, and where writing ought to grow from, is obviously a set of choices, albeit convoluted. Likewise, I doubt that there's a moment in a writer's activity when they are not aware of the shadow of past genius that is cast over them, the Greats--however defined--that they aim their work away from, toward an originality, and maybe genius,that is their own. The anxiety of influence, courtesy of Harold Bloom, is almost an observable dynamic in sensible study.

The scholar, in turn, only uncovers who the influences are in the course of credible research, but does not choose them. The temptation may be great, but the theorist/scholar/critic can speculate only so much in their interpretation of real data. Writers begin with private views and prejudices about the given world, perceived through their eyes, their sets of experience, but an aim of writing to begin with is too seek consensus: it's the shock of recognition, among other things, that gives the aesthetic satisfaction with a narrative that's rendered well. Private projects don't stay private: they enter into the reading world in an attempt to give us more ideas, fixtures, metaphors to help us think about ourselves .

That is all, I think, that literature can ever promise, the work itself. Criticism , like literature proper, is hardly a fixed set of standards, a Biblical claim of absolute, final totality. It's an activity that's adjacent, secondary to, literature, and at best can act as an aid to the reader seeking to underline salient elements that dovetail, enlarge, or illuminate the problematic nature of experience that won't, and cannot, tell you what it means.

Shot with his own gun

Andrew Hudgins wants to read peace marchers the Riot Act, as his poem "Summer of '09" makes clear enough. One assumes the narrator, a peace marcher himself, has ,by the time he comes to narrate this laundry list of  fascist ills, had a conversion experience. It is less bitter than it sarcastic, though, less a poem than an excuse to make another list of data he's gathered about an oppressive government's brutal crushing of dissent. Hudgins narrator is the idealist, a citizen mounting a symbolic protest against war as an institution who, as he details in negative integers, the painful terrors those citizens locked in country are subjected to in very material ways. Self criticism is a fine activity as far as it goes, but for all the absurdity he casts the laughing protesters at the peace rally in their being grossly removed from the horror they seek to vanish, Hudgins insulates the terror even more with the typical poet's mistake, IE trying to make the subject more convincing with an over blown language. He pulls out the megaphone, ramps up the language, and addresses the troops from the other side of the field.

—fascism's

implacable penitentiary memes

of sadism and certitude.

Hudgins intends to indict the naive here, but editorializing with Marxist Study Group about the awful ways of repressive regimes makes their sins more unreal , not more believable. Hudgins' All-Thumbs projection of his disgust with the self importance of protesters who know nothing of the real situation would be comical if it weren't for what I take to be factual basis of the did-not examples he peppers this squib with. From interviews, perhaps, biographies he's read, things he's actually seen, it's all very real and horrible, and perhaps Hudgins might appear somewhere in print and online to lay out his sources, undisguised by the burden of poetic art. Hudgins might not have intended to criticize the protesters, but that is what came across, although he tried to phrase his misgivings as self-criticisms. Something is lost in the stream of negative did-nots that highlight the horror of the State where the war is fought. He ends up speaking for all the protesters and implies the privileged position with which to protest is a universal characterization. Liberal guilt, perhaps, intense self consciousness, the inner turmoil of having so theoretical filters choking off one's moral instinct. Hudgins is tending to wander into Susan Sontag/ John Berger territory. He might have been trying to get across Foucault's point that pain and punishment become a part of a victim's body awareness that in turns defines a system of repression that operates invisibly and , perhaps, as an expression of those impulses within nature that determine a species' ability to thrive or tendency to die off. The metaphysics is fine stuff for a poem, I suppose, but the discourse ought not come in the guise of a missing index card from a lecture. I am more convinced each time I look at this that Hudgins didn't know what he was trying to do here; this is one of those things that begs for a reworking.

in their views that photograph or depiction of any sort insulates the actuality of what's being dipicted and winds up being less real, thus hampering or preventing outright the potential for any real change to take place. Hudgins' variation would be that the act of protest against an unjust war turns into a spectacle, a collective diversion where the issues are carnivalized, a citizenry's outrage is diffused , and the original horror goes on, unabated. This intriguing Marcusean insight, which he addressed as "repressive tolerance"(simply the idea that the State's allowing dissent to occur unmolested saps revolutionary impulses among the oppressed) is a handy trap, however, as many otherwise insightful Marxist insights are; a symptom is described, but no way out save for a rapture-like attaining of Revolutionary Perspective and focus will make the malaise go away. One winds up, per Sontag and Berger, having a troublesome relationship with Beauty , as in the finding of something as attractive, in itself, contributes to the greater evils of capitalism. Hudgins finds himself in self-doubt, a questioning of his motives, with the implication that it might have been more useful thing had he kept his hands and pockets and remained a tourist while in Washington. This is not a revelation of Hamlet -themed irresolution as to what do about a variety of problems, it is merely paralysis.

Hamlet finally took an action and accepted the consequence of his action , his goal, finally, to reveal the truth that had poisoned his Kingdom. Hudgins sounds like he intended to be on the side of the angels but walked away from the whole thing. There is something wrong with a perspective that at a righteous cause, a protest against a war waged against a country that never attacked the United States, is just another materialist indulgence, a fashionable pretense of concern. This is the kind of thinking that keeps people from showing up at the voting polls.


 Hudgins winds up being shot with his own gun. He wants to criticize the idealists who have their heads in the clouds with the fatal facts of the matter, and yet he can't shake the impulse to allow his language to get in the way of his point. Hudgins' clouds may be dark, but clouds they remain.

Brow Beat : Can New Yorker Poets Write About Anything Besides Poetry?

?

Slate's Browbeat section does a telling survey of the New Yorker's habit of publishing poems that are about poetry, about reading, about writing, in one fashion or another. I read with particular interest, as poems about poetry has been one of my specialized gripes for years. At this point , a blogger focusing on covering the rants on poetry blogs might write a screed against rants-against-poems-about-poetry, citing a series of links to my repetitive missives as especially grouchy examples. I've tempered my protests lately, though, as it the the tendency for poets to reflect upon their own form and their relevance to the world they live in is firmly established in world literary history; although it bugs me still, I have to admit that I am subject to slipping under the conceits of earlier Modernist manifestos that appointed their authors as those who would erase history and recreate the way we see the world. I would hope most of us have learned some bitter lessons about ignoring history, even at this level. You can attempt to persuade folks, yes, but you really can't force them to like something they're not inclined by personality to enjoy, and you can't force the correctness of your opinion on them. Anyway, my grievances are a matter of record on this blog, and I invite you to enjoy the article and the ensuing discussion stream.

Point Omega by Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo's novels have been remarkably strong given the length of his career, and the only one I think is subpar is his 9/11 novel; nicely fitted, of course, with some of the author's famed verbal brilliance, but it seemed more per-formative than anything else, with the estranged characters and their respective stages of psychic exile twined in pro forma fashion around that date's catastrophe. The novel seemed to have been written out of sense of obligation, that the author who had made a career out of writing about a world that fits the 9/11 cliche "everything has changed" felt compelled to give his remarks in fictional form. It alone among his books was a labor to read, as it seems to have been a labor to write.

Otherwise, I salute his post-Underworld writings The Body Artist and Cosmopolis, a delicately etched character study and a black comedy respectively who's central characters, a performance artist and a digital guru commodities broker, reach the end of the belief systems that filled in the interior absence of purpose and commitment to the world.In this instance I find much to like about "Point Omega", although I think it helps if you've read several of his books , are aware of his larger themes and appreciate the way he has condensed and concentrated his themes into a hard,splendidly spare narrative line. It is, I think, a continuation of DeLillo's examination of a culture that has had the mystery and mythology stripped from it by the harsher trends in Modernism, replaced with various wrap around belief systems ranging from political ideology, art-for-art's sake, technology and assorted other absolutist-tending habits of mass-think that each attempt to replace what had been the spiritual, the religious, the intuitive.

Our character Elster, here, is a polymath, a genius versed in a seeming unlimited variety of cross-indexed disciplines, someone whom the intelligence and defense apparatus of the State brought on as someone who's musings about their agendas and techniques might somehow give them an advantage over opponents both current and future. Elster,though, is someone who finds his learning, the knowledge and he garnered in an effort to weave his way through an infinitely complex network of warring belief systems, collapsing upon itself. Now he considers the finite essence of all things, stripped of meaning as he has been stripped of his inner life;he watches an endless artful deconstruction of an iconic movie, he prefers the limitless waste of the desert, he desires an existence that can be mute, meaningless, flat and precisely without resonance. I think this is powerful stuff, really, a lyric poem.

Tough Guys Don't Write Sissy Poems

Someone mailed me a poem by poetaster William Espy as their way of saying that poems are, by default, a pompous, elitist and obnoxious breed of ineffectual human; I assume the sender was tired of reading my posts on matters large and small. They thought they could put me in my place, a deed for which I'd be obliged to have them accomplish. Often enough I have no idea if I'm coming or going, or whether I'm advancing an argument, or retreating from something I've already said. If someone asked me where I was coming from, I'd have to answer that I didn't know; I misplaced my map of misreading. But enough of that here is the Espy verse I was sent:

YOU'D BE A POET, BUT YOU HEAR IT'S TOUGH?


You'd be a poet, but you hear it's tough?
No problem. Just be strict about one rule:
No high-flown words, unless your aim is fluff;


The hard thought needs the naked syllable.
For giggles, gauds like pseudoantidis-
establishment fulfill the purpose well;
But when you go for guts, the big words miss;
Trade "pandemonic regions" in for "hell".

…Important poems? Oh…excuse the snort…
Sack scansion, then -- and grammar, sense and rhyme.
They only lie around to spoil the sport --
They're potholes on the road to the sublime.


And poets with important things to say
Don't write Important Poems anyway.


Copyright © 1986 Willard R. Espy

I'm not crazy about the Espy poem for the usual reason, it rhymes, it clanks, it clicks, you can hear the parts move as you read it. And, despite the notion that Espy is a public poet, accessible, readable, "gettable", this remains a less-loathsome example of a loathsome narcissism among poets in general, a poem about poetry. It is ironic that a poet who bucked the tendency of Modern Poetry to be abstract, coded, enigmatic and self-referential would choose to exercise their whimsy on his own medium. This habit, whether requiring an extreme hermeneutics or graspable after the first read, is an elitism that has done much, I think, to keep potential readers away from investigating the craft.

It might have something to do with poems like these are the ones that become heavily anthologized or reprinted in various places by editors who are attracted to works that would rather gavotte among its particulars rather than chance a subject matter a reader would recognize and, in turn, interrogate. The potential reader, wondering if poetry has anything to say to them, picks up a volume and comes across like this, and places the volume down again, thinking that the poets are thumbing their collective nose at those unfortunate enough not to have had good English teachers in high school.

It doesn't really matter who writes Poems About Poetry--Language poets, School of Quietude, whimsical rhymesters--it's a sad, involute habit. His readership, though, is not the Ideal reader, the nonspecialist who potentially is interested in poetry and the stylistic perspective the art might bring on how ideas and experience intermingle, but rather other poets, who, as a class of professional, are not likely to change their ways. We have, in essence, something that's more an interoffice memo or motivational talk to the boiler room of smile-and-dial telemarketers. It's clever, wind up a contraption that, in its own way, forsakes the mission of any poet, regardless of aesthetic preference: to be in the world. This is as much an Ivory Tower as anything more elliptical, diffuse. What distinguishes it is the noise all it's moving parts make in their scraping attempt to achieve an effect.

 I overstate, perhaps, but my gripe against Espy is that he attempts to put "difficult" and "academic" (both terms meant as pejoratives) poets in their place by writing A Poem About Poetry; I am not against difficulty, I am not in favor of dumbing down poems in order to attract larger readerships, and I don't think the non-specialist reader insists, as a class, that poets have their wear as unadorned as sports writing. The gripe is against the poet who cannot get away from making Poetry their principal subject matter, by name. Not that each poem about poetry is, by default, wretched; there are bright and amazing reflexive verses indeed, but they are the exception to the rule, the rule being that a medium that ponders it's own form and techniques and ideological nuances too long becomes tediously generic. The problem, it seems to me, is that some writers who haven't the experiences or materials to bring to draw from will wax on poetry and its slippery tones as a way of coming to an instant complexity. Rather than process a subject through whatever filters and tropes they choose to use and arrive at a complexity that embraces the tangible and the insoluble, one instead decides to study the sidewalk they're walking on rather on where it is they were going in the first place. I rather love ambiguity, the indefinite, the oblique, the elusive, and I do think poetry can be ruthlessly extended in its rhetorical configuration to encompass each poet's voice and unique experience; the complexity I like, though, has to be earned. Subjectively, I prefer poets who engage, interrogate the ambivalence and incongruity in a sphere recognizable as the world they live in. The internal battle is what interests me at the bottom of the at long barrel of concerns, the personal narrative individuals can't seem to help constructing about the direction and implied purpose of their life, and Life Itself, a larger and dispute plain that does not fall prey to the limitations of our best designs and metaphysics attempt to impose. First, there was the word, we might agree. But those words helped us construct a reality that has a reality of its own, and I am more attracted to the writer who has tired of spinning their self-reflexing tires and goes into that already-strange world and field test their language skills.