Who else ?

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In line with his discussion of Edgar Guest under way in his current column in Slate, Robert Pinsky asked the question about who  we think among  currently popular poets might suffer a similar diminishment in estimation  , say, forty years from now. It would be a long list, but some things have to gotten to first off, pronto.

There remains a respectful silence on the matter of quality, but I think in a few years readers of poetry will gain enough spine and admit that the poems of the late and truly tragic Mattie Stepaneck were spectacularly wretched. I well understand a dying young man's desire to remain optimistic and strong and courageous and to show all this is some painfully earnest poems of faith, sunshine, flowers, spiriituality and such, but Stepaneck's fatal malaise made him immune to criticism.

The media, with its instincts for human interest stories that can be exploited indefinitely, turned the boy into a poster child for All Our Lost Innocence, and made it possible for the woefully amateurish and sub-literate cracker barrelisms of his poems to be published and become best sellers.

 There was stony silence as to how dreadful the work was; no one said a thing. You bit your tongue and didn't argue the idea that Stepaneck's popularity would fade soon after he passed away. No one wanted to be accused of saying mean things about the poems of a young boy dying from a fatal condition.

 Still, someone with no dog in the fight , with no emotional ties to the increasingly distant recollection of Stepaneck and the context of his verse, will come across his collected poems and become numb with incomprehension as to why anyone, anyone at all thought that such a specimen of slithering sentimentalism qualified as something worth publishing.  The future critics of poetry will regard poetry fans of this day, as we regard poetry readers of Edgar Guest, as rubes for making the relentlessly mundane a highlight of our aesthetic experience.

Edgar Guest and Marianne Moore: the task of the modernist poet

There's a smart,concise essay by Robert Pinsky contrasting the styles of poets Edgar Guest and Marianne Moore  in the current edition of Slate online. It is of value because he more or less isolates the reasons why no reads Guest these days, the poet who was once the most famous poet in America, and why the formerly obscure Moore continues to gain readers the many decades since her first publication.

Edgar Guest was not an incompetent writer, of course, but that does make him a good one. As with the faded phenomenon of Rod McKuen in the Sixties, Guest's singular ability was to take on a persona that reduced a great heap of cracker barrel wisdom, cliché and hick town wisdom into an attractive speaker who would seem to come along an endless string of life's events just after they happened and reveal the moral that only required a clear sighted commoner to brush the trail dust from.

By the time McKuen emerged during the Sixties a perhaps more poet archetype had filtered through mass culture and, abetted with the then current notion that rock-lyrics-were-poetry-- was able to take the idea of Poet as Tragically Solitary Romantic Hero and reduce it to appealingly two dimensional depiction of a Man Too Sensitive for Life's Many cruelties who was consigning himself to travels far and away, usually on boats , usually arriving at coastal cities in deepest mist to choruses of foghorns and sea gull cries. His universe , with all it's references to anonymous and genderless others in the form of the familiar sounding  yet effectively distancing pronoun "you", was solipsism with the worst social implication; although others in McKuen's imagined travels and romances are indeed present, although they have names and histories unique to them if one chose to investigate the sources of McKuen's muse, it is only McKuen's emotional state that matters. The essence of Hemingway's code --live by your own rules, do not impose your pains, wound and heartbreaks on to others , and seek experiences that are vital and apt to increase your appreciation of the Life You Have--is boiled down to a shriveled, grayish root . Where Hemingway's thinking was that one had to be prepared for others to follow their own consul as well and and summarily at conclusions and actions that are likely contrary to one's internalized philosophy, McKuen's premise is merely a set up for failure; the man's poetry leaves you with a feeling of unearned fatalism and acting out. This is a middle aged man writing as a sensitive teenager  who desires experiences his body has yet to know.  McKuen equates defeatism with the poetic spirit; Hemingway, in a manner of speaking, tried to show us how to take a punch and then get back into whatever game it is we've decided to take part in.This was perfect material for the teen ager who wanted to graduate from Bob Dylan records. The irony is that it is the lyrics of a songwriter that have survived the decades better than the generically defined page poetry of either Guest or McKuen.

Guest, it should be remarked, made a living cleverly rearranging, rephrasing, re- branding what it was his audience already believed in; there was nothing of surprise in his work, but rather a steady path toward a conspicuous set of resolutions. He was, in practice, a propagandist for the Way Things Ought to Be, a softly reactionary set of ideas that were not, in his writings, revealed as remarkable realizations as the result of following a string of contrary ideas to their metaphorical commonality, not a perception that is caught in composition and shared, indeed, his ideas are not even personal statements of any faith-based belief; they were, flat out, something akin to marching orders, talking points, instructions to a readership to take comfort in their reticence to challenge conventional wisdom , to resist straying from the compound, to be suspicious of education and nuance. Comic and technically skilled as Edgar Guest's pieces might have been his poems were by and large the disguised dictates of what Nietzsche referred to as "slave morality".

In essence, Guest is instructing his audience not to budge and to instead on a collective memory of a past that never quite existed, certainly not in the static , perfected, perfect balanced paradigm where a man,his family, his neighbors and the world about all of them existed in a common sense, "natural" harmony. He does this to nearly toxic degree with his homily "Home" , where the corniest of cornball American dialects informs the presumably willing readership a set of conditions , drawn from the baldest and least convincing of  stereotypes about rural life, that are required for a house for a house to gain the legitimizing and ennobling essence of being a "home". Pain, suffering , catastrophe are suggested as those things that make you part of an Order of Things that cannot be dismantled; new ideas, new technologies, new kinds of neighbors from different ethnic groups are not just suspect, they are wrong to be. Guest's hackneyed verse, filtered a meticulously contrived speech of common man wisdom, was contemptuous of modern ways, of being seemingly cut off at the root from a past that was, until then, continuous , coherent and seamless, generation to generation. There is something to be argued for  learning lessons through our own history as a people, but Guest turns into gummed up rhymes seeking easy places to land to launch a sinister agenda of mediocrity:

Ye've got t' sing an' dance fer years, ye've got t' romp an' play,
An' learn t' love the things ye have by usin' 'em each day;
Even the roses 'round the porch must blossom year by year
Afore they 'come a part o' ye, suggestin' someone dear
Who used t' love 'em long ago, an' trained 'em jes t' run
The way they do, so's they would get the early mornin' sun;
Ye've got t' love each brick an' stone from cellar up t' dome:
It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home.

Simply, Guest discouraged the impressionistic view of the world, detested the subjective, was annoyed to great extent at those poets who decided that their responsibility was not to their audience's need for walled-off security but rather to their own sensibilities as they sought to gauge the interaction of their personalities with the flux and flow of a world outside themselves, entirely separate from their wishes. Moore rather brilliantly had the quality of actual thought in her poems, and the best poems, such as her most famous "Poetry" or this poem "Silence", read as skillfully, artfully distilled notions, half thoughts, material items, memories that are tracked as they culminate into an eventual perception. Something other than what the writer wanted to see or say is revealed; the recollection of her father's speech about the virtues of short visits contrasted against his final offer of "make my house your inn" bring us neatly to Moore's terse knockout punch:" Inns are not a residences".

 In the brief span she brings together a father's personality where he was at a remove from those he ought to be close to, that he would preface his desire to have little to with others with the flattering comparison with great poets and their stoic virtues, that he would open up his house to his daughter merely as a place to stay temporarily, not as a home. There is quite a bit here, voiced in simple language, linked implication, not rhetorical gestures. Where readers had read Guest, quickly understood what he had to offer and soon enough boxed up his volumes as attitudes in American culture began to change, Moore and others of her like remain the ones we can re-read and discuss without embarrassment .The best poems remain relevant, and it might be said here that a truly modernist work remains modern long, long after it first finds the light of day.

Cootie farm

If on a winter's night a traveler...
Italo Calvino
Calvino can be an intriguing fabulist, but there is a limit to how often one can keep  interrogating the very medium<br/>they are writing in before one drops the book and fixes themself a strong drink. Self-reflective art in excessive doses and abusive combinations with other dislocating devices of retired experiments makes you complacent about the value of literary writing itself; what Calvino has going for him is an elegant style that engages you even as he performs the old tricks of revealing what's behind the curtain. For my taste, one should investigate the more recent novels of Paul Auster, especially his New York Trilogy. He essentially manages to have us step back from the linguistic artifice of fiction just enough to makes us aware of just how arbitrary the beginnings, middles and ends of plot outlines are when they are confronted by the irritable unpredictability of  reall events; and yet even with this conceit going for him, he does not lose connection with his stories. These are characters who suffer, laugh, revenge, connive in all their circumstances, quirky and believeable, like we the readers, trying to make sense of situations that defy every template we can attempt to tame them with.

The Lottery by Edward Hirsch

This poem is nothing but lead weight all around; it is a premise strong enough for a short story or a sequence in a longer novel, perhaps by the likes of Russell Banks, who's books are full of sad men at some post-crisis point in their life, recollecting over drinks, lots of drinks, about the intensity of a youth that is invariably squandered in is depressed tales.

Hundreds of us pressed tightly together 

In the south lounge of the Forum 

To watch the lottery on a giant TV screen.

The failure of the poem, perhaps, is that Ed Hirsch isn't a good enough writer of fiction to have plots points segue into revelations of character, the revelation of a world view that has the grit of felt experience.

We were stuck in the heart of the country,

But in Washington, the men in sober suits                         

Stood together on the bright stage

And faced the rolling cameras

For the invocation blessing our country,

Which would be a blessing to the world,

And the roll call of birth dates.

The mood among our motley seemed

Festive and fearful, seething, curious. 

This might as well be a TV Guide synopsis of a movie being broadcast after hours when the house is quiet and each incidental sound due to sagging wood beams or running water are too loud, prohibitive of serenity or self-reflection.

 Banks, not the perfect narrative artist, was convincing in the worlds he chose to bring to book length; his types of tale, with narrators bordering on suicidal depression, are not the things that make for a lyric poem.

The selection: a random sequence 

Of blue capsules mixed in a shoe box

And pulled out of a glass bowl.

September 14^thwas the first date

Pasted onto an enormous white board

With 365 more empty slots.

April 24^th: the lucky second.

Someone muttered, "I'm fucked";  

Someone lit a joint, as at a concert;

And the girl next to me began to sob

For her high-school boyfriend in Cedar Falls

Whose birthday was December 30^th.

History existed only in textbooks, 

But it arrived for us on December 1^st, 1969,

With the Selective Service System.

Those blue plastic capsules opened,

And people drifted away when their days

Were called to call their parents

Or get drunk or pack for Saskatchewan—

Where was it, anyway?—or muse over

The randomness of dying in Vietnam.

.

Might we have lingered longer  after all the birthdays were called off and had some details , in miniature, of how the incredibly lucky and the fairly damned responded to their fates being given a tangible timeline? But the poet is in a hurry, his concentration on a series of tasks he has yet to begin. There is a punch line coming up somewhere, some dated moral disguised, perhaps , as an irony that only know reveals itself now that the narrator has lived long enough to see the finite perspective he forced his experiences to fit into: The randomness of dying in Vietnam.  This is the kind of poem that would get a young poet at an anti war rally in the Sixties totally and completed laid by someone else who heard him or him read ,convinced as they might have been that these were lines that explained the natures of right and wrong and pleasure and denial. Today it sounds inane and dated. It is a last line that sounds like so many other last lines that strike you as having been composed before the rest of the preceding poem; it’s  a suit that was tailored just to accommodate the existence  of fairly spectacular zipper.

This poem is blunted by the fact that Hirsch stops himself from using his prerogative and writing longer; he wants the pathos to be suggested, whispered behind the collective reticence to show emotion.

The poem instead just lays there like a dead wife. There is a species of permanent mourning in Hirsch’s poems , as there is Bank’s novels and short stories; this seems to be an extreme latter day variation  of Hemingway’s idea that a real man should live by a personal  code to which only he is privy to and for which  only he can gauge a fidelity to the finer points  of a Technicolor set  of undisclosed do’s and don’ts. 

Sharpen That Pencil

You wonder about all this leisure time many of Robert Pinsky’s poets seem to have in their daily lives. Based on the profusion of poems we are offered that hover around the subject of poetry or consider the turmoil and troubles of someone who’s assigned themselves the odious job of being the conscious of the race, you would think many of them don’t have jobs they have to go to, work they have to do for a paycheck. These are not homeless bohemians scraping by on recycling money. Someone pays them a salary for some kind of work that's performed, tasks rarely mentioned or hinted at. Do they teach the writing of poetry? Why wouldn't be surprised if that were the case? What would be interesting , I think, would be a series of poems where there no one was captured in the act of being poetic, contemplating ambiguity, choking on big thoughts, constructing small, straining epiphanies.

A poet’s task is to regard such things, sure enough, but we have a tendency, a trend, a permanent crease across the fabric of our poetry community that can’t stop regarding itself as something isolated from the rest of the community. Many poets are willing to keep themselves separate from the hoi polloi and rusticated rubes who are mere lowly readers.

"When I Think About the Time the Man Asked Me To Stop Fidgeting With My Pencil"

By Christopher Cunningham doesn’t concern itself with poetry and the poet’s sorry burden directly, but it contains the clichés one would toss into a diorama one would build to illustrate the context you’d expect to find a writer in, a café, a pencil in a fidgeting hand, the speaker, by association, worrying the lines of a poem or lost in strophes he might yet write to fictionalize his experience.

And fictionalize he does, in the form of someone who is presented in a manner that typecasts him as an interruption, a bother. Oy!, the agony of being a poet subjected to folks not interested in who or what he is; the bounder even attacks the means , the symbol of the craft , the essential tool of every scribe hunched over a tattered notebook ;

Will you stop that.

Will you put your pencil

down, and stop touching it, stop moving

it, moving and shaking and twisting

it. Will you stop. Stop.

Our poet ponders, frets, imagines the day this intruder goes through with his disorder, and bothers with a thought about his welfare, perhaps, but mostly feels threatened, his territory infringed upon. Sympathy goes out the window, the muscles tense, the jaw line clenches, and then the resolve comes to him, at last, to stick up for his right to twist and spin a pencil in a public place:

But on that day, stubborn

with surprise, undismayed by the jaw

of his fervor, I said, No.

He stared, fastened by wonder

and agitation, his fingers moving, nervous digits

tying and untying themselves, fretting

at some insoluble knot,

but I said, No. I said, Don't Look.

Just don't look, I said.

Papa Hemingway couldn’t have toughed out the situation any grander or terser, Bukowski couldn’t have been more –go- fuck- yourself .

None could have been more smug. Like the rest of the lazy scribblers who write these inane confessions and , Cunningham’s narrator wallows in his own reaction and attempts to make us co-sign his knee jerk thinking; instead of closely observing the man or empathizing with the poetic techniques one assumes he has at the ready, positing an insight or an opinion made visceral with an observed detail, Cunningham rather imagines the man elsewhere in the day, being strange, quirky, alien, a threat bring fear and bewilderment to small children. Strawman arguments are familiar among pundits and back porch pontificators, but a poet is supposed to use a language that gets to a truth that is overlooked or undreamed of. "When I Think About the Time the Man Asked Me To Stop Fidgeting With My Pencil" is another pathetic example of the kind of poetry that is little more than a writer scratching his privates in a public place.  I'm positive that this poem is meant as self -recrimination, but that isn't enough to get it off the hook , or to make it a good poem. It reinforces the self-absorption--this would fit very well into the many volumes of poems where the authors are caught in narcissistic feedback loops where their awareness of their obsession of their own responses and reactions to situations only sustains the activity. It is not art because the subject does not achieve an independence from the creator's intents or motivations--there is not the sense that appears in the best writing when the subject and it's (his) the world it resides in assumes a character distinct from the artist. This poem is about the narrator's comfort zone being invaded, and ends with the slightest suggestion that the narrator feels bad about his response. That is generous of him, but we're still stuck in this man's emotional backyard, listening to him recite his tales of woe about how awful he feels for not mowing the lawn or taking out the trash.

K and K

Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times reviews books like the smartest kid for a junior college bi-weekly student newspaper, which is to say that her insights, her scorn, her depth of field would be amazing for an eighteen year old in any decade. What is amazing for an eighteen year old, though, seldom amazes anyone when the same level of aptitude and attitude are displayed in mature adults; you think  experience along the way to one's thirties and beyond would have seasoned the fact-obsessed certitude with a personality and a weariness of making statements that are applied like nails to a coffin.  This, of course, sets up those who continue to read her to have expectations that she will someday come into her own and develop the qualities one desires in a critic--real passion, a lively, unstrained prose style reflective of a personality that wants to talk to you, and, if it's not asking too much, insights, conclusions and judgments that break away from the clichés and tropes that often, too often pass for commentary. This blossoming is not forthcoming for Kakutani, who remains an underachiever  in the assessment of of other people's work. Her views are so frail in presentation,so inch-deep in investigation that she does not seem that could withstand a conversation with someone wo politely disagreed with. Kakutani seems like she would sulk, cast her eyes down, puzzled about why she is being attacked. She does not sound as if she cares about the books she's tasked with giving an opinion on, and there is mechanical movement to her columns, a method she's seemingly developed in order to dispatch her obligations as soon as possible.She gives you the feeling that she looks forward to getting away from the computer and easing into bunny slippers , cocoa and a dvd she is finally getting around to watching. Pauline Kael cared about the movies she wrote about, and though she faltered toward career's end with messy pronouncements and idol worship, at her best she convinced you that movies were important and had you talking about the issues she's raised.Hers was a passion that would bring you to a tavern after a movie where you would argue with her until the late night about the merits or demerits of a particular director's work. Kael was the sort you thought would continue the argument you just hung up with the first person to come to her door--the mailman,the landlord, homicide detectives--or with whoever chanced to give call at home; her engine was always goined, revving itself for another contest of who had the quickest wit.  Kakutani  just makes you wonder again and again how any reviewer could make reading books or writing reviews about them seem like such a joyless way to spend one's time.

2 poems by Bei Dao

Bei Dao is an especially fine and brilliant poet , and I thought it would be a relief to read some work from a contemporary Chinese poet who better brings together a modern diction with the tradition of image clarity found in traditional Chinese verse. Pound's translations are so loose in their relation to the original tongue and intent that many who know of such matters consider them to be not translations at all but wholly original poems instead. 


This perspective makes the poems a bit more approachable, and presents us with the idea that Pound's misreading of Chinese aesthetic led him, all the same, to develop his notions of a twentieth century poetry where the image prevails over sentiment and empty rhetoric. Bei Dao, of course, has the sure-footedness I don't think Pound ever achieved in this area. While Pound was busy mimicking an old old style (or what he took to be what an older style would sound like) ,Bei Dao neatly builds surely, delicately, all things in balance, indeed, not an idea but in the thing.

Branch roads appear and disappearin the hands of trees.Where did the fawns go?Only cemeteries could assuagethis desolation, like tiny cities.

The thinking comes after the poem, for the reading to resonate with. Our fine poet here performs his art beautifully, the presentation of the perception. 

Translated by Eliot Weinberger

June

Wind at the ear says June
June a blacklist I slipped
in time

note this way to say goodbye
the sighs within these words

note these annotations:
unending plastic flowers
on the dead left bank
the cement square extending
from writing to

now
I run from writing
as dawn is hammered out
a flag covers the sea

and loudspeakers loyal to the sea's
deep bass say June

______________________________­_____

Teacher's Manual

A school still in session
irritable restless but exercising restraint
I sleep beside it
my breath just reaching the next
lesson in the textbook: how to fly

when the arrogance of strangers
sends down March snow
a tree takes root in the sky
a pen to paper breaks the siege
the river declines the bridge invites

the moon takes the bait
turning the familiar corner
of the stairs, pollen and viruses
damage my lungs damage
an alarm clock

to be let out of school is a revolution
kids jump over the railings of light
and turn to the underground
other parents and I
watch the stars rise.

RED DRESS

The dress I bought you was a bad guess at what you wanted for a birthday or Holiday
when I take an unjustified sleep. I thought white polka dots against Communist red
would make you think of white flags and equality, that you’d stop asking me who I voted for or what I wanted for dinner if our lives were meatless from now on, that you’d let it go at that…:That” turned out to be a hanger in the front hall closet where you put the dress for future reference every time we came home. I remember you looking at it after a month, holding at arm’s length, you were shaking your head just slightly, a downward glance at white polka dots against a fire engine red material that made the air grow heavy with aromas that hadn’t been invented. Lately I’ve dreamed about climbing telephone poles. There are so many lines voices crossing one another across static and bad words, words and their inflection a sparking, electronic snarl. I knew one of those voices was asking me who I wanted for mayor, what I wanted for dinner, that’s all they wanted to know and more than I knew how to answer.

A sharp stick in the eye

Ezra Pound is some one who has given me eyestrain and head aches in college, something I can't forgive him for. He didn't give me anything that was remotely connected to the idiomatic language he idealized, the truly modern voice that was to be of its own time, a period sans history. It's a totalitarian impulse to try to live outside history, or to lay claim to it's reducible meaning, both matters Pound thought he adequately limned, but the problem was that his verse is leaden, dressed up in frankly prissy notions of what The Ancients had been up to aesthetically. The effect was perhaps a million dollars of rhetoric lavished on ten cents of inspiration. I didn't like him, I'm afraid.

Unlike Frank O'Hara, dead too young, but with such a large and full body of brilliant--yes, brilliant--lyric poetry left in his wake. O'Hara, influenced by some ideas of modernists, got what Pound tried to do exactly right: he mixed the  vernaculars of High and Low culture in the same stanzas with an ease that seemed seamless, he juggled references of Art, TV, movies, jazz , theater along with the zanily euphemized gossip of his love life, and was able to render complex responses to irresolvable pains of the heart--and heartbreak is always a close kin to his rapture--in lines that were swimming in irony, melancholy, crazy humor. This is poet as eroticized intelligence.

A reader should care if a poet's work adds up to the sum of their theories because it's a difference between talking a good game and playing one. Pound seemed to me to have the instincts of a good talent scout. I'm grateful for his remarks to his fellows, but I wish reading his work wasn't a path I had to go through in order to find the better poets.

If Pound's poems work for reasons other than how he wanted them work, fine that can be explicated interestingly enough with entirely new criteria extraneous to the author's aesthetic/political agenda, but it begs the question, really. It confirms my belief that Pound was talking through his hat most of the time. In this case, based admittedly on my learned dislike of his poetry, I think he gussied up his theories in order to usurp the critical commentary he knew would follow his work: no matter what, all critics had to deal with Pound's flummoxing prose before they could render an assessment, a trick he garnered from Poe, and one deployed by Mailer, a somewhat more successful artist/philosopher/critic (though failed poet).

Eliot had better luck combining the two virtues: The Sacred Wood and some of his other critical assessments have merit as purely critical exercises, self-contained arguments that don't require Eliot's work to illustrate the point. Eliot's poems, as well, stand up well enough with out his criticism to contextualize them for a reader who might other wise resist their surface allure. The language in both genres is clear and vivid to their respective purposes. It can be said of Eliot, though, that he was attempting to run interference with the critical reception of his own poetry by supplying a good amount of writing dedicated to form, or seeming to form, a substantial theory of his. A neat trick, this, since the popular critics and attending academics cannot begin their post mortems on  Eliot's verse without first engaging what he had to say about the practice and purpose of poetry; in some sense he swayed opinion to regard his work favorably. The point, though, is that one is required to deal with Eliot first on his own terms; his ideas color your findings regardless of the position you take.

Pound, again, to my maybe tin-ear, really sounded, in his verse, like he was trying to live up to the bright-ideas his theories contained: The Cantos sound desperate in his desire to be a genius.

David Ferry scratches his head

I remember reading David Ferry's poem The Intention of Things online and was somewhat bemused when other readers commented that the piece reminded them of Wallace Stevens'  wondering of what it must be l pass through the membrane separating our existence of mere representation and enter into the realm of Platonic Ideas, where the real things actually exist. Heady stuff for a poem to plow its way through, but there is at least an elegance in Stevens' ruminations on these fixed landscapes, things-in-themselves-unsullied or spoiled by human vanities.I had concluded some years ago that Stevens had stopped his search for intrinsic and immutable meaning in the nature of things and concluded that his imagination and his gift for scrupulous composition would be put to better use re-framing the texture and position of things among those palm-lined shores abutting the fabulous terraces and columned cabanas, thus investing his language with a further power to evoke the mystery of things that seem, to him, to collude amongst themselves to keep us guessing to what end our days serves. For most, this results in periodic bouts of being dumbfounded, a chronic state of WTF; the pratfalls we have at the point when we assume we've discovered our path results in arguments with the results. Stevens fairly much admits that he'd be baffled if he thought he could define anything in this world of appearances and realized he would be guessing. Fortunately,  the guesses were inspirations in themselves and that he had the genius to transform his speculative method into poems that would inspire the intrigued reader to ask better questions. Ferry, though, hasn't the elegance or eloquence Stevens, and his poem The Intention of Things is a rudderless mess. One might have fun chasing pronouns and such things as they try to follow these elliptical couplets, but this reminds not so much as a poem of phenomenological speculation linked with the secret purpose of objects than it resembles a stoned rap a group of dopers would wander into once the smoke took hold and the world around them became an unreal cartoon they'd been dropped into. The worse part of it is that it reads further as if one of the zonked participants actually remembered the disparate topics of the ganja fueled rap and wrote it all down, trying attempting to make it a serious inquiry into the sequestered nature of things and events. It is humorless, it is overdone, it is sophomore metaphysics, it is dull and very pretentious; the narrator seems to think he's Hamlet, standing apart and on high, ruminating on human folly, the inevitability of death despite all in-genius plots. But that's a speech that's already been delivered, an unsurpassed achievement. David Ferry's dry verse here seems more a typing exercise committed while he paraphrased a seeming half dozen ideas already infinitely paraphrased.

JIBBER JABBER OF THE GODS

Some years back I was in a coffee house thoroughly caffeinated into a babbling blend of erudition and nonsequitor overkill , arguing with someone , a young man dressed in black and brandishing a dogfaced copy of Ecce Homo that life had no meaning because it had no real structure, no arguable basis for being something other than an accident of molecules colliding at precisely the right point and time. Whew, I offered, that is the best Dime Store nihilism I've come across in a long time, and recommended that he put it on his blog, ;under a pilfered photograph of Richard Nixon. I went further and remarked that I had to disagree on the matter of life having no structure. Then the coffee really kicked in. 


Life, actually , does have structure, in the communities we create and the institutions we formulate to hold them together,and in the culture that is shared that provides a diverse citizenry with a sense that there is a purpose to where and the way we live, and that there are the means to improve, correct, or change the conditions of our lives. This is structure. While life has no narrative arc, per se, literature certainly does, and it is in the art of that narrative that the contingencies of life, all those things that one cannot predict (let alone prevent from happening) are contained in fictive form and which can be appreciated as drama, comedy, moral instruction, what have you. Literature is a means to make sense of life, to provide resolutions to brief joys and large traumas, and it is a way to prepare a reader for what ever strange turn one's life might come to.

What it be like

A poem should not mean
But be.

That said by poet Archibald MacLeish, in his piece "Ars Poetica". That thrust of that poem, in essence, was that poetry was no longer the central domain in which speculations about the nature of reality , beauty, and the pursuit of the Good Life were discussed and debated, and that it was , in modern times, not the friendliest grounds for
discussions about God and his purpose for us on earth. Other, prose dominated disciplines had quite handily usurped those topics as science handily dislodged, diminished and debunked the mystery and mythology the general consensus used to apply to the material world. A poem should not "mean" anything, as in questing for the precise definition of things and thereby making fixed, general statements about them. A poem should "be" as a thing itself, a material item true to its own nature, a construction of words, considered by MacLeish, WC Williams and Stevens (among the poets of that generation) to be malleable no less than clay, glass or steel. 

The aim of the poem was not to reinforce the materiality of the world and the given political and economic realities that relied on perception that markets could define, exploit and profit from, but rather that poetry should tend to perception, free of the filters we've been indoctrinated into. These poets were not especially overjoyed with capitalism (although one would be hard pressed to call them leftists in any sense) and it's propensity to smash and upset the unannounced world. Williams wrote (and I paraphrase) that the thing itself was it's own adequate symbol,which , considered closely, stated that there is no God and that human personality could and needed to see the things in the world on their own terms, in and of themselves.

God and the empty nest

The   difference in God's persona between the  Old and New Testaments, from that of grim, avenging  tyrant to a loving father trying to save His children from their  worst instincts, may be due to no more than He had changed his mind as to what to do with the world He created. It's reasonable to think of him as a deity who is constantly changing, evolving. Otherwise we'd have a God who is static and incapable of changing; he'd be someone who'd be incapable of dealing with a continually unfolding cosmos which he put in motion in the first place. The God of the Old Testament was a bitter, cranky, vengeful deity, a bully in other words, and the message of the God we discover in the New Testament essentially demands that we serve his purpose and plans for Humankind lest we be judged and condemned to horrible, eternal punishment. He makes threats, in other words, and this is bullying behavior however you dress it up with transparent words like “love” and “sacrifice”.

 The Prime Mover, I'd think, must by definition be able to move again, and yet again, as needed, as his vast mind assesses, discerns and decides. Process Theology, put forth by Alfred North Whitehead and others, deals with a bit of this, as does Norman Mailer in most of his writings, most recently in his dialogue with Michael Lennon, On God.    It may be a mistake to think of God as omnipotent; if we are made in his likeness then our weaknesses are his as well, and this gives a vital clue that God is less than all-powerful and that he doesn't know the outcome of each and every matter before him. It's an attractive notion that God remains teachable by the very things he creates. There's a reason that it's written that God blessed/cursed man with Free Will; I actually believe that FW is central to his Divinity, in the sense that he could choose to battle his creative power and simply do nothing. The popularized conception of in mass-culture is that God is in Heaven, and Heaven is in the sky, i.e., the clouds. It’s an image and an idea that is inseparable from the way we think, in the short form, of He who we call Lord. It’s in our literature, our poems, paintings, cartoons, and our movies. Ever see “The Horn Blows at Midnight” starring Jack Benny as an earth-locked angel? Rent it, since it is an amusing comedy utilizing the popular notion that Heaven, with God in it, is in the clouds.

 The existential nature of God, though, would become bored and ill-tempered simply existing in a vacuum, and so he decided to create meaning for himself, much as we do in this realm. Free will is that thing that allows us to associate together and determine and define right and wrong, good and evil, and it is also that inspire given instinct, I believe, to empower us to fight the baser desires and instincts. Christian by birth and culture, interested skeptic by choice. God gave us minds to use, and it’s my guess that He , being God, isn’t in need of his self-esteem reinforced with coerced praise, and isn’t the sort of deity to threaten us with eternal damnation unless we play His grubby game of Theological Monopoly. My guess would further to say that this God of my understanding is likely bored with that whole business and thinks there more useful, creative ways to fill eternity . These are my views, but the ideas aren’t new. Inspiration comes by way of Soren Kierkegaard , Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton, Bill Wilson and Norman Mailer. The way the ideas are expressed are my words, though, based on my experience.

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SAD SACK GENERATION

Laura Miller, Salon's sharp book critic, had a column in the Open.Salon blog  back in 2008 about the current crop of sad young literary writers. Progressing to the point where our inner lives are the principle subject matter for the middlebrow " serious novel", she wonders aloud how is that we've come up with so many novelists and short story writers who write novels about people unable to transcend their grieving. There is no "getting over" the depression that follows the death of a loved one, or the break up with a wife or girl friend. A generation prior would find no end of fiction writers who could lighten their meloncholy and despair with choice bits of humor, wit, absurd comedy, notable in work like that of John Cheever or John Updike; no matter how grim the action or limitless the poetry once could extract from the misery might be, their instincts were to undercut the mourner and push him or her toward the larger task of reentering the world where they live; sorrow is a neighborhood one ought not reside in too long.

 With time, you become a bore entrenched on your own box of miserable experience. Much of the cause for the rise of these dour, all-is-ashen scribes has been the emphasis in recent decades on the journey within rather the adventure without; characters confront a rough patch in their life and spend the course of many chapters studying their feelings and second guessing their reactions to further circumstances beyond control, resulting in some eventual metaphor about powerlessness. 

Occasionally  in a while this can be a moving saga, but there is less than there used to be about what people do in the world and how their actions effect communities and neighborhoods they might pass though. It would seem that someone had uttered once that having your characters merely think about world suffices for momentum, but that is hardly enough. There is a tedium in the results, a monotony self awareness that is depressing for all the depressed people these plots deal with. Blame therapy, twelve step movements, the 60s? It hardly matters now. 

Once we read stories of women and (mostly) men who wanted to engage their universe and change it somewhat, a situation where introspection, if any, was predicated on actual turns of events; tension was created, resolution came finally,and we had dramatic action. Even the great soliloquist Shakespeare knew that Hamlet's navel gazing had to be juxtaposed against more turbulent events around him. It's a shame that our better prose stylists have largely forgotten that lesson.

the failure of some 9-11 literature

A week ago, after work, on a crosstown bus, and all I wanted for the half-hour ride was to read the galley of  Don DeLillo's novel, Falling Man, a ruminative narrative highlighting the lives of New Yorkers on the day of the attacks, 9/11. Finally, a novel about the attack that matters, not to give too much away, but this is prime DeLillo, exploring the sober side of what was White Noise's premise for a postmodern comedy, the disruption of fixed and certain lives by the intrusion of an event beyond imagination.

In White Noise, the effect was comic, funny, and all ironies laid in the day were comedies of the clueless trying to make peace with the nagging changes that cause everyone to avoid the void as they try to retool old habits with new explanations, theories, contrived proofs that the world will return to normal. Now it's a tragedy, and the quality of irony finds itself made ironical. The attack on the World Trade Center puts us beyond abstractions like comedy or tragedy, on which one can grasp onto something fixed in their minds as a normality they can get back to. All is muted, rendered mute. Rationalization is deferred. And our expectations of what DeLillo would make of the penultimate attack on America's symbolic sense of being the world's best asset mounted to levels that were nearly toxic with glee.

DeLillo, however, is a writer who might have played out his themes and investigations of a hyper-technological democracy whose inhabitants are searching for a useful past as a way to make the fractured, reshuffled, and decentered present at least seem to have thematic continuity. "Falling Man," the 9/11 novel, strikes me as a book of riffs from a musician who can barely muster the energy to run through his songbook one more time. In the odd sense, in the cruelly ironic sense, it's a tragedy that the attack on the World Trade Center attack happened after DeLillo hit his peak with "Underworld," as masterful of the novel of America our propensity for distracting ourselves in ritual, obsessions, insane hobbies and esoteric systems of knowledge--performance art, baseball history, high finances, unrepentant consumerism, ceaseless works of charity--to keep the suspicion that all our material gains and assumptions are based on no fixed moral platform.

There are some fine sentences here, some splendid descriptions, but there is listlessness as well. "Falling Man" is finally dull, and even DeLillo's prose mastery can't make this alternating saga of survivor despair and terrorist preparation rise above the merely serviceable. DeLillo is overwhelmed by the topic, not so much for the impossibility of writing a brilliant novel in the post-attack atmosphere, but because all the themes he has relevant to the present condition are expressed more powerfully, poetically, with larger and surer measures of canon-making genius than the comparatively provincial exercise the author has issued here. It’s also a matter of whether beautiful writing is appropriate for a novel specifically concerning itself with the physical and psychic costs of 9-11; folks like Laura Miller, Meghan O’Rourke, and Frank Rich have wrestled with the issue of whether drawing metaphors and similes for larger contemplation is somehow immoral when addressing the events so catastrophic and fatal. Art, in the uppercase, means framing the materials and objectifying them, taking them from their contexts and positioning them in ways that will force a deliberation over their existence; this is the aesthetic distance, beauty removed from our hands and set aside so we can contemplate some feelings in the absence of real-world distraction. 9-11 is thought by many to be above such contemplation that this date cannot be abstracted as material for art-making, literary reflection.

Brat Pack novelist Manhattanite extraordinaire Jay McInerney got the urge to step up to the plate and write a Great American Novel, a work that would raise him finally from the middle rungs of the literary ladder and allow him to reach the top shelf where only the best scribes--Hemingway! Fitzgerald! Thomas Wolfe!-- sit and cast their long collective shadow over the fields of aspiring geniuses, furious scribblers all. McInerney has selected a large subject to make his reputation, the catastrophe that was and remains 9/11. Acutely aware that the minor league satires and soft coming of age stories that made his name were fewer commandings than they had been because "9/11 changed everything" (a phrase destined to be the characterizing cliche of this age), he offers us The Good Life, a mixed bag of satiric thrusts, acute social observation, two-dimensional characterizations and wooden generalizations about the sagging state of society, of culture, of our ability to understand one another, locally and globally.

I agree that Jay McInerney is a better writer than he's been credit, but history will judge his novels as minor efforts at best. Witty and observant, yes he is, but how he conveys his best lines, his choicest bon mots have the thumbed-through feeling of a style borrowed. Fitzgerald, Capote, and John Cheever are his heroes, true. Still, there's nothing in McInerney's writing that honors his influences with the achievement of a tone and personality that is entirely his own, an original knack of phrase-making that makes a reader wonder aloud how such wonderful combinations of words are possible. His influences, alas, are visible and seem to be peering over his shoulder. Even what one would praise as sharp and elegant observations from his keyboard creaks not a little. The style sounds borrowed, and our author sounds much, much too dainty to make it really cling to the memory: "The hairstylist was aiming a huge blow-dryer at his wife's skull, which was somewhat disconcertingly exposed and pink--memento mori--in the jet of hot air ... "

McInerney is compared to Fitzgerald relentlessly since his career as a professional writer began, in so much he, like F.Scott, was bearing witness to a generation of conspicuous consumption and waste. Still, one notices that any random paragraph from The Great Gatsby contains more melody by far. The writing genius of Fitzgerald, when he was writing at his absolute best, was his ability to make you forget the fact that you're reading elegant prose and have you become entranced by it. It was a means to put you in a different world altogether. It's this simple, really; you didn't see him writing, you didn't see him sweat. Able craftsman and a peerless stylist when he was performing best, Fitzgerald's prose seemed natural, buoyant, unstrained. McInerney's writing reveals that strain, that slaving over phrase and clever remark, and often the effect seems calculated. In his best moments, he rarely sheds the sophomore flash; after all these years, our Manhattan golden boy still writes like the most gifted student in a Kansas City composition class. After all these years, he is still trying to outrace the long shadows of those who brought him reading pleasure.

This is a wandering and traipsing along with the subject matter like a drunk tourist gawking at the bizarre ways of the big city, a laughable and loathsome tour of Corn's intellectual baggage.   "Windows on the World," a poem written by Alfred Corn and published in Slate on September 11, 2003, is an ill-conceived poem commemorating the attack on the World Trade Center that would seem to confirm the skeptic's view that poets are willfully suffering narcissists who think everything in the world is in play to disturb their peace. In other words, to fuck with them. It's strange, odd, perverse, and somewhat immoral to write a poem using the 9/11 attack as a pretext to write another self-infatuated poem that really is more about how much the writer thinks about himself and his assignation as a "poet"; whatever the god damned what Corn puts on his tax return as "occupation" has to do with the still barely speakable horror this day has come to mean is beyond any sense I can find. Worse, it is beyond anything useful to others. 

Connecting the attack with the crashing of the Windows operating system is a ploy for him to remain a thousand miles from any connection with real emotion; it is relentlessly ironic and snobby in its form as a poem. The subject matter, the real horror, is aestheticized out of mind the way a narcotic lulls one into a stupor and then a nod against a world that still must be faced and made sense of. Corn does none of that at all, but what he does do is give us a long, wavering, and arrogantly ambivalent stretch of muddled semiotics where everything is a straining reach, a forced association, a willful perversion of real imagist reach. Had the subject not been so grim and disheartening, this would seem more parody than anything else. This poem angers me to no end. If Corn was paid for this piece, he should feel honor-bound to donate the sum to a cause that gives hope to others in the human community. Following that, he might quit whatever teaching job he has in writing and get a job in the receiving area of a Salvation Army Thrift Store.

PUT THIS DOG TO SLEEP

Classical allusions  are enough to drive a good man to drink a dozen soda pops and belch until the sun comes again to the garden of night with a rosy fingered dawn. That is to say that a smart allusion  might, just might make a poem snappy and perhaps provide a deeper echo of  response after an attentive reader finishes a third or fourth reading. But you need to choose your references smartly, and be smarter about where you  position them. Otherwise it becomes comic opera, over dramatic, crucified by self-importance.  

Xenia  

Most days that summer your old dog came up,
in the searing heat, with a failing heart,
from your place, the half-mile uphill to mine―

up the steep rise, past the pastured goats, on
the buggy trail that swerves through blueberries.

As you pointed out, The Odyssey
is full of tears, everyone weeping
to find and lose and find each other again.

Spent, he struggled the last two hundred yards,
ears low, chest heaving. Hearing
the jangling of his tags I knew the gods

had chosen me to praise him for his journey,
offer food and water, a place to sleep.

I would admit that it's not an uncommon to have the incidentally tragic in your life to remind you of something that you read years before, but you have to ask the question as to why the poets needs to bring it up at all. It becomes an offhand way of name dropping the title of a canonical text into a poem that attempts the small significance of a dog growing old and eventually passing on. Perhaps there is no credible way of writing about something this minute without coming across as pretentious, sentimental or pompous. Becker does us a service by avoiding a deep wade through the bristling thicket of obtuse reference, but even this light toe-in-the -water approach, to mix metaphors, is off putting for the reason I object to poets habitually referencing that they are poets, poetry in general, or titles from their private library. It has them thinking about what they've read rather than ponder an experience they are having and, for me, that is a tendency that entirely misses the point of this kind of small commemoration.

The prospect of reading someone who is self-critical enough to doubt that they are genuinely generous and giving with their fellow citizens and creatures is seductive enough as is, as this kind of reflection can indeed go to the general notion of the alienated individual in communities that are becoming increasingly fragmented, complex; one comes to wonder whether the virtues or those about them seem to have are genuine and without affect, or if they're mostly performative, ie, good manners and thoughtfulness put forth merely as a means of easing through a day with the least social friction. This reflection, though, is very expressible without the insertion of The Odyssey or the use of an obscure word for the title. I venture to say that what Becker's poem accomplishes is not clarity, the isolation of a fleeting sensation in original, fresh language, or revealing a world view different from the reader's own. It comes across as rote behavior seen in far too many poets who cannot step outside their conceit that they bear the title of "poet" or worse, "intellectual" and refrain from making their subject matter dreadfully , boringly entombed in literary reference. I would be impressed if someone could ponder this self-doubting in a way that makes you think of someone actually in the world, pausing due to a strong and almost overwhelming rush of feeling that defy book marking. Becker had the reference to the Odyssey at the ready prior to this poem being written, and this, in effect, makes this poem dishonest.

The basic problem is the sheer absurdity of this enhanced recollection--someone feeling the pain of self-recrimination because they didn't accord an old dog the same dignity as a friend or relative who, quite suddenly, ascends to nuanced and footnoted heights of existential despair. Becker manages to serve the stereotypes of poets as people who are so improbably sensitive to the capriciousness of existence that their sadness exceeds mere suffering and instead becomes epic. This is the poet immobilized by their grand response to situations, feeling deeper, harder, more elegantly than do non-poets; this makes the poem practically useless as a vehicle to jolt a reader into thinking about experience in another way.

On the same subject, Michael Collier takes the same tale in his poem “Argos” and smartly deals with the story itself; the tale is made fresh,lively, without being subjugated to the service of  a trivial whimsy.

If you think Odysseus too strong and brave to cry, 

that the god-loved, god-protected hero 

when he returned to Ithaka disguised,  intent to check up on his wife 

and candidly apprize the condition of his kingdom, 

steeled himself resolutely against surprise 

and came into his land cold-hearted, clear-eyed, 

ready for revenge – then you read Homer as I did,   

too fast, knowing you’d be tested for plot 

and major happenings, skimming forward to the massacre, 

the shambles engineered with Telemakhos 

by turning beggar and taking up the challenge of the bow. 

Reading this way you probably missed the tear 

Odysseus shed for his decrepit dog, Argos, 

who’s nothing but a bag of bones asleep atop 

a refuse pile outside the palace gates. The dog is not 

a god in earthly clothes, but in its own disguise 

of death and destitution, is more like Ithaka itself. 

And if you returned home after twenty years 

you might weep for the hunting dog 

you long ago abandoned, rising from the garbage 

of its bed, its instinct of recognition still intact, 

enough will to wag its tail, lift its head, but little more. 

Years ago you had the chance to read that page more closely 

but instead you raced ahead, like Odysseus, cocksure 

with your plan. Now the past is what you study, 

where guile and speed give over to grief so you might stop, 

and desiring to weep, weep more deeply.

I much prefer the Collier poem, and thanks for posting it here for contrast. It works wonderfully, it flows, it achieves a wallop in a flowing, unpretentious language due to, I believe, Collier's decision to deal with the tale and it's moral ambiguity directly, in a contemporary tongue. Rather than treat  the tale as a gratuitous texture to some small event that cannot sustain the allusion, Collier's narrative world is whole and integregated. He assumes the logic of the standard tale and provides it a lightly applied modern dimension of articulated alienation, in scale, never dwarfing the dynamics with a blundering reference to other literary adventures; the tale and its already problematic contents are left intact.

Poetry mongering

Poetry without strict meter or rhyme is hardly formless if it is done well, since I think the aesthetic of the early modernists, from Whitman through Eliot, Pound WC Williams and up through the present day was to model cadences on the inflections of real speech. Idealized speech, of course, but speech all the same as the inspiration for jettisoning the mathematical formulations that dominated serious poetry.

There is something in the best of lines of non-rhyming, unmetered poems that gets at a number of verbal nuances that might otherwise not be available to a poet concerned with adhering to a conventional approach. 

As with metered verse, we have concern ourselves over which poets have an ear, a musical sensibility that can select the right words for a difficult perception to get across, and who know when to pause, to construct a high, frantic rhetoric, when to calm down, when to stop talking. Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara , Thomas Lux, masters of free verse, geniuses even, are every bit important to the history and extension of poetry and poetic gesture as were the usual suspects lurking in the ranks of the older dead white males.

We do have blather, of course we do, we have pompous and amorphous spewings of pretentious , slender lined tripe that is hideously dreadful, but this, I think, is the case for poetry in general, regardless of era, style, aesthetic, politics; most poets are awful and what they write deserves a can of gasoline and a match. The point of it all, among other points to consider and define, is discussing what makes for a good unrhymed poem. I would present Creeley and Thomas Lux as examples, and I would go as far to maintain that John Ashbery, Ron Silliman and Ishmael Reed are no less perfect examples, though of a more expansive, abstract leaning. It's a big subject within a bigger tent.

Critics and philosophers have debated the utility of art since The Republic and before , and aside from some inspired manifestos about how the surest art will revolutionize and utterly transform the human experience with the material and spiritual realms, the general consensus, so far as my academic and independent readings, is that art's basic function is to create joy, IE, pleasure, entertainment by any other term. In those terms, art is hedonistic by default, created and sought out because it pleases the creator and the observer. What moral/philosophical/sociological/political insight or "lessons" the art conveys or that one discerns is merely incidental. Aesthetics ,of course, is not a philosophy, but merely a kind of inquiry--it is a practice that can be attached to virtually any moral or philosophical undertaking. Hedonism , though, is not a philosophy at all, and I don't recall reading any serious defense or affirmative presentation of the "do your own thing' approach in over four decades.