An Editorial By: |
Crazy from the Heat: Summer Matters in the Po-Biz |
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An Editorial By: |
Crazy from the Heat: Summer Matters in the Po-Biz |
The rhythm
of a poem over its given measure, and not the measure itself, is of
greatest interest to reader and listener, but inherited measures—set
feet per line, set lines per stanza—sometimes appear purely arbitrary
when stripped of their historical roots. There are times when purely
capricious restrictions are just that. The true challenge reveals itself
when a poet attempts to impose an artistic or musical order within
extraordinary and arbitrary limits. Take for instance the recent rise and
very rapid decline of the poetry fad known as “Fib” poems, named after
the Fibonacci
sequence, popularized by Dan Brown’s mega-best-seller. Fib poems were
invented by Gregory K. Pincus and presented to the world on his blog.
Motoko Rich explained the form: “The Fibonacci progression is a
mathematical formula that starts with 0 and 1 and then continues to add
numbers that are equal to the sum of the previous two numbers. Thus, the
first seven numbers in the sequence are: 0-1-1-2-3-5-8. To write a Fib, a
more complicated version of the classic, highly constrained haiku, the
poet composes a six-line poem that has the correct number of syllables in
each line corresponding to each digit in the sequence.” It does not seem
to have occurred to anyone that this sequence, quite elegant in
mathematical and physical terms, may not be immediately or easily
adaptable to the musical demands of poetry. Even when dealing with
asymmetrical lineation in stanzaic forms, certain combinations will be
naturally rhythmical, as one finds in the ever-popular limerick.
The Fib novelty spread quickly, virally one might say, and spiraled up to
the New York Times and other major papers as an example not of
poetic innovation so much as a topic that could be tied to Dan Brown’s
ubiquitous book, blogs, amateur art, and the rapid spread of information
through the Internet. The poems themselves remind one of nothing so much
as the torturously dull truckloads of haiku turned out by bored grammar
school students. The elementary syllabic count of the three-line poem was
awkwardly adapted by Americans from its nineteenth-century Japanese
origins (it was in that century that Masaoka Shiki adapted haiku
from hokku) and is considered simple enough for even the most
distracted fifth-grader. Most people who tried their hand the Fib poems
were, at least according to the New York Times, “not professional
poets, but actors, comedians, video role-play enthusiasts, musicians,
computer scientists, lawyers and schoolchildren.” While it is doubtful
that many “professional” poets would have achieved much more than
their amateur counterparts, it was simply a matter of time before a poet
of genuine talent made some use of the rather unappealing form. A.E.
Stallings has expressed her opinion that most
of the Fib poems she has read are “dreadful, and, as so often happens
with syllabics (haiku, etc.) people hadn’t really done much to exploit
the line-lengths governed by the syllable count, but just divided up
sentences to get the right syllables per line.” She immediately set out
to correct this by producing no fewer than four of them. As soon as I
learned of this, I snapped them up for the Summer Issue of the Cortland
Review, which I guest-edited. In the hands of a masterful poet
like Stallings, the Fib poem may go on to earn an authentic, if minor,
place in the history of modern poetry.
This year’s Pulitzer Prize for poetry (with its generous $10,000 award)
went to the book Late Wife by Claudia Emerson, a book about divorce
and transformation in mid-life, much in the tradition of W.D.
Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle. Richard Wilbur, whose Collected
Poems 1934-2004 was also on the table, failed to win, but he later
took home the extraordinarily generous $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
On the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Emerson, who teaches at the University of
Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, seemed to be describing art
therapy. She explained “it has made my life better to write poetry. It
can be cathartic; and it can be beautiful and reach people. And I do
encourage my students to try it, to read it, to get inside the genre and
see if that’s what they want to do.” Her poems are intimate and
emotionally charged, and she is fond of the second-person pronoun as she
addresses both ex-husband and new husband: You
always washed artifacts you’d
tracked in from whatever
Her win is not unattractive, but it does suggest that the Pulitzer Prize
is not generally designed to reward the most advanced or modern styles in
poetry. One feels that a book like Emerson’s could have won ten, twenty,
or even thirty years ago. While the first Pulitzer for poetry went to
Sarah Teasdale’s quaint Love Songs in the last year of the First
World War (the poetry prize was not formally introduced until 1922), the
prize has also been conferred on Wallace Stevens and William Carlos
Williams (albeit late in their careers, after their reputations had been
made and their influences widely felt) and on John Ashbery and James
Schuyler (1976 and 1981, respectively). Perhaps the judges will gravitate
toward angrier, avant-garde collections in years to come; surely their
previous choices could not have been more conservative. While interviewing David Yezzi for the Cortland Review, I found myself backstage at the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y during rehearsals of Glyn Maxwell’s Sugar Mile, a stage adaptation of his recent poetry collection. I had read the book and quite enjoyed it, but I recognized its terrific dramatic potential when I witnessed it performed by trained actors on a stage. It was not so much that the book was improved by the performances as that another dimension of its potential was realized. The encounter validated my own private practice of assigning specific voices to speakers in poems, voices that exist (if I might risk confessing lunacy) only in my head. Even if I do not read aloud, I never read silently, so to speak. The best poems work as scripts for the human voice, as scores for music, and it is to Maxwell’s credit that his most recent book provides the best example one could want in making this case. Can a movie deal be far off? Poets would sit up straight and literary agents would feverishly scour literary magazines for the next sensation. Such a fantastic turn would utterly transform thinking about narrative poetry, but probably for all the wrong reasons. Boiler rooms would employ dozens of hot young poets to turn out miles of narrative poetry in hope of attracting a major Hollywood deal. A minor footnote to this fantasy is the fact that James Dickey’s best-selling 1970 novel Deliverance—basis for the 1972 movie with its famous dueling banjos and bucolic enjoinder to “squeal like a pig”—began life as a poem. Although Dickey shared ideas for the novel as early as a decade before, it was only when literary agent Theron Raines phoned Dickey, after reading his gripping out-of-doors poem “Springer Mountain” in the Virginia Quarterly Review, that Dickey began in earnest on the book that would define his career. Much ink has been spilled over Oxford University Press’s selection of David Lehman as editor of the latest Oxford Book of American Poetry. Opinions about the anthology’s virtues or failures have been fervent and abundant. Lehman was expected to act not only as anthologist but also, briefly, as pathologist of American poetry. Through OUP’s website, he conducted a poll to determine America’s favorite poem. The results are in no way surprising or much inspiring. Young T.S. Eliot’s classic “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” took the number one spot, followed by Walt Whitman’s flamboyant “Song of Myself” and Robert Frost’s tranquil “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” a conservative set but containing masterpieces nonetheless. Also on the OUP website, David Lehman offers his own “Oxford Cento.” A cento is a patchwork poem featuring lines drawn from other poems. Although it will never be a major poetic form, there have been worthwhile examples. For instance, Tom Paulin produced a fine example of the cento with his “The Wind Dog,” commissioned by BBC Radio 3 to celebrate their 50th anniversary. In the hands of Lehman, however, this technique, all pretensions aside, reduces magnificent literature to little more than a parlor game. Here is a brief excerpt: Give all to love, A burnt match skating in a urinal That
never lost a vote (O Adlai mine).
This is neither stimulating nor enjoyable. The poems he murders to dissect
are Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Give All to Love,” Hart Crane’s “The
Tunnel,” and John Berryman’s “Dream
Song 23: The Lay of Ike.” The grouping of these fragments is haphazard
and crude, even petulant, but Lehman’s the boss, and he does as he
pleases. It is impossible to envision the more dignified earlier editors
of the Oxford Book, F.O. Matthiessen and Richard Ellmann,
posting their “found poems” online in a strangely awkward amalgam of
earnest self-regard and oily commercialism. Readers are invited to “test
your knowledge of poetry by trying to figure out where each line
originated!” Perhaps this attempt at interactivity and “education” fulfilled
some clause in the editor’s contract, but serious readers of poetry will
not be occupied or even entertained by Lehman’s exercise. Those who are
new to the art would do better to spend time reading poems rather than
guessing sources of randomly excised lines.
When asked by Jim Lehrer what makes a poem “great,” Lehman responded:
“What makes a poem great is its
eloquence; its passion; its thought; its generosity of spirit; its
shapeliness; its form, whether it has one; the artistry with which it may
reveal some things and conceal other things.” The strange, ungrammatical
hiccup, “whether it has one,” seems a bizarre criterion for
“greatness” in a poem, since it is the only item in his catalogue that
is not a criterion at all; but we would do well not to read too much into
this, just as we should not bother disputing whether Lehman holds himself
to such majestic if confused standards. His Oxford book appeared to almost
universal applause, largely from reviewers who may not have known better.
Mark Ford wrote in the Financial Times that Lehman’s anthology is
“most valuable as a guide to postwar American poetry.” This is where
the anthology stands out the most: the sheer weight of post-war US poetry.
As one has come to expect, William Logan offered several contrary opinions
in his New York Times review: “A good anthologist must have a few
bizarre quirks, though preferably not too many. Lehman’s catholic taste
and appreciation of minor voices make him ill at ease with major ones.”
Logan concludes: the “bloated, earnest, largely mediocre new Oxford
takes up a lot of space on the shelf without providing a clear view of our
moment.” Time will tell if the supply of more John Ashbery than Ezra
Pound or Robert Lowell was a masterly stroke or merely Lehman’s attempt
to continue inflating the reputation of his influences. American poetry’s cognoscenti have repeatedly complained about British poet Geoffrey Hill’s failure to locate a stateside publisher for his recent books, including Without Title. While Americans were meant to feel ashamed over this course of events, it was never suggested that Hill himself might have had something to do with the hold-up. Counterpoint, in Washington, DC, served as his US publisher after the appearance of Canaan (Mariner Books, a subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin) in 1998. Counterpoint was acquired by Perseus, which shed some of the authors from its list, a common practice. Hill languished for a time without a US publisher, but that gloomy state of affairs has been remedied by Yale University Press’s decision to publish the acclaimed Without Title (Hill is comfortably published by Penguin in the UK). It will appear November 15th of this year, sadly, only in trade paper. Counterpoint issued The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech!, and The Orchards of Syon in cloth with dust jackets before the trade paper editions. This step down to paper might be regarded as a bit of a demotion (Hill’s recent books have appeared this way in the UK as well), but poetry is a highly subsidized and easily overlooked corner of the publishing industry. It might seem perverse that someone vastly acknowledged as the most important living English poet could not find a publisher in a country as wealthy as the US, a country where as many as 4,000 new poetry books are published each year; on the other hand, such neglect may be a more damning sign than we are willing to read.
Donald Hall has been named the new poet laureate, taking over from his
equally rustic predecessor Ted Kooser. As a result of this appointment,
Hall’s latest, White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems
1946-2006, shot to the top of the poetry
best-seller list for the first week of July, trailed by Emerson’s Late
Wife (Richard Wilbur’s Collected enjoyed a slight uptick from
his award, moving from the twenty-ninth to the fourteenth position in its
twelfth week on the list). Some have quietly speculated that Hall might
stir the political pot once in the beltway, but David Yezzi wrote in the Wall
Street Journal: “Mr. Hall
has made it clear that he does not view his new post as a political
soapbox but, rather, as a chance to advocate for poetry, as his
predecessors in the role have done before him. Such clarity of purpose
bodes well for poetry.” However, the Commentary page of the Times
Literary Supplement and Newsweek have quoted Hall as saying he
perceives threats to freedom of expression “in the current atmosphere”
of the US. He seems determined to do something, even if he is unsure what
and how. Hall also acknowledges that his new employers may not be
particularly pleased if he chooses to protest: “I see it happening. I
will certainly speak out. It’s not particularly appropriate, but I can
do what I can do.” No matter their political stripes, it seems that most
poets laureate, after experiencing the parliamentarian hostilities of the
capital first-hand, choose to campaign for their dearest cause: poetry.
The Commentary page for the June 30th issue of the Times
Literary Supplement poked fun at the sometimes egregiously absurd
practice of poetry blurbing in the US, a genre that has developed its own
impenetrable marketing sub-language. Highlights included Judith Butler’s
recommendation of Joshua Clover’s latest book as having an “enormous
clarity of language in the service of a poetics that brilliantly queries
our historical moment in and as form.” Good. Okay. And . . . breathe.
Butler goes on to describe a “fragmented world of a late and lost
modernity” having its own “moving and lucid affect, its forms of
aliveness.” It is not unusual that the British would look with some
consternation and possibly a smirk that the hyper-blurb culture that has
grown up in the extremely competitive and oversaturated US poetry market.
Certain words in the English language now exist almost solely as silage
for poetry blurbs: “luminous,” “lapidary,” “scintillating,” to
say nothing of “aliveness.” Tony Tost remarked in Jacket that
“the poetry blurb is widely derided as
a corrupt genre, the sort of market-driven writing best left to aging
poets anxious about their legacy perhaps or to upwardly mobile poets eager
to brand themselves as market forces.”
In the online magazine Sidereality we read that “poetry
reviews tend to suffer from the same malaise as poetry blurbs, from
hyperbolic positivity and praise regardless of the actual or relative
merits of the books in question. If every book of poetry is described as
‘breathtaking,’ it’s a good bet that most of them really
aren’t.” Joan Houlihan has written, “Trying
to compare the blurbs on a book of poetry to the contents is like trying
to compare a description of angel wings to actual angel wings. The blurbs
employ extravagantly unverifiable descriptions of the contents (what is
‘intensely somatic’? a ‘one-hundred ring verbal circus?’ who says
it’s ‘brilliant’ and why?) to contents that are themselves
indescribable. How do you determine the accuracy of a description of the
indescribable?” Judith Butler
is outdone by Forrest Gander, who pushes for a book by Chris Emery in this
way: “palliative as a corpse in a junkyard, Radio Nostalgia
doesn’t relax you so much as it opens a way into wakefulness.” Wow. As
the TLS jibes: “All that before you’ve tackled the poems.” No
wonder so few readers rush to tackle them.
The other side of the poetry publicity coin is the devastating critique,
the more offhand the better. While Katha Pollitt claims that a bad
review by a well-known critic can actually help a writer (essentially
restating the old cliché, “there’s no such thing as bad
publicity”), writers, like all artists, can be incredibly frail when it
comes to commentary on their art.
W.H. Auden warned that “one cannot review a bad book without
showing off,” and one reason may be that it is so much easier to be
imaginative when on the attack. This sort of “negative” foray is
limited to very few poetry critics in the US today, but historically it
has been integral to literary debates. Allen Tate described John
Berryman’s last book as “a calamity. His publisher should have saved
him from it.” Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote of Ben Jonson: “Reading him
is like wading through glue.” Ad hominem attacks are nothing new. Long
before William Logan agreed with Franz Wright that Wright resembled a
sinister potato, Horace Walpole was said to have remarked that Oliver
Goldsmith was an “inspired idiot.” Osbert Sitwell renamed Ford Madox
Ford “Freud Madox Fraud.” D.H. Lawrence confided in Amy Lowell that
she personally was much “nicer, finer, bigger” than her poetry.
Stanley Kunitz described Randall Jarrell as a “bearded, formidable,
bristling” man with a “high-pitched nervous voice and the wariness of
a porcupine.” Jarrell, for his part, once described an Oscar Williams
book as giving the “impression of having been written on a typewriter by
a typewriter.” Perhaps writers should just be allowed to classify
themselves. Gertrude Stein, in a moment of rare modesty, said: “Think of
the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me.” Clearly no
reviewer, however taunting or caustic, could capsize such incredibly
defiant, almost pathological confidence. We could probably use more of
this hardy, if slightly loony attitude today. Finally, a good old-fashioned literary mêlée. In the July 9th issue of the New York Times Book Review, Cynthia Ozick issued a poetic broadside in the letters column in response to Walter Kirn’s vicious review of her essay collection The Din in the Head. She titled her parodic retaliatory poem “How to Write a Literary Essay, by Walter Kirn”: Stuck-up prose gets up your nose Edge is what the wise guy knows. What’s new is true, the rest is quaint. What Trilling was is what you ain’t. If you don’t agree with the dogma I bring You
are left behind (and surely right wing).
Not Dryden, perhaps, but it serves its purpose perfectly and widens the
field of practical uses for poetry (although the line “What Trilling was
is what you ain’t” is a marvelous, lulling invention). In a move sure
to improve his own standing among hipsters and younger literati, Kirn
depicted Ozick as a reactionary and elitist defender of the complex novel
(he accuses her of using the “canon as cannon” and calls her “a
champion of the elevated and an apologist for the complicated”).
It is not hard to see why she chose to respond with a poem. First, her
belligerent doggerel is a wonderful kiss-off to Kirn, who portrays her as
a stern, ancient warden of high-styled prose. Second, it stands out on the
letters page and manages to make Kirn appear dopey by restating his
attitudes in singsong, childlike rhyme. It is briefly entertaining and
meaningful, two traits not usually associated with contemporary poetry.
Could this be the future of poetry? Will it once more become an implement
of persuasion? Debate clubs would rush to learn prosody. How fun it would
be to read a fastidious sonnet sequence composed as a letter to the editor
of a local paper, and fuming over local property tax increases. Leash laws
in heroic couplets? Haiku for balanced budgets? Perhaps Kirn could respond
with a more finely constructed poem of his own. The English language
hasn’t seen such battles in verse since the eighteenth century, and a
Neo-Augustan like myself (well, at least an occasional advocate of ironic
cosmopolitan metrical verse) would be delighted.
Alas, much like my whimsical notion of poets being buried under sacks of
money flung by movie producers, this is all just a bit of amusement. The
world is not made for such things. However, if you choose to write your
congressman or newspaper in poetry, please let me know. I would probably
be charmed, even if I disagreed with you. Until the autumn, my warmest personal regards and hopes that you can stay cool this summer and get through all the books you’ve set aside to read. Ernest Hilbert Editor, Contemporary Poetry Review
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