 E-mail this site to a friend.
 On or about December 1955, the nature of poetry changed. Or at least in America it
did, and radically too. From that point in time, as the Watergate defendants used to say,
anyone who could scrape up enough money for a typewriter and a few classes in
"creative writing"; had read either "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas or
"Asphodel, that greeny flower" by W. C. Williams; and had access to
someone owning someone with a press was in business as a poet.
Consequently, out of quite literally nowhere came legions of
Ginsberg and Kerouac look-alikes whose metreless confessios, wrung from
obligatory stints as dishwashers, merchant seamen, and delivery boys oriented variously as
to sex and mode of delivery, voiced the same Oedipal shriek as had made Howl the cri
de coeur du jour among those determined to put the kibosh on Moloch's pandemonium.
After decades of hectoring by Eliot and Pound it was Leaves of Grass's turn come
round again, only this time the leaves on everyone's lips, being smoked as well as
recited, were rather less conducive to singing the body electric, though Part III of Howl,
with its by-love-possessed apostrophes to Carl Solomon, certainly essayed that proclivity
also, if at a voltage level stuck between the hysterically prosaic and the Whitmanic
depressive. But barbaric yawps, even following forty years of bangless whimpers, might not
have aroused much interest had not these same dooryard blooms (presumably unknown to
Whitman, but who can know for sure) dotted the premises of his theme park, then under
reconstruction.
Which is not to say that the more elegant line of synthetics put
out by Tate, Ransom, Warren et al. were banished from the poetic scene. Far from
it: the period 1956-64 ushered in what was later termed the "war of the
anthologies," a display of Martial arts which, in pitting the Tweeds against the
Beards & Sandals, proved, if nothing else, that if worse came to worsted, one could be
Beat and fit to be tied--or boring and obscure--in more than one way; not to mention the usefulness of such rows in reminding what few
readers poetry could still muster that not everyone was boycotting capitals at the
beginning of every line.
But worse was in for more than just being worsted, for the
Sixties, in all their grotesquerie masked as glory, were about to burst upon the scene.
Though few outside of Bob Dylan and Mario Savio would grasp fully the dimensions of what
was to seize the nation in the wake of Lyndon Johnson's re-election as President in 1964,
that didn't stop the majority of American poets from pressing ahead with the Popping
of art on the one hand and its academic mistreatment as a kind of verbal physics on the
other. The result was a miscarriage of culture on nothing less than a grand scale, full of
sound and fury, signifying ripoff. That this whole grim charade should have been dignified
with the label "counterculture" remains an irony whose unintentional accuracy
bestrides the ensuing decade like a colossus: for whatever "culture" was
disseminated in those years was passed either over or under the counter, with profits
accruing to the passers well into the tens of billions of dollars.
Oddly enough, the self-punishing compulsions of the period
revealed themselves not only on the historic plane of superpower sabre-rattling and
political assassination, but also on the more trivial one of mass entertainment and its
offshoot, consciousness expanding. Who can fail to remember how, throughout the Johnson
and Nixon years, the media and activities related to them--and which were not?--waged a
piecemeal and determined assault on the human body and most of its vital functions? Dances
like the Twist dismantled pelvises, op-art detached retinas, LSD and other hallucinogens
attacked brain cells and chromosomes, and the transistorized jackhammer of rock music
reduced a generation's eardrums to waxy pulp--all to give the assaultees the impression
they existed, as though progressive amputation were the sole means by which this could be
achieved. Needless to say, this climate of imbecility masquerading as liberating
spirituality exerted a somewhat debilitating influence on poetry and the arts, leaving
aside for the moment the cretinization of the American educational system at virtually
every level, from K-12 all the way up through the imploding university graduate school.
But that's perhaps as it should be. Any binge that prolonged, that irresponsible, that suicidal
ought, in the retributive scheme of things, to cost plenty. The problem now, however, is
dealing with the boredom ensuing from having to pay all those dues.
And in many ways American poetry is still paying them, as
though afflicted with the poverty of having too soon made Adrienne Rich. It was
postmodernism, we now know, that saddled poetry--everywhere, not just in the United
States--with a not-so-new breed of sensitives for whom anything left of mindful is sacred,
and to whom everything but conservative values is poetically available, unless it be an
ear for verbal melody, a journeyman's sense of the ironic, or the merest smidgeon of
talent. I say "not-so-new" because while many of the matchups of names with
facelessness have only recently become familiar, the published hallmarks of some of these
ciphers have been with us for some time. Critics can talk all they like about the
unprecedented smorgasbord of poets and poetry out there, the amazing diversity of styles
that is everywhere to be seen, from the shores of Knopf to the graspless reaches of little
mags and even more negligible 'zines, but that "diversity" is as much a critical
invention as are great bleeding chunks of the poetry itself. The anger of the Beats,
though having never more than approximated--Ginsberg's Howl being the one
exception--the sort of rage that says to capitalism between clinched teeth, "I'm mad
as hell and not going to take it anymore," has now modulated to the whining of a
bunch of overfunded and underpowered collegiate post-Marxists about the utter baseness of
this and the superstructural crumminess of that. And often disporting with such, in
complacent tandem, are witless rehashings of all those nothing-riddled much-ados that made
the work of so many university-housed poets in the Age of Eisenhower so relentlessly
forgettable. A sample sonnet:
Radioactive now, you walk beside me
To the beach, every step a fragile
Radiance, as if the birds had settled
In the sun that fills your skin. To touch
You now I need an insulated hand
To turn aside the cobalt arrows darting
Toward my brain. Melting sand, your soles
Shimmer with the light of elements
Missing from my periodic charts.
You wade in oceans where the waves caress
The quivering cancer afloat in light, and I
Take your naked hand in mine, and feel
The rays like bayonets, seagulls piercing
My flesh, with molecules of massive cure.
This poem, titled "Lines for an Elderly Ex-Marine, in
Remission," appeared recently in the twenty-sixth (and final) issue of American
Review (November 1977), and it's precisely this kind of gratulatory tastelessness
that will kill off a magazine of new writing every time. Clearly the poet, Larry Rubin,
puts great store in C. P. Snow's warning that the humanist ignores matter scientific at his
own peril. But the trouble with poems like this is that they take nothing else to heart,
and the jargoneering awash in juxtaposing radioactive, cobalt, periodic
charts and molecules serves only to raise the density of a gravely
unspecific sentimentality to the perilous bathos of pure lead. One can but wonder what the
Great Cham might have thought of this inversion of metaphysical conceit whereby
homogeneous ideas are yoked by indolence together, and nature and art are ransacked for
pointless illustration, comparison, and allusion. But all that's beside the point. What
we're obviously meant to notice in Rubin's fourteener is--God help us--how cleverly the
sonnet form's traditional concerns, love and death, are accommodated to such distinctly
modern pretexts for lyricism as ex-marines and cancer. For sonnets, you see, are still
eminently writeable, even if the exigencies of this era of H-bombs, neutron anti-personnel
weapons and MERV's might lead a sonneteer to sing that his mistress's eyes are nowhere
near as bright as a thousand suns or that the most loathsome carcinomas can be found in
the sweetest breasts.
--Which is to say that whatever spirits might be summoned up
by such poeticizing are those of disembodied technique, or more properly, the atelier,
and thus the point I'm at pains to make: for many poets now writing in America (and for
all I know, elsewhere as well), that which gets the poem made almost always exceeds in
importance the end-product which the poem-making process is supposed to serve.
The great modernists were no less preoccupied with technique and
made a feisty show of dusting off archaic forms like the villanelle, the sestina, the
rondo, and the canzon. But in much of this pretentious graverobbing there persisted a
faith that at the foot of the prosodic rainbow--on whose elusive spectrum the gaze of
fewer and fewer current poets continues to be fixed--real gold could be found, and not of
the ten-carat variety, either. Only since the facsimile edition of The Waste Land
have we known, for example, just how complex structurally and prosodically was the
Pounded-out version of Eliot's masterpiece. We can now fully appreciate that the formal
labors of the poem, its Herculean efforts at simulating decomposition, are in
some places "through composed" and in other places deliberately hidden from
critics' prying eyes. And why shouldn't they be? Artistic-looking messes are easy enough
to concoct, but attempting a full-dress exodus from bedlam--well, that can elicit from
order certain unforeseen reprisals which put tremendous pressure on the poet to assure his
readers that, contrary to appearances, formlessness masks form in his poem and not the
other way around. Textual evidence supports the view that The Waste Land made its
final shift from a poem of fragments to a poem of fragments about the
time Pound suggested that the head note from Heart of Darkness be junked in favor
of a much better one from the Satyricon, and that the title "He Do The
Police in Different Voices," from Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, give way to
something more in line with the newly edited version's spiritual concerns.
Thus, what emerges from a comparison of those eventually to be
deleted portions of the manuscript which Eliot diligently crafted expecting to find a home
for them somewhere in his poem with those which the poem in its collaborative
wisdom eventually permitted him to include is the fact that virtually none of his
contrived experiments with pastiche or out-of-sync versification, such as the
"Fresca" sequence in imitation of Pope, ended up making it to the printer's. The
lesson he took away from this--and an invaluable one it was--was that prosody and other
aspects of verse technique take care of themselves as soon as the poet realizes that what
is happening in his poem lies largely beyond his capacity to determine its meaning in any
conscious way, and that poetry has the greatest impact when its clarity and purpose do not
too readily reveal a clarity of purpose. "Both errors," he went on to say,
"tend to make [them] personal" in their poetry, a proscription which for 35
years remained in force among America's literary quarterlies, with only a small group of
protesters loosely gathered around William Carlos Williams daring to go against the grain.
Following this, in the period ushering in our own poetasting
contemporaneity, came the deluge of personalizers, confessionalists, and dispensers in
common language (if not always that of men) of quotidian discoveries, mundane crises,
transactional graffiti. Williams no longer had a diminutive coterie of specialists in
"how not to sound like a Poet" around him; he had acquired, in the years just
before his death, a multitude of footstep-tracers all trying to find their variable feet.
Denise Levertov, a transplanted refugee from Essexism, was among the more talented of his
ephebes:
Let's go--much as that dog goes,
intently haphazard. The
Mexican light on a day that
'smells like autumn in Connecticut'
makes iris ripples on his
black gleaming fur--and that too
is as one would desire--a radiance
consorting with the dance....
The trouble with so many of
these narcissistic echoes of the MD from Rutherford was that while the good doctor had
sighted new visionary shores in late works like "Asphodel, that greeny
flower,"
his imitators were still littering the local beaches with beercans from the Collected
Early Poems or the first three books of Paterson:
On ashes of old volcanoes
I lie dreaming
baking
the deathward flesh in the sun...
And yet I rejoice
that everything changes, that
we go from life
into life,
and enter ourselves
quaking
like the tadpole, his time come, tumbling toward the
slime.
The only charitable thing that
can be said for this is that it makes literary criticism no more taxing than a
tea break in
one of Ms. Levertov's hometown factories. Try approaching it critically as though it were
some sculpted tribute to the muse of paradox instead of the chip off the Whitmanian block
that it so obviously is and you will look the sort of fool who believes that a poem which
carefully articulates its details is necessarily a poem about the sacredness of
articulated detail tout court. No, the fruit of this poet's imagination is
neither fit produce for nor any use to what Eliot years ago termed the
"lemon-squeezer school" of critics, though its seedy Gibranisms ("we go
from life/ into life") and pulpy ineptitudes (are basket case tadpoles typical of
primal life?) offer up more than just a hint of lemon.
We should, however, keep our historical accounts straight.
Eliot's Four Quartets also attempts to stage within a world out of joint a ballet
of the elements in praise of a more than earthly consort of harmonies; but Galway
Kinnell's Body Rags (1968)--in which may be found the above eleven lines--merely
limps from one cosmic demisé en scene to another like Coppélia impersonating
Markova. Yeats is there, too: the aging Yeats whose sublime scarecrow-posture, as assumed
in such poems as "Sailing to Byzantium" is even further hobbled in this poet's
1971 volume The Book of Nightmares. But that's another story; nothing much
improves over a three-year span: the tattered coat upon a schtick remains, propped in the
half-light of verse that dims from clumsy to falling-down illiterate. "In the Hotel
of Lost Light" begins,
In the left-
hand sag the drunk smelling of autopsies
dies in, my body slumped out
into the shape of his, I watch, as he
must have watched, a fly
tangled in mouth-glue, whining his wings,
concentrated wholly on
time, time, losing his way worse
down the downward-winding stairs, his wings
whining for life as he shrivels
in the gaze
from the spider's clasped forebrains, the abstracted
stare
in which even the nightmare spatters out its horrors
and dies--
and ends,
The foregoing scribed down
in March, of the year Seventy,
on my sixteenth-thousandth night of war and madness,
in the Hotel of Lost Light, under the freeway
which roams out into the dark
of the moon, in the absolute spell
of departure, and by the light
from the joined hemispheres of the spider's eyes.
Ah, time, time,
that Great Destroyer of everything from love to spiders' clasped forebrains, which makes
us lose our way worse (than what?) down the downward-winding stairs (descending Yeats?),
and makes us count the nights of war and madness with the best of the Chancellors and
Brinkleys. What God has wrought (and wrought up)! Of course the Vietnam War was an
obscenity; it would take a shallow foppishness like William F. Buckley Jr.'s to deny just
how obscene it was. But in denouncing its horror (and the depraved psychological climate
which in America made such a "nightmare" feasible), Kinnell does little more
than transfer atrocities from the villages of Southeast Asia onto the printed page. Yeats
may very well have been right--at least in principle--when he chose to exclude war poets
from his edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse on the grounds that they
were too close to their subject-matter to do work of permanent importance: feelings, no
matter how intense, are not art any more than gossip--to cite Gertrude Stein's scolding of
Hemingway--is literature. Imagine Shakespeare's King Lear as a diary or his Sonnets
as a late Elizabethan expose of a famous bi-sexual's problems in keeping his bedroom full.
The possibilities involving this sort of thing are endless, but who, apart from someone
like Kate Millett's subject-rhyme in verse, would bother to think about them?
Richard Howard, noted poet, translator, and editor, that's
who. Here, from his much-lauded study of no fewer than 41 contemporary American poets, Alone
with America (1969), is a brief encomium on the balletic felicities of Kinnell's Body
Rags
In these poems of astonishing
metamorphosis, Kinnell has been concerned to enact by his "dance of solitude" as
he calls the shaman's performance in "The Bear," to articulate the truth of
Goethe's great dictum: One learns nothing, but one becomes something. Ever larger in these
late poems bulks or--for bulk is not what we get, but rather a flickering ballet around
the circumference of what is guessed at in the darkness--breaks in upon us the awareness
that in order to achieve transformation the ritual imagination of burning must in our time
be abjured for natural process, with all its attendant waste and weariness: "our
faces smudged with light from the fingertips of the ages."
Now, no one capable of appreciating a truly fine prose style
would doubt the power, the sheer lucidity of Howard's mind or the expensive (in the
literal sense) verbal instrument he wields in defense of the poetic art; but in too many
of his essays one has the sense that a backbreaking effort is being expended in getting a
huge artillery piece into position along a nearly vertical slope, and all that just to
provide a gnat with a glorious immolation. Which is in no
way intended to suggest that Howard dislikes his contemporaries or that he is more than
perfunctorily critical of their efforts. Far from it: he likes
almost all of the poets whose work he discusses, and is solicitously maternal toward the
deficiencies his perspicuity unearths, as though--and this galls after five or six
essays--he himself were partially responsible for them. It's this quality of self-enforced
delusiveness that gives Alone with America the odd glint of a Dunciad
done as an apologia for duncery, of a presentation for the defense following which the
prosecution need only rest its case. For despite Howard's noble intentions toward his
subjects, his virtually inexhaustible patience with their pratfalls, what results is one
entomological Gotterdammerung after another whenever the likes of a Donald Finkel
or a Carolyn Kizer finds his or her way into his benevolent sights. Thus, he can claim
(with no inner- or other-directed irony that I can detect) that James Merrill's poem
"Gothic Novel"--
How rich in opportunity! Part of a wall
Gave back a hollow sound. Forewith, intrigued,
The Contessina knew her mind, consulted
No one. A door! Annunziata darkly
Swept up after the workmen and withdrew.
Lost in thought, her mistress was already
Rehearsing what to say in thirty years:
'Only after our marriage did I begin
To fear your father'--but she broke off
And went with a candle down the dank stair
Leading she knew not where--
"begins with a swift
pastiche of prose manners, disposed like a surrealist colonnade in an infinite regress of
archness." Well, maybe; but the same could also be said (and with no less mandarin
futility) of Gian Carlo Menotti's godawful libretto for the opera Vanessa, whose
notoriety as camp is probably unsurpassed. If Pound's Mr. Nixon was right when he claimed
that "no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece," then no one's likely to recognize
"an infinite regress of archness" either, in a poem or anywhere else. While
Merrill's X-ray of the gothic genre's pulpable hits may be noteworthy in certain limited
respects, Howard's apologia pro vita suet is so laughably excessive as to verge on the
mock-heroic. If only, one keeps thinking as one schleps through the nearly 600 pages of Alone
with America, he could've found some appropriate use for all those Gallic periods and
Virgilian modulations, those astonishing conceits and four-page paragraphs whose
sentential labyrinths unwind like fugues in a processional composed by Leibniz and
Valery--anything
but having to waste good style on such effronteries to the soul as weighing smog particles
in, say, Kenneth Koch's Fresh Air. This latter "rhetorical manifesto"
and "screed," Howard solemnly explains,
asserts that [the poet's] form must be come upon, must be invented
(benedictus qui invenit in nomine Naturae) or risk losing interest. Hence the terrorism of
many of Koch's larger, more deliberate creations which drive themselves by recipe and will
to the end of their tether and ours, a final triumph of method whereby nothing can be made
of them except the stunned contestation that they have been made. Such poems stand or
rather loom at the edges of Koch's career like barbarous temples, brightly lighted but
without a congregation to distract us from the hard brilliance of the great American
monosyllables--blue, girl, ugh, fun, lunch, pants--festooning every capital, every vault;
and on the altar, very reverently placed, as H. G. Wells once said of Henry James' later
style, lie a dead kitten, two egg-shells and a bit of string....
To start with, Kenneth Koch is,
let it be said, a fair-to-middling aged clown who has been kicking around the Manhattan
poetry circuit for over 30 years, and whose least aggravating talent is for parodying
pretensions just a silly millimeter away from utter zaniness:
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy, and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!
An affable surrealist, Koch has
managed over the years since his first book appearance in Ko, or A Season on Earth
(1959)
to outlive his friends (Frank O'Hara, Mark Rothko, etc.) and to influence absolutely no
one. In the 1960's he drew some attention to himself as a theorist on how to get children
to read and write poetry, but for the most part his career has been that of a stand-up
non-sequitur who in his poems chats with the void on equal terms. All I can see looming at
the edges of a career like Koch's is him ending up a perennial in one bouquet of light
verse after another. To gabble on, as Howard does, about brightly lit barbarous temples
when the poetry at hand accumulates pop junk faster than the back seat of a taxicab--
Until tomorrow, then, scum floating on the surface of
poetry! goodby for a moment, refuse that happens
to land in poetry's boundaries!...
Ah, but the scum is deep! Come, let us help you! and
soon we pass into the clear blue water. Oh GOOD-
BYE, castrati of poetry! farewell, stale pale skunky
pentameters (the only honest English meter, gloop
gloop!) until tomorrow, horrors! oh, farewell!
Hello, sea! good morning, sea! hello, clarity and ex-
citement, you great expanse of green--
O green, beneath which all of them shall drown!--
is to mistake salami for Salome and Hearst Castle for
Elsinore. But, as I suggested earlier, poor Howard can't help piling new clothes on
emperors whose enterprise in walking naked owes its chic to Zachary All. His lapsus,
however, is symptomatic. Afoot is a much larger conspiracy of pretense regarding the value
of contemporary American poetry, and its origins may be traced, at least in part, to the
dissolution of that elite corps of shock troops within the arts, that dependable company
of warm-up specialists so long the bane of the bourgeoisie--the avant-garde.
In the closing years of his life the Italian scholar Renato Poggioli (then at
Harvard) tried to put together a treatise on the philosophy of vanguardism in the arts. It
was eventually pieced together and translated by a student of his who titled it The
Theory of the Avant-Garde and had it published in 1968. It makes interesting reading
(as a corrective to Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, if nothing else) but what
would make more interesting reading by far would be a comparably erudite study on just why
the avant-garde packed up and left, leaving nothing behind but some sensationalist small
change which by the mid-1960's had found its way into Hollywood's redi-reserve account,
and a decade later into such novelistic door-stops as Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
Where the whole roadshow went is anybody's guess; what is certain is that its vanishing is
in no way attributable to the break-up of modernism, which had pretty much run its course
by 1925.
That particular vaudeville disintegrated, to quote a TLS review
of Pynchon's book by Edward Mendelson, "through the working out of its own
principles," a process which appears to have concluded in the late 1940's and early
1950's when works like Beckett's trilogy and Ionesco's one-acts condensed Proust, Joyce,
and Pirandello to the abstract level of linoleum mosaics wired for sound and occasional
shocks. But not in poetry, and definitely not in contemporary American poetry, where the
last vestiges of an avant-garde dissolved in the etymological frissons of the Objectivist
aesthetic: short lines, small matter, craft desiderating craft in an infinite egress of
archness. From Oppen, Zukovsky, and Reznickoff to the present sprawl of Anthology City,
where whole forests evaporate as though nuked in order to reprint poems whose fallout is
minimal and whose half-life is a semester, virtually nothing in poetry may be said to have
made new waves--unless one counts the good grey revival of the Beats with their Chanel No.
5 version of The Perfumed Garden and their litany of "America is
sinking!" chanted from the decks of their chartered Titanic. So much for
American poetic vanguardism from the 1930's to the death of Robert Lowell: a broken wind
of howls and over-civil caesurae, a teapot with no tempests in it, not even a
mild squall. And the flounder-infested mainstream of poetry and of poets? A sedate,
university-regulated brook, babbling in neat prosodic stanzas, of life (both tolerable and
intolerable, though more frequently the latter than the former), of love (its
pointlessness and desirability), of death (its pointlessness and undesirability, though,
as Leslie Fiedler has taught us, its relationship to love in America is no laughing
matter). Here is the brook in a typically pensive moment:
Talking along in this not quite prose way
we all know it is not quite prose we speak,
and it is time to notice the intolerable snow
innumerably touching, before we sink.
It is time to notice, I say, the freezing snow
hesitating toward us from others' grey heaven;
listen--it is falling not quite silently
and under it still you and I are walking.
Maybe there are trumpets in the houses we pass
and a redbird watching from an evergreen--
but nothing will happen until we pause
to flame what we know, before any signal's given.
Titled "Near," this
poem is by William Stafford who, having waited until the age of forty-six to bring out his
first collection of verse, West of Your City (1960), ought to have realized that
striving for sublimity of thought and feeling in a style of this sort is like trying to
reach Parnassus through a mineshaft. Robert Frost was adept at turning out such alum
leaves or Emerson-stücke, but his perceptive readers could always tell how much
of it was perma-Frost and how much just dry ice. In these ham-handed quatrains, the whole
game is taken seriously, as though the poet never for a moment thought it possible that
his earnestness might be judged deadly in the other sense.
One wonders whether some of these writers ever actually read
what they write anywhere but on the stage of an auditorium since their work so often
displays a tin ear, along with a leaden insensitivity to anything resembling natural
speech. Is it too much to ask of a poet that s/he be aware of how the specific gravity of
words in various lines of verse can be altered when by their positioning they are induced
to bend or lean or lean toward other words? Is it unreasonable to wonder whether anyone
under the stress of vision or of understanding could ever be heard jawing a mouthful like
"this intolerable snow/ innumerably touching," or committing idiomatic rape with
a blunt instrument as unserviceable as "and under it still you and I are
walking?"
Yet, to pick up any major anthology of poems published since
1955 is to find hundreds of such botches springing into view. One would have to go back to
the early sixteenth century in England to identify a literary period as poetically drab as
the present interregnum--assuming, of course, that there are still reigns for periods to
lie between. Nor are the prospects for change encouraging.
And yet some things have changed over the years. If the
Moss-covered poets of the 1940's and early 1950's hunted frantically for symbols, today's
laureates hunt frantically for "occasions." An occasion, in lingo currently a la
mode in the poetry casinos, is a spread of circumstance which produces in a poet a sense
of verbal possibility akin to what an amateur poker player feels as he lifts that single
dealt card which he's sure will fill that inside straight. However, if one reads
through some of the interviews with poets which have appeared in journals like the New
York Quarterly one soon discovers that the poetic excitement occasioned by these
occasions is experienced exclusively as a result of the writer knowing in advance that his
"inside straight" will not be filled.
In fact, that is pretty much the point of the process: to get
that string of events by which the poet is made ready for an occasion under way; and once
the switch is thrown and the juice begins to flow, well, then anything becomes possible.
Robert Creeley, for example, has built a successful career out of writing poetry while
trying to find something to say, and others no less gifted in waiting have similarly taken
the hint (and the fellowships) by learning to treat poetry as a higher form of loitering.
(I wouldn't go so far in dismissing Creeley as does critic John Simon, who remarks
somewhere that "There are two things to be said for Creeley's poems: they are short;
they are not short enough," though there are times when I've read him and found
Simon's viewpoint contagious.) Still, occasions can and do (occasionally) choose a
spokesman who senses the absurdity of the whole business, who knows with intimate
reflexiveness just how self-serving it all is, how much of an industry, but who
nonetheless thrives on its duplicities even to the point of making them the flexible
centers around which his poems take shape and cohere. Such a spokesman is John Ashbery, a
huckster impresario of what have to be the most bizarrely conjured cerebralisms since that
prince of Rotarians, Wallace Stevens, disappeared up the sleeve of his own Supreme Fiction
in 1955.
Alternately a tour-guide for the complacently monstrous and a
ventriloquist's dummy for the very id of the Absurd, Ashbery manages in poem after poem to
get not only his own shit together, but everyone else's as well:
The buildings, piled so casually
Behind each other, are "suggestions
Which, while only suggestions,
We hope you will take seriously." Off into
The blue. Getting there is easier,
But then we hope you will come down.
There is a great deal on the ground today,
Not just mud, but things of some importance,
Too. Like, silver paint. How do you feel
About it? And, is this a silver age?
Yeah, I suppose so. But I keep looking at the cigarette
Burns on the edge of the sink, left over
From last winter. Your argument's
Neatly beyond any paths I'm likely to take,
Here, or when I eventually leave here.
A number of things to note
about this piece which Ashbery titled "Spring Light:" it is, to start with, a
tissue of non-sequiturs, but not like those which form the collapsible spines of poems by
Kenneth Koch. These are non-sequiturs which dissolve as soon as we realize we're in the
presence of an interior dialogue and not something pruned from the pre-Joycean
garden of Edouard Dujardin. Another thing: the poem is coordinated around a basic tone-row
of terms whose axes are blue, silver (paint/age), mud (last) winter
and here. As a group of terms they constitute its "occasion" to the
extent that the poet, having been dealt them as a set akin to a hand of cards, must then
deal with them compositionally. We're not at all distant here from some of the aleatory
changes rung in music on post-Webernian serialism as an outgrowth of, among other things,
the experimentalism of Cage, Xenakis, Berio, and Stockhausen over the last two decades,
although what Ashbery is doing in these fifteen lines seems sufficiently word-gameish to
be considered post-Wittgensteinian as well.
Still, the idea behind it all is simple enough: like Creeley,
Ashbery is interested in that frame of mind, that consciousness of
language-as-a-starting-point from which all poetry emerges. But wholly unlike Creeley, he
sees no need to advance from that state of mind out of which poems are generated to the
essentially artificial realm where they are clad in verbal uniform and sent out into the
world as performances. (Just because Creeley's word-mimes are conducted
off-stage, it doesn't mean that they're not performances. To cite the most obvious
example, "I Know A Man"--the object is to "act out" the habitual
swerving of the mind from one psychological lane to another when, after hours at
attention's wheel, it falls under the spell of the center divider.) For Ashbery--at least
since his sixth book The Double Dream of Spring (1970)--poems are where they
begin, and where they begin is in that luminescent zone of vanity and meticulousness
before whose mirror the self primps to go out and make its impression on the world.
It's that performative impression that Ashbery wishes above
all to avoid and avoid giving, and in his poetry one finds neither the speaking masks of
the great modernists nor the dramatis impersonae of the later
"confessionalists." As for "meaning," its circumference is, like God
in the Augustinian paradox, nowhere and its center everywhere; never, as in the early
Eliot, is it made the adjunct of some ulterior voice whose dilemma seems but an excuse for
the witty encoding of speech. (It is possible, for example, to read "Prufrock"
as a half-sober recitation to the most intelligent bartender who ever lived.) For one
thing, Ashbery has managed to banish from his poems everything that Oscar Wilde would've
denounced as insufficiently extraneous, and no one who fully understands what this poet is
about will lament its passing. Where significance is but the final resting place of the
deleterious, themes shed their variations like vultures their feathers in a desert wind
and surrealism is never more than an irregular heartbeat away:
You can have whatever you want.
Own it, I mean. In the sense
Of twisting it to you, through long, spiralling afternoons.
It has a sense beyond that meaning that was dropped
there
And left to rot. The glacier seems
Impervious but it is all shot through
With amethyst and the loud, distraught notes of the cuckoo.
They say the town is coming apart.
As several critics of Ashbery's
books have remarked, it's hard to know what to say about a style like this. While from one
angle such lines tend to sound like Humphrey Bogart reading a Billy Carter translation of
Mallarmé, from another they come across as a collection of tether-ends in search of a
mind.
One thing that is not going on in Ashbery's poems,
however, is thinking on any systematic scale. In fact, such lengthy exfoliations as
"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" contain probably even less
"thought" than do any of those late pseudo-meditations by Wallace Stevens with
which they're often compared. Admittedly, both these poets are interested in what happens
to thought when, on philosophical R & R, its allowed to roam freely among the domestic
irrelevancies of the self's furnished flat. But whereas Stevens sees Poetry as promising a
new religion which will in time provide America with a more enlightened spiritual
capitalism than it's known in the past, Ashbery is not about to give up his Saturday
nights for anything as gloopy (to quote Kenneth Koch) as either the henpecked
terrestrialism of a "Sunday Morning" or the term-insured Cyrenaicism of an
"Esthetique du Mal." For him, large questions are there to be begged simply
because they're large, unwieldy, and finally, uninteresting; poetry, if we insist on
having it, must learn to take stock of those inconsiderable quandaries which nature
through the conducting of its own inventories day by day, month by month, slips into our
lives:
All things seem mention of themselves
And the names which stem from them branch out to other referents.
Hugely, spring exists again. The weigela does its dusty thing
In fire-hammered air. And garbage cans are heaved against
The railing as the tulips yawn and crack open and fall apart.
And today is Monday...
These are not lines, to
paraphrase Eliot, which have the look of lines that are looked at; "Grand
Galop," from which they were taken, traffics in no such simple narcissisms. Though
the poet is here very much in his poem, it's the poem we're being encouraged to look at
and not (as in, I would say, a good 90% of the poetry written in this country since 1955)
the poet camouflaged by his poem, by a public gaffe masquerading as a private acte
gratuit. In his verse merely as a prop among other props, Ashbery's poet flaunts no
distinguishing Dasein, and it is only after reading several of his poems that we
grasp the rationale for his having been trundled out onto that stage where everything is
prepared for and nothing acted out, where indeed only props can speak.
Thus, excluding certain notable differences in talent,
Ashbery's work reflects some obvious affinities with that of his early New York cohorts
Frank O'Hara, Kenward Elmslie, and yes, even Kenneth Koch, who seem to have taught him (in
the failing wake of such Dali-esque vinyls as "Europe") that poems ought to take
poets seriously and not the other way around. It was O'Hara, for example, who first
abolished the "reader" in his poetry (substituting for him whichever friendly
ear happened to be near any particular poem's ground zero), and showed in verse-memos like
"Why I am not a Painter" (which are to conventional poetry what the clip-on tie
is to the dinner jacket) that in art casualness is everything, and the more convulsive
that casualness is, the better for all concerned.
If the New York School had had a collective motto, it would
have been "Unbutton me here," although O'Hara, for one, was circumspect enough
to know that if a poem paraded about with its fly undone, it oughtn't to have its shirt
open to the navel as well. (Though, again, this is somewhat contradicted by a remark
O'Hara makes in his "Personism: A Manifesto" that "If you're going to buy a
pair of pants, you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with
you.") Only a paid audience finds everything interesting when that everything is
rolled out as a prize exhibit, and so wisdom dictates--in poetry, at least--that some
things be held back: a dissimilated reticence is preferable to a simulated exhibitionism.
Compare, on the other hand, the following decolletage from the boutique of James
Wright:
In the middle of my age I walked down
Toward a cold bloom.
I don't give a damn if you care,
But it half-rhymes with blossom...
("On the Liberation of Woman," 1973)
The refreshing thing about
Ashbery as a poet is that, either as a consequence of temperament or as a matter of
choice, he refuses to be programmatic about anything--not poetry, not the creative
process, and certainly not the modern psyche in extremis. Not only is he
conspicuously non-rebellious and non-"causal," but if his work continues to take
on added dimension, he could well end up being this century's first major non-visionary
poet in English. (That many would view this latter comment as pejorative with regard to
Ashbery's work shows that for a large number of us, romanticism is as difficult a habit to
break as three packs a day for a heavy smoker.)
But such speculations aside, it's a genuine relief to find a
poet who neither commits to his stanzas that which ought more properly be committed to an
analyst's ear, nor presents himself in his poems as an aging Orestes pursued by all the
Furies of the quotidian. The Blys and the Ignatows, the Dickeys and the Strands, the
Kinnells and the Staffords, would do well to pay attention to this poet for whom, at this
particular time at least, the only honest stance is that of nascent openness, a condition
of mind akin to, yet markedly different from, Keats's "negative capability" or
Yeats's self-induced openness to song. His poems advertise the awareness that in our
benighted period of history, poetry has become an anachronism which attracts very little
curiosity and conduces even less to love--which is partly the reason why the wit and the
verbal agility of an Ashbery seem now almost redemptive in their promise of things to
come. The rest of the explanation is, in my estimation, quite simple: for those who value
poetry for what it can still be, the author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
provides the only really interesting game in town.
Post Scriptum (1998)
Rereading (and, in the sense of
light dusting, touching up) this piece vingt ans apres, I'm amazed at how few
mixed emotions I feel as regards its essential content. In fact, I would venture the
proposition that I'm more in agreement now than I was when I wrote this with
T. S. Eliot's
characterization of poetry as "a mug's game"--though I confess to having very
mixed feelings about the utter lack of guilt that enables me to say that. Either I've
become a lot more cold-blooded in twenty years or American poetry has, and
cold-bloodedness is not what I, or anyone who truly values fine verse, turns to poetry
expecting to find. When I first wrote "On Contemporary American Poetry," I
thought I detected a certain freshness and exuberance in work done by John Ashbery which
landed him in a separate and rather special category. Some of his poems from the early and
mid-seventies--the ones from which the smartass smirk, that skull and crossbones of the
New York School, has been erased--seemed somehow like the crowings of a Stevensian bantam,
proclaiming loudly from the dungheap at sunrise that the rule of inchlings, capons, and
hens was over and that henceforth there'd be no claqueing and slacking tolerated where
poetry was spoken.
Well, I was wrong. Ashbery, for all his genius grants and
awards, proved no more hack-proof than the best and the rest of his generation. So, there
was that correction to be made, which found me back at Square One, without so
much as a glimmer of hope for an art form given its ritual burial in Paul Hoover's recent Postmodern
American Poetry: A Norton Sarcophagus (1994). Still, there is a new
millennium looming
out there, whose woof may prove worse than its warp. We'll have to wait and see if, in the
bloody century almost upon us, poetry will have a more sanguine future than serious music;
than graphic art and sculpture that doesn't merely do less with more computer technology
and virtual unreality; than the novel, already reeling from body blows administered by
pointless film effects and small screen mentalities.
About this and related matters I have grave doubts, but you
needn't rob them if you're of a more optimistic turn of mind. |
Howl