Teaching? .... I could probably teach grammar & composition. If I had to, & if I prepared myself, I could probably teach a passable intro course in history, philosophy, theology, literature...
Yes, I could teach grammar & composition, and I could teach literature, but I don't think I could teach poetry writing. Why not? Because the only method I know is inspiration. & inspiration is not a method. & most of the "methods" taught in poetry writing classes just get in the way of inspiration.
As I understand it, poetry is deeply-rooted in something you might call "breaking-into-song." No one breaks into song without being lifted-up, being inspired. There is something holy, sacred, & surrounded-by-fire in this experience, this song-rapture. The words, the poems, the traces of such inspiration give off the heat & light of that experience, & are tinctured with that "divinity", that sacred awe, that... apartness, strangeness...
Don't get me wrong : I don't think inspiration is a replacement or short-cut for craft & hard work. I just tend to think that that kind of labor - the path from "grammar & composition" to inspiration to finished work of art - is best struggled at sort of privately & indirectly. You must wrestle with the angel to win your birthright. Not necessarily in solitude, by any means : but it should be an individual artistic search. Otherwise there are too many middle-people involved, muddling up the distinction between writing true poetry and versifying, between inspiration & method.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but this is how I've always understood poetry. & I can't teach inspiration : I can hardly ever find it myself.
Showing posts with label 20th-century poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 20th-century poetry. Show all posts
1.13.2011
1.04.2006
I want to deal with 2 main arguments made by RS (quoted in previous post).
The first argument (to paraphrase) is that American poetry bifurcates into two paths, lines, traditions, models - the Romantic/Amer. Renaissance/Modernist/avant-garde/post-avant, on the one hand, and the "School of Quietude" traditionalists on the other.
The 2nd argument is that the traditionalist camp exerts an inordinate power & influence over the cultural scene, through control of major awards, publishers, etc.
In order to accept the 1st argument, one must, at all costs, put aside any detailed sense of the flow, and the particularities, of American literary history. But it's not that hard to retain a sense of such flow, such particularities : all you have to do is open up what is probably the best-selling, mid-20th-century poetry anthology, re-issued decade after decade, used in countless classrooms, bought & read by thousands : the Mentor Book of Major American Poets, ed. by Oscar Williams & Edwin Honig. Here you will find "avant-garde" moderns (Cummings, Pound, etc.) side by side with Frost, EA Robinson; Whitman & Longfellow and Dickinson & Bryant; Stevens & Marianne Moore & Auden. Of course it's not inclusive - the poets are white, & mostly male. It's from 1950 or so. But you can learn a lot more about the variety & vitality of "central" American poetry - even from this dated collection - than from Ron's historical dichotomy.
Ron wants to pretend that the vital midstream of American poetry history never existed. Why? So he can use his reductive labels to exaggerate the importance of his chosen canon. If you can somehow deny the impact of mid-stream, "populist" poets of the 20th century - the powerful careers of (just for example) Auden, Berryman, Lowell, Merwin, Dickey, Bly, Wakoski, Piercy, Rich, Gary Snyder - I'm thinking of the standing-room-only crowds at their readings, the big sales of their books, 1950s-1970s - if you can somehow pretend those things never happened - then you can present a simplified version of that history, which is really an insult : both to the intelligence of readers, and to those dynamic & resourceful careerist-poets themselves. They didn't depend on some cabal of old white guys at Lofty Publishing Houses to make themselves well-read, famous & influential. But... but... if they never happened, then look how Important the "New American Poets" (Olson, Beats, NY School, post-avant) suddenly seem to be!
And I haven't even begun to dismantle the simplifications involved here. The idea that American poetry somehow subtends like a spider from either the early American experimentalists (Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville) or from stuffy old Anglos (Tennyson, Housman, Kipling) is just utterly ridiculous. Where do you place Eliot in this scheme, and where do you place the New Critical dominance of mid-century poetics, which one could quite seriously argue developed out of Eliot & Pound by way of Frost & Stevens (or vice versa!)? The fact is, American poetics developed a dynamic of its own, filled with crosscurrents & dichotomies & contradictions, drawing both on Eliot's notion of "tradition" and on Emerson's notion of "invention" (see Langdon Hammer's wonderful book Janus-Faced Modernism, on the interplay between Crane & Tate, and the consequences for the academic poetry establishment, for just one example of the "particularities").
What irks me no end about Ron Silliman's conspiracy theory of American poetry is the odd image of a displaced "canon" or "prestige" which haunts the background of his polemic. It's as if his theory is built on a single primitive, unrecognized ideal image : that of a mythical Avant-Garde Classic Period, when people like Pound & Eliot could be both heroic, iconoclastic innovators, and supremely prestigious cultural authorities, at one and the same time! Thus the strategic thrust of his complaint : if only we could break down the walls of that whitened sepulchre, the SoQ Establishment, why, then we - the New Americans! - we will be the arbiters! It's a dream of power (oddly parallel to some of Poe's late-career fantasies, when he wandered drunk down Benefit St., here in Providence, trying to woo a bride/benefactor for his projected Great American Literary Magazine...).
As I have tried to imply, the best antidote to a-historical conspiracy theories and fantasies like this, is simply to read 20th-century American poetry, in all its ample complexity and capacious contradictions. And why do we need such an antidote? So that "future American poets" can work in an atmosphere of openness and possibility, rather than within such melancholy, theoretical corridors, dank with the perspiration of resentful struggle - rank with the odor of imaginary, puzzle-palace stratagems.
The first argument (to paraphrase) is that American poetry bifurcates into two paths, lines, traditions, models - the Romantic/Amer. Renaissance/Modernist/avant-garde/post-avant, on the one hand, and the "School of Quietude" traditionalists on the other.
The 2nd argument is that the traditionalist camp exerts an inordinate power & influence over the cultural scene, through control of major awards, publishers, etc.
In order to accept the 1st argument, one must, at all costs, put aside any detailed sense of the flow, and the particularities, of American literary history. But it's not that hard to retain a sense of such flow, such particularities : all you have to do is open up what is probably the best-selling, mid-20th-century poetry anthology, re-issued decade after decade, used in countless classrooms, bought & read by thousands : the Mentor Book of Major American Poets, ed. by Oscar Williams & Edwin Honig. Here you will find "avant-garde" moderns (Cummings, Pound, etc.) side by side with Frost, EA Robinson; Whitman & Longfellow and Dickinson & Bryant; Stevens & Marianne Moore & Auden. Of course it's not inclusive - the poets are white, & mostly male. It's from 1950 or so. But you can learn a lot more about the variety & vitality of "central" American poetry - even from this dated collection - than from Ron's historical dichotomy.
Ron wants to pretend that the vital midstream of American poetry history never existed. Why? So he can use his reductive labels to exaggerate the importance of his chosen canon. If you can somehow deny the impact of mid-stream, "populist" poets of the 20th century - the powerful careers of (just for example) Auden, Berryman, Lowell, Merwin, Dickey, Bly, Wakoski, Piercy, Rich, Gary Snyder - I'm thinking of the standing-room-only crowds at their readings, the big sales of their books, 1950s-1970s - if you can somehow pretend those things never happened - then you can present a simplified version of that history, which is really an insult : both to the intelligence of readers, and to those dynamic & resourceful careerist-poets themselves. They didn't depend on some cabal of old white guys at Lofty Publishing Houses to make themselves well-read, famous & influential. But... but... if they never happened, then look how Important the "New American Poets" (Olson, Beats, NY School, post-avant) suddenly seem to be!
And I haven't even begun to dismantle the simplifications involved here. The idea that American poetry somehow subtends like a spider from either the early American experimentalists (Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville) or from stuffy old Anglos (Tennyson, Housman, Kipling) is just utterly ridiculous. Where do you place Eliot in this scheme, and where do you place the New Critical dominance of mid-century poetics, which one could quite seriously argue developed out of Eliot & Pound by way of Frost & Stevens (or vice versa!)? The fact is, American poetics developed a dynamic of its own, filled with crosscurrents & dichotomies & contradictions, drawing both on Eliot's notion of "tradition" and on Emerson's notion of "invention" (see Langdon Hammer's wonderful book Janus-Faced Modernism, on the interplay between Crane & Tate, and the consequences for the academic poetry establishment, for just one example of the "particularities").
What irks me no end about Ron Silliman's conspiracy theory of American poetry is the odd image of a displaced "canon" or "prestige" which haunts the background of his polemic. It's as if his theory is built on a single primitive, unrecognized ideal image : that of a mythical Avant-Garde Classic Period, when people like Pound & Eliot could be both heroic, iconoclastic innovators, and supremely prestigious cultural authorities, at one and the same time! Thus the strategic thrust of his complaint : if only we could break down the walls of that whitened sepulchre, the SoQ Establishment, why, then we - the New Americans! - we will be the arbiters! It's a dream of power (oddly parallel to some of Poe's late-career fantasies, when he wandered drunk down Benefit St., here in Providence, trying to woo a bride/benefactor for his projected Great American Literary Magazine...).
As I have tried to imply, the best antidote to a-historical conspiracy theories and fantasies like this, is simply to read 20th-century American poetry, in all its ample complexity and capacious contradictions. And why do we need such an antidote? So that "future American poets" can work in an atmosphere of openness and possibility, rather than within such melancholy, theoretical corridors, dank with the perspiration of resentful struggle - rank with the odor of imaginary, puzzle-palace stratagems.
5.24.2003
Reading 3rd vol. of Eric Pankey, Cenotaph. Also checked his 1st 2 vols at downtown Public today (For the New Year - no apparent reference to Auden - & Heartland). Something happened with 3rd vol (Apocrypha). First 2 are standard boilerplate MFA style (except better - subdued & careful - makes the simple phrases sound without excess. Both his parents were accountants (like GG?)). Poetry & money.
But Apocrypha was a leap forward. Weight of Stevens & Donne & Bible & Shakespeare - and he was EQUAL TO IT : the wit & design & language all in balance, quite extraordinary. Models of excellence.
Then something happened : some personal trouble or reaching some limit of inspiration. These 2 books following Apocrypha read like a record of spiritual impasse. The response was uneven : confession, slackness, backing & filling, occasional successes, depression & some despair. Hard to read without feeling pity & sadness, because he's honest, he doesn't fake (though he repeats himself sometimes), but the meditations are dry, angst-ridden. I feel like I'm looking at the limit of orthodox US expression here.
Curious to read the latest vol. (which crossed my desk & got me started on him), Oracle Figures.
EP. Exemplary initials . . .
See insane peroration of Bluejay in Stubborn Grew, pp. 87-91. Here the Ojibwa outcast casts Amurrcan Litachore in the shadow of the aesthetic Ass of the Providence Atheneum, a neo-classical private library where the most famous photo of EP (Edgar Poe, not Ezra Pound) was taken, not long before his death, when he came (drunk & disorderly) to Providence to woo & snake-oil local poetess Sarah Helen Whitman into marriage & a new American Literary Arsistocracy. The subtext is Notebooks of Arthur Gordon Pym, which pivots on race war fear & the Peter & Paul Islands in mid-Atlantic; meanwhile (1848) Thomas Dorr was in RI prison for inciting the Dorr War, a miniature figurine RI constitutional re-revolution over extension of the franchise - but only to immigrant workers, not to African-Americans (so same supported the anti-Dorr faction, the South County landowners & aristocracy). Bluejay rhymes Poe's racist southern snobbery with Pound's pecking orders in a general condemnation of elitist "Greek" slavery:
"O.K. Now lookee here carefully, now. De cussin
blasted shippin outa hell lands at Desolation
Island, see? Dem duded white pengoons all dressy
wit de alba trapses onna trapeezes widda net, see?
Anna black doorman o backdoor man, see
he holdin up the whole thing wid one pinky -
an it ain't even yarn. Odd, man - lamby-pamby!
- an he crost Atlantic belowdicks, chain up to a T.
Na square dat wid dem rocksaglory, right -
P an P, sturdy an steady inna middle ova tight
sea - upright, man! Like Pizza Polevaulter, key!
Heavin an whole inna earth, alright! Y'follow?
So hey I sieze you got deez double dabblin upside-
arse-o-cats, real hep, man! Formula Tide,
like washin oeuvre everthin wid words t'swallow
aplenty! So soak dis formula, Hen:
Q2 (-E2 - P2) = -J2.
See, you got yo EP an yo EP, both ovum laird
o' th'Catkills. But even they gotta peepee, man!
An they gotta drop they shots an tiss inth toilet
juss like you an me! You with me?
We talkin catshit! Iz all kinda murmuree,
lowdown, muddy an mutteree, backassed - an wet!"
Bizarre as may be, this should be understood in the narrative context of a Henry/Bluejay - Dante/Virgil catabasis or descent into Hell, in search of Henry's lost black cat, Pushkin, stolen on Halloween - the analogy being Dante's emergence from (a literary) Hell into Purgatory through Satan's ass (figured locally in Stubborn as the abandoned railway tunnel under the Atheneum & the RISD art museum).
"Time was I ain't shot my wad inta Yoi yet either.
But iz comin, man. We down among the trainin' ground,
the jailbait. There's Dorr down there, soundin
mighty low below the courthouse, a mere nether-
unworldly goose he is, too. An here come his whiteface
double, po ol' Poe! 1848 slidin like a dyin worm
down Benefit, shoes achin, head achin widda storm
a Whitman onna brain - yeah, the coal lady in lace!
Burnin coal, waitin by the window, lookin down
from the broken wall - one helluva Helen firin him!
Afloat in his mind he wander up to th'Atheneum,
get his blacknwhite ticklelily icon taken
with a crown to his brow an his eyes awry, forever
an ever. He was damned an good at them posterior
analytics - helluva chilly mathematical germcarrier,
Poe. Black n white everthing goes t'him - steer
for the po-po-Pole, amen! I mean, Dorr's dyin
bloated an blighted down in jail fo the franchise,
an Poe's upstairs brushin his teeth, realize -
dig Helen in the whitey semperequal sepulcryin
shame, man! She comin back like a ghost,
lil muddy, but o'clay! Cistern in the grounsoon!
Yeah, he play one limpin aristocat, that one -
that only lonely Poe, po man - evbody get lost."
Again this has to be understood in the context of the Orpheus story which frames Stubborn, & the Poe obsession with the "dead lady", and the fact that Dorr was being held in prison in a basement cell only a couple of blocks from where Poe was reeling insanely up & down Benefit St, & the fact that Rhode Island was deeply & centrally engaged in the slave trade from the beginning, & the fact that the "Dorr War" was riven by racism & Napoleonism (Dorr was often likened physically & politically to little Nappy), and the fact that the only RI fatality of the farcical Dorr War (a Massachusetts carpenter was also shot by mistake, standing in his doorway) was a bystander named Gould (one of my relatives). Politics is local.
But Apocrypha was a leap forward. Weight of Stevens & Donne & Bible & Shakespeare - and he was EQUAL TO IT : the wit & design & language all in balance, quite extraordinary. Models of excellence.
Then something happened : some personal trouble or reaching some limit of inspiration. These 2 books following Apocrypha read like a record of spiritual impasse. The response was uneven : confession, slackness, backing & filling, occasional successes, depression & some despair. Hard to read without feeling pity & sadness, because he's honest, he doesn't fake (though he repeats himself sometimes), but the meditations are dry, angst-ridden. I feel like I'm looking at the limit of orthodox US expression here.
Curious to read the latest vol. (which crossed my desk & got me started on him), Oracle Figures.
EP. Exemplary initials . . .
See insane peroration of Bluejay in Stubborn Grew, pp. 87-91. Here the Ojibwa outcast casts Amurrcan Litachore in the shadow of the aesthetic Ass of the Providence Atheneum, a neo-classical private library where the most famous photo of EP (Edgar Poe, not Ezra Pound) was taken, not long before his death, when he came (drunk & disorderly) to Providence to woo & snake-oil local poetess Sarah Helen Whitman into marriage & a new American Literary Arsistocracy. The subtext is Notebooks of Arthur Gordon Pym, which pivots on race war fear & the Peter & Paul Islands in mid-Atlantic; meanwhile (1848) Thomas Dorr was in RI prison for inciting the Dorr War, a miniature figurine RI constitutional re-revolution over extension of the franchise - but only to immigrant workers, not to African-Americans (so same supported the anti-Dorr faction, the South County landowners & aristocracy). Bluejay rhymes Poe's racist southern snobbery with Pound's pecking orders in a general condemnation of elitist "Greek" slavery:
"O.K. Now lookee here carefully, now. De cussin
blasted shippin outa hell lands at Desolation
Island, see? Dem duded white pengoons all dressy
wit de alba trapses onna trapeezes widda net, see?
Anna black doorman o backdoor man, see
he holdin up the whole thing wid one pinky -
an it ain't even yarn. Odd, man - lamby-pamby!
- an he crost Atlantic belowdicks, chain up to a T.
Na square dat wid dem rocksaglory, right -
P an P, sturdy an steady inna middle ova tight
sea - upright, man! Like Pizza Polevaulter, key!
Heavin an whole inna earth, alright! Y'follow?
So hey I sieze you got deez double dabblin upside-
arse-o-cats, real hep, man! Formula Tide,
like washin oeuvre everthin wid words t'swallow
aplenty! So soak dis formula, Hen:
Q2 (-E2 - P2) = -J2.
See, you got yo EP an yo EP, both ovum laird
o' th'Catkills. But even they gotta peepee, man!
An they gotta drop they shots an tiss inth toilet
juss like you an me! You with me?
We talkin catshit! Iz all kinda murmuree,
lowdown, muddy an mutteree, backassed - an wet!"
Bizarre as may be, this should be understood in the narrative context of a Henry/Bluejay - Dante/Virgil catabasis or descent into Hell, in search of Henry's lost black cat, Pushkin, stolen on Halloween - the analogy being Dante's emergence from (a literary) Hell into Purgatory through Satan's ass (figured locally in Stubborn as the abandoned railway tunnel under the Atheneum & the RISD art museum).
"Time was I ain't shot my wad inta Yoi yet either.
But iz comin, man. We down among the trainin' ground,
the jailbait. There's Dorr down there, soundin
mighty low below the courthouse, a mere nether-
unworldly goose he is, too. An here come his whiteface
double, po ol' Poe! 1848 slidin like a dyin worm
down Benefit, shoes achin, head achin widda storm
a Whitman onna brain - yeah, the coal lady in lace!
Burnin coal, waitin by the window, lookin down
from the broken wall - one helluva Helen firin him!
Afloat in his mind he wander up to th'Atheneum,
get his blacknwhite ticklelily icon taken
with a crown to his brow an his eyes awry, forever
an ever. He was damned an good at them posterior
analytics - helluva chilly mathematical germcarrier,
Poe. Black n white everthing goes t'him - steer
for the po-po-Pole, amen! I mean, Dorr's dyin
bloated an blighted down in jail fo the franchise,
an Poe's upstairs brushin his teeth, realize -
dig Helen in the whitey semperequal sepulcryin
shame, man! She comin back like a ghost,
lil muddy, but o'clay! Cistern in the grounsoon!
Yeah, he play one limpin aristocat, that one -
that only lonely Poe, po man - evbody get lost."
Again this has to be understood in the context of the Orpheus story which frames Stubborn, & the Poe obsession with the "dead lady", and the fact that Dorr was being held in prison in a basement cell only a couple of blocks from where Poe was reeling insanely up & down Benefit St, & the fact that Rhode Island was deeply & centrally engaged in the slave trade from the beginning, & the fact that the "Dorr War" was riven by racism & Napoleonism (Dorr was often likened physically & politically to little Nappy), and the fact that the only RI fatality of the farcical Dorr War (a Massachusetts carpenter was also shot by mistake, standing in his doorway) was a bystander named Gould (one of my relatives). Politics is local.
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