Henry's Blunderworld

Back in 1993, Langdon Hammer published a book titled Hart Crane and Allen Tate : Janus-Faced Modernism.  As I have absented myself from the groves of academe, and from my job as an underling in the beautiful Brown University Library, I can no longer zip down to the stacks & grab any book using fingertip osmosis.  Like ol' Ez in his Pisan cage, here in Minneapolis I must rely on slippery Mnemosyne.  Yet as I bethought myself of certain poetic problematics, cruxi & conundrumistai, this book quietly surfaced from the Henry Blunderworld.

Janus-faced... how?  On one panel, there you have Hart Crane - the troubled gifted genius, the gay man in a land of homophobiopoetics, the impossible character, the Nietzschean-suicidal narcissist egomaniac, the artist, the graceful creator.  On another panel, you have the Salieri (as opposed to the Mozart) component (in Nadezhda Mandelstam's incisive paradigm, with respect to Pushkin, Mandelstam, et al.).  The craftspeople; the literary actuaries; the devotees, the acolytes, the Pharisees, the priests, the gatekeepers, the bouncers.... Allen Tate representing the highest order of compositional learning.  He will mimic the Great Poets by sheer force of pedantry (that giant forehead!) and guile (he sounds like Crane at his most sane).

This is unfair; this is irresponsible.  Allen Tate was a scholar of "the scholar's art" (though Wally Stevens, who coined the phrase, might consider Tate one of those academic "bought men").

Hey - everybody does the best they can.

It's just that Hammer's iron bonk or slice might illustrate a divide we ought to recognize.  Not between raw & cooked or Beat & Formalist or real & conceptual or whatever latest epiphenom floats with the campus curds - but rather something to do with poetry's original communion with its audience, its historical moment.

I have a theory about poetry which is extremely simple : poetry is the summit or bloom of a particular culture's sign-system.

Signs are sacred - they are gestures, pointing everyone toward what encircles, embraces, uplifts, defines.  Yet every culture is obsessed with its own mortality, its own weakness... and Time is the scythe reaping all our faulty sign-systems.  The poet represents and enunciates these ambivalent poles, these magnetic valences.

This representation is a mode of theater.  An enactment - unpredictable, evolving, adapting to particular circumstances.  Ovid sending letters to Caesar from his remote (& final) exile on the Black Sea became a model for both Pushkin in the 19th century and Mandelstam in the 20th : a model corresponding to actual existential personal and political circumstances.  Shakespeare (whoever he was) wrote popular plays in a renovated medieval genre in order to... huh?  Speak truth to power?  How with this rage shall Beauty hold a plea? (Sonnet 65).  Maybe.  The form adapted to the motive.  & little Tuscan epileptic Alighieri... don't get me started.

& who am I, what am I doing, paddling here in my noxious blogorrhea?

I'd like to overturn the Leaning Towers of official literary certification, along with the squirming anthills of generic rebellion.  I am bored with officialdom.  I am done with Academic Poetics.  I am fed up with Popular Poetics.  The noise is killing me.  Poetry is subtle, like the tender fur on a butterfly wing.  If you manipulate wing, wing becomes useless - Butterfly goes back to her musty thread-womb.

The poet has to have all the skills & training & smarts & gifts... but nobody can teach these.  Experience teaches them; the character of the poet brings them out of the ineffable treasure-house, and polishes, sharpens, aims.

The shaman swims through the fatal air.  Raven writes in flame on the tyrant's wall... in water (on the port side of the Ark).

Responding in part to Robert A.'s interesting post on public/private manners & mannerisms:

Here's a passage from an essay that TS Eliot published in The Egoist in 1919 (& never republished):

"This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with a passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person...
...We may not be great lovers, but if we had a genuine affair with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love... We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition."

- this is quoted in Langdon Hammer's Hart Crane & Allen Tate, as part of his history of Crane/Tate/Eliot's ambiguous-subliminal erotic psychologies. Crane responded (as a gay man) to this early Eliot; Tate, on the other hand, to the reserved, impersonal, authoritative Eliot of "Tradition and the Individual Talent".

I post this to point to the contrast between this, on the one hand, and the informal, relaxed familiarity of the NY School approach (which RA describes). Poet-friendships, there, are not surrounded by an aura of ambiguity, romance & taboo.

This "demotic" attitude seems connected with the general relaxation (or vulgarization) of sexual mores : the taboos have broken down.

The idea that private name-dropping in poems, etc., impinges on the boundaries of traditional public speech is true in more ways than one.

I think it's possible to send private, personal messages & public messages - separately - in one and the same poem. The overuse of obviously private messages seems kind of slack, in a way. But it may also be a realistic acknowledgement of the limits of a poet's reach & impact. & it reflects, back to us, the quality of our own private lives.

Eliot's passage above, by the way, seems like a script for my own comically-representative experience (I mean Mandelstam's impact, & the "Shakespeare episode"). Shakespeare's ambiguously erotic & narcissistic sonnets literally knocked the wind out of me - & threw me back into the Biblical fold.

Oddly, Eliot here seems sane & healthy to me. He's talking about love, not "eros" or sex (hence his phrase, "we may not be great lovers" - funny). Love may involve passionate erotic energies, but it's not only that. Contemporary mores often simply reduce love to eros.

Jeffrey Bahr writes:

"I've posted a challenge to any who would engage seriously in the attempt to -- if not reconcile, then at least identify the goals -- among the disparate views of what poetry is, should be, must do."

Tall order. Definition is power. Criticism creates the vocabulary and context for understanding & reception. With such a large abstraction ("poetry") fitted out to explain such a diverse phenomenon, the resulting contention is inevitable.

Langdon Hammer's book mentioned here yesterday presents a sort of close-sociological comparative analysis of the interrelated careers of Crane, Tate & Eliot. Hammer starts out by demystifying some of the reactionary-traditionalist rhetoric offered by some of the big Moderns, Eliot & Pound in particular. Rather than looking at them as defenders of tradition, or backward-looking medievalist-traditionalists, Hammer tries to show how they were pioneers of literature's New Class : entrepreneurs in the business of culture. He talks about how their differing attitudes toward established sources of cultural reception (Eliot's embrace of English establishment, Pound's opposite tack) influenced the amazingly contrastive outcomes of their careers (Eliot the lauded Nobel prizewinner; Pound the jailed treasonous crackpot).

He then looks at the differing responses of Hart Crane & Allen Tate to the cultural atmosphere which Eliot did so much to invent. I'm just getting into this section of the book. He contrasts Eliot's (& Stevens') ability to separate making a living from their identities & prestige as poets, with Crane's theatrically conflicted background. (I will never get over this iconic conjunction : Hart Crane, the son of successful Cleveland candy manufacturer - inventor of the Life Saver - dies a suicide-by-drowning in the Caribbean. Poets' lives often have such strange symbolic-fateful resonance. This is a real cultural-psychic phenomenon, if not an act of Providence.) Crane's path was marked, early on, for the taboo-scapegoat-genius-outsider role.

Hammer argues that Allen Tate's own conflicted response (on many levels) to Crane's example only spurred him to emulate Eliot's career path, and take it further - firmly installing (along with John Crowe Ransom & others) the presence of poet-critics in the English Departments of American academia.

The poet-critic was a new kind of professional person, who combined valuable technical knowledge of two kinds : poetry-making and scholarship. With this dual capability, such a professional could be included in the intellectual power-structure of the "New Class"; with anthologies and textbooks like Understanding Poetry, the ground was laid for the next generation's innovation : the Creative Writing Program.

So I'm just getting into Hammer's book. It's really a "close reading" of the literary biographies of these men, and the consequences for poetry and for "poetry careers" generally. I think it's a wonderful book; provides a kind of lens for viewing today's different atmosphere. Hammer in the early pages focuses on the paradoxical prestige and authority which accrued to Eliot's forms of detachment & disinterest. Because he was neither an academician nor a professional writer or journalist, his criticism augmented the sense of poetry's (and the individual poet's) independent cachet, its cultural autonomy.

In thinking about this, alongside Jeffrey's challenge mentioned above, my first vague thoughts in this direction circle around the idea that whatever poetry offers a society at large must be grounded in some kind of imaginative and intellectual empathy. Poetry has to present a fiction of its own independent momentum : that is, independent to some extent of the poet's individual background, capable of understanding and interpreting others. Yet, at the same time, poetry, if it is to fulfill its purpose, has to be a kind of end in itself : it has to be a source of pleasure for its own sake. And here the special verbal and intellectual capabilities of unique and individual poets are brought to bear. Take, for example, a fine poem in the current issue of Poetry, by Carolina Ebeid, "Reading Celan in a Subway Station". In this poem, with metaphorical sleight-of-hand, the poet fuses listening to an accordion player in the subway with the emotional atmosphere of Celan. It's a very curious magic.

So these dual imperatives - the ability to penetrate history & experience beyond the private & personal, and the ability to raise personal (poetic) expression to a highly-integrated state - seem to underly what poetry is about.

The question about the "professionalization" of creative writing - has been very controversial. When poetry becomes an institution, and part of a larger institution, and a kind of business... what is lost, what is gained? I guess there are no simple answers or single truths about this.

Spiritual truths, down through history, have shown themselves rather disruptive to social arrangements. And sometimes poets must experience life outside the circles of privilege and custom and family and economic self-interest, in order to speak with any authenticity or imaginative empathy about the conditions and lives they encounter. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (discussed in current issue of New Yorker) is an American classic which confronts this issue head-on.

Crane's example shows that one can offer a future-oriented, American vision in poetry, without severing the roots of English-language tradition; one can learn from the modernists, without assenting either to Eliot's world-weary outlook or to Pound's reactionary/futurist extremism.

From different angles, Crane's friends Tate & Winters both undermined his reputation after his death, accenting his weaknesses & failures. Those two, along with their southern "Agrarian" New Critical allies (Ransom et al.), laid the foundations for the cautious, conservative, Eliot-sponsored preciosity of early 50s poetry (Wilbur, et al.), which was what Lowell & the free-verse confessionals (along with the early "New Americans") were reacting against. I suppose one could say that Lowell "broke the pentameter", again. But Crane had shown, earlier, than one didn't have to break the pentameter (contra Pound).

BK Stefan's patient revaluation of both Ron Silliman's comments & Lowell make good reading. Sustained careful attention is important not only because it affects the reading climate; it can also influence poets' awareness of what might be possible.

Every poet carries around their private landscape of literary history, a symbiosis of historical objectivity & personal affiliations.

Hart Crane is important to my own because he displays a synthetic, absorptive talent : an ear for both Elizabethan/Baroque sonority & for the technical fireworks of 1920s modernism (Joyce, ee cummings, Pound, Eliot are all there in The Bridge, along with Whitman & Dickinson & Melville). Much of Allen Tate's idiom sounds imitative of Crane; Tate (along with Crane) in turn influenced Lowell. I'm not mentioning this to promote Lowell but to note lines of stylistic filiation.

More later maybe.