Notes Toward & So On (11)

A book of criticism on the mid-20th century American poets by Adam Kirsch - titled The Wounded Surgeon - got a rave review in the NY Times yesterday. (The photo of Kirsch - with the little TS Eliot glasses & tie & hair mussed just so... amazing, like some kind of hologrammic projection or clone of the quintessential 50s English prof. Send it to Jim Behrle for processing.)

(Dude, whazzup with your author photo?)

According to the review, Kirsch's thesis is that under the intimidating shadow of the previous generation, the mid-century poets (Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, et al.) were forced to branch into a less monumental, more personal, inward (if that's the right word) practice - but that, nevertheless, the stringencies of the Moderns maintained influence benign.

I'm going to see if the library has this...

Thinking this morning about Pound, though. As critic & schoolmarm-stickler, he certainly had tremendous influence. Yet did he practice what he preached?

Pound is somebody whose mad flight manifests, in all its maniacal fibrillation, a certain freedom, profundity & ranginess, which is not exactly an applicable paradigm or learnable rubric of modernist/New Critical technique. These attributes are cultivated, perhaps, by an insatiable appetite for knowledge - combined with a faith in poetry as the medium of a unified sensibility : an integral consciousness, integrity. (This in no way justifies the stupid, harsh & mean aspects of Pound, though his obvious nuttiness somewhat mitigates our judgement.)

A unified sensibility delves into the world, reality, & finds ways to characterize it - which is why the works can be studied repeatedly, always offering new perspectives. The faith in poetry's value, as a means of expression, results in a long struggle. I guess this was the motive for the production of long poems, even after the displacement of epic by fiction. (On the other hand, an integral sensibility is also the means by which poets discover their own distinctive style - whatever length or form it takes.)

Pound was that kind of resilient, stubborn, independent soul, that solitary eccentric (monomaniacal, actually) thinker. There are better, purer, examples of the artist - the ones who succeed in the struggle to unify & transmute sensibility into poetry. It's the flagrant eccentrics, like Pound & Blake, whose extremity illustrates a more general rule.

In fact this may be the main lesson - "soul freedom", utter (vocational) commitment, the link between integrity (of sensibility) & art - which Lowell & Berryman, anyway, took from Pound, rather than anything to do with the monumentality & objectivity of the art work.

It can be argued that the age of science, enlightenment, & rationalism set poetry free to enter its proper sphere of pure play. & if you accept that play is a central & "serious" human activity, there is some truth to this. But if play/poetry/childhood is framed as part of a duality in which work/seriousness/reality-principle is the more important or essential half, then poetry has been assigned to a play-pen & will be coddled, tolerated, & held in fond contempt.

I would realign these relations, with the claim that science & rationalism cannot, & will never, provide an adequate description of reality. Philosophy reaches a little closer, but its discursive abstractions are still inadequately communicative. Only the arts provide a sufficiently vivid affective-intellectual image of experience & reality. Poetry can span the distance between philosophical concepts on the one hand, and dramatic immediacy & actuality on the other. (Philosophy for its part aspires toward the condition of dialogue & drama.)

I offer these admittedly unoriginal notions to follow up on previous posts. How can poetry assume its full powers, then? I would think one critical measure in this regard would be a poetry's expressive wholeness - its willingness to patiently present & clearly "argue" - or logically defend - its sensuous, affective, or experiential subject-matter & the underlying rhetoric of same. This is what I see, for example, in the tightly-knotted & expressive sentence-structures of Keats' sonnets and odes : these poems display a striking, a startling, fusion of song & statement. Expressive logic or wholeness - as opposed to the poetry of half-statement, deflection, intimation, pose, predetermined attitude, rhetorical inflation-for-effect.

Closer to our time, Wallace Stevens reaches in this direction, with his fusion of philosophical reflection & rhetorical play. Robert Lowell simultaneously argues & suffers with contemporary history. But these are just 2 examples among many, not meant as representative figures; my purpose is to focus on a way of interpreting poetic value.

A thin layer of white on the garage roof next door this morning. Frost rhymes with rime.

Frost, antique farmer
becomes antic Lowell
unwell amid antiques

Gee(w)z, I come back from dawdling on break in the bookstacks reading Rene Girard on mimetic rivalry. . . only to find myself parodied by Jonathan Mayhew. it's been a long day. Jonathan, you've been reading way too much Robert Lowell in your spare time. Plus, where are the doggerel rhymes? This am't parody, it's travesty. I'm shocked, shocked.

BK Stefans includes an interesting canonizing review of Robert Lowell's recent Collected. The following passage is characteristic:


"One can't help, reading through this massive, spellbinding volume, mourning some of what has been lost in American poetry since Partisan Review crowd was in the ascendant: an earnestness about writing (and rewriting) poetry in a bid for immortality (Berryman's narcissism may have killed any frank courting of this instinct), an intellectual aggressiveness that was more ethical than theoretic in nature (like Auden, Lowell's pacifist politics were often transparent, and he was a conscientious objector in WWII), an imagistic impulse that was best typified by Lowell's unerring sense of visual detail ("...octagonal red tiles, / sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; / a Rocky Mountain chaise lounge, / its legs, shellacked saplings." [162]) and an embodied, phantasmagoric sense of history and geography, highlighting that generation's greater chronological proximity to Pound and, before him, Robert Browning (and the Victorian habit of comparing one's "age" with a prior historical epoch, especially that of the Roman Empire). "

Berryman often came under attack from his own generation for "bad writing" (Louise Bogan probably the most salient example of this). Here Stefans juxtaposes Berryman & Lowell : Berryman's narcissism vs. Lowell's earnest bid for immortality through careful (re)writing.

What stands out for me anyway about that circle of "establishment" American male poets from mid-century is the enormous weight of stress & torment. The lyrical balance of some of Schwartz's poems contrasts with his miserable neurotic personal life. Berryman & Lowell's work is remarkable for its lack of repose.

I think Berryman actually captured the historical flavor of his times, through his manic self-obsessed disintegration & the schizoid undertone of "black talk", than Lowell did with all his earnest & Olympian historicism. America & the West are a racial-ideological construct on certain levels, and in Berryman we begin to hear the unsettling African undertone of that deeper seismic-historical resonance.

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.

Nice to read all the comments on Lowell's "Skunk Hour", especially Kasey's extended.

I would just interpose that the line "I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell" don't seem so awful to me. I think it has to be read in context. The whole poem, from the opening-line "Nautilus Island", is wrapped around "ill" and "ell" sounds. This is a situation in which the larger structural context moderates the surface exaggeration of the line. It occurs in the poem's pivotal, "crisis" stanza, followed shortly by "I myself am hell". After which, the lines that follow about the skunks (with their "swills", "pail" & "tail") come as a kind of bleak-comic relief, the return of nature after the melodramatic ill-nature of the speaker's despair.

"Cal" Lowell was probably NOT related to Silent Cal.

On Second Thought, he probably was.

THAT would mean I'M very distantly related to Robert Lowell, since I'm a distant relative of Silent Cal.

We're probably MORE closely related via those old Bostonian whacko families, actually.

Stay with us here for the latest genealogical news on the post-avant scene. "The Blogging of America is Blogging."

Silliman watch : Robert Lowell playing the bogeyman role reserved by previous generations of Brit- & Yurrup-bashers for TS Eliot.

The School of Carpitude will soon have a new canon-fortress as formidable as any, if this Pope of Carpitude has his way.