Jonathan likes to cogitate upon the conundrum of literary schools & conventions. & I'll grant that in every time period forms of writing reproduce a kind of basic introductory Acceptable Style, and an established Constellation of Authoritative Authors who are the acknowledged Prestigious Ones.

But what does it mean to say this, or criticize the situation? Not much. If you don't specify the particular Snipe - if you don't investigate & evaluate specific works of art - you're not doing a critical job of work.

Here's a popular Double-Yr-Money Shell Game which you can watch on the streets of New York:

The Gamester displays 3 shells :

1. Official Verse Culture
2. Rebel Verse Culture
3. Border Verse Culture (oscillating between #1 & 2)

The penny or nugget is Poetic Value, which the gamester/rhetorician shifts rapidly from one shell to the other.

The Gamester can play this game for hours, without ever applying Poetic Value judgements to a single work of art. We're playing it right now!!!

I appreciate Jonathan's engagement with my blog & the problems raised. In the process he illuminates the gaping chasm between general principles & present realities. That gap leaves me, too, feeling powerless & even foolish.

But why is it that politically-correct musings on the beauties of anarchist principles is looked upon as a noble thing, a sign of earnest idealism and moral enlightenment - while on the other hand, musing on the moral underpinnings of our own democracy is considered hopelessly a) deluded or b) immoral (complicit)?

There is conflict or contradiction nestled in the heart of every "partial good" : its very goodness can become a form of idolatry. Thus patriotic devotion leads to immoral actions on behalf of my nation. (Not to mention hypocritical allegiance to a supposed principled cause, motivated by purely selfish interest.) So people are understandably suspicious of the uncritical vaunting of our own political system and our own culture. However, I believe that, just as often, habits of criticism and suspicion obscure the real values at work, and distort history. Anyone who praises our own system of government is likely to be branded as someone who has "made peace with the regime", or been co-opted, or is invested in the establishment, etc. etc. But I think it should be pointed out that there are ideologies at work in the culturally-cool gestures of the self-righteous rebel.

God, it's been a long Friday.

In the previous comment box, Jonathan writes:

"The present regime is all about concentrating power, not dispersing it. Hence, attacks on the independence of the judiciary, increased police power, the eroding of civil society, the justification of torture, arrogance rather than the humility you so movingly advocate. I'll forgive Josh whatever youthful political earnestness he might have. That nice-sounding first-shall-be-last Christian rhetoric has nothing to do with the theocratic regime you voted for."

This is well-put, if exaggerated. & though I wouldn't pin the blame for unaccountable power in Washington solely on the Republicans, there are & have been things done in the name of democracy & American security - like detentions without trial, and shipping prisoners to places like Uzbekistan - for which we should indeed be ashamed.

Democracy should be about protesting & changing these things. So Jonathan is right to point up the problem. But he also twists a general statement of principles - what the plan of American democracy is about, as compared to anarchism - into an indictment of my vote. & that is a typical partisan inflammatory polemic. Typical : which is why - considering the current political climate - I wasn't surprised.

Today Jonathan clarifies some of the distinctions between taste (an aesthetic response to an aesthetic object) and judgement (appreciation, &/or critique, which combines both taste & a set of standards). Judgements will differ because standards differ. Taste informs judgement - judgement refines taste.

I agree with Jonathan about blind spots, anyway. But all I can say is, "give the guy a break." Do you really think literature & poetry fit into neat academic summations & the pat judgements suitable for MFA PROGRAMS? Brodsky's accomplishments & horizons are large, messy, complicated. His relationship with English & the battles over what is contemporary style were complicated. I wouldn't be surprised if he had a love-hate relation with English which he couldn't even acknowledge, which involved his dependence on that language from the day he stepped off the plane in London & under Auden's paternal umbrella. & that mixed feeling may have come out in these kinds of doggerel-songs. They may also be regarded as some kind of slap at what was considered contemporary American "high style" (Merwin, let's say). I don't know. Brodsky was a subtle and oblique poet - many of his poems in Russian depend on allegory & allusion & comic irony. His writing is steeped in estrangement, & feelings of frustration, spleen, loneliness, guilt.

The whole approach starting from "Brodsky doesn't deserve his fame - I'm going to show you why based on these poems..." - this ungenerous attitude guarantees there will be no encounter with Brodsky's strengths as a poet, essayist, human being. But this argument could go on forever, because there's no shared grounds for evaluation.

Here's an early poem, translated by George Kline, from the Penguin selected volume:

ON WASHERWOMAN BRIDGE

 
On Washerwoman Bridge, where you and I
stood like two hands of a midnight clock
embracing, soon to part, not for a day
but for all days - this morning on our bridge
a narcissistic fisherman,
forgetting his cork float, stares goggle-eyed
at his unsteady river image.

The ripples age him and then make him young;
a web of wrinkles flows across his brow
and melts into the features of his youth.
He holds our place.  Why not? - It is his right.
In recent years whatever stands alone
stands as a symbol of another time.
His is a claim for space.
                           So let him gaze
into our waters, calmly, at himself,
and even come to know himself.  The river
is his by right today.  It's like a house
in which new tenants have set up a mirror
but have not yet moved in.

1968

The poem exhibits an almost perfect balance between the thought of what poetry can and cannot be; between thought and (elegiac) feeling; between private emotion & a sense of a particular time (late Soviet Russia). The last image is perfectly subdued, an undertone. (Pushkin : "my sadness is luminous".) I can see why Auden was impressed with young Brodsky.

More Jonathan on Brodsky. A curious closed-off attitude. With translation you have to make allowances. If, in spite of that, you find nothing in the poetry, so be it. There are also the essays, the readings. (I can attest Brodsky was a remarkable reader of his work, in English & Russian. I've never witnessed a more intense & powerful reading than the one he gave in Providence.)

I know I have similar attitudes toward various poets. They just don't do anything for me. Why Jonathan feels called upon, periodically, to dump on Brodsky, I have no idea. There's a residual jealousy of Fame there, in the "community".

Once a year or so, on a seasonal basis I suppose, Jonathan decides that Joseph Brodsky was an overrated poet. Jonathan doesn't know much Russian, as far as I know, nor much about Russian literary culture of the 60s-70s-80s-90s. But he feels qualified. In Russia, Brodsky is considered a major poet, an immoveable presence & influence.

There was always sort of a vague Brodsky-resentment in the American poetry puddle. I remember a long rambling put-down by Sam Hamill in APR, to which I responded with a letter. That must have been in the early 80s.

Nobody has ever claimed Brodsky's poetry in English (translated or otherwise) was great shakes. But he was not an American poet. He was something cosmopolitan & not easily cataloged, & disturbing to some in the little proffy-professional ego-puddle we call American poetry.

[By the way, I have been reading M. Blanchot lately, thanks to Jonathan. Blanchot had some very insightful things to say about poetry/prose, language/meaning, Mallarme, Proust, Simone Weil, lots of other French authors, Broch, etc. He's emits that special Paris odeur de "I am so profound & serious" - but, unlike some of the other theorists & critics, he keeps it beautifully concise.]

On poetic language/meaning (in the essay translated as "The Mystery of Literature") - or the old form/content chestnut - he seems to be saying that, in poetry, these two make an irreducible pair. In ordinary speech, the words disappear into the meaning; in poetry, there is this oscillation - each one of the pair trying to be all-in-all, yet each needing the other. Somewhere in that irreducible tango lies the special form of truth which poetry offers.

Reminds me of the question John Irwin asked himself in the book about Poe & Borges (Mystery to a Solution) - how do you write a mystery story that the reader will want to read a second or third time (even though the crime is "solved" at the end of the 1st reading)?

Poetic form (the words) traps meaning in a circle or a ring, which thus becomes a kind of fountain, ever-renewing, everlasting. I tried to express this in an old poem, the opening poem in Way Stations:

OCEAN STATE


 
Here the waters gather along the shore.
They meet the land breathing in foam,
and roll the sleepy pebbles and shells
back into long sand waves as before.

 
Our moon, casting her antique spells.
A motionless iris in the whale’s eye
of the sea, her unspeakable name
sinks to the bottom of lonely wells.

 
Her low whispers frame the deserted dome.
Her light covers the circus floor.
And she lifts, with one nocturnal sigh,
the heaving swells in a silver comb.

("Ocean State" is the motto of Rhode Island. Reminder : I was born on RI Statehood Day - 5.29.52 - a kind of circular number.)

Reading Maurice Blanchot on Mallarme, courtesy of Jonathan.

Distinction he makes between Valery & Mallarme. For the former, poetry is a vehicle of meditation, intellectual mastery; for the latter, purely an aesthetic object formed from words (words from which everything has been refined away, except for this aesthetic essence).

An aesthetic based in turn on the one characteristic of language which fascinates Mallarme : the way in which words replace, disperse - distance themselves, abstract themselves - from the real things they sometimes represent. In so doing, words present themselves in aesthetic form - as poems.

Maybe my shadow-boxing with Language Poetry over the years has been, in part, a battle with my own fascination with, my own bent toward, some such seductive doctrine. Solipsism, solitude, silence, music.

How different the doctine of the Chicago critics (not great poets themselves, admittedly - but going back to Coleridge, for one, anyway...). Here the aesthetic imprint of a poem is not so simply yoked to the words, the language medium, per se.

Just as Mandelstam juxtaposed the Ukrainian philologist Potebnia (with his notion of the "inner psychic image" of the word) to the Russian formalists (with their poetics based on a linguistics which analyzed the word into separate functions) - the Chicago School opposed the strictly linguistic poetics of the New Critics, with a kind of metalinguistic concept of the poem. That is, the poem can't be reduced to its linguistic medium : rather, the medium conveys an imaginative whole, a complex image (a single lyric, or an entire play, or an epic).

Still, Mallarme (and lurking behind him, Poe & Baudelaire) accomplished something permanent (he discovered a sort of antimatter) : everything after has to take it into account. How that gets done, in theory & practice, is the big question. Celan maybe took it to the limit. Every word refers to some train of thought & feeling - conceptual, experiential, personal. Yet the words are so encrypted in their own musical silence as to both invite & defy "meaning", interpretation. The defiance itself is rendered as (tragic) beauty.

So Celan sort of has it both ways. His defiance of meaning is not a literary game or an ideological program. It stems from a felt awareness of death, wrong, grief, hope, love - which are, in a sense, extra-poetic "referents". Or they are elements from the realm of fact & "journalism" which are both acknowledged & somehow won for poetry, absorbed.

I'm sure all this sounds awfully obvious to those who've spent more time with these poets & these issues.

Jonathan wants Poetry to do a Henry Gould issue. It would probably help if I sent them some poems.