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).

A stone fallen from heaven

I'd just like to sketch out some quick unrehearsed responses to Joshua Clover's recent piece over at the Harriet blog ("Unfree Verse").  This is a plain-spoken, straightforward personal essay about some of the dreary aspects of working in academia, and of contemporary work-life in general, and of the effort to be a poet and write poetry in this time & place.  I respect Clover for his honesty, but I have to register my disagreement with his conclusions.

Clover sums up, near the end of the piece, like this : "In the society of ambient discipline, all verse is unfree."  He defines "ambient discipline" as : "I don’t mean Foucault-type discipline like sovereigns and regimes of power. I mean political economy basically. How our shared and fragile lives are structured according to the imperatives of the economy’s self-remaking."

Now this may not be Foucauldian, but it seems to be describing a structural, pervasive economic determinism.  We are not in control of our economy; it is in control of our "shared and fragile lives."  This appears to be an underlying principle of Clover's sense of what he terms "political economy".

There is no argument to be made against the fact that freedom, for each of us as individuals, is limited.  What I question here is the implied global determinism, structuring human social life in its totality.  The history of the 20th century offers numerous examples, from the political left and right, of theories of determinism put to use as means of denying the differences between liberal democracy, on the one hand, and political authoritarianism or tyranny, on the other.

I would argue that a belief in forms of government which provide limited, yet very real, freedoms - those freedoms we associate with basic norms of human rights and liberty - is not naive or delusory.  In the treadmill of economic necessity, so plangently evoked here by Clover, we can lose sight of these fundamental political conditions.  Moreover, cynicism will always rush to the aid of our discontent, if we let it.

I would also argue that there is an analogy (though imperfect) between political freedom and the freedom of art and poetry.  I was struck by Clover's remark : "Poetry can stand for freedom so intensely that people start to worry there is too much freedom."  This gets at something important, but then Clover deflects it into a gibe at Robert Frost (and, by extension, at the neo-formalist school of poetic "discipline").

Let's think for a moment about poetry as free expression.  For poets, this involves the very marrow of our vocation.  We are creatures of the dream of fabulous inspiration : we wait and work for the moment when the poem bursts forth with unaccountable force.  It is on this kind of "charismatic" experience that we have based our whole sense of poetry's cultural importance, its authority.  We believe poetry is the ultimate form of human verbal expression; that poetry is how human beings express living truth.

Even the cherished, exalted fountain of pure, living Truth, however, must subsist and be understood within shared limitations : of mortality, of biology, of history, of politics, of economics, of cognition, of cosmology...  - thus the Chaplinesque, tragicomic biographies of the poets (paralleled by the tragicomic destinies of the cultures which produce them).  Our experiences of poetic free expression, then, are elusive - perhaps never equal to the imagined ideal.

However, once again, this mixed situation does not negate the reality of freedom in poetry, just as economic necessity or political divisions do not of themselves preclude the (limited, embattled) existence of democracy, equality, freedom, and popular sovereignty.  As a poet, I believe in the effort, the labor, of making room for creative freedom and inspiration in one's practical life.  I believe this effort is justified, even if not everyone, yet, has equal access to creative opportunities.  Because it does take work.  It involves actual life-decisions; it requires some devotion, some faith, some self-discipline.  Most of our commitments, of course - along with our whims - may prove eventually to have been mistakes; but this does not disqualify the effort.

No one, as poet, has to take a job in academia.  No one, as poet, has to play the mercenary games of networking and self-promotion (I'm not suggesting that these games, and academia per se, are the same thing : they are not).  Poetry is a distinct labor, which is sometimes rewarded with inspiration, and even more rarely with public recognition.  The freedom to make the original poem - unmediated by necessity of any kind - is the honor, and the ultimate social value, of the trade.  The "autonomy" of art, which Clover derides, is part and parcel of this limited, experiential, laborious, earned freedom.

"The poem is a stone fallen from heaven : no one will judge it." (Osip Mandelstam)  This, it seems to me, is the credo of every real poet.

BAP : Best Academic Poetry

Latest tempest in the American Sneezepot has to do with the 2015 edition of the avuncular Best American Poetry anthology.  Apparently a "white" poet passed as a "yellow" poet, & was accepted as such by the editor of the anthology, who then defended his decision to keep the winning poem (editor seems to have found himself in no-win situation).

Anyway, the most curious thing to me about the editor's (Sherman Alexie's) defense of his modus operandi was statement that 99% of the chosen poets were professors.  Who woulda thunk it?

Anyhow, a Twitter exchange with Sina Queyras about this lil' imbroglio resulted in the following hepicene poem by Yorick truly :

NOM DE PLUM

I have eaten
the poems
that were in
the anthology

and which
you were probably
saving
for 2016

Forgive me
they were so
so

Plums in anthology basket

In my blunt statement about poetry & academia, I neglected to mention a third (& mediating) factor: the enthusiasm for knowledge, the pleasure involved, shared alike by teacher, student, poet. "Poetry is the scholar's art." (right, Wally. He also said that academic poets were "kept men".)

Yet knowledge & poetry ain't the same, eggzackly (as JL, whose comments instigated this thread, points out). The original NY School can be understood as a sophisticated effort to do an end run around the professionalization of poetry, which was promoted by Eliot, Allen Tate (whose style strikes me immediately as that of a canny academic imitation of Hart Crane) & the New Critics (Janus Face of Modernism, an excellent study of the Crane/Tate dynamic & its aftermath: I forget the author's name, unfortunately...).

So what's all this about the relations between the academy & poetry writing?

Seems like the academy is one of the sources of socially-sponsored, officially-accredited writing. It gets this authority, obviously, due to its assignment to teach the young. Teaching requires books & knowledge; a school is, for one thing, a publishing (book-sponsoring) & book-collecting center.

Poets also make books, & teach too, in a way. So you can see how a symbiotic relationship occurs there.

I suppose a major element in the development of a meaningful artistic style involves finding a way to avoid, overturn, deny such authorization. Why? Because formal education is one thing, and the school of hod nicks is another. These two also have a symbiotic relationship. Teachers bring to school what they learn on the outside: if they didn't, school would be even more boring than it is. Poetry has to come from outside, too.