The Love of Poetry

Ben Lerner's much-bespoken book-length essay, The Hatred of Poetry, is built on a conceptual framework drawn primarily from Plato and one of Lerner's mentors, the late poet Allen Grossman.  Allen Grossman and I, as it happens, attended the same high school in Minnesota (in classes exactly 20 years apart).

Although I admire Grossman's deeply-felt and magisterial writing (he produced a wonderful essay on Hart Crane), I've never taken to his theoretical perspective, his philosophy of poetry.  Nor do I agree with Ben Lerner's recent extrapolation, here, of some of those concepts.

I wrote an piece called "The Love of Poetry" in response.  It's not a review.  I try to mimic Lerner's anecdotal, autobiographical style in order to draw different conclusions.  The essay was published today by the online journal DISPATCHES, and you can find it here.

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : Henry (label : subject/Henry).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Related topics (there are others) : breakdown, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry's books, Shakespeare...

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : criticism (label : subject/criticism).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Some related topics (there are many others) :

Acmeism, academy, affinities, American culture, American poetry, Aristotle, classic, classicism, Coleridge, commentary, disinterestedness, holism, investigative poetics, Modernism, postmodernism, Russian poetry, style, wholeness...

Future prose projects (maybe):

1. an essay on how American poetry can recover some social import & relevance... by way of Quietude. (cf. Geoffrey Chaucer)

2. an examination of another Geoffrey - Geoffrey Hill.

(I liked this phrase in a rather tendentious America-the-great-satan screed by Peter Riley, in another book review in the same Jacket issue : "New-Yorky persiflage".

"Persiflage" - wonderful word.)

Henry's Lenten Resolution

For Lent, I've decided to become a more disciplined researcher. If you want to write an essay or an article, you must do the basic footwork on the subject at hand. You need to try to pull together the sources.

Observe the subject as an object.

I've never been to grad school (some could argue I've really never left high school). Much of my "thinking" runs (on purpose) on obscure tracks.

But I work in a library, for heaven's sake. I should be able to do this, on a small scale.

Then again, I may not have the will-power for it. I may just want to lie in the hammock in the snow & strum my geetar & imagine my "duende".

Have been reading Orhan Pamuk's novel, Snow. Very appropriate to the local weather. & watched a beautiful Turkish film, set in Istanbul : "Distant", directed by N.B. Ceylan.

Would like to get back to my essays, which hobby was sort of interrupted by the New Orleans adventure & the Lulu campaign.

In a comment posted over at Kasey's blog, I wrote something like "if only we could distinguish between works of art and intellectual games, between poetry & rhetoric." I see now that these essays made a start in that direction. Sometime I hope to elaborate & apply some of these precepts to reviews.

A new mini-essay : Book Vs. Talk. Pigeonholers take note.

A new essay-effort : Art & Ethos

In the twists & turns of the argument of Whittling, Whistling, I'm actually trying (among other things) to make room in the "theory" for modes of didactic, satiric poetry. Discursiveness, direct address. It may not seem that way... I may not have been very clear.

The idea is that these particular forms of poetry (along with all the other forms & modes) reflect the theatricality of poetry in general. I'm saying poetry & poets are inherently dramatic (hence the emphasis on those attributes noted by Aristophanes). That's why I call poetic language itself the main character, the protagonist : an exaggeration, meant to underline how the medium shapes the message.

A new proto-mini-essay : Whittling, Whistling

There's a new mini-essay over there : A Quick Nod in Words.

What's an essay for? asks Jordan.

I'd like to write them in order to precipitate out some of the jumbled thoughts I have on these poetry/poetics conundra. & by putting them in more formal language, make them more accessible to those outside the day-to-day po-blog conversations.

For example, with regard to the string of rambling comments I made earlier here on the issue of poetry & its ideological/critical paraphrasement. It's possible the Andrew Ford book will provide me with a sort of background with which to come to terms with all that.

Ie., perhaps poetry's janus face - 1. self-standing art-form, craft; 2. social/civic performance, political occasion - can be re-interpreted, without favoring one side by dismissing the other. Perhaps its a more complicated, interesting symbiosis. That would be a topic to "essay".

I've started a new blog spinoff, called HG Essays+Reviews. The first entry in what I hope will be an ongoing series is titled A Note on R.S. Crane.

Back in town. Woke up at 3 am this morning, with ideas for essay on Chicago School critics (Elder Olson, RS Crane et al.). I should get away more often.

Plan was triggered by a letter in the new issue of Poetry, from Stephen Stepanchev, in which he describes a class he took with RS Crane back in 60s, & advocates for "Chicago" approach. Exciting! That's what I been talkin' about! (Even though he doesn't get it quite right - the Chi School was not a branch of New Criticism, by any means. It was a critique of that trend.)

On the other hand (following down-at-the-mouth comments of ye'day), the digital-fidget reality of oure age is indeed a new form of publication. So with these blogs one develops a new form of semi-public literary persona.

The blog impact was more vivid a few years ago, when they first surfaced - in the sub-poetry world, as sort of an alternative to discussion lists. You noticed a creative variety among blogging habits & habitats.

The idea that one can dip around in a blog's archive, since they're searchable (at least to some extent).

But this diary approach is obviously more diffuse than that of the essay. There's more rigor involved in proposing arguments or offering research & evidence in essays or articles.

I can blog in off-stretches at work. But I can't write poetry or compose an essay or a story. To do that requires some solitude & concentration.

p.s. if I were to re-write those comments quoted in Octopus, I would probably rein in some of the grand abstract claims about poetry & zeitgeist. Mandelshtam, Dickinson, Dante... each had their own unique, characteristic ways of expressing some of the metaphysical questions in relation to poetry. Mandelshtam, for one, made explicit in his essays that poetry-making & poetics are always a living, developing, changing process.

Yet I wouldn't renounce the comments entirely. Even though the insights of the Chicago critics, which I've been talking about over the last couple weeks, have helped me recognize certain critical distinctions - which, if they were put into play, would take the reading of poetry far deeper into the particulars of individual works - still, I think that those critics' forthright renovation of Aristotle's Poetics - after a hiatus of a few thousand years - chimes somewhat with my essay's theme of anachronism.

In the midst of the Festivites d'Hiver, mon dieu, HG Poetics is swallowed by an Octopus [see "Essays"]. Merci bien, Octopus!

An old mini-pseudo-manifesto:

GOULD'S PUSHKINISM


The annual Conference of Literary and Academic Professionals (a major undertaking which attracts each year approximately 12.5 million scholars from every corner of the globe) took place in Providence, Rhode Island last April, and as I had arrived a day early, with time to kill, I rang up a local poet named Henry Gould (at the immense library where he is employed), and we agreed to meet for coffee nearby.

Gould seemed at home in the seedy (art-student/slacker) ambience of the place, with his unkempt hair hung low over a frayed lumberjack shirt and his nervous fingers and lips playing with an unlit cigarette. I sensed immediately the irritable guardedness often remarked upon in the narrow subculture of ephemeral poets in which he has been supposed – or at least had been until a few years ago – to circulate in a certain sluggish, reserved and hesitant fashion. Little did I foresee how many hours I would remain there, facing him across a crumby & coffee-smudged formica counter, soaking up his theory of poetry, which he defines simply as: “Pushkinism”. Rather than try to paraphrase, blend, or homogenize Gould’s words, I will present my notes, in which I transcribed his statements as accurately as I could manage after returning to my hotel room (Marriott, room #132).

*

Pushkinism is literary professionalism. The poet is an author and the author is a free man or woman and the poet’s work lacks the slightest whiff of necessity, force, uncertainty, guile, venality, apprenticeship, imitation, vanity, trickery, cajolery, laziness, stupidity, vulgarity, ignorance, naivete, provincialism, snobbery, falsehood, malice, envy, boredom, academicism, self-indulgence, arrogance, indifference, corruption, effeteness, boasting… Pushkinism is pure in heart.

Pushkinism recognizes an irreducible distance between everyday life and the making of poetry – a distance measured by two processes in symbiosis: the presence of the muse and an extreme state of intellectual effort and concentration. Populists, seducers and entertainers who are unwilling to acknowledge this distance need to find another hobby.

Pushkinism denounces and avoids literary subcultures. To put it more strongly: Pushkinism asserts that literary creation – that awesome work of Nature – is a process of transcending, reversing, defeating, and destroying every literary clique, program, subculture, and sinecure in the entire universe.

Pushkinism is Romany violins. Pushkinism is rare. Pushkinism is a gift of God. Pushkinism is nativity and incarnation. Pushkinism is Mendelssohn.

Pushkinism is pure escape, pure aesthetic indifference, pure freedom, pure joy. Thus Pushkinism is the discovery of God (mediated by the muse) through art, in whose company pure escape is transfigured into unending labor, humble servanthood, complete sacrifice, clear mystery, mysterious clarity.

Pushkinism is humanism: the force of the charismatic ordinary person bringing State and Ideology to their knees. Democracy and common sense and the common good and universality and individuality and life everlasting and the grace of God. The Captain’s Daughter and The Bronze Horseman and The Queen of Spades and Boris Godunov and Eugene Onegin.

Pushkinism understands that art is a force of nature, an expression of a time and a people, a correlation and reflection of the same. Art is time being redeemed: do not think of it as consolation, hobby, clubhouse, personal possession, or rebellion. No one owns it, no one configures it, no one encapsulates it, no one contains it: it belongs to people, they find it for themselves.

Pushkinism is the brilliance of human knowledge given back, humbly returned, to the superhuman sources of beauty which both frame and transcend it. This is the power of melody, harmony, and rhythm (instilled by the muse).

Pushkinism is the meekness of Pegasus rearing his head, first in this land, then in that land… Pushkinism is a band of Scythian horsemen, bringing (as Mandelstam wrote) the young ones safely to their wedding… Pushkinism is the steady drone of cicadas scattered high in the cottonwoods.

Pushkinism is the recognition of art’s perennial quality - that which runs deeper than change or fashion in the melody of a line or the balancing of passages or the denouement of a tale. Pushkinism is the welling-up of a Breugel-spring: earth’s everlasting variety and renewal.

Pushkinism is classicism – as understood by Mandelstam and Celan: ie., not experiment, but the fulfillment of a vow; not an appeal, but a faithful return of what was freely given.

*

The hour was getting late, and I was due to present my paper early the following morning (the complete paper, titled “Scrambled Eggs and Exactitude : a Reconsideration of Diner Literature from 20th-Century New England”, can be found at my website, www.profproof.com), so I bid my provincial poet farewell, with an encouraging slap on the shoulder (to which he responded with a characteristic squint and a drag on his depleted cigarette), and headed up and outward to the street.

It's a rainy Wednesday in March, and I'm doing boring blogging talk about. March 5th marches forth. On this date both Stalin and Anna Akhmatova died. Unacknowledged Tatar queen of Russia.

& to continue the boring vain of talk about, here's a silly old manifesto:

THE RHODIAN MANIFESTO


'I wonder why in Rhodes they tie up their cats with string. I saw one attached to a front door-knob this morning.'
- Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus


*

WHO ARE THE RHODIANS?

The Rhodians are an association of poets who do not live on the Island of Rhodes, but might like to. (The Island of Rhodes is not to be confused with Rhode Island, a small state in the USA.)


THE RHODIAN CREDO

Of Minimalism. The Rhodians accept a simple definition of poetry, ie.:
Poetry = rhythmic/measured language. The features often attributed to poetry, such as imagination, intellect, emotion, pathos, unity of affect, knowledge, communication, dream, and so forth, are understood to be features of consciousness and language in general. Poetry bears the imprint of both consciousness and language, but its distinguishing trait is rhythm, pattern, measure. The Rhodian approach precludes tendentious, apologetic or polemical appropriations of features of general consciousness into specialized definitions of what poetry should or should not be. Rhodians believe that the compositional attributes of poems are all free additions to the simple nature of poetry so defined.


Of Continuity. The Rhodians believe that poetry as an art form is distinguished by its continuity. "Poetry is avant-garde because it doesn't change much." Rhodians declare that each poet and each group of poet-friends is responsible for, and eligible to inherit, the bequest of past poetry in its entirety. Poetry as simply defined passes through the hands of its makers to its audience of hearers and other makers; it is molded by their personalities and the experience of their time on earth. It is a human art form, perhaps shared to some extent with other creatures.


Of Purpose. The Rhodians maintain that there is no particular "correct" way to make poetry. But this does not preclude the Rhodians from choosing certain principles and orientations. One such principle is that poetry-making involves a limited, but sufficient - and self-sufficient - autonomy. If the process is not valuable for its own sake it is not worth doing at all, since it makes no claim to be valuable for any other reason. (Here the Rhodians follow the orientation of fellow Rhodian, and former Cranston native, Ted Berrigan.) Another such principle is that poetic autonomy is linked with a realist approach. Rhodians reject sceptical trends which question our ability to posit the existence of a real world outside our verbal formulations (even though Rhodians would like to reside on an island). Rhodians assert their ability to make true statements about the real world, and assent to the influence of that capability on their poetry. In fact Rhodians believe that the human impulse to respond to reality, in all its consciousness and specificity, is something of an artistic opportunity for which they can be grateful. Finally, the Rhodians reject theories of poetics which devalue the communicative function, reifying denatured words upon the page. For the Rhodians, language is essentially communicative - the propositional, interrogatory, evaluative, expressive making of signs. Within the continuum of such gestures, words play a combinatory and supportive role. So, while recognizing the special quality of language in art and poetry - the "focus on message" or reflexive aspect described by Jakobson - Rhodians acknowledge the fundamental semaphoric aspect of the medium.

Mandelstam's influence on my writing happens on several levels. He represents a figure of wholeness (Hebraic-Hellenic): a sort of psychopomp, as I've described in earlier posts here. Acmeism - the loose grouping of poets with which he was affiliated and whose poetics he helped define - emphasized, on the one hand, cultural continuity (M. once defined it as "longing for world culture"), and on the other hand, realism and craft - a celebration of this world as opposed to the other worlds of Symbolism.

But this "world culture" for Mandelstam was not, as some have assumed, rooted in traditionalism or conservatism. M's Acmeist "domestic hellenism" was a future-directed cultural norm, a kind of radiant humanism (see his "the gold coin of the future global humanism"). Poetry was rooted in this larger cultural continuity with Europe, with the ancient Mediterranean, and through them with the world at large.

I discovered that Mandelstam's world-view seemed to counterbalance some shortcomings in the great Moderns, Pound & Eliot & Williams & Stevens et al. All of them share points of affinity with Mandelstam and Acmeism, yet Pound's irascible fanaticism, Eliot's otherworldly pessimism & conservatism, the parochialism of some of the others, left me dissatisfied. Only Hart Crane (& Montale, & Joyce, & Proust) among those moderns, won as deep an assent - or as deep a sense of personal affinity - from me, as did Mandelstam. This sense of affinity had a lot to do with the approaches and trial runs I took in the late 80s and 90s around the long poem (or "poema", as they are called in Russia).

And in the mid-90s I was intrigued to discover that many of the Language poets had traveled to Russia about the same time I was discovering Mandelstam, and that their affinities lay more with the Russian Futurists of the early 20th century, and, among critics, the Russian Formalists, than with Acmeism. Futurism and Acmeism can be seen as dual, antithetical outgrowths from Symbolism. And it seemed curious to me that in the 2nd half of the 90s I was (at least in my own mind) replaying those rivalries (between acmeist continuity and postmodern futurism) in my debates with poets affiliated with Language Poetry and the NY School (in venues such as the Buffalo Poetics List).

I've written more about these things in a couple essays in Mudlark. I try to see my polemics as forming some sort of holistic world-view. The cultural continuity of Acmeism, I relate to the idea of a "tradition-at-large" within which oppositional, idiomatic styles subsist. And on a philosophical or spiritual level, I relate this tradition-at-large to what I see as the telos or purpose of poetry in general. In a philosophical sense, wholeness is the search for the Good, the whole of goodness or God - within which or whom all lesser, partial goods are absorbed. This is the ancient concept of philo-logos, the ordering principle of the wise or just person, Wisdom or Justice, which subsumes passion to the contemplation of the Good in itself, and seeks to reflect it in radiant good works.