MORE OBNOXIOUSNESS FROM THOMAS BRADY!

December 31, 2010 at 11:36 pm (Harriet, Scarriet, Tom Graves, Travis Nichols)

                                                                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                                                               In a book aptly titled Iowa, (the death star of foetry?) the following lines are proffered by the Blog Harriet bully and poet Travis Nichols:

His thin story happened then while coat and pant cuffs flapped around a step-father and half sister. The memories true or not against him seem to be turning to steam, as I turned, all the while thinking of chewing out alone eventually through the ghostly meats.

We’ve seen far better work scribbled extempore from our English Comp. students.  Does this pitiful poetry excerpt from Mr. Nichols explain his Harriet Blog bully behavior?  Are they related?

Of course they are.

When high becomes low and low becomes high,
Distinctions end and all’s one: beauty’s truth and the foul-smelling lie.

Today the reigning pedagogy is to aspire to a niceness that sees goodness and beauty in everything; the result is a universe created by the mind of David Hume, where bodily sensation and doubt are all that exist, where the old enchantments and the old heroics and the possibility for new enchantments and new heroics, fade away in a welter of darkness, despairing laughter and confusion.

Scientific truths do exist; the David Humes of the world have not done away with them, and self-pity and doubt is not my message even as I point out the sorry state of certain contemporary niceties of culture.   Travis Nichols’ wretched intellectual character is finally of no importance, nor does it finally matter how the Poetry Foundation chooses to run Blog Harriet, which seems to be successfully aping Ron Silliman’s cut-and-paste service at present.

Morals cannot finally be about morals, nor poetry about poetry.  All attempts at moral self-analysis (whether universal or local) are too little, too late, for doubt never leads to anything but more doubt; rising from the ashes is a better strategy than accepting partial criticism; if wrong is not entirely overthrown, that wrong only comes back stronger; it needs but one small doubt of its wrong to succeed.  Small exceptions bedevil every moral design, and their smallness is what allows them to ruin our chance for a heaven of happiness on earth, or in the poem.

So Plato was right to make beauty and the good the same in every aspect of mind and body; the good person can make bad poetry, for the good is more important than poetry at last, but just as true is that the bad person cannot make good poetry, and this is true not because poetry is important in itself, but only because poetry allows beauty and the good to separate for a moment, so that we know ourselves, which is to know happiness: for happiness is why the self, and the self’s ability to make poetry, exist.

Because poetry cannot finally be about poetry (and thus the cry, “it’s about the poetry,” when uttered, is always wrong); poetry exists as poetry only when it furthers the Good, i.e., the happiness of others.  The unhappy person cannot make others happy (unless they are making a divine sacrifice—good luck with that) and this is why Travis Nichols bullying others when Blog Harriet was a truly interactive blog (he chose to censor intelligent contributions based on his simplistic sense of ‘playing nice’) will translate into wretched poetry written by Travis Nichols. 

This is not a matter of morals so much as physics.  This is pure science, yet we still live in the dark ages in this respect, because we still believe bad people (or simplistically nice people) can write good poetry.  They cannot.

This is the great moral dilemma.  If bad people cannot write good poetry, how shall the bad person be made good, for only with poetry, in the sense Shelley meant: imaginatively going out of oneself and identifying with others, can a person be made good?  The answer is nothing the less than: the child must be given no chance to not become a poet, to not be imaginative.  There is no vocation that is not poetic, no training that should not be poetic.  Imagination, as Shelley understood, subsumes all.

And this is why Letters should be as free, open, uncensored, and democratic as possible;  why poets should not be allowed to hide behind their professional reputations any more than critics should be allowed to scorn behind a critical veneer; and why pedantry of a professional turn should never be allowed to censor, regulate, and proudly reject the amateur.  And this is not because everyone should be nice, or no one should have to wear, or not wear, shoes.  It is because the poetry is the method to be nice, and to know nice, just as unity and consistency are tests for truth.  Do biographies confute this?  Do great poets sometimes have foul reputations?  Check the reputation—it is most likely a lie.  If a great poet was deemed guilty of personal wrong, check the ‘wrong;’ was the poet wrong, or were the worldly opinons and actions of the poet’s surrounding accusers wrong—perhaps in ways not immediately known?  Or, if the poet is a vile person, check the poetry—is it really good?   Of course this throws us back upon a world of the uncertaintities of individually flawed judgments, which is precisely why we need to give those individual judgments as much freedom, as possible.

Systems and institutions act as gate-keepers to keep riff-raff out and royalty in, but what if the royalty are also riff-raff?  What if there’s no need for gate-keepers because the ‘gate’ no longer has any validity?   Even if we agree that private property is sacred and civil authority necessary, do we also agree that critical health in Letters requires the same sorts of safeguards?  Or not?  Do the necessary safeguards to property and civility also apply to poetry?  I would think not.  Why then, do so many poetry professionals, who are the first to clamor for revolutionary justice when it comes to issues of property and civil reform, put up walls when it comes to freedom of speech where they live?   It’s easy to pretend to ‘fight a system’ (the American capitalist one, for instance) when that system is so vast that the ‘fight’ is not finally having any affect at all, except verbally and abstractly.  But as soon as freedoms begin to rattle personal, aesthetic, and pedagogical windows of the actual place where the poetry professional lives, the ‘revolutionary avant-garde theorist’ quickly transforms from 1792 Wordsworth to 1845 Wordsworth, from revolutionary to conservative, and so conservativism forever reigns, from tradition to police ation to police action.  There’s always one side that needs another side put down.   The cause of this is easy to see, but difficult to change, because it relates to the cause itself, the ultimate failure—on all sides of the social, religious, politicial spectrum—of the imagination.  In our minds, the other side is always wrong. 

This is what we saw in 2010 at Blog Harriet and Silliman’s Blog:  Poetry professionals shut the door on speech.  

Scarriet may not have the clout of a Poetry Foundation or a Ron Silliman. 

But we’ll still be here, talking.

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WHAT THEY ALL WANTED

December 31, 2010 at 4:45 am (Thomas Graves)

Four guys know a girl,
Only one can have her—
She’s a sister to them all—
Each one her friend, her brother,
Yet all want to be her lover
Or smile still, or joke with her, or fall
Into hell, where fire flames up from every beauty in the world.

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A POEM IS A DELICIOUS SHUDDER OF DELIGHT

December 28, 2010 at 1:00 pm (Charles Olson, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, John Milton, William Carlos Williams)

A poem is not an organism.

A poem is not a field.

A poem is not language.

A poem is not breath.

A poem is not a letter to the world.

A poem is not a rhyme.

A poem is not an image.

A poem is not speech.

A poem is not song.

A poem is a delicious shudder of delight.

As Poe said,—and who better to explain brevity and poetry than someone named Poe?—a poem is brief and it elevates the soul.

 I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags — fails — a revulsion ensues — and then the poem is, in effect, and in fact, no longer such.

With these simple words, Poe dispels centuries of pedantic darkness.

It is always a painful process to root out ignorance in the popular mind, especially when it is habituated to certain comforting falsehoods; Poe goes right for the pain, testing his thesis in the jaws of Paradise Lost:

There are, no doubt, many who have found difficulty in reconciling the critical dictum that the “Paradise Lost” is to be devoutly admired throughout, with the absolute impossibility of maintaining for it, during perusal, the amount of enthusiasm which that critical dictum would demand. This great work, in fact, is to be regarded as poetical, only when, losing sight of that vital requisite in all works of Art, Unity, we view it merely as a series of minor poems. If, to preserve its Unity — its totality of effect or impression — we read it (as would be necessary) at a single sitting, the result is but a constant alternation of excitement and depression. After a passage of what we feel to be true poetry, there follows, inevitably, a passage of platitude which no critical pre-judgment can force us to admire; but if, upon completing the work, we read it again, omitting the first book — that is to say, commencing with the second — we shall be surprised at now finding that admirable which we before condemned — that damnable which we had previously so much admired. It follows from all this that the ultimate, aggregate, or absolute effect of even the best epic under the sun, is a nullity: — and this is precisely the fact.

Poe’s logic is air-tight.   The reader who reads a poem is performing a physical act, and this truth is all, really, that Poe is asserting, plus the notion that physicality has natural limits, which none can dispute.   Note that Poe is not making dubious claims re: the actual physical properties of the poem, and here Poe correctly limits the very thesis itself and does not err in the sense that Charles Olson (d. 1970) did, for instance: giving the quality of “a field” to the poem is to assert absolutely nothing, for a field can be measured, just as any physical object can be measured, but the physical measurement of a field and the physical measurement of a poem allign how?  They do not, and thus one can see at once that it is mere theoretical nonsense.  Poe again:

In regard to the Iliad, we have, if not positive proof, at least very good reason for believing it intended as a series of lyrics; but, granting the epic intention, I can say only that the work is based in an imperfect sense of art. The modern epic is, of the supposititious ancient model, but an inconsiderate and blindfold imitation. But the day of these artistic anomalies is over. If, at any time, any very long poem were popular in reality, which I doubt, it is at least clear that no very long poem will ever be popular again.

History has proven Poe correct: “no very long poem” has attained popularity in the century and a half since Poe wrote these words, and now we see that Pound and his followers, with their long poems*, were less modern (in the actual sense of that word) than Poe; it was Pound, not Poe, who fell into “inconsiderate and blindfold imitation.”   One looks about for an epic by popular poets Robert Frost, Edna Millay, Philip Larkin, T.S. Eliot, Mary Oliver, or Billy Collins and finds none.  One of the many reasons is: the poetry anthology is the mode of poetic popularity and no epic will fit in it.  Another historical test of Poe’s theory is this: the novel is one of the great modern pastimes of the human heart and yet, despite trillions of novel-reading hours, no long poem during this time has emerged as a popular work in the vast reaches of this fiction-reading pursuit.  The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth may be the one slight exception, but it is more a wonderful oddity than a truly popular work.  Why no modern, best-loved long poems?

The core of Poe’s idea (duration) makes it an absolute rock of common sense, impossible to refute.    He follows out the implication of the central idea with genius-like simplicity:

It is to be hoped that common sense, in the time to come, will prefer deciding upon a work of Art, rather by the impression it makes — by the effect it produces — than by the time it took to impress the effect, or by the amount of “sustained effort” which had been found necessary in effecting the impression. The fact is, that perseverance is one thing and genius quite another — nor can all the Quarterlies in Christendom confound them.

On the other hand, it is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax. De Béranger has wrought innumerable things, pungent and spirit-stirring; but, in general, they have been too imponderous to stamp themselves deeply into the public attention; and thus, as so many feathers of fancy, have been blown aloft only to be whistled down the wind.

The little poem by W.C. Williams called the “The Red Wheel Barrow” is a brief poem that has made a certain lasting impression on the public taste, but this proves nothing except that such a strong pull had been created by undue length and heavy-handed pedantry—persisted in by the pedants against Poe’s wisdom for such a long time—that “The Red Wheel Barrow” was, and is, a mere physical counter to this pull, lacking poetic qualities in itself; and we should also remember that this little poem was first heralded by the triumphant textbook Understanding Poetry, and has been pushed on students (anxious to do as little work as possible) in the schools and thus took root in a pedantic atmosphere at first, not in the popular mind.

The rush of excitement exists in the reader, not anywhere in the poem, and academic attempts to resolve the poem based on New Critical principles is a blind endeavor compounding error with error; the shift from New Critical thinking to various experiments have only made the problem worse, since these experiments keep following the poem as it disappears down the hole of its own physicality. 

The poetic problem must be constantly approached from two directions: transitory excitement engendered in the reader and physical adjustment in response to that excitement in the act of composition, with the act of composition and the act of excitement feeding one another in a process that never rests in any sort of field or vehicle or receptacle that can be quantified except in the mind of the poet—a mind which balances a vast quantity of impressions and expressions in a combining process too rapid and complex for an outside observer to follow.

The brute fact of duration is the only quantitative measure possible in poetry according to Poe’s instinctive genius, and so far, in terms of poetry as a popular art, this remains as true today—despite a great deal of modernist avant-garde hoopla—as it was when Poe published the first modern poetry essay in 1849, the final year of his life. 

 * I refer to Pound’s Cantos, Olson’s Maximus Poems, Williams’ Paterson, Zukovsky’s “A” among others.  Of course, it could be argued that these works were not intended by their authors to be long poems, but rather ”a series of lyrics” (in Poe’s words) which is probably true, but if so, this hardly refutes Poe’s thesis.

 

 

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THE MODERN POET’S DILEMMA

December 26, 2010 at 3:23 pm (Boston Globe, Longfellow, New York Times, Sharon Olds, Ted Kooser)

The poet today is in a real pickle. 

The newspaperman doesn’t trust him. 

The newspaperman once appealed to the brain, and the poet, to the heart.  But today the journalist is as emotional and big-hearted as the poet once was, while the poet, now trained in the university and too sophisticated to ever write heart-felt verses again, is perceived by the general public to be all brain, and no heart. 

But is the brain really the poet’s realm today?   I think even the most disinterested Language Poet in a lab coat would retort, if pressed on the matter, “if you prick us, do we not bleed?”  And God knows, the Ted Koosers and Sharon Olds of the world sing to the heart.  

But in social reality (to which the poet surely belongs) perecption is reality, and the university-trained poet is brainy in the eyes of the general public.  Even Ted Kooser and Sharon Olds are smart compared to your typical, heart-felt journalist.   (It helps, of course, to be known as ‘Billy.’)

It’s true that during the holiday season, newspapers tug at the heart-strings more than usual, but it’s every poet’s duty to recognize just how much the print media (which competes with the poet, whether we want to admit it, or not) indulges in stories of emotional realism. 

Longfellow-ism drives the journalist, even in places like the New York Times and the Boston Globe; though every reader knows no journalist is a Longfellow, no weaver of magic words and words’ sounds. 

But then, neither is the poet.

The journalist goes for sentimental dreck and deceptive rhetoric at every turn.  If there’s a dramatic, sentimental angle to be exploited, every journalist, no matter how sophisticated, will go for it every time: the politician drinking with the pub’s owner, the the tears of the widow, the joy of the birth…be human the editor keeps saying.  “Fear of Unrest Grows” is the favorite phrase of the highly emotional newspaper; the fact of unrest does not exist, but that doesn’t stop the passionate newspaperman from writing in large letters: FEAR OF UNREST GROWS.

But if the newspaper trades in Longfellow-ism, wouldn’t the editor be sympathetic to the poet and celebrate poetry?    No, because here’s the rub: the editor may be all heart, but the time-honored tradition of reporting the world’s events to the world still lingers, and this requires—at least in the proud heart of the editor—brains, acumen, and objectivity.   It doesn’t matter that newspapers are purveyors of sloppy language and emotionalism; they wish to be perceived as smart, too, and in this insecure area, the poets, no longer Longfellows, but profound, MFA-trained experts in esoteric matters of language and expression, are rivals, not friends of the newspaperman.

Newspapers still believe in truth, although they convey little of it.

Respectable and distinguished poets no longer believe in Longfellow, and thus in a climate of tradition and passion which surrounds them everywhere, and without any actual scientific credentials, and yet radiating brainy expert-ism, the poets have no friends, and nowhere to go.

And so: FEAR OF POETRY IS GROWING.

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THE ROMANTIC EAR

December 25, 2010 at 7:37 pm (Thomas Brady)

I write for the love of the modern eye:
It just looks at me; it doesn’t blink or cry.
Then night falls.  There’s only darkness here.
Now she speaks in love’s tones to me
Secretly; gently and confidently
I talk to the romantic ear.

Turn the lights on.  Do you know why
It’s important to look, to never blink or cry?
Observing all, what is there to fear?
Those tones of love now seem trite;
What was it we said in the night?
What was it we needed to hear?

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READING WALLACE STEVENS IS LIKE…

December 23, 2010 at 10:37 pm (Charles Bernstein, Dante, Edgar Allan Poe, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, T.S.Eliot, W.H.Auden, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth)

Here’s how the game works.  

Let’s start with Homer. 

Reading Homer is like... You are 22.  It is mid-summer.  You are playing the board game Risk with young and old family members, drinking ouzo, eating lamb on a large, open-air porch.

Reading Wallace Stevens is like…You are 60.  It is fall.  You are squeezed into a little uptown Manhattan jazz club, slightly buzzed, but hungry.  An elegant stranger looks you up and down and it seems they are going to speak to you, but they only end up giving you a snooty look, and turn away…

Reading John Ashbery is like…You are 20.  You are talking to your favorite English teacher in a bar who you happened to run into by accident, for the first time outside of school.  You are drunk on 2 drinks; he seems sober on 12.  He’s really cool, and he sure can talk, but you keep waiting for him to get to the point…

Reading W.H. Auden is like…You are 36,  It is early spring.  You are listening to a trio play Vivaldi in a museum.  Your amusing friend has excused himself and they’ve been gone for quite some, and you’re a little worried.

Reading Poe is like…You are 9.  It’s late winter.  You are drawing a vase of lilacs early in the morning before anyone else is up, and you’re doing a crossword puzzle at the same time.

Reading T.S. Eliot is like…  You are 17.  It is autumn.  You are rowing across a lake in a rowboat, wearing a suit; a slightly older person in a stylish hat is with you.  You are afraid they don’t love you.

Reading Frank O’Hara is like…  You are 29.  It is spring.  You are playing poker at a drunken party for high stakes and you are winning.  You ask somebody please put another record on the phonograph.

Reading Philip Larkin is like…  You are 49.  It is spring.  You are purchasing a ticket at a railway station.  You have just had a nice meal, with drinks before and after.

Reading WC Williams is like…  It is mid-winter.  You are 99, and staring at yourself in the mirror.

Reading Wordsworth is like… You are 12.  It is late summer. You are playing hide and seek with your younger cousins in the woods.  You are tired of looking.  Everyone, it seems, is gone.  It is starting to rain.

Reading Dante is like….You’re 31.  It is the beginning of spring.  You are at a  rap concert, but you hate the music.  Your beautiful date, it is obvious, dislikes the music, too.  You finally discuss this in the lobby. You both stay.  You don’t know where else to go. 

Reading Charles Bernstein is like… You’re 2.  It is winter.  You are indoors, where it is quite warm. You are hitting your sister, 1, with a scrabble board.

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MONKEY, BERNSTEIN, TO ROBBINS, OFFICIAL DEFENDER OF TRUE POETRY: “US MONKEYS ARE ON A ROLL”

December 21, 2010 at 6:27 pm (Charles Bernstein, John Ashbery, Michael Robbins)

Don’t ever call me a monkey, again, Michael Robbins, you mere doctoral candidate!  Official verse culture clone!  Bad!  Bad!  Bad!

Shit Fight!

Anis Shivani’s latest Huffington Post offering, The Most Important Contemporary Poet: 22 Major American Poets Speak Out is mostly predictable, but we do seem to be moving into a 1930s zeitgeist; the choices of “most important contemporary poet” were white, male, dead, or nearly so, and foreign+ politically grim (one-half) and avant-garde (one-third) as a rule, with a smattering of High Modernist and Beat. Ashbery was not an overwhelming choice by any means (there was no consensus on a poet), but he got the most votes. 

Billy Collins, Mary Oliver and Seamus Heaney did not get a mention: not enough avant-garde or political identity in those poets?

There was the usual complaint of ”no one poet is best..!” which is the worst cliche’ of all, or perhaps it’s this one, which was seen, too: girl picks girl, queer picks queer, midwesterner picks midwesterner…

One entry was deliciously catty, and thus by far the most worthwhile.  Anything is better than forever dull platitudes of avant-garde or grim.

We speak, of course, of Charles Bernstein’s wacky contribution:

Poetry’s greatest asset may be its unimportance. Which means that what counts as important in poetry is, for much of the culture, unwanted, unwarranted, weirdness, what I call the pataque(e)rical. Even monkeys can do it, or so The London Review of Books, official organ of the Defenders of True Poetry against Barbarians (PAB) tells us in a pronouncement by UChicago supplicant, doctoral candidate Michael Robbins, who proclaims, from his uncontested pulpit (no letter protested) that what folks like me hold as the greatest importance for poetry is the work of nothing more than monkeys (Sept. 9, 2010). Us monkeys are on a roll: you hear it everywhere from LRB’s England from Tom Raworth, Maggie O’Sullivan, Allen Fisher, and Caroline Bergvall to the New England of Susan Howe (whose forthcoming That This from New Directions is extraordinary) and Larry Eigner. Eigner, born “palsied from a hard birth,” has a new Collected Poems, ed. Robert Grenier & Curtis Faville (Stanford) that is one of the most, well, important books of the decade. Eigner’s work is miraculous, turning insurmountable odds into poetic gold while never losing the truths of insignificance. As he ends a 1953 poem, “I am, finally, an incompetent after all.”

Is it just me, or is Bernstein self-destroying?  It has to be the influence of Emerson and Whitman, self-evidently absorbed by Bernstein as a young student: Do I contradict myself oh yes I do and I am so cute!   Bernstein champions the marginal, and yet when he becomes irate at Michael Robbins the cut comes in the form of snobby condescension: Bernstein’s premeditated attack on Robbins consists of pointing out that Robbins is a doctoral candidate.  How does Bernstein think he can swoon over Eigner’s “incompetence” and be believed (I don’t believe him for one second) when almost simultaneously he sneers at a fellow poet-critic for being a doctoral candidate?  I’m amused at how Bernstein can lead Eigner up on stage for the purpose of honoring Eigner when the stage is covered in Bernstein’s own poop—tossed at fellow human, Michael Robbins. 

And what’s this about “LRB’s England?”  Is Bernstein really imagining a war between England’s London Review of Books and the true England, with Bernstein and his obscure English poetry friends vanquishing “LRB’s England” (in league with the evil UChicao doctoral candidate Michael Robbins) under the banner of Not-LRB’s England? 

Yea, it sure sounds like Bernstein’s “monkeys” are “on a roll…”  uh huh! 

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PURE AND IMPURE POETRY: THE NEW CRITICS’ LAST HURRAH

December 20, 2010 at 6:13 pm (Charles Bernstein, John Crowe Ransom, Modernism, Robert Penn Warren, Ron Silliman, Stephen Burt, T.S.Eliot)

Because our loyal Scarriet readers do not have the attention span of rabbits, we thought we’d tax their intelligence and patience with further investigation of Robert Penn Warren’s monumental—but now forgotten (except, secretly, by Stephen Burt)—1943 Kenyon Review essay, Pure and Impure Poetry.

In the 1930s, Robert Penn Warren contributed a pro-segregation essay to New Critic John Crowe Ransom’s Southern Agrarian group’s  I’ll Take My Stand, co-founded The Southern Review (with New Critic Cleanth Brooks) and co-authored (with Cleanth Brooks) the textbook Understanding Poetry, which lasted 4 editions (1974), was the college textbook on poetry for two generations, including the GIs who flooded the universities after the war, and, according to Ron Silliman, was “the hegemonic poetry textbook of the period.”

In the 1940s, when Pure and Impure Poetry was published in John Crowe Ransom’s journal, Robert Penn Warren won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, published his  Selected Poems, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States.

In the 1950s, Robert Penn Warren’s daughter, the poet and professor, Rosanna Warren, was born, he recanted his segregationist views in Life magazine, and he won the Pulitzer for Poetry, becoming the only person to win the Pulitzer in both Fiction and Poetry.

Pure and Impure Poetry is a window into both the triumph and the last gasp of Modernism, as it cuts off Romanticism’s head (resembling from one angle, Poe, and another, Shelley, and from still another, Bryon) holds it aloft, and cries, “Vive le T.S. Eliot!” The essay finishes what Eliot and Pound had started, as Robert Penn Warren declares with absolute certainty: “the greatness of a poet depends upon the extent of the area of experience that he can master poetically.”

The practice of extending the area of experience that he can master poetically is the final nail in the coffin to poets like Poe who excluded all sorts of things from poetry.

Despite Pure and Impure Poetry’s long and detailed arguments, this is all that Robert Penn Warren is saying: poetry can be anything, and this is the Modernist victory.  Penn Warren sneers at Shelley’s brief lyric “The Indian Serenade,” (selected for cursory praise by Poe a hundred years earlier in his The Poetic Principle) after Penn Warren discusses how Shakespeare has the worldly Mercutio sneer at Romeo’s romantic attitude in Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare’s poetry, as beautiful as it sometimes was, wasn’t pure, so, Penn Warren asks, why should any poetry be pure?  Why Penn Warren clubs Shelley’s brief lyric with an entire play by Shakespeare is not to be questioned, for it is all part of the blood lust and slaughter of Romanticism, in which every dactylic gasp by Shelley is mocked with the ferocity of those who escape the anxiety of an unfaithful mate by deconstructing the problem into ”dey all bitches.”

As we all know, Modernism’s little band did win in the century that saw the British Empire transform itself into an American one, (almost in the moment Pure and Impure Poetry was published—1943 a rubble-moment in Europe’s history) but it was a pyrrhic victory: for Penn Warren kills, but kills in Poe’s terms and on Poe’s turf.

Here, in the essay, Penn Warren quotes T.S. Eliot:

The chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be (for here again I am speaking of some kinds of poetry and not all) to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog.

Lovely.  (Sigh)   Criticism as lovely as a poem.  Remember when that used to be a regular occurance?   Penn Warren, like a panting lover in one of Shelley’s poems, eagerly follows the trail.  But look what happens:

Here, it would seem, Mr. Eliot has simply inverted the old sugar-coated pill theory: the idea becomes the sugar-coating and the “poetry” becomes the medicine. This seems to say that the idea in a poem does not participate in the poetic effect and seems to commit Mr. Eliot to a theory of pure poetry.

Robert Penn Warren finds himself in Poe’s cul-de-sac, for listen to the language: Penn Warren talks of Poe’s ”poetic effect!”

Robert Penn Warren and the Modernists expand the definition of poetry to include everything, but they keep using the word “poetry;” thus they effectively doom themselves to wander in an old-fashioned wilderness.

Everyone knows art requires focus, and Poe and Shelley wrote memorable poetry while Robert Penn Warren and his heirs did not—because of their intellectualized de-focusing.

The post-Modernists and Language Poets likewise attempt to get beyond the Modernists (Charles Bernstein would never be caught dead uttering such phrases as “poetic effect” or “pure poetry”) only to die in the same way, and, like Penn Warren, they don’t realize their dilemma.


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FAKE IT NEW: BURT DID NOT COIN ELLIPTICAL POETRY

December 18, 2010 at 3:47 am (Frederick Pottle, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Stephen Burt)

Stephen Burt’s ”incoherent self:” doesn’t realize he’s a New Critic

WIKIPEDIA: Elliptical Poetry or ellipticism is a literary-critical term introduced by critic Stephen Burt in a 1998 essay in Boston Review on Susan Wheeler, and expanded upon in an eponymous essay in American Letters & Commentary.

Uh…no.   Robert Penn Warren, (with whom we trust Professor Burt is familiar) in an essay published in John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon Review, “Pure and Impure Poetry,”  (Spring 1943 issue) writes:

“In a recent book, The Idiom of Poetry, Frederick Pottle has discussed the question of pure poetry.  He distinguishes another type of pure poetry, in addition to the types already mentioned.  He calls it the “Elliptical,” and would include in it symbolist and metaphysical poetry (old and new) and some work by poets Collins, Blake, and Browning.”

In po-biz, new is the new stupid. 

The last century of American Letters has witnessed ‘the new’ as the last refuge of the scoundrel poet.  If one doesn’t know anything, trumpet ‘the new’ as much as possible, and with a few pals, equally bereft, on one’s side, anything is possible.

Not only is Burt guilty of outright theft, but the “Elliptical” of Robert Penn Warren’s essay is scientific (no irony intended) compared to Burt’s razzle-dazzle new-speak. 

Burt, unable to cook anything, merely makes a mess in the kitchen, throwing in every ingredient he can find.   Here is Burt in his infamous 1998 essay:

“Elliptical poets try to manifest a person—who speaks the poem and reflects the poet—while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. They are post-avant-gardist, or post-’postmodern’: they have read (most of them) Stein’s heirs, and the ‘language writers,’ and have chosen to do otherwise. Elliptical poems shift drastically between low (or slangy) and high (or naively ‘poetic’) diction. Some are lists of phrases beginning ‘I am an X, I am a Y.’ Ellipticism’s favorite established poets are Dickinson, Berryman, Ashbery, and/or Auden; Wheeler draws on all four. The poets tell almost-stories, or almost-obscured ones. They are sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, or desperate; they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television.”

Note professor Burt’s lack of rigor, vaguely wrapping himself around the new:

“Elliptical poets try to manifest a person—who speaks the poem and reflects the poet—while using all the verbo gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves.”  —Burt

Is it the speaking or the selves which have their coherence undermined, and why do they have an undermined coherence?   Let Mr. Burt answer at once, since he obviously knows.  And how can one undermine something before it exists?  If one is not skilled enough, in a poem, to produce a coherent speaking self (is it so easy?) how do we know it has been undermined?  Anyone can point to a sociological theory which mourns the vanished self, but the poem is not a theory, unfortunately for Burt’s elliptical poets.

“Elliptical poems shift drastically between low (or slangy) and high (or naively ‘poetic’) diction.  —Burt

Has Burt never read the Roman poets?  They did this constantly.  Come to think of it, the majority of poets, ancient to present, alternate between low and high diction.

“…they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television.”
—Burt

It’s comforting to know the poets don’t “resemble television”…

Burt’s murky, gizmo-rhetoric would have been laughed out of the pages of the Kenyon Review, when Ransom was editor, and the New Critics were contribuing articles.

In contrast to the gee-whiz rhetoric of Stephen Burt, we have the acumen of Robert Penn Warren:

“Poe would kick out the ideas because the ideas hurt the poetry, and Mr. [Max] Eastman would kick out the ideas because the poetry hurts the ideas.”

The concept is actually interchangeable—Poe also thought, like Eastman, that “poetry hurts the ideas.”  Poe was explicit on this point.  At least with Penn Warren, however, there is a concept.  Burt is babble.  He has no point.  But my point here is not to agree with Penn Warren, but to expose Burt’s blatant theft.

Robert Penn Warren from his 1943 essay again:

“Then Elliptical Poetry is not, as Mr. Pottle say it is, a pure poetry at all if we regard intention; the elliptical poet is elliptical for purposes of inclusion, not exlusion.”

This is no quibble over a word, either.  In his 1943 essay, Penn Warren’s definition of elliptical poetry is exactly the same as Burt’s 1998 review.  Here is Penn Warren:

“Poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not.  At least, most of them do not want to be too pure.  The poems want to give us poetry, which is pure, and elements of a poem, in so far as it is a good poem, will work together toward that end, but many of the elements, taken in themselves, may actually seem to contradict that end, or be neutral toward the achieving of that end.  Are we then to conclude that, because neutral or recalcitrant elements appear in poems, even in poems called great, these elements are simply an index to human frailty, that in a perfect world there would be no dross in poems which would, then, be perfectly pure?  No, it does not seem to be merely the fault of our world, for the poems include, deliberately, more of the so-called dross than would appear necessary.  They are not even as pure as they might be in an imperfect world.  They mar themselves with cacophonies, jagged rhythms, ugly words and ugly thoughts, colloquialisms, cliches, sterile technical terms, head work and argument, self-contradiction, cleverness, irony, realism—all things which call us back to the world of prose and imperfection.” 

And Penn Warren, again:

“Then the question arises: what elements cannot be used in such a structure?  I should answer that nothing available in human experience is to be legislated out of poetry.”

Burt posits a return of a “person” who “speaks the poem” while  simultaneously using  “gizmos, developed over the last few decades,” of “Stein’s heirs” and “language writers:” Burt blindly stumbles back over the same ground to the New Critics, who were, as we see with Robert Penn Warren’s 70-year-old-essay, already allowing the widest possible field to the “speaking” of a “poem.”

 It’s time for Philosophy and History to kick New-Speak off its throne.

[Are we "going after Burt" or just giving Pottle and Penn Warren credit where credit is due?]

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PLAYING AT POET

December 16, 2010 at 3:31 am (Anis Shivani, Campbell McGrath, Wallace Stevens, Wayne Miller, William Carlos Williams)

Get over him, already!

Scarriet readers know how effortlessly I crank out my diatribes against Modernism, and I think it’s beginning to have an effect. I sense out there a new defensiveness when it comes to the High Moderns; not that poets are finally turning their backs on them—they are much too stupid to do that—but I sense a growing panic as they realize: Modernism is a parent, that despite all my obscure and ribald post-modernism, I’ll never out-perform, and I’ll never escape.  

The panic is probably for two reasons: First, it’s the twenty-first century and the Modernists grew up in the 19th.  So it’s a simple matter of time marching on.   If the Modernist legacy is to plough new ground, why is the “new ground” overrun with William Carlos Williams [1883-1963]  Condo Developments?   

Second, such reactionary dogs as Dana Gioia and William Logan hold aloft the Age of High Modernism as the Golden Age.  And then you’ve got Scarriet harping on the ugly political aspects of the Modernists.

But the biggest reason might be this one: What’s so special about the Modernists, really?  Shouldn’t readers of poetry—and not just a handful of historians and scholars—enjoy poetry of all ages?  Do we need our poetry to remind us on the hour that we live in the “m-o-d-e-r-n age?”  When push  comes to shove, why should a William Carlos Williams poem, for instance, have more meaning for us than a poem from any other era?  Have we ever stopped to really think about this?  Is Wallace Stevens necessary for us to walk away with a more profound philosophical understanding of the world?  Come on.  Really?  What exactly is this philosophy that hasn’t been articulated before by numerous other poets and philosophers?   It would be one thing if the ideas of Wallace Stevens were part of a public debate, so that it would behoove us to join it, for that reason, but this is not the case.  His ideas are obscure.  Are any of the so-called High Modernists significant due to the timelessness and significance of their ideas?   Po-biz has invested a great deal of intellectual capital in “Make it New!”   Even if this were not uttered 100 years ago now—what does it mean?  

Rapid-fire commentary characterizes po-biz talk, but there’s little real thinking.  

What of ideas like Eliot’s “objective correlative?”   Here’s a “high-modernist” concept, but interestingly enough, it applies to centuries of literary history, of which, because we’re ardent “modernists,” we are now ignorant.  

Eliot and the New Critics did make some interesting criticism regarding “pure and impure” poetry (an essay by Robert Penn Warren by that name, for instance, is neglected but brilliant) and as intellectuals like Ransom and Tate came to terms with what Eliot had done in The Sacred Wood, a lively and intelligent socio-aesthetics was born, even among these rabid haters of the Romantics. 

But the Beats were finally too sexy for the New Critics, and the Creative Writing Programs too profitable for disinterested Criticism.

Today’s po-biz commentators, even though they can smell rot, only talk in sound-bites.  The Romantics could argue, the Romantics could philosophize.  (Who actually reads Byron, anymore?  We don’t even know what Romanticism is, much less Classicism.)  

Philosophy?  A real sympathetic, historical perspective?  In Po-biz today?  Nope.   The Modernists, and we, their heirs, are all mysticism, symbol, and easy advice.

Take, for example, the latest from Huff Post’s Anis Shivani’s Modernism debate:

“Finally, I’ll risk restating the obvious by venturing that there’s only one useful piece of advice for any young writer: write. Pay no attention to the state of American poetry, the death of the book, the legacy of Modernism, the bedbugs in your cheap apartment: ignore as much as you possibly can get away with and write. Resist the careerist temptations of PoBiz. Stay home and write a poem. There is no particular place to get to in Poetry Land, anyway. The point of the journey is the journey itself, the process of writing poetry, which hopefully you consider enriching and indispensable. If not, spare yourself a lot of grief. Go back to that fork in the yellow woods, watch out for ATVs driven by gun-toting meth-heads, and pick another road.”

—Campbell McGrath

Ignore as much as you possibly can?   Stay at home and write?   The point of the journey is the journey itself? 

Imagine your typical college freshman today: angry, confused, depressed, bereft of history, philosophy, culture, has never been to a museum, has never read Plato, or any literature before 1920, knows only the shallowest pop culture, the shallowest ethics, and this is Campbell McGrath’s advice?  Stay at home and write?  Are you fucking kidding me?

Or, this one:

“The legacy of Modernism is alive and well–though, frankly, it’s so broad as to be pretty much unbetrayable. After all, the Language poets and Philip Levine both envision their work as building on William Carlos Williams. Robert Bly thought “Deep Image” poetry was a return to true Imagism, yet Ron Silliman lumps Bly and James Wright with many of the “academic” and Confessional poets Bly excoriated in The Fifties.

All poetry lives somewhere on a spectrum between Classicism and Romanticism. If high Modernists such as Eliot, Pound, and Moore tilt toward the Classical side, and the Confessional and Beat poets inhabit the Romantic, then we’ve more or less marked the boundaries of the Modernist legacy. But that gives us quite an aesthetic and intellectual range to play around in.

Many American poets frustrated by 1980s post-Confessionalism–which leaned largely on personal narrative and ad misericordium for its effects–have turned back to the high Modernists, Objectivists, and New York School to balance out a poetic that was, in the end, too baldly Romantic. Sometimes this turn has produced new work that’s mechanical, emotionally flat, or unparsable–but that doesn’t negate the fact that this rebalancing is mostly a good move, one that’s hardly a betrayal of Modernism. Indeed, it’s a backward turn similar to Eliot’s when he exalted the Metaphysical poets over the Victorians and Romantics.”   

 —Wayne Miller

The term “classical” gets thrown around an awful lot these days in a vague, yet extremely self-congratulatory manner.   As if applying this label to Ezra Loomis Pound and Miss Moore (!!) somehow lets us off the hook for the roaring ignorance of 99% of literary history.  The Titan Moderns, half-Classical, half-Romantic, stride the ages, trampling the pygmies and dwarfs who chirped in Athens, tweedled in Rome, and squeaked during the Renaissance. 

And thank goodness for the restorative Objectivists and the balancing act of the New York School!

This isn’t poetry we’re doing today.  This is playing at it.  All of us.  We should be ashamed. 

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