Scarriet

As editor and chief writer of Scarriet (a daily, original, literary culture magazine 2009 to the present) I often feel the burden of knowing so much more than others. I am lonely because no one of any influence is privileged to know what I know. Poe’s murder. The identity of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. The origins of the Creative Writing industry. The true nature of Modernism. Government and Letters. Obscenity’s influence on literary reputation. Why poetry sucks now. The dirty truth and philosophy of so many cultural exercises.

Does every obscure poet and editor (all 340 million of them) feel the same as I do—trapped by limits of audience and knowledge? Is my sad boast merely the nature of the dye I work in?

I may as well quote here from a work few know—The Burden of the Past and the English Poet by prize-winning critic, W. Jackson Bate, published about a year prior to Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (they were both at Yale). Here’s how this obscure book begins:

~~OUR subject could be expressed by a remark Samuel Johnson quotes from Pliny in one of the Rambler essays (No. 86): “The burthen of government is increased upon princes by the virtues of their immediate predecessor.” And Johnson goes on to add: “It is, indeed, always dangerous to be placed in a state of unavoidable comparison with excellence, and the danger is still greater when that excellence is consecrated by death…He that succeeds a celebrated writer, has the same difficulties to encounter.” That word “dangerous” deserves a moment’s reflection. In its original, rather ominous sense, it means “having lost one’s freedom,” having become “dominated” and turned into the position of a household thrall: being placed in jeopardy, subjected to the tyranny of something outside one’s own control as a free agent. A cognate is our word “dungeon.”

I have often wondered whether we could find any more comprehensive way of taking up the whole of English poetry during the last three centuries—or for that matter the modern history of the arts in general—than by exploring the effects of this accumulating anxiety and the question it so directly presents to the poet or artist: What is there left to do?~~

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Shakespeare was not only a poet, but wrote plays which are the greatest of their kind—and are constantly performed to this day. The 19th century German poet Goethe felt sorry for English-speaking poets—who had to toil under Shakespeare’s shadow.

The feeling of hopelessness in view of all that has been done before is not new—it was expressed by the Ancients, and more recently by William Hazlitt (1778-1830) in a brief essay on Coleridge:

“The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements. The accumulation of knowledge has been so great, that we are lost in wonder at the height it has reached… What niche remains unoccupied? What path untried? What is the use of doing anything, unless we could do better than all those who have gone before us? What hope is there of this?”

Such talk from a previous age should rather make us smile than take the complaint seriously. In letters, science, and technology we continued to advance—Poe and Wilde and Joyce were still to come, despite Hazlitt’s “anxiety.” But recently? Is it petulant to say that in the 21st century we are regressing? That things look pretty hopeless for poetry?

There’s some success in English-speaking Letters. Go to Twitter: “My 3 latest poems accepted by the ____ Review!” “Wrote an essay after 2 year writing block! Wine and cake tonite!” “I was just made full professor!” Etc

There are backyard gatherings, bar readings, zoom conferences.

Yes, there is “success” in Letters today, God help us.

Ambition, combined with the polite (and cake,) hide so much.

I picked up a recent volume of poetry—“14 International Younger Poets”—which I reviewed not too long ago, (meanwhile, Art and Letters press, which enthusiastically chose, published, and supported the 14 poets, has folded) and it forced me to reflect on my review. I don’t think any of my judgments were wrong. I singled out Blake Campbell’s work as the best that I saw, but praised everyone. I pressed the idea that rhythm was poetry’s most important element—(poetry asserts itself not against prose but the static picture.) Fair enough, I think. Campbell rhymes consistently and when you rhyme, you foreground your rhythm—it’s impossible not to do so when we rhyme—oh exquisite risk! part of what some feel (wrongly?) is the only genuine poetry.

Is this not always the difficulty of the world? You try telling the truth of 14 young poetic reputations through the prism of What is poetry? What is good? How will I be honest and not offend?

Now that the excitement of the 14 International Younger Poets anthology publication has passed, and the responses (or lack of them) have been heard, is it OK for me to wonder how good, really, are these 14 poets? And more importantly, because poems are always doors to something else, how good is contemporary poetry? And what’s going on with it?

How many are wise without long hours of reflection and study?

Those fortunate enough to freely ponder at length include younger poets not tied to youthful folly—sensitive, well-read, they burn in college libraries, or in a quiet place at home, to break through, to be real poets.

Read the millions (if you can) of poems published these days: poem after poem like a team filled with great players—who never win pennants.

In their parts, contemporary poems are better than Tennyson and Shakespeare: word-play, worldly interest, sound-resemblance, syntax, rhythm, dictionary-muscle, sentiment, they’ve got it all. In terms of bat-speed, pitching accuracy, base-runninng, fielding savvy, these athletes can hit and run down metaphors and rhymes as well as anyone.

Individual poetic parts may be better historically than they have ever been.

Here’s a poem from one of the 14 international poets, “My Mother’s Brain:”

The shrub billows and glows in heat.
Monkey shadows lead me on to an
Unremembered line in my mind.
Ferns swivel as if they’ve been
Forgiven by you, everything has
Been forgiven by you, even god,
And every word I will ever write to get
To what you don’t want to remember.
For the longest time whenever anyone
Muttered mother I only heard murder.
When I stepped out of the hospital
That day into the light, I was like
A scalpel held against air’s throat.
I had become dangerous,
From then on forever looking
For what they had removed to resurrect you.
What was the truce made, I ask you time,
What truth of her did you take for
You to resume your flow?
Mother of thought lost to eternity,
I look at the fallen peaches;
Bruised, opened, making me
Drunk with their scent.
Overgrown, flourishing with weeds,
The valley seems impatient to help
Me fall toward it. Small birds make
A line at the mouth of the gutter
Rushing with rain water.
Crowds clamor to see the view,
The unbearable beauty of the rest
Of the world renewed each time
By what you will never utter.

This is the first poem which greets the reader in 14 International Younger Poets (by Avinab Datta-Areng) and perhaps the best in the entire volume.

And yet… If one flips forward into the book, this is pretty much how everyone writes—this style, a style able to eclipse theme, meter, and every other peculiarity—a strong template.

One can see great individual parts thronging forth.

But the poetic parts never seem to add up to Tennyson or Shakespeare. Or, it might be said, there is too much addition for it to shine forth as clearly as Tennyson or Shakespeare. Yet it seems as rich, in general, as Tennyson or Shakespeare.

We haven’t had a “To be or not to be” or “And after many a summer dies the swan” since, well, “To be or not to be” or “And after many a summer dies the swan.”

Nor an iconic poem vastly popular, like “The Raven” or “The Ancient Mariner.” (“Howl” doesn’t count because its fame sprung from an obscenity trial. Nor “Daddy,” the notoriety of which is wrapped up in a suicide.)

Why?

Is it merely because poems are no longer put on pedestals? There’s no textbook taught to all the kids which makes the latest genius like Datta-Areng famous and familiar? There’s no physical center? Every lovely light is local now?

Or is it simply that the formula to write the really great poem has been lost?

The poets today, as good as they are, in terms of pure, practical method, are doing something wrong. Is this it? Come on, people, it’s been decades since Frost died.

Let’s drop our vanity for a minute. Is this it? The poets are doing something wrong. Either a poetic secret, or something so obvious that we all miss it, is eluding us.

Bear with me. I’m just thinking out loud.

I don’t think it’s because Tennyson is a dead white male and we no longer want to write like a dead white male—the Tennysonian home run hit by a non-binary black would be welcomed by the eclectic “poetry world” just the same; the style and subject could be wildly different; we just want the home run. We want to see the home run. Why can’t we?

Don’t make me quote Casey Stengel.

“Can’t anybody here play this game?” “Finding good players is easy. Getting them to play as a team is another story.”

Good players are everywhere. The 14 poets of the Art and Letters anthology, edited by Philip Nikolayev, which I’m revisiting here, are all good.

I recently found a new favorite excerpt in the volume. The poet is Shruti Krishna Sareen:

I so wanted to buy this book for you
a small gesture for you and the birds you woo
I finally bought it for myself
I couldn’t give it to you, and I couldn’t leave it on the shelf.

These four lines hit directly that artificial sweet spot all know and feel is poetry. I love the balance and symmetry of it. The arrow which hits the bulls-eye is real speech conveying a real-life situation of tangible importance and psychological depth. It is airy and substantive at the same time. Poetry swallowing whole all the casual and serious trappings of non-poetry. Sincere. Not a whiff of pretense. It is poetry, not poetry trying to be poetry. Neither is it that amateur stuff which charms with a certain simplicity because it couldn’t be poetry if it tried. This is “And after many a summer dies the swan.” No. It is “to be or not to be.” Renaissance good, not just Romantic/Victorian/Modern good. Imagine a shy person who admires someone, who doesn’t want it to be too obvious, conflating what they love with what the other person loves, brought to the brink of the feeling alone and yet in a place of commerce: “I finally bought it for myself/I couldn’t give it to you, and I couldn’t leave it on the shelf.”

I realized these 14 poets, with a qualified exception or two, are good in the same way—due to the influence of the world wide web, every poet is alive to how the best poets everywhere write and think these days: lots of poly-syllable words, a lot of abstraction, a lot of sophistication, a roaming, never-standing-still style, restless, detached, image-making on wandering video/voice tracks, a touch of macro-obscurity adding to the sophistication, macro-clarity and micro-clarity in danger of taking the sophistication away, a feeling that several poems are competing (or giving up the quest) to be one.

Poets today are fighting uphill against something—and it has little to do with the typical poetic elements (rhyme, meter, metaphor).

Here’s the answer, I think. Poets are writing poetry, but with prose diction.

I don’t know if I should say the poets are drunk—as Baudelaire would have them—and they need to sober up and return to poetry which sees and feels reality. That’s partially it, but not really it.

One of the things I like most about the 4 lines I quoted from Shruti Krishna Sareen is that it has a clear, aphoristic quality.

Prose diction—this is what is chiefly inhibiting all kinds of wonderfully talented poets today.

If we present the schema this way: Science, Aphorism, Poetry, Prose. Poets today are writing poetry, and even rhyming a little, but there is always the modern tendency to move towards prose and never in the other direction, towards what even the father of modern science, Francis Bacon, praised: the pithy clarity of Aphorism.

Poets writing poetry, beautiful poetry, but immersing it in prose diction.

This is what’s going on.