WHAT
IS TO BE DONE?
by
Douglas Messerli
This essay was to have introduced the 2005-2006 Gertrude Stein Awards, a book that did find enough funding to be published. Since I have now embedded those awards, as well as later years, in the PIP Poetry entries, I have now determined to reprint the essay here.
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Writing in 1994 in the first Sun & Moon volume of The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, I noted that it had continually struck me “that at the end of a century primarily defined, in terms of literature, by its innovative poetry, the major literary awards, anthologies, and other publications devoted to American poetry still consist of the kind of academic and thematically based poetry that Ezra Pound might have railed against in the first decade of the 20th century; a poetry that Frank O’Hara, who at mid-century claimed a poem had to be at least as interesting as the movies, might today have perceived as less interesting than the worst of television. In the commercial publishing world, the media, and the university, innovation is primarily frowned upon, if not outrightly dismissed.”
There was, obviously, no single solution to the situation I recognized that year, but I felt that at least by presenting an anthology of more innovative poetry, I might somewhat balance the equation and reveal what I perceived as a truer representation of the continuing tradition of late 20th and early 21st century American poetry and poetics. Predictably, such a gathering of writers resulted in some critical dismissal, one reviewer claiming he found little of interest in the work of the 94 poets included—such a broad-ranging disinterest that I can only surmise that he simply didn’t like poetry. The conservative press (which, in the context of their coverage of literature, includes The New York Times Book Review and Los Angeles Times Book Review) mostly ignored these anthologies, while attending to others such as David Lehman’s The Best American Poetry series (which I feel represents a more narrative-based poetry and works which the populist-conceived online encyclopedia Wikipedia has characterized as “Precious Moments Poetry”). For the writers of more innovative work and the less highly funded review publications, however, The Gertrude Stein Awards volumes offered a refreshing alternative. Unfortunately, after only two volumes, the series suffered as part of the more general financial difficulties facing my Sun & Moon Press, and I had to cease publishing.
In the ten years since the 1994-1995
volume, we have seen, with ever more increasing determination, what appears to
be an almost concerted attempt to redefine the 20th century tradition of
American poetic writing, one of the most obvious of these examples of literary
revisionism being David Gates’s comment in The New York Times Book Review
(in a basically negative review of Pound’s great poetic contribution) that,
“Compared with equivalent stretches of ground-clearing and throat-clearing by
Frost and Yeats, little [of Pound’s poetry] remains readable. This is partly
because, thanks to the modernist emphasis on subjective experience, poetry has
largely come to mean their [Frost’s and Yeats’] sort of post-Romantic personal
lyric.” Given the remarkably energizing output of poetry by established and
younger authors that I noted in 1993, it is evident to me today that Gates must
have read very few of those poets I had described as innovative writers.
Evidently Brad Leithauser had also read few
of those poets, given the evidence of his Seamus Heaney review published
recently in The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, July 16, 2006). It
seems almost beyond belief that a critic at the beginning of the 21st century,
after 100 years in which all but the most traditional of poets writing in
English have eschewed end-line rhyme, could begin a review by asserting, “I
sometimes think there’s no more reliable way of initially entering a poet’s
private domain than by examining what he or she rhymes with what.” Only a
handful of contemporary poets, in fact, might reveal themselves under
Leithauser’s criteria. How many poets in the Gertrude Stein volumes, I wonder,
might reveal their “private domain” through rhyme? Is there one?
The New York Times Book Review’s
peculiar representations of American poetry have continued, more recently, with
their deification of Helen Vendler and her poetic tastes in the December 10,
2006 issue, where that critic is described not only as the most “powerful
arbiter of the contemporary poetry scene,” but, as John Leonard, their own
former book review editor, proclaims, the “best [critic] since Randall
Jarrell.” Even if one were to share the self-consciously reactionary
presumption that Jarrell is the high-water mark of poetic critical writing, the
Times is quite shameless in such proclamations, particularly in this case,
since Vendler was the “secret” selector of books of poetry for review in the Book
Review throughout much of Leonard’s tenure as the Book Review
editor, which, as Charles Bernstein suggested in a recent conversation, puts
the paper in the enviable position of praising their own literary taste.
Indeed, the editor who followed Leonard, Harvey Shapiro—who felt Vendler’s
“anonymous power” was, perhaps, not a “healthy arrangement”—is chastised for
being sexist. Bah! to those who might question this authoritative expert on
“contemporary poetry”—praised for admiring the work of dead poets such as Lowell,
Stevens, Plath, Bishop, and Merrill, while challenged for liking such “radical”
works as those of Allen Ginsberg and Jorie Graham, as if these figures might
awaken the sleeping readers of their review! The New York Times Book
Review’s self-congratulatory hymn, however, is nearly overshadowed by the
ego of its subject, who argues—in the context of her attacks against Alice
Quinn’s assemblage of Elizabeth Bishop’s “uncollected poetry,” Edgar Allan
Poe & the Juke-Box—that even art exalted as that of Kafka and Virgil
should have been destroyed—since the authors had asked for the destruction of
their work after death—and proclaims that she would consider it a “personal
betrayal” if something she had asked to be burned was not, even if it had been
the “Mona Lisa.” Is it any wonder that this “great” critic finds she cannot
read the work of poets under 50, since “They’re writing about the television
cartoons they saw when they were growing up,” and concludes that she does not
share their “frames of reference.” Now, I suppose, the Times can also quote
Rachel Donadio, the author of this abysmal piece, in their justifications for
their narrow aesthetic tastes.
Even before this paean to mandarin values,
the Times had already proclaimed, in the words of David Orr (April 2,
2006), that Bishop was the greatest poet (correction: the greatest artist) of
the second half of the 20th century!
“You
are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes
its shape to plenty of other forces—Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray—but
nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the
20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop
(1911-79). That she worked in one of our country’s least popular fields,
poetry, doesn’t matter. That she was a woman doesn’t matter. That she was gay
doesn’t matter. That she was an alcoholic, an expatriate and essentially an
orphan—none of this matters. What matters is that she left behind a body of
work that teaches us, as Italo Calvino once said of literature generally, “a
method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any
method whatever.” The publication of Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, which
gathers for the first time Bishop’s unpublished material, isn’t just a
significant event in our poetry; it’s part of a continuing alteration in the
scale of American life.”
Such absurdly grandiose claims of a New
York Times Book Review cover piece leave one nearly speechless. How does
one talk about contemporary poetry in the context of such blather?
For the Times, evidently, one
simply blunders forward—or backward. On January 28th of this year, William
Logan (you know, that profound American social commentator—this, from his Vain
Empires: “Our mothers drank martinis and sweet gin: / we were too young for
anyone to love us. / That fall our boys invaded Vietnam.”) went even further in
revising modernist and contemporary poetic assumptions, dishing out a dismissal
of Hart Crane, whose complete poems had just been republished by the
prestigious Library of America. According to Logan, Crane’s formerly great The
Bridge “seems inert now—overlong, overbearing, overwrought, a Myth of America
conceived by Tiffany and executed by Disney.” Early poems such as
“Chaplinesque” are a “dreadful mess.” The poet himself might be similarly
described, Logan commenting in an aside about Crane’s sexuality, “He was frank
about his homosexuality only with close friends—his sexual appetites were
voracious and involved far too many sailors. (The definitive work on the United
States Navy’s contributions to cruising has yet to be written.)” In short,
Crane was “no innovative genius…,” but was “a Midwestern striver out of a
Sinclair Lewis novel.”
In this piece I do not need to defend the
much beloved, if sailor-starved, “Midwesterner.” I might observe, however, that
while a consideration of an artist’s sexuality might indeed lead to insights
into his or her art, I see no possible insight or relevance to Logan’s
judgments about Crane’s poetry based on the frequency of this poet’s sexual
encounters. What assumptions lie latent, if hidden, in a critic’s negative
evaluation of a poet’s art with regard to the frequency of his sexual activity
and his choice of partners? Any insights gleaned may be more about the critic
than the poet, and the implications are both suspect and disturbing.
I find “The Tunnel” section of The
Bridge, several of the Key West poems, and other later, uncollected
poems—poems that go unmentioned in Logan’s attack—to be highly memorable and
important works. And I see the heightened—and, yes, occasionally
melodramatic—language of The Bridge as being a long way from the “brassy
versifying” that makes one feel one is “stuck in a mawkish medley from Show
Boat and Oklahoma!” (Moreover, I like those musicals!) Finally, what
does Logan mean in his use of an epithet regarding Crane’s Midwestern birth?
Should we presume that, had Crane, like Logan, been born in Boston to those
martini-sipping mothers lounging at the “seductive swimming club,” everything
might have been different? As publisher Daniel Halpern argued in a letter in
reaction to Logan’s attack that he saw the role of the critic to reveal to the
reader more about the poetry than the poet’s sexual life or place of birth.
Where to from there? The Times
blithely moved forward (or spiraled downward, depending upon one’s point of
view) the following week (February 4th) in an attempt to further the
canonization of Robert Frost with David Orr’s review of Frost’s Notebooks.
To demonstrate just how “experimental” (as opposed to “mainstream”) Frost was,
Orr chose to quote from Marjorie Perloff, sometimes described as representing
the opposite of Vendler’s Harvard-based, more conservative encampment. Diving
into two pages of Perloff’s 21st-Century Modernism (pages 8-9), he
quotes the critic as arguing that, as opposed to the dominant mode of
“expressivist” writing, experimental writing “involves constructivism…the
specific understanding that language, far from being a vehicle or conduit for
thoughts or feelings outside and prior to it, is itself the site of
meaning-making.” He continues with a quote from Charles Bernstein (“there are
no thoughts except through language”) and Rosmarie Waldrop (“as soon as I start
listening to the words they reveal their own vectors and affinities, put the
poem into their own field of force, often in unforeseen directions”), following
up, in the next paragraph, with four further quotes on the performative nature
and pleasurable ulteriority of poetry, pausing only to self-consciously “admit”
that these issues might not appeal to “more conservative tastes.”
Oh, did he forgot to mention?—Orr cagily
reveals—only Perloff’s first comment and the next two quotes were from
contemporary poets; the others were all from Frost! So, he implicitly declares,
he has proven that Frost is a contemporary experimentalist!
In fact, the Perloff quote is not at all
that of a contemporary poet, but is a summary of Austrian philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s ideas, and—without diminishing the importance of Bernstein’s and
Waldrop’s comments (it is interesting to note that Orr did not feel it
necessary to mention their names)—I’d like to suggest that Bernstein’s
statement is primarily a restatement of not only Wittgenstein, but of Pound,
Williams, and the Russian Futurists; Waldrop’s comments might as well have been
those, as Perloff later reveals in her book, of Gertrude Stein! One must ask,
accordingly, are we truly talking about contemporary experimental poetics in
this context or about modernist values of Frost’s own generation, which might
lead one to question if Frost was at all involved with the poetics of his own
time?
It is no surprise that the San
Francisco-born poet, pretending to be a New Hampshire farmer writing primarily
dramatic monologues in the tradition of Robert Browning, might describe his
poetry as being “performative”; and nearly any poet of merit understands that
writing (any writing, not just poetry) and even lecturing is often a procedural
act, that “may not be worried into being.” Yet, I hardly think that what a poet
writing in rhymed stanzas means by the word “performative” can be described as
the same as the performative acts of the far more associative and
chance-generated works of John Cage, David Antin, or Jackson Mac Low.
Orr’s conclusion, that had Frost’s
journals included essays on Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin (it is nearly
unimaginable that Frost would have read these writers!) he might be recognized
as an American experimentalist, is an absurdity. Have most “experimental” poets
written on Stein or Benjamin? That some of the most conservative of
writers—Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, Glyn Maxwell, and “nearly every Northern
Irish poet born after 1935”—declare Frost to be “the greatest American poet of
the 20th century” might reveal, I would suggest, something more about Frost’s
stature with contemporary poets. That younger writers might be led to
satirically imitate Frost’s works does not mean, moreover, that they think
Frost is therefore a viable influence on contemporary writing.*
Again, my goal in these observations is
not to criticize the poet or his writing. Indeed, I wish David Orr had
discussed the topic at hand, the Notebooks of Robert Frost, which I am
sure is filled with an aphoristic-like writing I might appreciate. It is clear,
however, that Orr had the adoration of a poet more on his mind than a relevant
discussion of Frost’s own poetry and poetics.
Given the active rewriting of American
poetics I have described above, is it any wonder that most younger readers
interested in contemporary poetry do not bother reading The New York Times
Book Review or similar desolate visions of poetry presented in the Los
Angeles Times Book Review (no longer a freestanding publication)
and, when they admit to poetry’s existence, The New York Review of Books?
Perhaps, I now feel, I had expressed the
problems facing us at the turn of the century too simplistically. For it is not
really a matter of whatever one defines as innovation against some vaguely
understood concept of a more traditionally-based writing. No matter which
“side”—if one is even interested in taking “sides”—one allies oneself with as a
reader or writer, the real issue is that commentators such as Gates,
Leithauser, Vendler, Logan and Orr ignore the vast majority of writing by poets
who are not interested in “personally expressive,” transparently thematic
poems. Indeed, such a narrow definition of contemporary poetry—one, I would
argue, that dominates not only the American press but award-giving institutions
such as the Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Awards, and National Endowment
for the Arts literary panels—disenfranchises the wide range of poetic expression
that in its very diversity may be the most challenging and defining writing of
our time.
As with the Russian revolutionary
democrat, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, I can only ponder, accordingly, “What is to be
done?” And, without attempting to overthrow the autocracy, I have openly
wondered what I might do to help reveal to readers in the USA and throughout
the world a “larger perspective” of contemporary poetry. One answer resulted in
my ongoing Project for Innovative (PIP) series of World Poetry of the 20th
Century, currently in its eighth of a projected sixty to seventy volumes.
Another is a revival of the Gertrude Stein Awards. Now a product of my Green
Integer publishing activities, this anthology—since the Sun & Moon volumes
already included Canadian writers, and the Green Integer publications are
international in perspective—has been expanded to include all English-language
poetry, including writers in Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), Ireland,
Australia, New Zealand, India and other countries in which poets write in
English. This broader perspective, I feel, might help to make it clear that the
achievements of the poets included are not simply representative of one or two
nations, but of writing in English around the world. I also believe these poets
might benefit from putting the poems I’ve chosen—with no intentions of
describing their single contributions as the “best”—within the context of their
writing in general. Although my choices are not based on any previous poetic
publications—in fact, some of the chosen poets are quite young, with few or no
book publications to their name—it may also help new readers who I suspect feel
I am representing only lesser known, “experimental” poets to perceive that the
majority of the poets included have been writing for many years and have
produced numerous volumes.
I have been overwhelmed with the
enthusiasm and expressions of appreciation with which my announcement of this
revival has been greeted. All of the poets whose works are included have
happily provided me with substantial biographies and complete bibliographies of
their poetry. Let us hope that it helps to bring attention to that wider range
of contemporary poetry that has been proposed by the great figures such as
Pound, Stein, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, O’Hara, Ginsberg, Ashbery, and
numerous others over the last century.
*I
haven’t read what David Orr describes as Susan Wheeler’s “very funny imitation”
of Frost, but I myself have written a satiric poem “after” Frost:
The
Acquaintance
(after
Robert Frost)
I
have been, I have
walked,
I have outwalked.
I
have looked, I have passed
And
dropped my eyes.
I
have stood still
When
far away,
Come
to houses
But
not to call
And
further still
One
luminous clock
Proclaimed
the time
Taken
to be.
I
might add that perhaps the funniest of all “satires” on Frost might be the
Richard Adler and Jerry Ross song from The Pajama Game, “Hernando’s Hideaway,”
the music of which is written in the same rhythm as Frost’s “Stopping by Woods
on a Snowy Evening.” If one puts the music to Frost’s poem, it is difficult to
read the poem thereafter with a straight face.
Los
Angeles, July 18, 2006
December
13, 2006
February
15, 2007
Reprinted
in different form from The Green Integer Review, No. 4 (August-October
2006).
Reprinted
in another version in Jacket [Australia] No. 32 (April 2007).
1 comment:
There ya go.
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