Modern Poetry as “Diminished” Romanticism

I’m interested in the way  James Longenbach, in the Cambridge Companion to Modernism, frames modern poetry in terms of a “diminished” Romanticism: a poetry skeptical of the Romantic’s claims about the artist’s ability to hatch new universes (what Shelley was said to do on a daily basis), but still wanting to respond to the “epic” issues of the times, and to speak, on occasion, with an epic voice.  Longenbach sees Yeats, Eliot, and Pound’s early poetry exhibiting a purposely diminished quality – their Symbolism and Imagism as ways to scale poetry down to a concrete point, to avoid abstraction, to avoid the sentimental tug – but then he notes that all three of these writers push the boundaries of the diminished approach almost as soon as they pick it up – Eliot and Pound moving to the longer clusters of lyrics that are simultaneously diminished/personal and and epic, Yeats addressing politics more directly in his later poems (“Easter 1916,” “The Second Coming”), etc.

I have to work my way around to realizing “diminished” is not being used in a pejorative sense here, but rather to denote a purposely reigned in approach to poetry that yet builds itself off from, or pairs itself down from, a very Romantic base.

Longenbach sees Moore, HD, Stevens, and Owen continuing to rely more heavily on the restrained, or “diminished” side of things  in strategic ways that avoid what’s alternately described as the masculine or violent approaches they see coming out esp. in Pound’s later work, approaches that, by participating in epic projects, lend a heroic tone to war that HD, for instance, wants to turn away from.  Moore likewise used seeming “inconsequence” as a “weapon” (“In This Age of Hard Trying”) against structures of authority.

But, of course, nothing breaks down along such clear lines.  Even with Eliot, Longenbach reminds us, The Waste Land is referred to by the poet himself as both an attempt to bring all characters (and thus all of a fractured society?) together in the figure of Tiresias, and, alternately, Eliot’s own “personal grouse with the universe.”  It is, thus, Eliot’s “impersonal” poem, and also his completely personal poem.  In such disparate comments as Eliot’s about a single poem, we see the complexity and ambivalence in the Modernist attitudes, the desire to approach grand themes paired with skepticism about poetry’s ability to evoke real change in regards to those themes.

“Modern Poetry.” Logenbach, James.  The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999. pp 100-129.

Digging In

So, last summer’s reading was child’s play.  I’m hunkering down to take exams this August and have the spreadsheet study plan to prove that I mean business. That means 250-300 pages per day, Monday-Friday.  The good news is that I won’t be juggling this with a summer job, but will be spending all my time buried-in-books.  Sort of like a science experiment – just how much will my little brain hold before it refuses any more?

Still here

Well hello there, little blog…. I forgot you were here.

Miss Moore’s “The Pangolin”

In honor of Jarrell’s intense regard for Miss Marianne Moore, here is the ending of her poem”The Pangolin” (which begins, so wonderfully, “Another armored animal…”) -

Not afraid of anything is he,

and then goes cowering forth, tread paced to meet an obstacle

at every step.  Consistent with the

formula – warm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and a few

hairs – that

.

is a mammal; there he sits in his own habitat,

serge-clad, strong-shod.  The prey of fear, he always

curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work

partly done,

.

says to the alternating blaze,

“Again the sun!

anew each day; and new and new and new,

that comes into and steadies my soul. (116)

.

In case you’ve never seen a pangolin, here’s a photo of a baby one. “Another armored animal…”

**NOTE: Ben thinks this baby pangolin is ugly and slug-like.  I disagree.**

Moore, Mariaane.  Complete Poems. NY: Penguin, 1994.

Jarrell’s “Reflections on Wallace Stevens”

Jarrell is unapologetic in both his praise and his criticism of Wallace Stevens.  Praise for the early work.  Criticism for the turn much of Steven’s later work takes towards the abstract.

A few of his critiques seemed like generally worthwhile statements to bring into a creative writing class.  (For example, useful when trying to explain to a student that a poem “reading like an essay,” or “being really abstract” is not necessarily a successful poem.)

Here’s Jarrell on the pitfalls of “philosophical” poetry:

“Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano”(140).

And quoting Goethe about the importance of the universal within the particular:

“But surely a poet has to treat the concrete as primary, as something far more than an instance, a hue to be sensed, a member of a laudable category – for him it is always the generalization whose life is derived, whose authority is delegated.  Goethe said, quite as if he were talking about Stevens: ‘It makes a great difference whether the poet seeks the particular in relation to the universal or contemplates the universal in the particular… [In the first case] the particular functions as an example, as an instance of the universal; but the second indeed represents the very nature of poetry.  He who grasps this particular as living essence also encompasses the universal” (140-141).

In addition to high praise for his early work, Jarrell did point me towards Stevens’ poem “Esthetique du Mal” as a late poem with some shiningly successful sections.  Hauling Stevens Palm at the End of the Mind off the shelf, I was particularly drawn to the following section of “Esthetique,” (which I’d not read before):

IX.

Panic in the face of the moon – round effendi

Or the phosphored sleep in which he walks abroad

Or the majolica dish heaped up with phosphored fruit

That he sends ahead, out of the goodness of his heart,

To anyone that comes – panic, because

The moon is no longer these nor anything

And nothing is left but comic ugliness

Or a lustred nothingness.  Effendi, he

That has lost the folly of the moon becomes

The prince of the proverbs of pure poverty.

To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,

As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,

To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,

As if the paradise of meaning ceased

To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.

This is the sky divested of its fountains.

Here in the west indifferent crickets chant

Through our indifferent crises.  Yet we require

Another chant, an incantation, as in

Another and later genesis, music

That buffets the shapes of its possible halcyon

Against the haggardie… A loud, large water

Bubbles up in the night and drowns the crickets’ sound.

It is a declaration, a primitive ecstasy,

Truth’s favors sonorously exhibited. (258)

I’m adding this poem to so many of Stevens’ poems that are worth returning to time and again: “The an on the Dump,” “The Snowman,” “Sunday Morning,” “Disillusionment of Ten O’clock,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” “The Plain Sense of Things” (hmm, would Jarrell agree or disagree on that one?), “Of Modern Poetry”… and the list goes on…

Jarrell concludes by saying that “a good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two times and he is great” (148), and even amidst the criticism we can tell he thought Stevens was a lightning rod during significant periods of his writing life.

Jarrell, Randall.  “Reflections on Wallace Stevens.”  Poetry and the Age. NY: Octagon Books, 1972.  pp 133-148.

Stevens, Wallace.  The Palm at the End of the Mind. NY: Vintage Books, 1990.

From “The Obscurity of the Poet”

A few lines from Randall Jarrell:

“Anyone who has spent much time finding out what people do when they read a poem, what poems actually mean for them, will have discovered that a surprising part of the difficulty they have comes from their almost systematic unreceptiveness, their queer unwillingness to pay attention…. You need to read good poetry with an attitude that is a mixture of sharp intelligence and of willing emotional empathy, at once penetrating and generous” (12).

“People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good?  Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?…. The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it” (26).

Then there is this, answering the complaint that contemporary poetry is “too obscure” compared to poetry of the past:

“[H]ow difficult and dull the inexperienced reader would find most of the great poetry of the past, if he could ever be induced to read it!  Yet it is always in the name of the easy past that he condemns the difficult present” (11-12).

Basically, we like the poetry we have learned how to like, the poetry with which we have taken the time to become receptive.  For English lit. scholars, that might be the canonical authors who they’ve been “taught” how to read.  For the general public condemning “difficulty” in poetry, though, one wonders if they’ve taken the time to be receptive to any of it.

Jarrell continues:

“The man who monthly reads, with vacant relish, the carefully predigested sentences which the Reader’s Digest feeds him as a mother pigeon feeds her squabs – this man cannot read the Divine Comedy, even if it should ever occur to him to try.  Yet one sort of clearness shows a complete contempt for the reader, just as one sort of obscurity shows a complete respect.  Which patronizes and degrades the reader, the Divine Comedy with its four levels of meaning, or the Reader’s Digest with its one level so low that it seems not a level but an abyss into which the reader consents to sink?  The writer’s real dishonesty is to give an easy paraphrase of the hard truth” (18).

While I feel uncomfortable, at moments, with the elitist leaning of some of the lines here, I don’t think that’s what is really at heart in this essay.  Jarrell challenges what is (or isn’t) behind claims that contemporary poetry “fails” in its obscurity where canonical writers are immediately crystal clear to their audiences.  And he challenges readers of all sorts to look for the rewards in the difficulty – to be empathetic and attentive to the “hard truth” found in art.

Jarrell, Randall.  “The Obscurity of the Poet.”  Poetry and the Age. NY: Octagon Books, 1972. pp 3-27.

Finished Sweater

Getting Filled Up Again

I know artists talk about how teaching an art form drains their creative energy.  And I understand that.  I often feel empty after trying to fully understand and speak to my students’ writing. Not bad empty.  Just empty.

But then, sometimes, it works the other way.  The final lines from one of my student’s poems this past week reminded me of why I write, or, more accurately, reminded me of how I felt when I first discovered contemporary poetry (who knew such a thing existed?).  I remember feeling I’d found this way of seeing and speaking that completely made sense to me – but at the same time feeling so outside of it all, like my words and I were just peering through some foggy window, watching all the “real” poets past and present interacting with each other in their poety lives.  I felt like such an interloper at first – which was a bit lonely, but also delicious. It’s late, and I’m rambling nostalgically here, but what a wonderful surprise it was to have a student poem bring that all back, changed (of course) by this young writer’s own way of seeing and thinking, yet startlingly familiar even in its difference.

Hesitantly Returning…

As is so often the case, fall hit me with a bang – classes, teaching, editorial work, Ben’s new job in CT… it was a deluge of new things to juggle.  I considered shutting the blog down, but didn’t even want to deal with that, so I let it languish.

Halfway through the semester, now, I’m finding my feet again, enjoying teaching (my advanced poetry students rock), and trying to (amazingly) look beyond “what needs to get done by tomorrow.”  Thus, I get to stop in at my blog again.

On the exam front, I’ve realized that trying to take my exams in the spring of my second year as a PhD student is just not reasonable.  At least, it’s not reasonable if I also want to be a good editor, a good teacher, and someone who occasionally gets a real night’s rest.  I went to a Q&A a couple weeks ago for the qualifying exams, which helped me realize that I want to give myself enough time to fully prepare for these beasts of test, and to maybe even find that preparation process enriching (rather than merely harrowing).

One positive discovery about the exams:  the take home portion (72 hrs in which to write a 15 page essay) of the exams will not only be in my major area (contemporary poetry), but may also be geared towards a specific area of study within that field.  Bridging off from the independent study I did this summer on poets of place, I’m currently thinking about notions of exile in poetry as a focus area.  Without fully realizing it, that seems to be where my independent study found itself wandering…

Here’s the intro from a paper, “Poets and Places” that I wrote for that study:

When I began studying “poets of place” this summer, Elizabeth Bishop kept slipping into mind – not as a “regional writer” (phrase often connected to poets of place today), but rather as a writer who investigates our very notions of place – our beliefs that we can ever truly know a place however close we feel (or would like to feel) to it. Bishop’s poems treat locales – New England, Brazil, – with both a native’s deep love and an explorer’s questioning gaze. I’ve been reading poets, lately, who seem to have similar interests in places, and the final line from Bishop’s poem “Questions of Travel” keeps coming back as I read. “Questions of Travel” begins with an awed, somewhat wearied, traveler’s view of “too many waterfalls here,” clouds and streams tumbling repetitively over the mountainsides. We don’t know where we are, but we know it is somewhere far, as the next stanza suggests with its directives and questioning – “Think of the long trip home. / Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?” Questions continue throughout the poem – of travel, of the pity it would have been not to have explored the new territory, of the nature of the “home” one recalls from a distance. The poem ends on the traveler catching a quiet moment to write these questions in a journal –

“Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay at home?

Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

about sitting quietly in one’s room?

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there… No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?”

Bishop takes the questions to a grand scale in those final two stanzas, then pulls the poem up short with a “No,” returning us to her central, scaled back question, and the line – which I read as an embedded question within a question – that I keep falling back to – “home, / wherever that may be?” I’ve often looked to Bishop for that pull between a desired sense of place, and a sense that full grounding remains always elusive – do we even know where home “may be”? Such elusiveness courts contemporary poets who seem equally invested in interrogating notions of place. Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Jim Daniels, C.D. Wright, and Adam Zagejewski all have varying degrees of uneasiness in their allegiances to – or desires for – a sense of home ground. And whether traveling far or wandering their own backyards, each seems haunted by Bishop’s questions of home and away.

[And an excerpt from near the end of the paper that deals with notions of exile in Adam Zagejewski's poetry]

While the elusiveness of home can be felt by a speaker exploring known territory, as C.D. Wright shows in her imaginative return to places from the past, it also can be highlighted when one is between places. Bishop herself did not know a particularly stable home as a child, which may lead to her partnering her impulse to wander with an equally important concern for home spaces. Adam Zagajewski, displaced by WWII’s wreckage of Eastern Europe, displays a similar longing in poems that explore life between places, and life in unfamiliar territories. In his collection Canvas, poems of places glimpsed from a distance emphasize the speaker’s feelings of being at something of a distance from himself. In “Daybreak,” Zagajewski begins:

From the train window at daybreak,

I saw empty cities sleeping,

sprawled defenselessly on their backs

like great beasts.

Through the vast squares, only my thoughts

and a biting wind wandered.

These cities share an alone-ness with the speaker, who appears desolate in the way his thoughts partner with the “biting wind” wandering the cities. These places lie vulnerable before the speaker’s thoughts, yet distant from him. At the moment of the poem, the birds are waking and “the stray cats’ eyes” blinking, but we see no people in the cities, “The first van hadn’t arrived yet / at the brown slaughterhouse wall.” Our speaker is importantly in transit, viewing cities at daybreak, but not part of any one of these cities’ daily lives; the connection he feels to these places is one of sympathy, but never possession. The speaker concludes:

Cities at daybreak are no one’s,

and have no names.

And I, too, have no name,

dawn, the stars growing pale,

the train picking up speed.

Even the sympathetic connection drawn through the poem is tenuous; as the train picks up speed, the “nameless” speaker drifts from each unnamed city.

I’m taken by the incredible sense of longing in “Daybreak,” and how naming and namelessness are inherent to this desire. We begin with the speaker’s commentary on ambiguous “cities,” plural, but then shift to an incredibly particular image in one city – “The first van” and “the brown slaughterhouse wall,” are singular. Pointed to with the particular article “the,” these are specific, and rather dark, images, made more desolate by the fact that the van hasn’t yet arrived. It is here, after the speaker turns from speaking of cities in the plural to this city in the singular, that we might imagine the speaker is thinking of a specific city, but he immediately states that “Cities at daybreak are no one’s / and have no names.” Whatever naming may be done in the poem is a naming of anonymous, of an ultimate groundlessness, which brings us to the speaker’s important realization at the end of the poem: “And I, too, have no name, / dawn, the stars growing pale, / the train picking up speed.” Everything in this poem is impermanent, including the moment of daybreak and the speaker’s view from the window. Yet in order to address this impermanence, this nameless feeling, the speaker must name that which he does view and imagine out the window, must connect enough to suggest the ultimate disconnect.

Books I’ll Be Teaching This Fall

It was truly painful to narrow my list of ten to a list of five, but I’m happy with the outcome.

1. Amy Quan Barry’s Asylum

2. Nancy Eimers’ No Moon

3. John Rybicki’s We Bed Down Into Water

4. Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie

5. Frederico Garcia Lorca’s Selected Verse

(Aside from the Rybicki book, I realize these aren’t the latest works by each poet.  Cost is a real issue for a lot of my students, and I wanted to give them a fighting chance at finding the required books used…. Besides, these books all rock!)