D22-DES15
On American Poetry Criticism;
& Other Dastardly –Isms
PART 11:
S.O.S.: Cyber-Crit & Verse- New Venue, Same Old Shit?
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 7/21/02
Wannabes
Eliot
Weinberger Erich Vogel &
William Logan Ruminator
Review Contemporary Poetry
Review Marjorie Perloff &
Dana Gioia Ekphrasis
Web Del Sol
Plagiarist.com
Wrap Up When
Hacks Attack!
Most of the
focus of my attacks on APC, in this ongoing series of essays, has been directed
at the print medium- specifically magazines & books. However, far more
outlets for poetry & its criticism now exist in the cyberworld. It is here
where I will now turn my attention to the rarely good, mostly bad world of
cyber-crit. Here, we see a panoply of voices, from all over & all strata,
unrivaled in the print world. Unfortunately, virtually all of them are boobs,
illiterates, or money-seeking apparatchiks who were too low on the totem pole to
latch on to the print side of this bonanza of the banal.
I will
examine a # of online critics, magazines, & pieces & do my usual
rotisserie on their massively abundant flaws & maybe, just maybe, discover a
sliver of insight & integrity in the cyberworld outside the friendly
confines of Cosmoetica’s domain (pun intended!).
Let me start
off with a very familiar sort of faux cyber-crit: the laudatory explication
by an editor. I will start off with the poetry editor of a website, storySouth,
maintained by an attendee of the Uptown Poetry Group I run. Despite my personal
like of Jason Sanford, & respect for his taste & opinions as an artist,
I have disagreed often with him over the poetry ½ of his website, run by a
college pal of his: Jake Adam York. JAK is, unfortunately, all-too typical of
the ‘poetry editors’ online. But, the real sin is when they try to develop
rationales for the crappy poetry they choose to feature. I will now give some
excerpts from the Poetry Afterword for storySouth’s spring
edition. It is a brief essay titled Interstates, Interchanges: Telling Souths.
It can be found at http://www.storysouth.com/spring2002/poetryafterword.html
.
JAK makes the
hack’s error of beginning his essay by trying to link all that follows with
the implied genius of what is quoted, usually by a big name writer. This says
that both the quote & the works described are ‘of a like kind’. He
quotes:
‘But you were not listening, because you knew it already, had learned, absorbed it already without the medium of speech somehow from having been born and living beside it, with it, as children will and do: so that what you father was saying did not tell you anything so much as it struck, word by word, the resonant strings of remembering?.
So is described Quentin Compson's experience of hearing (and re-hearing and ...) the story of the Sutpen family in Absalom, Absalom! The words come from Quentin's college roommate Shreve McCannon and from Quentin's father, whom Shreve ventriloquizes, and, in part, from Rosa Coldfield who first starts telling it to Quentin, whom Quentin's father voices, and ultimately from William Faulkner.’
What follows after the quote is the statement of the very obvious, though
dragged out & stated multiple times. This is an old technique which not only
is designed to show that depth abounds, but meant to add padding- length equates
with depth in a lot of critics’ minds.
Then, aside from stating the obvious, there is the old ruse of
slightly re-stating the obvious again & again, then digress slightly,
re-state the obvious (again), relate it to a non-sequitur- but make sure you pad
a lot- to seem discursive & authoritative. Witness:
It's a version of the solid South, the cultural idea that outlives the bygone political moment.
But however haunting and attractive the notion of such solidity is, however much we may maintain the conceptual validity of the category The South, much of our contemporary experience must complicate this beyond such simple deployments. Whether we eat at a McDonald's, exercising our membership in a decentralized and perpetually instantiated (and thereby re-centralized) American culture while a perfectly good local barbecue smokes down just across the two-lane, or at an Indian restaurant only blocks from the re-incinerated Margaret Mitchell house, there is something perpetually not-South about our Souths, something Southern still, but Southern in its own local way.
Which means that there's a great deal to say. That we are not so contiguous with the history and the place that we don't need telling. That writing is not simply reminder.
The poems in this issue of storySouth bear witness to this reality even as they bear witness to the stories that require them, even as they teach us those stories. These poems as in conversation with the South (and The South) even as they are in conversation with diaries, relatives (mothers, brothers, ancestors), themselves.
Don’t you just love all the PC clichés JAK refuses to let die a natural death? Let’s count’em: the ‘fill-in-the-blank’ South, ‘contemporary experience’, his way cool use of ‘instantiate’
[Main Entry: in·stan·ti·ate
Pronunciation: in-'stan(t)-shE-"At
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): -at·ed; -at·ing
Date: 1949
: to represent (an abstraction) by a concrete instance
<heroes instantiate ideals -- W. J. Bennett>
- in·stan·ti·a·tion /-"stan(t)-shE-'A-sh&n/
noun],
‘American culture’, the plural Souths,
‘contiguous’, the idea of ‘telling’- as well its need, ‘bearing
witness’, ‘in conversation’, & wrapping up with a reversion to ‘the
self’. This dreck could only have come from the mind of a refugee from MFA-dom.
Need I say the poems are uniformly bad? Yet he relates them to this
well-known & respected author to gain some patina for them, all the while
peppering the fancy ‘instantiate’ to say these poems are deep. Of course,
the ‘essay’ ends with generic pabulum that says absolutely nothing, & an
‘end’ meant to be memorable & convey JAK’s commitment to art, all the
while betraying his utter lack of originality. Word:
These poems help us know. They tune us to the talk and invite our replies. They demand and satisfy the curiosity of Quentin Compson's fictional roommate — Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all?
For this, they say. For this, at least.
Jake Adam York is the poetry editor of storySouth.
Ugh! How did this guy not end up suckling at Oprah’s tit? But, he’s
an anomaly, right? He’s a freak, totally unrepresentative of the pap that is
infecting all forms of American writing? Unfortunately not. Let’s gander at
this little slice from an essay that was on Hyde
Park Review, ‘Octavio Paz: A Meditation, Reviewed by C.M. Mayo’:
Poet, essayist, critic, translator, and editor, Octavio Paz was, writes Stavans, "the quintessential surveyor, a Dante's Virgil, a Renaissance man... and a believer in reason and dreams and poetic invention as our only salvation." Born in 1914 in Mexico City, Paz lived past the age of eighty, having written over forty books of poetry and essays, among the latter, the classic Labyrinth of Solitude, in which, writes Stavans, "he articulated, in lucid, erudite, nonacademic prose, and with Olympian authority, the key to the question he nurtured in his heart for years: What does it mean to be a Mexican in today's world?"
This is a critical 2-fer.
1st is that CMM feels the need to critically shorthand by constantly
quoting, thereby letting the work, de facto, review itself. If that bullshit
were not enough we get the pap of the quoted author, Stavans, which (of all that
could possibly be quoted from a tract of book-length) is inevitably banal &
PC itself.
Think of it- we get a
critic who is so lazy that he quotes from the worst part of a work in order to
justify the work. There is nothing ‘critical’ in the whole piece!
You counter: But, who the hell ever heard of C.M. Mayo? Even in the small poetry world he’s a nobody. True. But let’s look at the critical skills of a ‘somebody’- at least in name value he’s got ‘brand’. This is from an essay by noted poetry critic Eliot Weinberger called ‘What Was Formalism?’. The essay can be read in full at http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket06/weinberger-formalism.html. EW starts off on a familiar trope:
I
have recently come across an anthology with a
fire-alarm red cover, an inflammatory title (Rebel Angels ), and a
gaseous introduction whose first word is "Revolution." It is not, as
one might expect, a lost artifact of the Beat Generation, but rather a Molotov
cocktail tossed by the radical right of poetry, the self-styled "New
Formalists."
According to these Rebel Angels -- who, like most
conservatives, have short historical memories for what they are conserving -- it
was during the "cultural upheavals of the 60's and 70's" that
formalism, defined as "meter and rhyme," was "largely . . .
abandoned by American poets." The result was that "poetry and prose
became nearly indistinguishable." [The 150 years of prose poetry aside, to
what are they referring? People reading projective verse mysteries at the
beach?] Happily, however, certain poets -- Wilbur, Nemerov, Hecht, Van Duyn,
among them -- "courageous in their commitment to their art," withstood
the onslaught, kept the faith, and inspired a renaissance launched by those
misfits from the Generation of '68 for whom baba was a rhyme-scheme and
not a guru, and who are now in their forties and fifties.
Here, EW opens by trying to defend poetry against the obvious charge of
banality in recent decades. But, instead of sticking to the colloquial sense of
the general criticism he snidely dismisses it with the brush-off remark about
Projective verse- itself a fairly banal & prosaic poetic branch. He then
veers into the eternally pointless debate over free vs. formal poetry- as if
either claim matters as much as good vs. bad poetry- regardless the style:
The formalism they have collectively revived is not merely
"the art of making poems in measured speech." It "assumes a
valued civility . . . a larger cultural vision that
restores harmony and balance to the arts." According to the poet Timothy
Steele, formalist poetry, more than any "other pursuit," can
"nourish"
a
love of nature, an enthusiasm for justice, a readiness of good humor, a
spontaneous susceptibility to beauty and joy, an interest in our past, a hope
for our future, and, above all, a desire that others should have the opportunity
and encouragement to share these qualities
which presumably were and are
absent from "free verse," not to mention the "other"
pursuits. The thought that justice and equal opportunity are the hallmarks of a
flourishing formalist verse culture (such as Victorian England, the Court of
Versailles, Heian Kyoto . . . ) belongs in a parallel
universe, perhaps one where a group named after Lucifer & Co. promotes hope,
good humor, beauty, and joy.
Here we get the classic conflation of art having benefits outside of
merely enlightening &/or entertaining. The fact that I doubt most true
devotees of poetry subscribe to it, well…. But,
then EW emerges & lashes back at what we thought was his own point. It turns
out he has some decent prosifying in him, but his critical eye is wanting:
Rebel Angels collects the
poems, each labeled with the form it employs, of twenty-five poets
"deserving attention for the beauty, accuracy and memorability of their
language, as well as their feelings and ideas." They "represent
nothing less than a revolution, a fundamental change, in the art of poetry as it
is practiced in this country" -- and, if poets deserve attention for their
feelings, a revolution in criticism as well.
As a devotee of poetic revolutions, formal or
informal, I cracked the book at random, hoping for a new specter haunting
America. But these were the first lines of the first poem I read:
We stood on the rented patio
While the party went on inside.
You knew the groom from college.
I was a friend of the bride . . .
Every revolution must lose a
few skirmishes, so I flipped again, to a rebel sonnet:
Four
years ago I started reading Proust.
Although I'm past the halfway point, I still
Have seven hundred pages of reduced
Type left before I reach the end. I will . . .
EW is correct in pointing out the 1st 4 line quote is not
good- but broken as free verse it also would suck- & I’ve read this kind
of casual dreck far more in free verse than formal:
We stood on the
rented patio while the party
went on inside. You knew the
groom from college. I was a
friend of the bride . . .
See what I mean? The 2nd quote is too brief to say good or bad- but it has potential. In, & of, itself it is too fragmentary & could belong to a good or bad poem. Overall, EW fares better than most online critics- even though he is more ossified than most cyber-critics.
Let’s look & see if the younger generation does any better. Here’s a review from the Poetry Harsh archives by Erich Vogel, Poetry Harsh, Issue 1, Nov-Dec 96. It’s on Louise Gluck's Meadowlands.
Louise Gluck is my favorite
poet; she has been since I first began reading modern poetry in earnest. I think
The Wild Iris is the most perfect book of verse ever written. That it
should be followed by a mediocre book like Meadowlands is depressing.
Gluck's work has been so consistently brilliant for so long that her latest
false step comes as a rude shock.
Louise Gluck's poetry has always been strong on
unity of theme, image and style….
The opening is the classic feint. The critic is being coy & telling you he has biases, only so his current review, however dull or wrong or both, will take on a patina of ‘truth’. Of course, EV then quotes from Glück poems that totally point out his critical hackery- devoid of any ‘unity’ (gotta love that cliché of criticism, eh?) of theme, image, or style. But, give him props- he’s actually here to do a negative revie. The problem is that his critical skills in praise are so woebegotten that his negatreviews have no real heft behind them- unlike, say, me- who both makes a case very directly & counters with writing great poetry, as well. EV, in truth, shows he is far more a fan than a real critic. Think I’m lyin’? Well, get set on dyin’. Check this use of quotation by EV:
In the past her poetry has seemed to fashion gorgeous evocative imagery out of a seemingly inadequite {sic}number of descriptive terms, with a talent that was impossible to pin down to mere technique.
"and then, all winter, their wool scarves
floating behind them as they sink
until at last they are quiet.
And the pond lifts them in its manifold dark arms."
(from "The Drowned
Children" in Descending Figure)
The image of scarves fluttering behind is very trite. The 4th
line quoted could be from bad Victorian verse. But, then, EV has basically
precluded any crit of his crit with his opening ‘admission’ of possible
bias. See how that works? But, then he is striving to be a Bad Boy Critic- this
is what failed poets often resort to. Let’s now turn to the self-professed King
of Bad Boy Critics- William Logan. Now, you might expect such a guy to
be doing the Kerouackian deal, right? Especially being born in 1950 & coming
of majority in the epochal 1968. Well, let’s see how outside this guy is
before we see how ‘outside’ his crit is. This is from his online bio:
Professor William Logan is the author of five books of poems: Sad-faced Men (1982), Difficulty (1985), Sullen Weedy Lakes (1988), Vain Empires (1998), and Night Battle (1999). He is the author of two books of essays and reviews on contemporary poetry, All the Rage (1998) and Reputations of the Tongue (1999), and co-editor of a book on the poetry of Donald Justice, Certain Solitudes (1998). Reputations of the Tongue was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in criticism. Another volume of his criticism, Desperate Measures, is forthcoming in 2002.
Professor Logan is a regular critic of poetry for the New York Times Book Review and writes a biannual verse chronicle for the New Criterion. He has won the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle, the Peter I. B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the John Masefield and Celia B. Wagner Awards from the Poetry Society of America. He has also won the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and has received grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Florida Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Professor Logan teaches poetry workshops and an occasional seminar on contemporary poetry. He graduated from Yale (B.A., 1972) and the University of Iowa (M.F.A., 1975). He was the English Department’s Director of Creative Writing from 1983 to 2000.
Professor Logan’s office phone: [see When Hacks Attack! below] Professor Logan’s email address: wlogan@english.ufl.edu
Go ahead, email him with this article, He won’t reply. Like most wannabe artists & critics he bristles at being on the receiving end. But he’s a rebel, dammit! Read on & see how rebellious he is as he plays it safe in this criticism of Robert Frost. This is from ‘The Other Other Frost’ @ http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/13/jun95/frost.htm
Frost was a poet of missed chance, of failed opportunity, of regret and cold disappointment. Of all the moderns he is the one we have not come to terms with, yet part of the problem has always been Frost himself.
More than forty years ago Randall Jarrell wrote two marvelous essays of rehabilitation, “The Other Frost” and “To the Laodiceans,” arguing for the gloomy, hard, human Frost (“human” was a favorite Jarrell word), the Frost of “The Witch of Coös,” “Provide, Provide,” and “Home Burial.” Most of the poems Jarrell favored are now part of our Frost—but instead we have two Frosts, a farmer schizophrenic, half Vermont maple-syrup and half raw granite, an old man of the mountains people can take home to dinner.
Note the classic collectivizational we? He even underlines the damned thing. You know a critic is on shaky ground when they need to resort to saying, ‘Well, everyone else agrees!’ Then we get the conflation of self with a respected elder. The fact that Randall Jarrell was a mediocre critic (see my essay), well…. This allows WL a vague rationale for the whole criticism. But then we get a load of crap:
Has any major poet written a worse poem about America than “The Gift Outright”? It contains every part of Frost’s terrible sentiment for the Land, America, the Past, for Ourselves, for the general myth that replaces the mangled event—even the best line, “To the land vaguely realizing westward,” drowns in the horror of all that is left unsaid.
Well, yes, WL. Think of any of the major (& how does WL define that term?) poets pre-Whitman & post-1950. I won’t name them all, but you know who I mean. Then we end that fragment with a tip-off to upcoming dimestore pop psychology. Check this out:
If Jarrell’s Frost was the Frost of interior and melancholy, of moral observation and metallic cunning, he was also the Frost whose monologues and scenes tended toward sentiment (a poet a lot like himself, in other words). I would like to propose what might seem impossible after Jarrell, a list of a dozen or so of Frost’s best poems rarely seen in anthologies and likely to be new to most readers. Here is the list: “The Code,” “A Hundred Collars,” “The Bearer of Evil Tidings,” “Snow,” “Place for a Third,” “The Exposed Nest,” “The Fear,” “Spring Pools,” “The Thatch,” “Sand Dunes,” “The Strong Are Saying Nothing,” “The Draft Horse,” “The Silken Tent,” and “Willful Homing.” This is a list of moral ambiguity and suspended grief, of stark horror and shy confusion—if Frost was a confusion to himself, we should, part of the time, be as confused and surprised by the Frost we read.
Not a bad list- but very hit & miss. & note the near knee-jerk fellating of old RJ! But, it’s the headshrinking attempt that is the worst! Yet, it continues!:
Frost knew when to let a poem go—in his best poems the ending comes as a slight shock, as if the poem couldn’t be over (in his worst the reader feels the poem shouldn’t have begun). The actions seem to move beyond the end of the lines—this is an old trick in fiction, but how many poets have used it well? Fiction wouldn’t have served Frost’s temper (if he’d been a novelist he might have written something awfully like Ethan Frome), but when we place him it must be alongside those moody gothics Hawthorne and Melville, the New England geniuses of guilt and redemption, and failures to redeem. Something of the violent Fate that moves their fiction moves through his verse, but it is a Fate blinder and more callous. Here is “The Draft Horse”:
With a lantern that wouldn’t burn
In too frail a buggy we drove
Behind too heavy a horse
Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.
And a man came out of the trees
And took our horse by the head
And reaching back to his ribs
Deliberately stabbed him dead.
The ponderous beast went down
With a crack of a broken shaft.
And the night drew through the trees
In one long invidious draft.
The most unquestioning pair
That ever accepted fate
And the least disposed to ascribe
Any more than we had to to hate,
We assumed that the man himself
Or someone he had to obey
Wanted us to get down
And walk the rest of the way.
This is the Frost who makes readers uncomfortable. We ought to be able to call it an allegory—but no allegory suggests itself (or, rather, the allegories are too simple for the savagery). The murder of the horse is so abrupt, so unforeseen, that the murderer seems more than just part of that unknowable agency that makes life harder (no memory “keeps the end from being hard,” Frost wrote in “Provide, Provide”). The couple, with their faulty lantern and fragile buggy, with the wrong horse, are destined for trouble—and how Frost loved those scary old woods. (One critic asked—this is the sort of question critics should ask—why the couple had hitched a draft horse to a buggy. The answer should have been obvious—because they had to.) Frost knew more about depravity than any American writer after Melville and before Faulkner— and he had a cellar knowledge of our irrational fears (Frost tells us the man stabbed the horse deliberately; but first, in the way he grips the horse’s head, Frost shows us deliberation). This is the Frost people don’t want to care for, and yet look how compellingly the poem ends. The couple don’t curse their fate; they’re so unquestioning they seem slightly stupid. Yet isn’t this a philosophy, a kind of clear religion, not “to ascribe/ Any more than we had to to hate”? As readers we know we wouldn’t act this way, and we’re not finally sure that we should act this way—but we’re not sure we shouldn’t, either. That makes Frost strange, and us, in our settled, suspicious natures, ill at ease.
Here is where WL really reveals himself as a BAD (sans the Ass or Boy) critic- even as the specter of the old query in to what defines a good critic rises. Is a critic good because they have great technical acumen, regardless of how well they can convey that acumen? Or, is a critic good because, despite the value of the opinion, their dialectic skills reign supreme. In other words, the old Siskel vs. Ebert debate! Well, WL is wrong in 3 ways: 1st off, his take on the poem is wrong- but I won’t delve in to that since a) I agree with him that the poem is good- the reason why he gets wrong; & b) the purpose of this essay is not to critique poems but to apply that to the criticism. 2ndly, let’s look at the definition of allegory:
Main Entry: al·le·go·ry
Pronunciation: 'a-l&-"gOr-E, -"gor-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ries
Etymology: Middle English allegorie, from Latin allegoria, from
Greek allEgoria, from allEgorein to speak figuratively, from allos
other + -Egorein to speak publicly, from agora assembly
Date: 14th century
1 : the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and
actions of truths or generalizations about human existence; also :
an instance (as in a story or painting) of such expression
2 : a symbolic representation : EMBLEM 2
See? He does not even know what the terms he uses mean. He says, ‘The murder of the horse is so abrupt, so unforeseen, that the murderer seems more than just part of that unknowable agency that makes life harder’- i.e.- he states the very allegory the poem uses! The poem makes very good use of symbolism- it is, almost a poem that could be appended to the definition that follows. 3rdly, this is BAD criticism because he unspools his very points as he elaborates them- again, reread the italicized part I just quoted. 3 strikes- get the hell outta here, Billy Bob!
Well, maybe not, because he comes back with easily the best point of the
essay- if not his critical career:
The women in Frost’s poetry
usually stand apart from the action, like a Greek chorus—and yet we’ve had
few poets who understood women better. How many wonderful women he created as
characters: the wife in “The Death of the Hired Man” and the wife in “Home
Burial,” the Witch of Coös and the Pauper Witch of Grafton, the wife in
“The Fear” and the depressed wife in “A Servant to Servants,” the mother
in “The Housekeeper,” the wife of “In the Home Stretch.” There’s a
fine anthology to be made merely from Frost’s women, merely from Frost’s
wives (Frost must have been a bit afraid of women—in the dialogues, the women
usually come off better than the men). Frost wasn’t ashamed of being a man,
and that gave him an understanding of women—not the understanding, but
an understanding that can only come from liking what women are.
But, another
hallmark of anyone who is bad at anything is their lack of being able to be
consistent. WL follows up this excellent point with this:
In “Place for a Third” (what an awful maker of titles Frost was—sometimes they’re slapped on like gummed labels)….
Huh? Frost is known, almost, for his great titles. How many other poets’ titles stick in the memory? Usually readers fumble around with vague memories of the poem’s subject matter. Just look at the title he disses- it’s not expected in the least- & could lead a reader in many directions. WL ends the long piece with another tired tope in criticism- that of the eternal font of wisdom from the master:
Frost was a vain and arrogant man, and some of his humility is merely vanity. But some of it is humility, too. He knew his poems might not always be of use—he knew his life had not been much use to those he loved. When we tire of “Birches” and “Mending Wall,” of “After Apple-Picking” and “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” of “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and “Fire and Ice” and all the other poems anthologized into the thick crust of our memories—after we have tired of these, there is another Frost, and another. The good in Frost often lies so close to the sentimental and bad, it is difficult to remember that some of the best-loved poems are the best, just as some are the worst and most trivial.
A year & a ½ later WL was still opining for the New Criterion when he tried his hand at critiquing Surrealism. The results were not pretty. You can read the whole thing @ http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/15/dec96/verse.htm, but here are some slices. It’s interesting to note the sheer # of poets never even remotely associated with Surrealism that WL points to. This isn’t bad as a critic should be able to point out links to things unlinked before. The problem is he’s been smokin’ some good shit to come up with some of these opinions. F’rinstance:
Mitteleuropa Surrealism isn’t what it was when the Balkans, the Orthodox Church, and the Ottoman Empire brooded in the background. Surrealist poems, those uncompromising, gritty, erotic protests against logic or meaning, were once the dreams Kafka suffered, the dreams of an insurance clerk. In America, Surrealists like Charles Simic write like this:
They had already attached the evening’s
tears to the windowpanes.
The general was busy with the ant farm
in his head.
The holy saints in their tombs were burning,
all except one who was a prisoner of a
dark-haired movie star.
Simic is known in this country as a bad translator, worse poet, bad
critic, but passable proemist. Surrealism is appended to his name because of his
Slavic origins- no other reason. But, Goddamn!, look at the crap Logan selects-
even though he is trying to make that point. But to WL it is crap not because
the writing is bad (damn the Style!), but because it simply doesn’t fit into
his Surreal box. But, what devotee of Surrealism would have thought even
Surrealism would come down to its clichés? True, you & I, intelligent
readers, could foresee that, but not those knee-deep in the muck. To most,
Surrealism is just an excuse to write poorly & lazily, & to blame the
art work’s failure on the ignorance of the audience, rather than the
artist’s failings.
WL next conflates Surrealism with A.R. Ammons. ARA is not a Capital nor
lower-case surrealist. His poems simply don’t say much. To his credit, WL
points this out- but why Billy call him a Surrealist when he’s manifestly not-
by any standard?:
Ammons’s flaws are so
disfiguring it’s impossible not to notice them: a lot of his poems are tedious
(you trudge through the physics to get to the nature, but it wasn’t worth the
trudge); they’re ponderous, muddled performances, terrible and trivial at
once, like an elephant balanced on a pinhead. Just when you fall in love with a
stripped-bare description of the natural world, or an improbable insight into
the human, he’ll start a poem, “Anxiety clears meat chunks out of the stew,
carrots, takes/ the skimmer to floats of greasy globules,” or succumb to
blather like “The flow-finding of the making impulse/ rounds the curve, of
what-is/ and shakes out scaffolding/ suitable to the outline of the perception.
. . .” He’ll end a confused rumination on the limits of nature with a line
so awful it ought to receive some sort of prize: “remarkable sucked fizzy
drinks burning the mucous.”
Ammons doesn’t always take himself seriously—a big
galoot of a poet, he’s proud of being nearly unreadable (his poems “bowing
to no one, nonpatronizing and ungrateful”), but knows he likes to be read. You
can tell it gets under his skin when a review says he falls “far short of
Stevens”—but it’s true, he does fall far short of Stevens.
Well, duh! Next, WL takes on Robert Hass- trust me, he says nothing of import about an unimportant poet of little talent- but he WAS Poet Laureate! WL then fumbles over C.K. Williams:
Williams has turned the long verse line of Whitman, that brawny lover of men, of laborers and loungers, into the medium of modern urban anxiety, of naked souls in the naked city.
Many of these poems are anatomy lessons (you feel Williams would like to buy a textbook and take out his own appendix).
As with ARA the opinion is dead-on. But even fewer folk have conflated Surrealism with CKW than ARA. CKW’s poems have been called prosaic, dull, & too long- but never Surreal by anyone who knows poetry. So why do it? Well, it’s the idea of ‘critic-as-creator’: WL wants to create a new paradigm (another cliché of criticism) so that future critics will quote from this essay in years hence. &, hey, I did- except not in a way he would like! The next silly conflation is with Russian émigré poet Joseph Brodsky. Again WL nails a good point, only he lumps the target in the wrong group, which therefore invalidates the whole criticism- even the good!:
What are we to think when a poet as gifted as Brodsky, a
Nobel laureate, writes “one keeps carving notches only/ so long as nobody apes
one” or “the tear could be mine, chin-bound” or “The eye tracks the
sinking soap, though it’s the foam that’s famous”? Or “The battle looks
from afar like—‘aaagh’ carved in stone” and “seven/ years later and
pints of semen/ under the bridge” and “a cross between muscular torso and
horse’s ibid” and “O if the transparent things in their blue garret/ could
hold their eye-dodging matter in second gear”? The words are generally right,
but all their music is wrong.
Brodsky’s
career in English was a career of might-have-beens. He plainly wanted to stake
his claim in two languages (his essays may be his lasting achievement in
English), but his pride could not accept his limitations, while mere ambition
could not overcome the absence of what a native speaker absorbs through his
pores.
The only other poet of interest that WL tackles in the piece is Anthony Hecht. It’s a very VERY bad criticism. Look how WL slavers over AH. I will under line the critical clichés. 56 words’ worth in 4 lines!:
Very few poets have ever handled English words with such devotion, and Hecht has written with extraordinary passion (always dry, dry passion—like a martini mixed with the memory of vermouth) into late age. We have had no better poet of war to honor these decades of peace, or what we have chosen to call peace.
The # is 7. All are flat-out verbatim clichés, except the martini
metaphor- there it’s the idea, not phrasing, that’s cliché. So, we see that
WL- perhaps the most noted poetry critic of the pre-geriatric generation, is
mostly bad- even his good points are undermined by his own lack of
understanding. Even worse is a recent essay in New Criterion called ‘Falls
The Shadow’ (http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/jun02/logan.htm).
Let’s have a little fun this time. I’ll go rapid-fire through the piece,
pull a quote, & then nail it down for the tripe it is. Here WL takes on the
eternally dull Charles Wright:
These gentlemanly Southern poems lie drowsily on the page, as if the poet had handed you a mint julep and invited you into a hammock. When a poet admits he’s “getting too old and lazy to write poems,” the prognosis isn’t good.
Wright is one of our most talented poets; but he’s content to make bad
jokes. But however much I want to believe that Wright’s carelessness and
over-reaching might be crucial to his casual beauty, too many of these poems
skim the surface of the poet’s impressions the way a cook skims fat.
Smack-dab in the middle of another good shot is the ‘one of our most’ cliché. The unanswered question is that if his poems do as WL describes, how in the hell can the cliché be true? It can’t. Bad critic with a bad point. In this next snippet- also pretty accurate- it is important to note the laziness of the writing. This is another hallmark of a bad critic. The laze comes in all the referentiality that leaves a tyro bewildered & clueless. The critic makes no attempt to look a large audience in the eye.
Alan Dugan’s poems are essentially Hobbesian—nasty, brutish, and
short. His taste for sour (and vituperative) complaint and bare-knuckled
self-analysis became characteristic, though many poems were cast in a monstrous
diction half Dylan Thomas, half Hart Crane:
Dugan is scathing about the pointlessness of work (“for wages, some
shit’s profits, and his own/ payment on his dreamed family plan”), the
degradations of love, the ghastly human condition (where the first imperative is
Eat! and the second, Screw!); but this hard-boiled austerity, this
isolation from the causes of joy (Catullus knew pleasures, but for Dugan
pleasure is just the crass satisfaction of instinct), left him no room to
develop. The poems have ground on, decade by decade, in cruel repetition, like a
bread and water ration.
But is that enough? Without Larkin’s appreciation of foible or
Hecht’s taste for darkly beautiful lines, Dugan’s poetry has been cruelly
limited: his world reduces everyone to Freudian complex and Marxist statistic.
This selection dips into referentiality, yet without explication. Add to
it the poor selection of the poem; well, read on:
Cynthia
Zarin’s delicate, whimsical poems are knowing in a disquieting way—as if she
doesn’t quite want to know what she knows (the dust jacket claims The
Watercours was written after a divorce, though you can scarcely tell from
the poems). She has learned much from Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop and
Amy Clampitt, and when you read her poems you often think you’re reading Moore
or Bishop or Clampitt.
The rationing, the slugs on the lawn, the spirit
lamp casting up the mute face of
the charwoman’s dead child, the elephantine
car that made it
through another
winter, the
hoarfrost dotting the lawn. An utter
frenzy of communication, of agendas
surprisingly fulfilled in the glossy umber
evenings
with—downstairs—the wireless
going, each typed letter (for later, she typed
them) a stitch in the seam every so
often righted by an exclamation, a scrawled
postscript.
Such stanzas are lovely, but
you’d swear they were torn from Clampitt’s notebook (ventriloquism can be
forgiven in a young poet—in an older it looks like ill-breeding).
The unsaid is that Amy Clampitt was the quintessential ‘style over substance’ poet. This selection is terribly enjambed & dull. But the 1st sentence is classic critical crap when dealing with a poet who does nothing but glop images upon images: ‘Cynthia Zarin’s delicate, whimsical poems are knowing in a disquieting way—as if she doesn’t quite want to know what she knows’. Does WL comment on any of this? What do you think? Instead we get more in the same vein:
Dick Davis was part of a group of proper English formal poets, ardent admirers of Yvor Winters, that made almost no impact on British poetry in the seventies and eighties. Like many New Formalists in America, their verse was a little too careful, a little too ordinary, and a little too dull. Sometimes as formal poets age they unbend (all too often they become fossilized instead) and use their trained ears to write in classical simplicity.
The sun comes up, and soon
The night’s thin fall of snow
Fades from the grass as if
It could not wait to go.
But look, a lank line lingers
Beyond the lawn’s one tree,
Safe in its shadow still,
Held momentarily.
The first stanza might have been
written by Frost, it’s so cleanly expressive; but the second must have been by
Frost’s deaf yardman, with its clogged alliteration and the awkward rhyme on a
secondary accent. It’s amusing to find an exponent of the classical virtues
guilty, elsewhere, of a dangling participle as bad as some freshman’s
(“Lifting her arms to soap her hair/ Her pretty breasts respond”).
Oh boy.
Stanza 2 is obviously the better stanza- musically, technically, &
narratively. Stanza 1 has been written by many before & line 3 is poorly
enjambed- period. Again, WL starts out with a good point but shoots himself in
the foot by revealing his terminal ignorance about technical poetry skills.
Let me end my rail against WL with his view of Geoffrey Hill:
Hill rails at his critics (“I’m/ ordered to speak plainly, let what
ís/ speak for itself, not to redeem the time/ but to get even with it”),
making direct appeal to readers (“Don’t look it up this time; the sub-/
conscious does well by us”), as if he were Luther translating the Bible into
the vernacular. But Hill would be delusional not to realize his poetry is beyond
the reach of the common reader, or even most uncommon ones. Beyond the tags from
half-a-dozen languages, The Orchards of Syon assumes a knowledge of the
cleric Thomas Bradwardine, of a scrap of Job that appears as a chapter
title in Moby-Dick, of the influence of Richard Jefferies on Henry
Williamson, of the bridges and canals of James Brindley and the coin presses of
Matthew Boulton, and much other arcana. The diction reaches from the fixed past
to the fluid and temporary present of cell phones, refuseniks, and rap
cassettes. A reader must know that Silvertown was the set, on a ranch outside
Los Angeles, where hundreds of westerns were born.
Amid
the disordered lines of rant and reprisal, there are scattered passages of
physical beauty (a beauty Hill sometimes resents and winces at):
Distant flocks merge into limestone’s half-light.
The full moon, now, rears with unhastening speed,
sketches the black ridge-end, slides thin lustre
downward aslant its gouged and watered scree.
The Orchards of Syon is the testament of a poet nearing
the end of life, a poet who has earned the reader’s trust by long careful
mistrust of his own words. If there is no consolation in this contemplation of
the grave, there is no self-pity, either. These monologues have been a
preposterous, irritating, and baffling addition to the work of the major poet of
our laggard age. Their fraught understandings of guilt, and grace, have been
rivalled in the last century only by Eliot’s Four Quartets.
The piece
starts with scattershot referentiality, & ends with a single conflation with
an older, & greater, poet (all the while ignoring the Four Quartets'
many flaws). All in all, WL is a superfluous, bad, & generally banal critic.
It’s only because his contemporaries are absolutely TERRIBLE that his
reputation has been burnished.
But he’s
not the only critic to gizz his opinions hell-mell. Let’s take a turn away
from the individual critic & pounce on a magazine. This time let’s hit the
infamously bad Ruminator Review (nee Hungry
Mind Review). A few years ago, before the name change former editor
(Artsy-Fartsy) Bartsy Schneider edited a special section called ‘HMR's
Millennium Books, Twenty Writers Choose Books for the Twenty-First Century’.
Need I tell you that the opinions & critical assertions were atrocious?
Not to mention the writing, itself- such as this trite bon mot to start
the piece?
‘The responses, as you'll see, are magnificently varied. We hope you find among them a book to take with you.’ -Bart Schneider
Is this the best Bartsy can do? Really? Let me hit the books chosen & savor the horror of the very worst bits: The Diary Of Anne Frank; The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks; Hard Times, by Charles Dickens (Emily Carter chose it); The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston; Ecce Homo, by Friedrich Nietzsche; The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James; Essays before a Sonata: The Majority and Other Writings, by Charles Ives (Bill Holm chose it); Call to Arms, by Lu Xun; On the Road, by Jack Kerouac (chosen by Adrian Louis, who essays in doggerel); Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino; The Fourth Dimension, by Yannis Ritsos (chosen by Jim Moore); Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell; The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro; Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust; & Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-80, by W. E. B. DuBois. These retorts were, if not good, at least not blatantly stupid. What follows cannot claim the same.
Sven Birketts chose Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Listen up:
Because it
is there we find the most potent possible distillation of subjective inwardness,
our most endangered attribute. Because there we find the most potent possible
distillation of subjective inwardness, our most endangered attribute.
Why Rilke?
Because if he cannot persuade us directly of inwardness not just as a human
capacity but our raison d’etre, then he can at least allow us to sample what
the momentum of the soul's life might once have felt like.
Failing that, his Duino
Elegies can report with wrenching eloquence on the road not taken, the one that
would have made all the difference.
Repeat after me: the collective WE! & why the gratuitous recycle of the Frostian cliché? Are these literatistas so devoid of original thought? Minnesota’s favorite barfly, Robert Bly, ends his stab at José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses with:
It is hard to write a book that deeply insults the Right, the Left, and all the good people in between, that offends the fundamentalists and the atheists, and all the good New Age people in between. But Ortega has done it. It is a book of genuine wisdom.
To say that being offensive, in & of itself, is a good thing is flat-out dumb- but then it explains Bly’s entire raison d’etre. But the last sentence is pure cliché. Noted AIDS enthusiast & bad poet Mark Doty gushes over Dream Palace by Herbert Morris:
Let this stanza from "Boardwalk," one of the great poems of the last twenty years, suffice. It is a parenthetical aside-a favorite Morris technique-in the larger body of the poem, but it speaks worlds. In it, the speaker's mother is examining with him a family photograph from a childhood vacation taken fifty years before.
(Scrutinizing this photograph with me,
decades later, tracking down lost details
until, one by one, each has been recovered,
restored to its incomparable luster,
the past freed from the dust which settles on it,
freed from the past, made whole, retrieved intact-
Those were drop earrings I wore, see them? pearls;
that vast collar was fox, black-as-night fox,
and your leggings had buttons down the side
which I would fasten with a button hook-
slowly, quite slowly, Mother turns to me-
the turn as lovely as the need to turn-,
tears filling her eyes, spilling to her cheeks,
whispers these words: You two were dazzling, dazzling.)
Okay, Marco- where’s the greatness? Forgive me for the Clara Peller reference but this snippet is merely a trite photo poem, loaded with the clichés of such. It lacks both music & invention. Geez! The next example of critical pap comes from famed poetaster Naomi Shihab Nye. It concerns a former mentor of hers- although she does not address that fact, of course. Not that that would disqualify her feelings & opinions but- admit the goddamn cronyism! Her choice?: The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems, by William Stafford. Aside from the trite recommendation, it is in shockingly BAD prose:
Give this book to the person who hasn't read any poetry for a long time, who hungers for it without knowing what's being missed. Give this book to the person who reads poetry every day. It will be out in paperback momentarily-notice how in the cover photograph the shining, translucent droplets of water on the leaves haven't run together yet. This book is poised, alert, waiting for us-wherever we are, wherever we will be tomorrow.
Forget the collectivizing ‘we’. There are 6 year olds who can write better. Period. Lastly we get the moronic Bartsy himself. He chose William Carlos Williams’ Selected Poems, &- like many would-be writers- quotes the author chosen. Yet, it’s the truest words old Bartsy’s ever penned, & the best of the quotes from Ruminator’s piece:
I cannot say
that I have gone to hell
for your love
but often
found myself there
in your pursuit.
But all is not lost. There are sites that attempt some criticism of merit- with mixed results. Contemporary Poetry Review is 1 of them. The essays mentioned here were actively posted as of June, 2002. Outside the Cosmoetica domain it probably has the most interesting articles/reviews of poetry. That said, 85-90% of the pieces are dreck, but a few stand out. Notable in the failures, however, are how routinely generic they are. This typical snippet is from a review called ‘Shakespeare's Inner Workings, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets’ by Helen Vendler:
For Vendler, words alone are certain good. She is
the New Critic par excellence and much of the theory operant in The
Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets is that of evidential or structural criticism.
What is immediately wrong with this snippet? To the vagabond poetic
peripatetic not much. But to anyone familiar with Vendler’s spew it is
apparent that she is in no way, shape, nor form a New Critic. Does she rely on
‘structural criticism’- to a degree, in her own limited way. But to equate
‘structural criticism’ with New Criticism is akin to calling a Brachiosaurus
fossil an iguana fossil, merely because dinosaurs were a form of reptiles. The
point? Even at a fundamental, offhand, level most critics do not know what they
are talking about. & I won’t even get into the more technical aspects of
poetry- alliteration, rime, or the myth of metrics.
Here’s another snippet from 1 of the site's major domos, Garrick Davis.
While occasionally writing salient (if cursory) pieces, this piece The
Breakdown Of Criticism Before The
Printed Deluge is all-too
typical of the not-really bad but not-good-either writing that suffocates poetry
criticism online & off-:
We live in an age awash with bad books. This fact, though that
statistical non-entity the average
reader may be unaware of it, constitutes the greatest crisis facing
literature at the end of this century. It has for some time been axiomatic among
critics that the sheer volume of new works has effectively silenced
their profession; it is simply impossible to cover or recommend or
dismiss the desideratum
of even narrow disciplines.
True poets depend
upon critics to advertise their difference from their inferiors, though most are
loathe (sic- DAN) to admit that fact. Indeed, this era has
rendered the very name poet
meaningless, since it confers that title on its popular singers, its performance
artists, and eloquent journalists-- in short, on anyone who uses language and
wishes that dignity.
In such an environment, anthologies and surveys will
abound because no one is sure what constitutes poetry and thus no one is certain
what is not poetry.
Lacking a set of critical principles, the age cannot discriminate between the
authentic and the counterfeit. Critics will find everything either commendable
or equally bad; poets will veer from one fashionable style to another, uncertain
who to imitate. Publishing lists will expand, vanity presses multiply, as a
shallow and misinformed culture bloats like any bureaucracy.
Until criticism asserts itself again, by its exercise of
judgment and thus exclusion,
poets will be free to construct their own Tower of Babel. Worst of all in such
an onslaught, as criticism breaks down, libraries founder in their acquisition
budgets, and lovers of poetry relent and read the classics, is that some new and
important poet will surely be lost in anonymity, from the sheer number of his
inferiors.
So why is this writing not
good? Well, 1st off, everything he says is true. 2ndly, it has all
been said before. 3rdly- & here’s the crux, like all the other damnings of
bad poetry GD refuses to get specific. He refuses to name names- of bad poets,
bad critics, bad magazines, etc. So, what’s the point of writing this? It’s
like saying a serial killer is bad, but refusing to name Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted
Bundy. The difference is that JD nor TB can do nothing to advance GD’s career.
Compare this snippet with any of dozens of similarly-lengthed pieces on
Cosmoetica. I name names- like GD, himself! The fact that so many people have
written on the death of poetry- or its tangential bitches, is not unique either.
Even worse are the defenders of doggerel. As bad as the cowardly critics of it
are, the naïve-or really faux-naïf – stances of doggerel’s boosters are even worse.
1 of the few online journals that can rival CPR in import &
‘quality’ is the online version of the Boston Review. Here is a piece http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR24.6/perloff.html
by that diva of discombobulative criticism- ‘Large’ Marj Perloff. Can you
guess its title?: ‘In Defense of
Poetry, Put the literature back
into literary studies’.
Here are some samples with my comments appended:
We might begin by noting that the treatment of poetry as a branch of
history or culture is based on the assumption that the poetry of a period is a
reliable index to that period’s larger intellectual and ideological currents.
Beckett’s Endgame, for example, testifies to the meaninglessness and
horror of a post-Auschwitz, nuclear world. But as critics from Aristotle to
Adorno have understood, the theory that imaginative poetry reflects its time
ignores what is specific to a work of art, along with its powers of invention
and transformation. Thus Aristotle’s point, in the ninth chapter of the Poetics:
The
difference between a historian and poet is not that one writes in prose and the
other in verse.... The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and
the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more
philosophical and serious [kai philosophoteron kai spoudaioteron] than
history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives
particular facts.
This snippet is so wrongheaded that I may just end the essay here & rest my case. But, if I did so I would not be able to run up those neat college football type scores you get when Nebraska or Florida State plays Shitlicker U. After all, I need to stay atop the BCS ‘Top 25 Poetry Critics’ poll, right? 1st word- what have I railed about over & over in this essay? Yes, the damnable collective ‘we’. This is an immediate bold, italic, underscoring of the critics lack of belief in their own statements. Then we get the obligatory mention of other critics to bolster what really could be said in 10-12 words. Then we get the gratuitous [however impressive] foreign quote- all the better if it’s from the Ancients. Lastly we get the sad & familiar & WRONG, WRONG, WRONG conflation of art (poetry) with truth. In the Large One’s defense, by conflating as she does no one at Contemporary Poetry Review will dare call her a New Critic! Hi-ho Silver!:
I have been speaking only about poetics; in other humanistic fields there
are no doubt different problems and solutions. But, whatever the specific field,
it might be well to remember that apologetics is never a fruitful mode of
discourse. Never apologize, never explain! I thus deplore those new
MLA-sponsored National Public Radio programs (and I refused to do one) in which
"we" (academics) explain to "them" (the public) what it is
"we" do in our classrooms.
This bit says it all; everything that I have railed against for years.
How indefensibly arrogant! Thi-s in a nutshell- is an INCREDIBLE display of
Academic hubris! Marj weakly ties to garb her disdain for intellectual
conversation, much less dialectic, by making it appear as if she’s defending
some right to privacy- or privilege. But it is a transparent ploy. 1 only
wonders if she realizes just how damning a statement this is- not just of her
own person, but her whole profession. I’ll bet she took alot of heat for that
statement. But the heat was not for the substance of the statement, but
for its utterance in a public forum. The Large One continues with
another Oldy-But-Goody of bad criticism- the reference to a bad, but respected
quotation &/or the selection of an inappropriate poem to make a point,
&- of course- show how wide-ranging you are.
[Theodore]
Adorno’s adage that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz seems to be taken
as a given. This retro Kulturdrang strikes me as just as misplaced as
Weisbuch’s "how-to" practicalities. One cannot kill the human
instinct to make poetry–the German verb Dichten is apposite here–and
to enjoy the poetry making of others: indeed, the study of poetry has been with
us much longer than any of those current academic orthodoxies Steiner deplores,
and it will continue to be with us. Some things, it seems, never quite collapse.
Let me conclude with a little Frank O’Hara poem that is nicely apropos:
Lana
Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
The gist of this snippet- be yourself as a poet- is totally lost under
the fatback of Adorno & O’Hara. Granted, there are a few relevant passages
& points in this generic ‘We gotta fix poetry’ piece. But these points
have been made & unacted upon ad nauseum. The Large One’s piece,
therefore, is mere filler, with nothing new nor nutritious to bring to the
plate.
But Large
Marj is not the only flourishing mediocrity of ‘name’ out there, criticizing
dully & dinkishly. Dana Gioia- a rather poor poet, but hit & miss
critic- even has his own web domain, www.danagioia.net,
where he houses most of his noted works. Noted for his ‘attack’ essay &
book- both called Can Poetry Matter?- DG is rather laconic. In fact,
DG’s ‘attacks’ were hardly attacks- & came to the rather banal
conclusion that yes, poetry can matter- if we want it to. Didn’t see that
copout comin’- did’ja? That said DG is far from the worst critic out there.
In fact, would that he were the ‘worst’ poetry critic out there the state of
poetry criticism & poetry would be worlds higher. Unfortunately, in the bush
leagues of Poetry Criticism’s Kansas he is a notable- & noticeable- woof
in the warp of the land; for whatever props that earns him. Yet, he is so banal
so often that on his whole site I could only find 1 instructive essay to quote
from: http://www.danagioia.net/essays/efrost.htm.
It is a review called ‘Frost
Complete, At Last, Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose & Plays,
Edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson’. Now, bear in mind my earlier
selection of Critical Bad Ass William ‘There Goes My Snarl’ Logan’s take
on the duplicitous- or even triplicitous- nature of that old demon- Bobby Frost.
Read this:
For students of
American poetry, this is not just an important book; it is an irreplaceable one.
Typical hyperbole. Nothing
new said. Think that’s bad? Here’s how he ends the piece:
We
have had many versions of Frost. At last we have the real thing.
Sounds like a Coca-Cola commercial, no? Or this snippet:
-after we have
tired of these, there is another Frost, and another. The good in Frost often
lies so close to the sentimental and bad, it is difficult to remember that some
of the best-loved poems are the best, just as some are the worst and most
trivial.
Oh, wait, that was bad ass Logan. See? Both banal smiley faces coming
from 2 ‘critics’ known for attacking- not being sheep, like the rest of the
crowd of critics are. Sad. Dana Gioia’s entire website contributes 3 sentences
of value- & negative, at that. & he’s 1 of the BETTER critics- name or
otherwise!
What’s even worse, I guess, than just being a bad critic is being an
arrogant critic- or worse, online site. Late last year a site was recommended to
me to submit some of my The 49 Gallery Poems. These are poems
which are based on paintings- usually great &/or famous- which go beyond
just the generic ‘describe-what-you-see’ poems on paintings. I was told the
site, Ekphrasis, was going to
be doing an issue devoted to painting poems. I could not sample the site online
since it includes no art of any sort. A few months later I ran across a paper
copy of the magazine in a local bookstore. Of course, the poems on paintings
were of the ‘describe-what-you-see’ variety. What was frustrating was the
arrogance the editors/critics showed. Bad enough that the poems they ultimately
published were banal, generic workshopped retreads. Worse that they refused to
publish my far superior poems. But most damning of all was how they refused to
even look at my poems.
Ekphrasis is a poetry journal only accepting quality poems focused or centered on individual works from any artistic genre.
Ekphrasis is in the forefront of the growing body of poetry of this orientation. We strongly recommend that you familiarize yourself with the quality of the journal's content before submitting. Ekphrasis is a digest-sized publication.
LAVERNE AND CAROL FRITH, EDITORS
P.O. BOX 161236
SACRAMENTO, CA 95816-1236
e-mail: ekphrasis1@aol.com
Do true poetry-lovers everywhere a favor & email these dolts &
rip them for their arrogance. Y’know what I mean- those editors who request
your name, address, email, etc be on every page because they cannot remember
which tripe belonged to which doggerelist? Or, worse, those folk who have gotten
so arrogant that they refuse to even go to a mailbox & return your poems-
even if you’ve sent the SASE! They feel that poets should have to spend their
own money copying & re-mailing the same poems over again- why return a copy
you don’t want?
The point for this digression is 2-fold. 1) it mirrors the arrogance that
critics display- & that Large Marj admitted. 2) It segues me nicely into my
next point of attack.
The Chaos; or The Web Sells
Its Soul!
[click for a follow-up piece on Adam Dressler]
Recently I received the following email from the online literary portal Web
Del Sol. Last year I’d emailed them to see if they wanted to exchange
links. Most of the online links are total crap; but some have a bit of merit-
like the non-poetic side of storySouth.
Trust me, this is gonna be a long arc in this essay so hold on to your hats.
Anyway, here’s how it starts:
From: "Adam Dressler" daddydress@hotmail.com
To: cosmoetica@att.net
Subject: Portal del Sol
Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2002 20:18:46 +0000
Hello, my name is Adam Dressler. I'm the new editor for Portal del Sol, on the Web del Sol site. I'm sorry to have taken so long in getting to you. I've just finished reviewing your site, and while some of the writing is quite fine, I don't feel it's in high enough proportion or that there is enough on the site at present for me to reccommend [sic] it on Portal. I'll be updating Portal fairly often, however, so please don't hesitate to contact me with news about your site. I wish you the best in this and all future endeavors.
Sincerely,
Adam L. Dressler
This unintendedly hilarious bit of news prompted me to look a bit closer
at this ‘portal’ which claims to be the ‘cutting edge’ of online
literata. Basically it’s a clearinghouse & omnibus for mostly MFA &
selected ‘hipster’ type online sites & zines. But, there are the Contemporary
Poetry Reviews, Rain Taxis, & other, too. These, I guess have a
‘higher proportion’ of fine writing than Cosmoetica does. Translation- they
do not offend, name names, or actually individuate themselves nor their writers
from each other. Aside from me you will read poems by my wife, Jessica, Uptown
Poetry Group folk like Bruce Ario, Art Durkee, Don Moss, & even some lesser
pieces by ‘name’ writers like Clayton Eshleman &
Frederick Turner.
None of the writers’ writing is anything alike, in any measure- a claim few of
WDS’s sites can make between each site, much less the writers on each site.
1st off, few of the sites had any criticism- & the little
that appeared was atrocious. But, there was a goodly share of doggerel by
‘name-brand’ poetasters. Especially displayed was Vox- a Bulgarian
site that offered some tripe from 2 ‘names: Pulitzer Prize winning poet Henry
Taylor, & poetic hanger-on & radio diva Grace Cavalieri.
Here is my experience with HT. I received an email from him 1 day last
year. Apparently he had come across Cosmoetica & felt compelled to share his
opinions with me. No, it wasn’t the usual threat/rant I’ve received 1000s of
times in the last few years, &, no, nor was it the condescending brushoff
typified by Adam dressler of WDS. After surveying Cosmoetica, & all its
poetry & prose stylings, this Pulitzerata- supposed ‘Master of Words’-
had just 1 question that gnawed at him. No, he did not think I had an ax to
grind against Robert Bly, he did not think my poems sucked, he did not upbraid
me for attacking his Academic domain. No, this Made Man of verse asked me why I
always used the 1 word form of alot, rather than the standard a lot? I explained
to him that ‘standard’ rules of writing have little place in any mature
writer’s canon- especially a poet’s, that ‘alot’ would probably be
standard in a few decades, much as other words dependent on an a-prefix had
become, & that it was mere stylistic preference- just as I’ve almost
single-handedly resuscitated the little used semi-colon (;) from extinction,
& prefer the ampersand (&) to the word ‘and’, & the numeral (1)
version of a number to the written out (one) equivalent, in my prose. HT was
puzzled, & returned to his shell. But he did get posted on Vox,
dammit! & what would a new site be without the superfluous & gratuitous
plug-cum-c.v.?:
Henry Taylor is
Professor of Literature and Co-Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing
at American University in Washington, DC., where he has taught since 1971. His
third collection of poems, The Flying Change, received the 1986 Pulitzer
Prize in Poetry; his first two, The Horse Show at Midnight (1966) and An
Afternoon of Pocket Billiards (1975), were reissued in one volume in 1992.
His translations from Bulgarian, French, Hebrew, Italian, and Russian have
appeared in many periodicals and anthologies, as well as two collections by the
Bulgarian poet Vladimir Levchev. He has also published translations from Greek
and Roman classical drama; his translation of Sophocles' Electra appeared
(spring 1998) in the Sophocles, 1 volume of the Penn Greek Drama series. Another
collection of poems, Understanding Fiction: Poems 1986-1996, appeared in
the fall of 1996, and his collection of clerihews, Brief Candles,
appeared this spring from LSU Press. He is now at work on a new collection
called Crooked Run, titled after a creek in his native Loudoun County, Virginia.
Not impressed? I doubt this HT poem- evidence of Vox’s high proportion of fine writing- will do the trick either. But I want you to suffer like I have:
Landscape With A Tractor
How would it be if you took yourself off
to a house set well back from a dirt road,
with, say, three acres of grass bounded
by road, driveway, and vegetable garden?
Spring and summer you would mow the field,
not down to lawn, but with a bushhog,
every six weeks or so, just often enough
to give grass a chance, and keep weeds down.
And one day--call it August, hot, a storm
recently past, things green and growing a bit,
and you're mowing, with half your mind
on something you'd rather be doing, or did once.
Three rounds, and then on the straight
alongside the road, maybe three swaths in
from where you are now, you glimpse it. People
will toss all kinds of crap from their cars.
It's a clothing-store dummy, for God's sake.
Another two rounds, and you'll have to stop,
contend with it, at least pull it off to one side.
You keep going. Two rounds more, then down
off the tractor, and Christ! Not a dummy, a corpse.
The field tilts, whirls, then steadies as you run.
Telephone. Sirens. Two local doctors use pitchforks
to turn the body, some four days dead, and ripening.
And the cause of death no mystery: two bullet holes
in the breast of a well-dressed black woman
in perhaps her mid-thirties. They wrap her,
take her away. You take the rest of the day off.
Next day, you go back to the field, having
to mow over the damp dent in the tall grass
where bluebottle flies are still swirling,
but the bushhog disperses them, and all traces.
Weeks pass. You hear at the post office
that no one comes forward to say who she was.
Brought out from the city, they guess, and dumped
like a bag of beer cans. She was someone,
and now is no one, buried or burned
or dissected; but gone. And I ask you
again, how would it be? To go on with your life,
putting gas in the tractor, keeping down thistles,
and seeing, each time you pass that spot,
the form in the grass, the bright yellow skirt,
black shoes, the thing not quite like a face
whose gaze blasted past you at nothing
when the doctors heaved her over? To wonder,
from now on, what dope deal, betrayal,
or innocent refusal, brought her here,
and to know she will stay in that field till you die?
Were I doing this poem in my patented This Old Poem essay
series I would grade this out as a passable example of workshop poetry. The
poem does not offend, yet the introduction of murder, especially of a black
woman, is meant to seem daring. 48 lines could easily be shaved down 2/3s- even
a sonnet could better wrap this up. Instead we get this free verse sonnet on
steroids. The standard painting-like title is supposed to be ironic, but it
merely is out of place because the poem is far too long to contain any real
power in the revelation of the dead body. The What If? Tone of the
speaker is also meant to be pushing boundaries- but this is not 1950, when pre-Confessionally-
this poem’s fat would have been counterbalanced by its ‘shock value’. ½ a
century later we’ve seen literally 100s of these middle-aged white man tries
to balance PC & Confessionalism-type poems. Compare how this poem fares
against, say, my Ninth Murder
poem. What does this have to do with
criticism?, you ask, since this is a poem & not a piece of criticism. Alot
(HT, for you), because this is part of the fine writing AD deems WDS-worthy.
This is critical skills on display?
Of course not, we all know that WDS is like any other clique, & Vox
is just 1 of the homey mags that has latched on. Here’s another gem, this from
Grace Cavalieri:
Pinecrest Rest Haven
There was no
where else
worth sitting
so Mrs.P stayed in the lobby.
The radio said
Elvis was king. But Mrs. P
had been taught Jesus
was king. She knew it took
different things to keep
different people alive but this
was confusing.
Remembering the past was
far more perilous
than living it, so why do they
bring us to our knees
this way? Thinking of kings
made her way too sad.
When she was in school, the
wind was cool
on the field, blowing like a
sheet
straight up through her cheek
connecting her to the stars.
That was then.
At least HT’s poem was competent in its technical skills. This poem is poorly broken, trite as can be, & wholly generic. Then, again, old Adam must know something- after all, how else would he get so ‘in’ at WDS? Another denizen of the ‘in-crowd’ at WDS is the Potomac Review. Like many of the links this mag is outdated, albeit only by 2 seasons. Read this piece of sterling prose from the Winter 01-02 issue & ask yourself- is this the good writing AD means?
Eli Flam
End Pages:
To Bear Witness [Ugh!
I smell a Forché out there!- DAN]
"The
writer must write so we can learn to believe the horror we have seen."
—James Baldwin
[The obligatory nod/association with an older, more well-known writer,
even if what is quoted is banal & obvious.]
We still stand aghast at the horror of this past September 11, a day that
will live on for millions around the earth. Time and again, all the more near
ground zero at New York’s World Trade Center or the Pentagon, people have said
that words cannot describe what they’ve seen, what they have felt. Yet we keep
trying to put it into words. At the heart of literature—of any writing worth
its salt—is the need to bear witness.
[FDR need not worry at this invocation of him- by the last sentence we
are clued in to how banal & tame this writer’s insight is.]
"Literature,"
comments a colleague, "is our shared roadmap to life. While for some, oral
stories fill the same need, offer the same sense of communion and shared
insight, those of us likely to read a magazine like this probably rely heavily
on the written word to seek and find deeper meaning in our lives."
[More vapidity, however PC & obvious.]
Let us consider what we are. In the immediate aftermath of the death and
destruction September 11, Joel Achenbach wrote in the Washington Post that this
"dominant species combines extreme cleverness with an unreliable morality
and a persistent streak of insanity....We are a marvelously talented form of
animal, yet strangely unevolved."
For all of our
thousands of years on earth, for all our ever-developing artifice, homo
sapiens—crossing all kinds of borders—commits murder in vicious ways
that victimize not only the dead, but many of the living. Some, like Adam
Mayblum, write about it, "so we never forget." On the 87th
floor of 1 World Trade Center—the North Tower—on September 11, most of his
associates were already in their office at 8:30 a.m., "joking, eating
breakfast, checking E-mails, and
getting set for the day when the first plane hit just a few stories above
us....The building lurched violently and shook as if it were an
earthquake." In the
developing disaster, Mayblum joined thousands clumping down crowded, collapsing
stairways, helped others to get out.
[With
all this quoting does EF have even a single original thought to share?]
"Today," he wrote on E-mail, "the images that people around the
world equate with power and democracy are gone, but ‘America’ is not an
image, it is a concept. That concept is only strengthened by our pulling
together as a team."
[Pap, 2ndhand- I guess not.]
A warning comes from a historian at Adelphi University, Nicholas
Rizopoulos: "In our triumphalism, we like to think we are the best that
ever inhabited the earth (and) assume that everyone else will just accept this
as a given." There are many with deep grievances against the United States,
grievances that should be heard openly and examined carefully.
Early every
morning, I walk a quarter-mile from my rural home in Southern Maryland to pick
up the newspaper. Just down the road is a building site whose foundations had
been laid in early summer. Only into September, though, did construction start.
A handful of men raised walls, braced underpinnings, framed out windows and
doors. New life begins on all sides; if only we can learn to turn bloodiness
into neighborliness, to be constructive instead of destructive—to evolve to a
truly higher state.
[It’s always handy to have an ‘expert’ of some sort around to
reinforce that the 2nd- or 3rd- (or 4th-) hand
garbage you quote is on the money! Note how nothing even the expert says is
original, nor apropos.]
In the poem "Kin and Kin," Denise Levertov at first thinks perhaps our species is "best unborn, and once born/ better soon gone, a criminal kind,/ the planet’s nightmare." But, working through "the wise, the earthen elders/ humble before the grass," the poem concludes that there still might be "a chance to evolve, a swerve we could take,/ a destiny still held out (if we would look)/ in the Spirit’s palm."
[That Levertov is not around is a
comfort to many who value true insight, I’m sure, but what the hell was the
point of this piece. I understand the need to sometimes work things out via
writing. I did it recently in my essays mentioning the love I had for a cat that
ran away. [LINK] The point is I gave more than just banal lamentations,
& most of the email feedback recognized that fact.]
This, however, is deemed quality by the likes of Web Del Sol & Adam Dressler. I’ve already quoted from pieces on Contemporary Poetry Review & others that have links to & from WDS so I need not rehash the banalities. Let me return with another typical bad poem that is online in 1 of the WDS satellites. This is a poem from the ‘current’ 2001 Summer issue of the North American Review. Trust me, there are no ‘reviews’ worth reviewing here. This poem is from another Pulitzerata- Yusuf Komunyakaa. He’s a poet whose career rationale seems to be dispelling the myth that black men (such as himself) have innate rhythm. His poems are uniformly dull, poorly constructed, & utterly lacking in any music- even as he poorly tries his best to invoke music by any other means necessary. Look on:
Satchmo
Dear Mr. Satchmo,
I’m on the other side
with “Tiger Rag” &
“Way Down
Yonder in New Orleans”
on
the turntable, a heart
drawn on the soles of my feet.
Here, in the inner sanctum,
I
see you toting buckets of coal
to Storyville’s red-light houses.
You are a small figure
raising a pistol to fire
at God in the night sky,
but when I turn to look
out at the evening star
your face is mine. You
are holding a bugle
in your first cutting
contest
with fate. From back o’
town to the sphinx
& Buckingham Palace,
to the Cotton Club
& soccer fields in
Africa, under
spotlights with Ella &
Billie
one hundred nighttimes sweated up
from Congo Square.
Listening
to your notes across the
river,
the sea across miles of salt
trees, I hear a birth
holler pushing through
brass
at the Lincoln Gardens
in ‘22 with Papa Joe,
the Hot Five,
the Hot Seven . . .
the sun on your horn
makes me think this note
can find you, Satchmo.
The Singing Brakeman
beckoned you to Culver City
to cut your deep light
into wax & Miss ‘Lil
followed trying to sew up
a ragged seam. When you blow
I feel like you’re
talking
to me, talking about Mayann
& Mama Lucy as if
they’re the same
person—
Lucille dancing on the edge
of the stage—a loved one
selling fish in the Third
Ward.
In a corner of the naked
eye, your smile isn’t
a smile: confessions &
curses
drip from your trumpet,
& notes about the FBI
dogging your footsteps
since ‘48 float like
ghosts
of reefer smoke in an alley.
Ike wanted you to change
your words about Little
Rock
as you wove hex signs
into “Indiana” &
“Sleepy
Down South.” By the time
that bomb in Memphis
settled into your mind,
you were already back
in Corona blowing triplets
for three or four boys
sitting on your front
steps.
If you & your drummer
couldn’t play on the same
stage,
New Orleans was only a
bronze statue
in a park. Satchmo, I believe
in your horn, how it takes
us
to a woman standing in a
cane field
circled with peacocks.
All the referentiality- especially those warhorses Ella Fitzgerald & Billie Holliday. Can we even ‘attempt’ to rise above the expected- I mean, black men being compared to peacocks? Were the race of this poet unknown I’m sure other black poets would pillory the imagery as indefensibly bigoted. Just compare this poem with my wife Jessica’s poem on Ella Fitzgerald. Many of WDS’s sites, such as the Northwest Review, don’t have ANY writing online! Others, like Conduit, are all style over substance- love them bells-n-whistles! Facture (Faction/Fracture?- wow!) tries to be