The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska

Poetry by Billy Collins, US Poet Laureate 2001-03. 

Too bad you weren’t here six months ago,
was a lament I heard on my visit to Nebraska.
You could have seen the astonishing spectacle
of the sandhill cranes, thousands of them
feeding and even dancing on the shores of the Platte River.

There was no point in pointing out
the impossibility of my being there then
because I happened to be somewhere else,
so I nodded and put on a look of mild disappointment
if only to be part of the commiseration.

It was the same look I remember wearing
about six months ago in Georgia
when I was told that I had just missed
the spectacular annual outburst of azaleas,
brilliant against the green backdrop of spring

and the same in Vermont six months before that
when I arrived shortly after
the magnificent foliage had gloriously peaked,
Mother Nature, as she is called,
having touched the hills with her many-colored brush,

a phenomenon that occurs, like the others,
around the same time every year when I am apparently off
in another state, stuck in a motel lobby
with the local paper and a styrofoam cup of coffee,
busily missing God knows what.

____________________

from a short essay by Brett Foster dated 18 Nov 2011, retrieved from https://www.cpjustice.org/public/capital_commentary/article/661 

I like Billy Collins as much as anyone. I share his poems with my students, and I appreciate his amiable ambassadorship on behalf of a marginal art—he makes contemporary poetry suddenly enjoyable for many people who just beforehand were strongly convinced it wasn’t. All that said, this poem, “The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska,” strikes me as small and problematic when read in a broader context. Collins’ speaker, touring from state to state and motel lobby to lobby, seems almost embarrassingly remote from the social concerns of today. The speaker, insulated from real life, risks “busily missing God knows what” not only literally but also on a symbolic level. Why do so many poets and poems often seem clueless about the embattled world around them?

But Collins, one might object, is a modern-day Renaissance wit, a persona-maker sensitive to sprezzatura, a kind of artful nonchalance. He does what poets have done for centuries: regard universal human experience through the lens of the personal and individual. One of the most dominant poetry movements of the last century was the Confessional School, and poets remain as prone today to use “I” and “I” and “I” like an automatic stapler of self-absorption. Poets, the proverb goes, will obsess on a bougainvillea as the world burns around them. There are understandable reasons for this. The lyric mode, first of all, invites dramatizations of the self, and most poets, hungering for genuine expression, quite rightly steer clear of the season’s “hot-button” banners or the hot-winded cant of our politicians.

Moreover, with so many American poets, the fact of their employment in multitudinous creative writing programs contributes to this impression of social or economic separation. Doubtless, the securities of tenure have ensured that many of us writers have not felt the direct, most brutal effects of the economic downturn. In other words, Collins’ lecture-tour, missed-it-all poem may be closer to reality than to cluelessness. It is the rare poetry volume indeed that acknowledges the existence of 2008’s financial collapse or a recession’s economic distress—see The Situation by Ian Harrow, or Leontia Flynn’s Profit and Loss. It may be coincidental, or not, that the first two poetry collections that come to mind are British, and both authors avoid becoming “single-topic” voices.

American poets often seem more extreme in either direction: there are the activist poets, and then there are the rest of us. We may read the New York Times and shake our heads, but instead of going much beyond that, we usually do what we’re good at, and what we enjoy—we keep reading.

Poetry: Ode to a Man in Dress Clothes

“Ode to a Man in Dress Clothes”, by Gretchen Marquette, published in the Summer issue of The Paris Review. Marquette lives and works in Minneapolis. In Harper’s 2013 Aug, p. 22.

 

When I see a man
in a dress shirt, I want
to walk up behind him,
place my hand
between his shoulders,
to rest it there
for a moment. I think
about his socks, how
he chose one pair
that morning and the rest
are still at home
in a drawer.
And his shoes —
god those shoes, they break me,
especially when they’re polished, what
does he do to make them shine
like that, yes, all it takes
is a pair of shiny black shoes and such
a wave of tenderness
collapses over me that I see
his ties, at rest
on their little carousel, imagine
that he held them up
in the mirror
at the department store,
unsure.

 

 

Philosophy vs. Literature (vs. Literary Theory vs. Literary Criticism)

Stellar writing by Mark Edmundson, adapted from Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida, published in Harper’s, 1995 August, pp. 28-31.  Boldfacing mine.

It has been twenty years since the publication of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology set off the boom in literary theory, the full effects of which are only now becoming apparent. Whether or not most of us have actually read a word of Derrida, or of Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, or Fredric Jameson, our collective sense of what art is and does has been dramatically altered by their work.

The aim of what has, rather grandly, come to be called “theory” is the skeptical interrogation of various cultural forms–history writing, legal discourse, advertising imagery, and, perhaps most significantly, art. Over the past two decades, theorists have sought to reveal art’s long-suppressed kinship with propaganda, pornography, and the language of imperial oppression. Seen in theory’s bleaching light, great poets no longer appear as ideals of wisdom or of human triumph against the odds. Now they’re to be approached as shrewd deceivers: tour guides to dreamy, detached lotus worlds, apologists for race and gender oppression, bagmen for the bourgeoisie. Current criticism, under the rubric of cultural studies, has continued the trend. Today’s professorial commentators on literature–or film or rock or hip-hop–assume the truth of high theory without feeling a need to argue for it. And as the various purported mystifications of popular culture fall under theory’s skeptical beam, practitioners savor a sense of rebellion, of old laws broken and new freedoms won.

But before theory’s triumph is complete, we ought to back up and see the battle between poetry and the professors in a larger historical context. When we do, it becomes clear that theory isn’t the unprecedented intellectual revolution that its proponents often assume. Rather, it’s an installment in a struggle that’s as old as Western culture itself–the struggle between the philosophers and the poets that Plato, in the fourth century B.C., said was already ancient.

To Plato, the poets were a band of deceivers. They offered illusions, mere imitations of imitations, whereas life’s highest purpose is to seek eternal truths. For his own part, Plato claimed to offer access to concepts that could help one to live a better life. Through philosophical conversation, you approach pure knowledge of the Good, the True, the Beautiful. Conversely, the knowledge that you glean from reading literature is messy, undefined, without focus. You may encounter numerous instances of just action in Homer, but by simply reading Homer you’ll never find out what all those instances have in common: you’ll never make the step from anecdotal to general knowledge, never become a philosopher.

Until the theory boom, literary critics provided a third element in the poet/philosopher debate. Responsive to both art and intellection, critics from Aristotle to Virginia Woolf effectively defended poetry, not only from popular indifference but from dismissive philosophy. With the onset of theory, the critical contingency is fast disappearing. There are now plenty of poets and no end of philosopher/theorists, but art’s public defenders, writers whose first allegiance is to the aesthetic experiences that have shaped them, are becoming ever more rare.

What instruction did the theorists offer in place of that defense? From Jacques Derridá one learned to see that the poet created mesmerizing visual images that disarm the reader’s critical faculties. The deconstructionists could dissolve sensuous literary images–Wordsworth’s daffodil field, Keats’s gorgeously personified Autumn, Crane’s arching bridge–back into interpretable words, putting intellect in control and bringing an end to awe. Marxist critics like Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton taught how subtly literary works insinuate ruling-class values. Michel Foucault gave the New Historicists ways to show how Shakespeare, the supposedly liberating playwright, spawns political subversion in his plays, then subtly discredits the revolutionary energies he’s released, making his world (and ours) safer for the status quo. What theory says, in the most sophisticated possible ways, is that the poets lie.

The theoretical critic of today continues, with high-tech conceptual instruments, Plato’s philosophical quarrel against the poets. A feminist deconstructor, though she may hold her appointment in the department of English, is on the philosophers’ side in the ancient quarrel. She thinks it better for people to be educated by the strong and consistent moral ideas offered by one or another philosophy than to risk being led astray by the unregulated profusion of stories and metaphors that literature offers. To encourage students to focus on images of women, on ocular metaphors, on Oedipal rivalries between male authors, on any overriding theme, is to rein in their freedom to find diverse meanings, meanings that might not be, by the instructor’s lights, satisfyingly moral.

However brilliant they were, Plato, Kant, Hegel, and the philosophical disenfranchisers allied with them didn’t have much hope of evicting literature from its culturally central role. Theory does. With theory, the philosophers may win their battle against the poets once and for all. If they do, they will substantially put an end to the culture of criticism that has championed poetry ever since Aristotle wrote the Poetics to defend dramatic art against his teacher, Plato. Philosophy’s victory is likely (though not inevitable), I believe, because recent developments, both intellectual and material, have given it fresh resources to press its claims.

First, there is Freud. The work of Sigmund Freud and his followers did more to shift power in the war between the poets and the philosophers than any other single event. Deploying Freud’s theory of the unconscious, you can supposedly get to the repressed origins of the work at hand. You are suddenly in a position to say things about the poem that the author could not. The critic now can preside as the authority, taking up the role of analyst to patient, finding motives for the poem that were beyond the ken of the pre-Freudian cultural world.

Then there is the professionalization of literary studies. Criticism now emanates chiefly from universities, which is to say that it must be taught. And philosophical theory–as opposed to responsive, impressionistic criticism–is an eminently teachable discipline. Many of the great philosophers were also great teachers. They had something to hand on: concepts, categories, imperatives, structures of argument. But a more artistic criticism, the kind that reacts to the particularity of an individual work rather than to how it might be related to a general system, is not so easy to teach. Metaphor making, says Aristotle, is a sign of genius, and cannot be learned from others. You can teach an intelligent student to do what a philosophical critic like Paul de Man does (though surely not so well); but it is probably impossible to teach someone to respond like a gifted metaphorical critic, a Virginia Woolf, if he hasn’t an aptitude for it.

A third factor: critics now tend to share a sense that the culture is in a state of crisis. With the disappearance (for many) of authoritative truths, there is a yearning for some stable knowledge, even if it is a negative, skeptical knowledge, on which to rely. If the once authoritative centers–the government, the church, the family–no longer hold, then perhaps, as some contemporary critics suggest, it is up to criticism to provide terms for a humane social life. And if social reform becomes the critic’s burden, then his work must take on a high seriousness. Aestheticism, eccentricity, experimentalism, the unorthodox: all these may be marginally tolerable in a world where civil and religious institutions seem stable, but in our current state of “crisis,” literary criticism needs to become a site for intellectual contests about ultimate, general truths–political truths rather than personal ones. In a contest of big concepts and grand ideas, individual works are inevitably subsumed. When wars are on, even culture wars, all able bodies, corporeal and textual, have to be pressed into service.

What will happen if criticism collapses completely into theory?  What will be lost if that long tradition of critics who defended art is finally made to look irretrievably old-fashioned by the new, streamlined theoretical models? Consider some examples of this endangered species of literary appreciation: Samuel Johnson on Milton’s grand and unprecedented powers of imagination; William Hazlitt on Wordsworth’s stunning originality; Keats on Shakespeare’s extraordinary capacity for disinterestedness; Orwell on the generous anger of Charles Dickens. What comes out of these critical performances is a more finely shaded image of how singular is the author at hand. Such critical specificity, the recognition of what is unique and praiseworthy in artists, strikes a blow against those forces, be they conceptual or institutional, that tend to homogenize us, to cramp our hopes for growing more complexly and rewardingly individual than we are.

I don’t want to be understood as saying that the theoretical attack on poetry must inevitably lead toward a cultural Iron Age. Once you’ve stripped theory of its Freudian presumptions about getting to the repressed origin, and so explaining the work once and for all, the skepticism that theory stimulates can be valuable. It is worth asking if Shakespeare lets out rebellious energies and then crushes them. And it’s worth asking how much the impersonal and authoritative third-person voice of this or that novel encourages us to fall, both in reading and in day-to-day experience, into a naive trust in impersonal authority. It’s worth going along with Derrida and examining the power of images to mesmerize us.

But it’s also worth answering back on behalf of literature and art. For theorizing is only half the work of literary criticism. The critic also shows–contra the deconstructors–how certain literary images, like Coleridge’s wild poet with “flashing eyes and flowing hair” (a prototype for all rock stars past and to come), can stir unroutinized insubordinate energies in the reader; how Shakespeare’s boisterous, exuberant Falstaff inspires us to fight with him against the urge, embodied by the icy Prince Hal, to suppress the more joyously anarchic human pleasures.

Critics must identify those points where literature resists being explained away. They must defend poetry at a time when art–and every expression of individual spirit–is under attack. By failing to place theory in the ancient quarrel and to see its connection to current anxieties, theorists may be deceiving themselves. What looks to them like a revolution has in many ways come to resemble the age-old reaction that flat-minded, respectable people have always had against literature. Brilliant theory is only half the game. If it’s the only half you play, you’re on the side of hard-eyed businessmen, of government know-it-ails, of smug philosophers, of all the people who think, however secretly, that art is a childish diversion that we can well do without.

Where’s the poem?

From “Winds of Revolt: The Poetry of Middle Eastern Uprising,” by Robyn Creswell, in Harper’s, 2013 Nov, p. 90.

Unlike their American peers, Arab poets are public intellectuals. At moments of crisis, readers expect them to take sides. In Memory for Forgetfulness, his recollection of the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish complained that such expectations were unrealistic:

In response to cultural residues within us that link the war cry to stirring verse—survivals that assume the poet’s role is that of a commentator on events, an inciter to jihad, or a war correspondent—the Arabic literary milieu has become used to posing the question of poetry in the middle of raging war. In every battle they raise the question, “Where’s the poem?”

 

Memoir of a father, silence, and poetry

Source:  Pico Iyer, “From Eden to Eton:  One boy’s transatlantic education,” in Harper’s, 2011 Nov, pp 42-48.

By the time I was five, I was filling my green exercise books with long stories about witches, wizards, and dragons, though making sure (I was my father’s son) that the goodies always voted Labour and the baddies were revealed by their support of the Conservatives.

…

Later, when I was growing up, he would tell me about how he’d been taken, as a boy himself, to see  Maharshi, the famous
mystic—also an Iyer, as it happened, part of our priestly clan—who’d lived in a cave for seventeen years, practicing “self-inquiry” and communicating mostly through silence.  Such unworldly influences my father had balanced and made more rigorous by reading Hobbes and Hume and Locke, as well as the English poets. It was as if his life were to be consecrated to the joining of the spiritual and the political domains; and by linking them together, he could perhaps join East and West as well, separated, for the time being,
as he’d written in his first book, by a “glass curtain.”

…

Without a thought, I’d started writing about the book I’d so proudly discovered in college, a secret talisman now for thirty years. The
Road to Xanadu, by John Livingston Lowes. Would I have loved it so if I’d known how much it meant to my father? It was like hearing, from my mother, three days after he died, that my father’s favorite poem, which she asked me to read at his memorial service, was Yeats’s “When You Are Old,” the same relatively obscure poem (I had thought) I had recited for years to new companions.

So much time we spend trying to run from who we are, as useful an exercise as trying to outrun one’s shadow—or one’s past. Besides, I
thought, I’d always told myself that my father was a mystery to me; but if that was the case, and I found so much of him in me, what did that begin to say about my knowledge of myself?

On the medieval troubadour tradition

Source:  Joshua Cohen, “New Books,” in Harper’s 2012 June pp 67f:

“Before the thirteenth century,” Marisa Galvez writes in Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (U of Chicago Press), “the terms ‘poem,’ ‘poet,’ and ‘poetry,’ were reserved for classical authors.” Medieval vernacular versifiers called themselves trobadors, skilled in trobar or chantar. In relating their history, Galvez juxtaposes works such as the thirteenth-century Middle Latin / German / French / Provençal Carmina Burana, which criticized the Catholic Church, with the fourteenth-century Castilian Libro de buen amor, which delineated the joys and perils of carnality, and she interleaves pages from comedic and terpsichorean chansonniers with the comparatively dignified longings of the Liederhandschriften of the German minnesingers. The essential theme being gestured at in these pairings is the creation of authorship, though Galvez prefers to bury herself in manuscript dating rather than address an incipient Renaissance in which an artist could become the lord of his lord, and love could be both an unattainable ideal and a married Florentine named Beatrice. By favoring the collective over the individual, Songbook achieves an unintentional rhyme between cloistered monks and courtiers—whose creations still had to be inspired by and respectful of their God and their patrons, respectively—and the modern academic, whose every inkling of originality must be justified with endnotes and parenthetical equivocations. The roving minstrelsy, which Galvez regards as a medieval Creative Commons, were treated by Dante and Petrarch as a type of market research or their later pagebound poetries. From orality to textuality in two centuries flat—and still a century before the printing press typeset Virgil and Pindar and capitalized the classics into Classics.

Within that oral-to-text transition, the legendary bards said to be the originators or compilers of countless songs became themselves the heroes of songs known as vidas, or “lives.” This innovation, an early music-industry variant of the thirteenth-century Legenda sanctorum (“lives of the saints”), led to self-portraits and pitiless caricatures of rivals intended to ensure, or obliterate, the artists’ renown. Guilhem de Peitieu, Ninth Duke of Aquitaine (1071–1127), liked to boast about his “garnimen,” or sexual “equipment.” Peire d’Alvernhe, a non-noble, fairly hilarious itinerant who appears in De Vulgari Eloquentia (active in the middle of the twelfth century, he’s the earliest troubadour name-dropped—and, in The Divine Comedy, plagiarized—by Dante), wrote a dozensish song called “Cantarai d’aqestz trobadors” that condemns his peers to luteless purgatory:

I shall sing of those troubadours
who sing in many fashions, and all praise
their own verses, even the most appalling;
but they shall have to sing elsewhere,
for a hundred competing shepherds I [see],
and not one knows whether the
melody’s rising or falling.

In this Peire Rogier is guilty,
thus he shall be the first accused,
for he carries tunes of love in public right now,
and he would do better to carry
a psalter in church, or a candlestick
with a great big burning candle.

And the second: Giraut de Bornelh,
who looks like a goatskin dried out in the sun,
with that meager voice of his, and that whine,
it is the song of an old lady bearing buckets of water;
if he saw himself in a mirror,
he would think himself less than an eglantine.

Q

U‘s mate, O with a new root,
the one capital letter
which probes below the baseline,
here’s to the quirky beauty

of its tail, that fluent tongue
stuck from a wide-open mouth,
that elegant half-mustache
parted quickly toward the east,

that antique handle we grasp
to lift up the monocle
of our alphabet’s monarch,
that final flourish of the quill.

Michael McFee

The all of human sentience become a mob

How much of human life—human ways of living, being human, thinking, behaving, acting—is becoming, is characterizable as a vulgarization of what have been its better parts, its higher levels in intelligence, purpose, imagination of the good, vision of the happy?…. To have, to consume, to be done with wanting, waiting, finding the fitting match to desire: the all of human sentience become a mob.

Apply this to any of the treasured forms of the human best. Apply it to poetry. Poetry now is, much, a foppery of new casual word-wit.  Old vulgarity is made, in it, a preciosity of a new vulgarity; poet-wisdom readies itself for promenade in the mirror of a new literary worldliness; and there is a playing upon the instruments of metaphor and measure, with a resolutely careless air of modern ease in the technicalities of traditional poet elegance and eloquence.  There is everything of exhibition of capacity to string out line and line of poetic verbal agility; and a nothing of straining love of the rare truth-sound and truth-sense long dreamt of under the name of poetry, and given a tremorous reality by the unhesitant bearing of poems—as to say, “We speak of the best speaking.”

Do I think there will be an end of this nothing, this poetry of a time of human leveling of the essential grace of the human to the floor of self-ignorance upon which the human first knew life?  The human has returned itself to this floor, all that it had learned collapsing, from failure of the mortar of self-knowledge. I believe there will be no end of the nothing that the human has made of itself until, above the din of the mob-music of the private patter and chatter of this poet-many, there rises as above a loud silence, heard only by itself, a smallest number of voices calling upon each other from lonely afar-s. “Speak best! Speak best! –or the human fact will die of the fast descending estimate it is making of itself as a low-cost mass-pride.”

Excerpted from Laura (Riding) Jackson’s (1901-1991) “The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language” (ed. John Nolan, U Mich, 2007).  Jackson, the author of many works of poetry, criticism and fiction, renounced poetry in 1941.   Published in Harper’s, 2007.06, p 32.