HERESIES OF POETRY

Painters aim for a pictorial reality, one that gives employment and direction to their lives. Aesthetics is a difficult field, but, leaving aside abstract art, a painter has generally two needs to fulfill: that of creating a plausible representation of the outside world as it appears to most people, and that of creating a satisfying work of art. Both are challenging, but the second is the more imperative when we remember that 1. paintings are representations of reality that give order, value and significance to objects or scenes depicted, 2. the objects and scenes become available in this form through the medium of depiction, and 3. the objects and scenes are themselves of visual interest — both through previous paintings, and the value society places on them per se. Even in the simple matter of colour, artists will distinguish between pictorial color (color needed to make a picture) and perceptual color (everyday experience of color: as it actually is), and except in some contemporary art, will need to work in both, recasting their sensations in pictorial terms. {17}

Craft also has its complications. Many contemporary styles, which lift the living speech of everyday people unsullied into the fabric of the poem, allow selection and arrangement but little 'polishing' of individual words. All the same, we could perhaps 'graduate' the craft axis as:

rudimentary: experience overwhelms the wording: amateur/'beautiful thoughts' poetry.

workmanlike: words match but do not extend experience: Creeley

accomplished: words appropriate but point to further depths: Pound

over-accomplished: Wilbur

precious: words so refined as to replace experience: Darío

So (thirdly) it's theory then? Your author is poorly read in the newer forms of literary theory? Possibly so, but a summing up does look critically at its current strengths and shortcomings — clarifies, weighs and applies it in supporting pages. And shows where the alternatives lie, which other books and sites do not. {18}

Perhaps (fourthly) he's in a time-warp, and won't accept that poetry today has to be new. But who has shown that to be the case? Or argued for it without having their own work to promote? Different in subject matter and style, perhaps, but intrinsically different? To judge by website traffic, serious contemporary poetry is rejected by 99% of poetry lovers, and even its practitioners do not buy each other's books. {19}

Nonetheless, the work of both Bloom and Perloff have circulated academically in ways that may legitimize and exclude certain writers and modes of writing. Both have their limits. Bloom reductively dismisses much 20th century writing, while Perloff tends to claim that certain tendencies in poetry are specifically 20th century creations. In Jed Rasula’s The American Poetry Wax Museum (1995), we see a hyberbolic example of a good-guy/bad-guy account of the poetry field. As a historical narrative of how power circulates in the poetic community, this book is highly useful. He traces much of the division in the American poetry scene of the last 50 years to a split over who was heir to the Pound throne — on one side there’s Berryman and Lowell and on the other there’s Olson, Zukofsky and Duncan. This division can be traced through the battle of the anthologies in 1959-60, and many of the "big names" of the last 35 years, in their official pronouncements at least, have thrown their chips either on one side or another (despite the calypso singers laughing at them). {26}

But Perloff wants to bastardize the considerable musical achievement of John Cage, rendering it a theoretical referendum on the agenda of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. Perloff’s dependence upon the critical dimensions of Cage’s work seems to be the problem endemic to all L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry -- their criticism IS more interesting than the poetry (music) itself. Their attempts to blur the distinction between poetry and criticism acknowledge as much. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry as well as most post-modernist poetry is dissipative -- entropic would be a borrowing that would get Gross and Levitt’s blood boiling (which reminds me of the funny story of how John von Neumann convinced Claude Shannon to make a trope of the term, entropy, in Shannon’s foundational paper on Information Theory.) {27}

Related to the fetish of “imagery” is another phobia, the phobia against abstraction. “No ideas but in things.” This is someone’s provocative flash which has somehow turned into a dogma, and as such is just as onesided and dangerous as the kind of abstraction gone berserk whose consequences we all know. Unless we allow ourselves a certain degree of abstraction we are faced with a series of unrelated concrete phenomena which we cannot put together. Unless we put things together we cannot comprehend them. The obsession with the concrete can mean a suppression of thought. Indeed, in the obsession with “imagery” one may discern an unconscious parallel to the state of mind which the visual media work hard to induce. There, too, and increasingly in recent years, viewers are bombarded with sequences of images that never add up to anything. One knows for what purpose this is done. {28}

According to the typical academic understanding of the work of poets since the 1960s, both the critic and the poet have been freed from the restrictions of craft; the poet, they seem to say, is no longer a liberator, but the liberated. Thus ironically contrary to what Heidegger and Rorty have recently hoped, today's poets are not liberators; many of them claim instead what appears to many to be nothing more than a petulant personal liberation, which they fail to understand is their historical birthright. It is almost now a standard chapter of a poet's life that she or he describe some struggle and eventual emancipation from the constraints of form or the confines of a particular verse-genre or critical ideology, whether imagism, formalism, new-formalism, new criticism, or the local dogmas of a university workshop. {29}

Free verse is another loaded term. Again, one might ask: free from what? . . . Timothy Steele, in his masterful study Missing Measures, points out that Eliot, Pound, Ford & Co. confused idiom with meter in ways previous verse revolutionaries such as Dryden and Wordsworth did not. One wonders how tools which had assisted in producing the riches of the English language suddenly came to be seen as constraints; this would be similar to a carpenter seeing nails as constraints because they keep the house from falling apart. Regardless, the term soon came to imply freedom from verse. . . Initially, this definition sounds nonsensical: free verse claiming to be free from verse while still asserting it is poetry. . . . By the time one reaches the Nineteenth Century one can find as fine a thinker as Matthew Arnold making the imbecilic statement that Dryden and Pope were masters of English prose rather than poets. . . Therefore something written in verse is not necessarily poetry. It is not that large a leap to hold that if something written in verse is not necessarily poetry, poetry does not need to be written in verse. {30}

Timothy Steele in his book Missing Measures has traced the process by which the understanding that poetry was some thing more than language arranged metrically turned into the belief that poetry was something quite other than language arranged metrically, and meter, which until the late nineteenth century had been a sine qua non of poetry, was thrown out of the window. The same thing seems to have happened to paraphrasable meaning: the recognition that poetry was something more than its language's paraphrasable meaning has become the dogma that paraphrasable meaning is unpoetic, or at least that a poem approaches the poetic in so far as it is unparaphrasable. This would have been a very weird doctrine to anyone before 1800, and to almost anyone before 1900 (that is, in those now almost unimaginable days when large numbers of people besides poets bought, read, and cared about poetry). Even Coleridge, who was hardly the most stalwart advocate of poetic clarity, is on record as saying (in his Table Talk) "Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least." {31}