In today's New York Times, a place I know we all rush for
the latest and "greatest" in poetry criticism, David Orr asks, in
"The Great(ness) Game, basically,
what will happen when THE generation of GREAT poets is gone.
Orr begins with
noting that John Ashbery is the first living poet to have a volume in the Library
of America. And this leads Orr to
ponder: "What will we do when Ashbery and his generation are gone? Because
for the first time since the early 19th century, American poetry may be about
to run out of greatness."
Hit the
7-elevens! Stock up on greatness before the twister hits!
First off,
“Great,” is a sloppy term, something to which Orr’s pile-up of potential
definitions and questions, mostly rhetorical questions, gestures. To give him
some credit, the definition of “great” is his topic; but notice the plague of
single words meat hooked in quotation marks (“greatness,” “great,” “boring,”
“good,” “major,” “serious,” &c.)—and THEN notice when Orr increasingly
decides meat hooks aren’t necessary.
Words whose meaning he begins by suggesting are up for grabs, are by the
end of the essay, grabbed. The start of the essay is addicted to quotation
marks on terms, while the end, I’m not sure if he thought this was subtle,
features few. For a piece dealing with definition he plays faster and looser
with the indefinite and definite than any writer I’ve ever read. Defining
“great,” he opines, is an “increasingly blurry business.” [these quotation
marks are mine—from now on I will bold the words he himself puts in quotation
marks.] However “increasing blurry,” the
term “great” is at the beginning of the essay more often then not held in
quotation marks, and, by the end, great stands naked, proud, and apparently
self-evidently in focus.
1. “The
problem is that over the course of the 20th century, greatness has turned out
to be an increasingly blurry business.”
Orr blames
this on postmodernism’s questioning of “Truth, Beauty, [and] Justice.” But
simple sense might tell us that as history progresses, we have fewer and fewer
filters (years, critics, just plain old historic contingency) through which
poetry must pass to get to us eager readers. Contemporary poetry is precisely
that, contemporary, these poems haven’t been around long enough to have
dependable gauges of “greatness” even were we to wish to make such questionable
judgments. And there is the adventure! There is the delight, the pleasure, the
challenge for the contemporary reader. I do not for one read a poem to decide,
“Is this great?” I read it to see if it invents, if it makes me run out and
read it to all my overly-patient friends, if I can’t stop running through lines
of it as I fall asleep, if it gives me insight into big or little questions
I’ve been puzzling over. Or if it shapes in language something that has been
floating in the often addled ether of my thinking. Or if a new device makes me
see language and its possibility in an unexpected way.
2. “Poetry
can’t be as confident of its own durability... [and to gain assurance of
durability]...Poetry needs greatness.”
By this
logic nuclear waste might be mankind’s greatest contribution to history. Because
something lasts does not make it great. And, no, poetry doesn’t need a mountain
in Nevada..
There are negative qualities to durability.
Say, staying far beyond ones welcome. Do I care that a poem I read today
may not be read in one hundred years? No (unless by some miracle I’m still
around to read and share it). Do I care
that it speaks to me and might speak to many people now. Yes. Do I admire it for its care and craft and
wisdom, of course.
3. “Does
being “great” simply mean writing poems that are “great”? If so, how many? Or
does “greatness” mean having a sufficiently “great” project? If you have such a
project, can you be “great” while writing poems that are only “good” (and maybe
even a little “boring”)? Is being a “great” poet the same thing as being a
“major” poet? Are “great” poets necessarily “serious” poets? These are all good
questions to which nobody has had very convincing answers.
These
aren’t all good questions. In fact,
given my own inclinations, none of them are good questions, which considering
my status as a literary critic and theorist might say something. One quibble I
have is the notion that boredom is always bad in literature. Sometimes, here I especially think of
Ashbery’s Flow Chart, but really of any reading whatever, boredom is the key to
the kingdom. You drift away and then are
snapped back—and there’s nothing more (at least for me) exceptional that this feeling
of being lulled and then violently woken by art. I also think of Beckett,
Joyce, Blake, and many others.
Yes, every
poet has written boring (if we read this to mean poems that never grip us, or
whose purpose we can’t figure) poems. . . duh. It is often less a question of
writing them, we all have, than publishing them. And poets aren’t always their
own best editors. Or rather poets are often their own worst editors—thus the
importance of poetic communities (see below about MFA programs). Quantifying
the number of poems that make one great is simply absurd. A project, such as
Crane’s “The Bridge” might be worthwhile not because it totally succeeds as a
poem but because it is truly fascinating to read. What is “good,” why all these
scare quotes? Why all these question marks? And no, a serious poet is not all
that serious, because seriousness is a mark of a lack of imagination. If a poet
were totally convinced that her writing were important, god help us. Even
writing about horrible events in history, a writer of her worth will have
flair, flourish, thoughtful pauses, and more often than not self-deprecating
passages (as befits being a single person chronicling any event of enormous
magnitude: this just off-hand makes me think of a favorite poet, Zbigniew
Herbert).
4. “But the
poetry world has also acquired new vices, most notably a tedious careerism that
encourages poets to publish early and often...”
As a young
poet encouraged to publish early and often by NO ONE, I take particular
exception to this. At near forty, I love
reading and publishing in journals, but never early and not that often—and no
one is encouraging me. As an editor of the Massachusetts Review and a reader
for many contests, I understand that there are slews of worthwhile poems and
manuscripts that will never see the light of day. So, this tedious careerism
must only apply to a few very special people. Ones I don’t know. Perhaps Orr and I attend different parties.
And knowing many poets mid-career struggling to peddle a second book, I see few
able to partake of this terrible vice. In fact, I see them sending to the very
same contests I do as a poet who has not yet (and may not ever) publish a book.
Publishing in my mind is a way of building community, as are readings. And
readings are burgeoning.
Thankfully. The recent pleasure
in the AWP so many took is not about simple careerism, it is about a lively
community that Orr would call a vice and I would call anything but tedious.
5. Related to
#4, Orr blamed MFA programs for more than just a “tedious careerism.”
“...a
peculiar development in American poetry [presumably borne on the desire to feel
nostalgia for “greatness” (his quotation marks)] that has more or less
paralleled the growth of creative-writing programs: the lionization of poets
from other countries, especially countries in which writers might have the
opportunity to be, as it were, shot.” And
further: “Many of us in the American poetry world have a habit of exalting
foreign writers while turning them into cartoons.
The OPPORTUNITY to be SHOT! This is either a cleverism
misfired, “as it were,” terribly, or one of the single-most parochial and
callous comments about writers who DO face real dangers. Dear David Orr,
writers are shot. Dear David Orr, if the space station can receive this
channel: political oppression, the imprisonment, torture, and murder of writers
exists and is hellishly real.
6.”When we
lose sight of greatness [note not in quotation marks], we cease being hard on
ourselves and on one another; we begin to think of real criticism as being
“mean” rather than as evidence of poetry’s health; we stop assuming that poems
should be interesting to other people and begin to think of them as being
obliged only to interest our friends—and finally, not even that.”
O really?
Well, the topic of my next few posts will be Jack Spicer. Spicer refused to
have his poems published outside the Bay Area, he did write for his friends. He
took poetry so seriously that he thought that the sort of greatness Orr finds
so important was incidental. He’d leave a poem tacked up on a bar wall and
forget it. I can think of few poets in more of a death lock with poetry, Spicer
took poetry terribly seriously, and suffered for it. Yet, he imagined it for
his friends.
7. So instead
of paying attention to this mysterious cloud of “other people” that Orr
invokes, “we,” notice he doesn’t seem to be included in that “we”: cling to the
ground in those [great] artist’s shadows—John Ashbery is enormous at this
point—and talk about how rich the darkness and how lovely it is to be a
mushroom.”
Perhaps
Orr hasn’t read much recent Ashbery, but a line from “Phantoum,” in his A
Worldly Country, strikes me as both cogent and hilarious here:
Grape and
cherry were the flavors. Later they added mushroom.
We were
grape children, trying to cope in a mushroom world.
