Modern Blues-- David St. John

Last Saturday I taught a day-long class on William Carlos Williams, and so for the week before I'd been thinking a lot about what it meant to be "modern" in his day. I talked to my class about the usual "modern" suspects in both America and Europe and internationally, about all of those writers of poetry and fiction who wanted, in Pound's words, to "make it new." I talked about modern painting-- the Armory show and the influence of Cubism. Of course we also talked about Williams' urgency in trying to bring an American idiom -- a more immediate diction with phrases that reflected, in his view, a more American sense of breath, as opposed to an English prosody -- into our poetry. This is all old news, but what struck me once again, as it had when I was a young poet, was the fierce clamor of the many poets of the day all seeking to break the tired molds, conventions and traditions, and to offer their historical, literary moment a fresh view of what language could do in poetry. My favorite single poem reflecting on this project remains a poem not by Williams, but by Wallace Stevens, "Of Modern Poetry." 

But, of course, for those of us born after the struggle to be Modern, what's left for us to do anymore in order to prove how very new and/or even-more-modern-than-they we and our poetries are? The century has been (to me at any rate) a truly hilarious catalogue of poetic reactions and personal one-upsmanship, as each new movement of literary prejudices charts it program toward the future of poetry. It is this American notion of "progress" that haunts me and terrorizes me, that need to believe we are always going forward, "making progress." Yet, haven't we also learned that, for change to be good, even excellent and exciting, it doesn't necessarily have to signify "progress." And in that regard, I want to suggest what most poets already have figured out -- that even to want to be More-Modern-Than-Thou is, in fact, to engage in an exercise of exquisite (one could say indulgent ) nostalgia. It is to long for a day long past when the idea of the new ("the new") was a sacred concept.

Don't get me wrong; believe me, I long for those days a lot recently also. But I want to suggest a new mantra. Let's try, More-Now-Than-Thou. Let's continue to absorb those lessons of the generations who have written before us -- after all, our poetry is a long conversation with the poets and poetry of the past so that we can speak more eloquently to the future -- but it is essential that we continue to speak to our present moment above all else -"to the men and the women of the day," as Stevens says. 

Yesterday, walking through the crowded aisles of what were mainly booths of Mid-Century Modern furniture (as well as paintings and jewelry) at the Los Angeles Modernism Show, held annually at the Santa Monica Civic Center, I realized that the scent in the air (aside from money) was the scent of nostalgia, and that the fetishizing of and commodifying of these ideas of newness and innovation, in these forms of gorgeous and striking material objects, was something we do in the arts and our criticism as well. The dealers were all ready to sell us what had been the coolest, newest aspects of our pasts. A nostalgia for the new. And I do love this stuff, I confess. 

But I left empty handed as the reality set in -- no surprise that I couldn't afford to be Modern. What a relief it was then to be delivered outside, into the chaos of the now.