The Great(est) Game [by John Emil Vincent]

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.

Comments

[Ms Baroque]

Hi there John.

First, I'll tell you that my oldest kid is called Emil! Second, that you are making me want to read more Ashbery. Third, also Jack Spicer - though I've already blogged on how flipping expensive his book is here in the UK. And fourth, hiya, great post. Or should I say, GRRRRRREAT post!

Oh and finally that my "blog name" is Ms Baroque, but that I blogged on here by my real name, Katy Evans-Bush.

:)

[Laura Orem]

Thanks, John, for this post. This piece really griped my gizzard, as the saying goes, when I read it in the Times. My response to it, after I simmered down, is - what a waste of time and energy to worry about relative greatness. Also - three observations: A) it was interesting that those who Orr cites as the arbiters of literary greatness are all middle-aged-to-old white men; B)the contemporary generation of any poem is notoriously bad at determining its quality; C)I have enough to do to keep my metaphors from jumping off the page and murdering me with my purple gel pen to worry about if the poem I'm writing is "great" or not. I just want to get to the last line with some semblance of sanity intact.

To Mr. Orr and those who ponder this question, I say: Get on with writing poems. Any greatness will rise to the surface, although most of us won't be around to know about it.

[Susan M. Schultz]

John--Consider yourself encouraged to write poems and proses! But then again, the parties I go to . . . And perhaps some writer's block is in order for the advocates of GREATNESS.

[Steven Dube]

Great points, John. But I wonder if you ignore the appeal of greatness?

Or to put it another way, is this lack of greatness poetry's defining characteristic?

You can say there are great films, novels, songs, memoirs, TV shows, comedic acts, and so on, but if you can't say the same about poetry, whether you think this is positive or negative, it is worth noting.

[John Vincent]

Dear Steven Dube,

A lovely point. It is true that when I hear the word "great" in literary studies I reach for my shotgun (figuratively). Some major cultural trends have made that a knee jerk, or trigger finger jerk, response. I will put a couple names forward: E.D. Hirsch, Harold Bloom, Allan Bloom, William Bennet....These are just a few.

I believe that reading or listening or watching is a matter of pleasure, sometimes difficult as in the pleasure of a challenge, but I do not believe that judgment ought enter our readerly experience. It is everywhere, it saturates the market--what gets published what doesn't. I don't control that, never will, and wouldn't want to frankly. I believe the notions of "best" or "great" or "top 10" are ways to make our pleasure in approaching the technologies by which we touch each other (language, written or visual or spoken) instrumental to other forces. Of course there are always other forces, but at least for myself, I'm willing to decide what I love rather than I am to decide what is "great." What I might love, you might hate, and there is nothing objective about that. My job as a critic is to report things I think are worth giving a look--they might delight you, they might not, but I will have made my best argument and of course finally you will decide.

There is of course the BADLY MADE. That is a discussion for a different day. Or there are GENRES I don't prefer. Again, I am a filter, a limited consumer and commentator, and as a critic I can only convince my readers or listeners that I am a reasonable and working filter.

This is my idea of being a critic, born perhaps of my real devotion to poetry and literature in general.

thanks for commenting. jev

[Laura Orem]

I think it's true of the visual arts, too. Look at how their contemporaries trashed the Impressionists. And historically, what is seen as "great" by the generation surrounding it often loses its appeal later. Then we snicker at those backwards old-schoolers who couldn't figure out what was good.

I don't think contemporary poetry "lacks" greatness. It's there, but it seems to me that the time spent searching for it or categorizing relative greatness could be better spent writing more poems.

[John Vincent]

Snark hunting rarely, so far as I've heard, turns up a snark. Or there'd be snarkskin jackets, and snarkskin boots with pointy toes.

[John Vincent]

Dear Katy Evans-Bush,

Thanks for comments and if you want to talk places to start or middle with either Ashbery or Spicer, I'm glad to give whatever thoughts I have based on approaching and reapproaching them. Especially with the approaching them, which I recall quite vividly, god bless me.

cheers john

[DL]

Thank you, JEV, for this thoughtful post, which I caught up with only today. This business about American poets' refusal to be great, this worry about whether any of us is truly great (or truly modern or truly "yours"), is an evergreen thumb-sucker along the lines of "What is American about American poetry?" and "Literary Awards: Why We Hate Them." You find versions every few years. But "great" journalism isn't supposed to last, and "great" poetry may exist like a time-capsule or unexploded land mine. What people will remember after the rest of the NYTBR article is forgotten is probably the mushroom simile.