« Reply #5 on: October 04, 2008, 11:29:43 AM »
ARE YOU ALRIGHT, MR WRIGHT?
Warning: The Following Review will use Complete HONESTY in Analyzing the Work Of Living Poets. May Cause Dizziness, Nausea, or Rage.
The Southern poet Charles Wright’s introduction as Guest Editor of the Best American Poetry Series (an honorary recognition of ’Best’ in itself) is meandering, incoherent, but thankfully, brief, and does manage a fit of clarity as it winds up:
“Everyone talks about the ‘great health’ of American poetry nowadays. [I think they only mean, Mr. Wright, ‘I drink to your health.’ They don’t mean ‘healthy.’ What people mean is ‘stinking drunk.’] And it’s hard to fault that. There are very few bad poems being published, very few. [But many bad introductions.] On the other hand [uh-oh, here it comes] there are very few really good ones, either, ones that might make you want to stick your finger in the Cuisinart, saying “Take m now, Lord, take me now. The way I felt about Lowell [A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket…HA HA] and Roethke [In a dark time…HA HA] and Berryman [Life, friends, is boring…HA HA] back in my green time. [Wright preferred the MANIC SCHOOL] And early Creeley [not to be confused with boyhood Keats] and Sixties’ Merwin [before Metal Merwin. Yes, Sixties Merwin was the best…’Feel the new Vibration, all across the Nation, we’re ditching Punctuation!] O, there is lots of moving the language around the page (and I guess in the mind), [Yes, I guess…] there is much whippy, [whip it good?] snippy ‘gotcha’ kind of stuff, alternately interesting, alternately ho-hum. [Does he mean Foetry.com and Alan Cordle? Ramke/Graham/Sacks? Christopher Woodman and Jeffrey Levine and Joan Houlihan? The ‘late’ Creeley? Joan Houlihan needs to write another outraged letter. Wright called Alan Cordle interesting. If this doesn’t cause outrage in MFA Nation, I don’t know what will.]
After this bolt of sanity, however, a frightening madness takes over. What shall we make of how Mr. Wright goes on to conclude?
“We seem to be in the Great Joyful Swamp of still water and rotting trees, all the ‘isms’ circled around just ready to have the ground go out from under their feet and add themselves to the watery complacency. [Are you following this? I’m submerged, I think] We need a kraken to rise up and scare the piss out of us into what’s in our hearts and whatever Urge it is that constitutes the soul. We need a non-verbal turbulence [we certainly have that here, what with the Urge and the kraken], a force, in our poems. We need to have the night and darkness and some real sharp teeth to take the hurly-burly out of our heads and stuff it into our veins. [Need that? Hey, I WANT THAT! Where do I sign up, Mr. Wright?] Though Language is always Capo, sometimes we need the Consigliere to whisper in its ear--Time to go to the mattresses, Don Carlo, time for a new poetry con coglioni. Let’s let the frills and cleverness dance by themselves. Over there, in and among the gum trees. And the water cypress. No more ‘whatever.’ Now the sharp blade. After all, it’s been a hundred years, you know. [Gasp. Was that a lecture, or did Charles Wright just stab me in the neck?]
Charles Wright, kraken with a sharp blade, has assembled, in the name of Urge, an anthology of creative writing teachers, except for Patti Smith, the rock star, and Robert Bly, and a few others. When Ashbery, Merwin, and Bly are gone, it’s very likely that every poet in Lehman’s annual book will be a creative writing teacher.
Only two poets in the volume are under 30.
Fifty are over 50. This may be why the overriding tone of the book is eschatological gloom. Poets acutely observant, secular, and getting old. It isn’t pretty. But art has always thrived on this, hasn’t it? Well, not really. Genius, for most of mankind’s existence, has been young and happy. Only recently has it come disguised as bitter and old-minded. These poems spring from the aging and gloomy; even the humor is the fearful, hysterical kind. If poets are unacknowledged legislators, who would push legislation that makes the people unhappy? Yet that’s what contemporary poetry does. It’s nearly always clever, but it makes us miserable. It disdains mankind and society. Jarrell saw the poetic problem back in the early 40s: “Contemporary life is condemned, patronized, or treated as a disgraceful aberration or special case…” Nothing could describe the Best American Poetry 2008 better. The young can be old and the old can be young. But we don’t have to be hysterically bitter.
In his brief introduction, the Series Editor, David Lehman, cries against an “epidemic of ignorance” and welcomes more Workshops in the form of the BFA; more Writing Workshops is the answer!
Lehman quotes an Auden essay (The Dyers Hand) on the ideal School for Poets, written in 1962, a year, Lehman says, “far in advance of the ubiquitous writing workshop,” but Lehman is typically short-sighted, underestimating how the Modernists/New Critics had already changed the university by the 1950s. Allen Tate, a leading Southern Agrarian/New Critic, founded a Writing Program at Princeton by the time he left that institution in 1942. Modernist poets had invaded the Academy in force well before 1962, and had made serious preparations to do so in the 1930s. Lehman needs to read Garrick Davis’ important new book, “Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism.” From his introduction to the essays, Davis quotes Randall Jarrell writing in 1941: “Today there is not merely a division between scholars and [poet]-critics, but open war.” However, “By 1955 all of this had changed so dramatically that the English critic A. Alvarez complained, in an essay that year, about the number of poets teaching at universities. What had happened in the space of those fourteen years? …the New Critics simply replaced the old academic scholarship in the universities…” The academy as a place where poets teach themselves, a shameful idea a mere 50 years ago, has become the norm. The triumphant New Critics themselves witnessed the decline of scholarship in their time; it was the New Critic’s fault, but, of course, they passed the blame on to their idiot children, the even more obscure post-modernists. In a few generations, Pound, Ransom, and Tate’s Modernist hustle has managed to severely weaken poetry, criticism, scholarship, and public appreciation of all three.
The poets represented in Best ’08 give the distinct impression of an artist who sits in front of a computer, contemplating the world’s end, googling the awful natural fact. Creative Writing Teachers google global warming, then write poems. Poetry writing is easy, really.
David McCombs, Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford (Stegner, an environmentalist, founded Stanford’s Poetry Workshop), Yale Younger Poets winner, ‘99, Tupelo Press Dorset Prize winner, ‘05, and director of Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas, contributes “The Last Wolf In Edmonson County.” According to an old story, the last gray wolf was shot and killed in a certain country in Kentucky, in 1902, by a man named Noah. In the notes in the back (which are a great feature) McCombs writes:
‘The story combines so many elements I’m interested in: local history, extinction, agriculture and nature, changing attitudes toward the natural world, fairy tale associations of wolves, biblical echoes of the name Noah…’
This is what Socrates rightfully complained about. McCombs is ‘interested” in all these things, and this is considered enough. It hardly matters that none of the ‘elements’ mentioned in McCombs’ notes actually get into the poem; the poem merely expresses a vague sense that something is terribly wrong in some place which could conceivably be Edmonson County, in 2008, and it seems to involve the stalking by a wolf and the stalking of something more sinister. The feeling is considered enough. The “elements of interest” such as “agriculture” or “extinction” count only as badges of a certain earnestness, their expertise never questioned. Noah isn’t used in the poem. Did the poet remove it from the final draft of the poem? Was this “element” not considered strong enough? Was the poet, at the last minute, afraid of appearing superstitious? Are all his interests mere superstitions, or should we take them seriously as credentials? I think McCombs wants to have it both ways, and I don’t know if it’s honest to do so.
Most of the poems boast the hyper-romantic feelings of end-of-the-world menace in banal language. These are worriers, not poets. “The jets. The wood in piles along/ the bank. The dead. The jets. Liquor/ through a straw. Speaking. A little anger/grows inside them. The jets. The dead” writes Joshua Beckman.
Marvin Bell tries for levity, “I awoke and was dead, so I decided to take my own life, and ended up alive after my self-inflicted demise” but this fits in, finally, to the dismal tone of the book. Charles Bernstein follows Bell with some pretentious dribble. Ciaran Berry watches a YouTube that makes him sad. Frank Bidart reflects gloomily on the inevitable end of his life. Bly, in a short lyric, philosophically imitating D.H. Lawrence, scolds humanity for not being content like lobster, clam, and heron, and I suppose they deserve the scolding. The son of the president of the U. VA, John Casteen, invokes the ‘God of varmints’ in a beaver-hunting poem; Kate Daniels relates a temp job experience taking care of a man hellishly dying from cancer, but ruins an otherwise powerful narrative with gratuitous references to lynching in the South because the patient happens to be black, and the hospital’s in Virginia, “elements of interest” which have nothing to do with the narrative.
There is a great deal of armchair apocalypse. Because the rock star Patti Smith’s niece attends VA Tech, Smith writes a short poem telling us ‘deer don’t do that’ (randomly shoot each other with high powered rifles). Gee, thanks.
Here are some more highlights:
“Think of the gunk that never comes off the roasting pan.” --Dean Young
“I have disobeyed my oath. I have caused harm.” --C. Dale Young
“I am not asking you to die for me. So you will die for me.” --Lynn Xu
“The most beautiful house I ever died in” --Franz Wright
“What happened to our home? I said. The government took it, she said. What for? I said. They said it was for strategic reasons, she said” --James Tate
“The tumors grow, and scanners never lie.” --Alan Sullivan
“I know I am an old woman. But I cannot live in your shoe.” Kathryn Starbuck
“Apocalyptic knucklebone” --Lisa Ross Spaar
“Our sun will become a red giant and as it expands it will swallow the earth.” --Dave Snyder
“the serpent’s hiss, the new dialect” --R.T. Smith
“the sight of a small child/leaping out of a window/with its nightclothes on fire” --Charles Simic
“His hands have been chopped off. He signs bills with the mess.
The country is in good hands. It ends like this.” --Fred Seidel
“Yet despite the occasional suicide bomb,/I’m often as bored as folks back home” --Sherod Santos
“To listen as you recited that litany of automatic miseries” --David St. John
“I hadn’t read ‘The Toilet’/or ‘The Slave,’ I’d only been fucked twice.” --Ira Sadoff
“their rags and mortal hair they forage” --Tim Ross
“Pelicans get lost” --Alberto Rios
“In my mouth the mausoleum of refusal: everything died inside me” --D.A. Powell
“Past the power station in flames, Martyr’s Square” --Michael Palmer
“I am President Stove I will chop down the cherry tree over on that page” --Ron Padgett
“fear gone blind into the hunt” --Meghan O’Rourke
“If we can’t keep the crybabies smothered” --Debra Nystrom
“In winter, the camp teemed with refugees” --D.Nurske
“They’re poisoning the atmosphere” --Paul Muldoon
“thread return to her as dread or even dead” --Susan Mitchell
“and what you know of the coming/of age before you had grown old” --W.S. Merwin
“lava of the city’s entombment” --Carolyn Forche
A bomb, a bomb that will go off soon for him, “ --Bob Hicok
“has no intention/Of releasing him from the poem. You can get killed out there” --Robert Haas
“That rattle coughs up something sinister” --Cornelius Eady
“radioactive waste in it” --Jorie Graham
“Then, suicide at fifty.” --John Ashbery
“and what came stalking there was not a shade, though/it moved with stealth among the sawbriars, lit by nothing.” --Davis McCombs
Is all of this Wright’s “we need a kraken to rise up and scare the piss out of us?”
But don’t newspapers and TV, and much of it half-truth, do this for us already, and in language that’s hardly less eloquent? Are poets today 'makers,' or are they being 'made' by bad news?
I found only one uplifting passage of poetry (as opposed to mere hysteria) in the entire book; from Tony Hoagland:
--Description
Which lingers,
And loves for no reason.
