Hecht in the Times

Dinitia Smith's article "Distilling the Music of Poetry," in today's New York Times, is a profile of Anthony Hecht: "that epitome of Formalism in poetry." There is a photo of the 80-year-old poet, who, true to his formalistically epitomal status, "wears a jacket and tie in the middle of the day," "his posture ... erect, his beard neatly trimmed." Later in the piece, Smith observes, "He sits very still. His accent is almost English." She writes that "The library where Mr. Hecht sits is an expression of the man and the work--serene, with fluted pilasters and a frieze around the ceiling with lines from his "Death the Poet," written in gold leaf." If Hecht were himself a poem, apparently, he would be a particularly fussy funeral elegy in tightly woven heroic couplets.

"For 50 years," writes Smith, "Mr. Hecht has been a bulwark against the invasion of contemporary poetry by the undisciplined, against the purveyors of free verse, the babblers of the spoken-word movement, the language poets with their brittle associations." It would be easy to poke fun at the ludicrousness of the "invasion" imagined in this passage, at Hecht's bigoted intolerance of any practice outside the most rigidly "traditional" formal process. But he is just a quaintly cranky elderly gentleman with what has to be an increasingly minimal amount of influence on anything going on in contemporary writing. His verse is generally nondescript even on its own formalist terms, never going much beyond the range of what might be expected from a precociously antiquarian undergraduate. He is a respectable scholar of traditional poetics, which is to say that he has an archival rather than a sensual apprehension of forms, or at best his sensitivity is limited to the appreciation of the already-fully-appreciated products of literary history. What is really troublesome is the Times' valorization of his retrograde and vacuous attitude toward experimentation.

When people still complain about the pernicious influence of "academia" on poetry, in America at least, what they are really responding to is the gross caricature of academia perpetuated by mass media. To read the Times or watch popular movies or browse the slick anthologies at chain bookstores, one would think that the literary establishment in the US is a vast room full of tweed-clad Poloniuses, harumphing and tush-tushing over their meerschaums at that disgraceful beatnik poetry of which the younger generation seems so enamored. Obviously, there are real problems with the treatment of poetry in academia, but eccentrically conservative formalists like Hecht are irrelevant both from the perspective of innovative poetics and with regard to the shapeless stuff that gets held up as a model in mainstream MFA programs.

Hecht asks questions whose incompleteness or short-sightedness is telling: "'One wants to feel in control,' he says of Formalism. 'If you are writing in free verse, what makes it a poem? ... It's as if someone says, "I thought of a butterfly," and it becomes a poem because it's sanctioned by their own brilliance.'" This is a fair question: what does make something written outside of traditional meters a poem? That some of the reasonable, readily imaginable answers do not occur to Hecht is directly related to his opening comment about feeling in control. His unwillingness to unscrew the training wheels and risk careening into a tree is what one perceives most strongly here. Again, he comes close to achieving a genuine insight when he remarks that the "butterfly" poem is "sanctioned" by the author's "own brilliance"; what Hecht cannot appreciate is the extent to which poetic effects do often take on their power as a result of contextual, contingent, and capricious factors such as the poet's own self-confidence.

I thought
of a
butterfly

What a wonderful poem! I wrote a couple of posts ago about the "unsettling" prospect of a condition in which no poetry seems bad; this condition is unsettling only in a parodic sense, of course, and what is parodized by such a panic is a Hechtian state of mind, one that cannot tolerate the destabilization of external standards. But such destabilization is indispensable to poetry. The risk one continually faces is the loss of the distinction between good and bad, complex and messy, elegant and crude, witty and inane. Without this risk, there would be no point in writing poetry, as opposed to, say, memos or court orders. And if the risk materializes as an actuality, well, then you have yourself some bad poetry that you can't really say is bad. Live with it.

Googlism?

Are Googlism poems "really" poems?

Why do I feel like I've written a poem when I come up with satisfying results using the Googlism engine?

Am I responding to something in the language/form, or rather to what I perceive as my commendable discretion in selecting some results over others as more "poetic"?

Like a proud burgher doting over his porcelain acquisitions....

Does it make it better or worse that no one but myself may find my discretion commendable? That the pride is private and aesthetically insular?

Is this a microcosm of the poet's relation to poetry in general? (Not the casual reader's relation, which is initially one of enchantment, then comfortable familiarity, then indifference, then contempt; in this sense, there are no casual readers of poetry, and that is why.)

In order to live completely with poetry, one must gradually learn to meet it as an Other. It comes to one on its terms, which one is powerless to negotiate. If one does negotiate these terms, the results may be skillful, amusing, beautiful, intricate, ad nauseam, but they will not be recognized by the poet, in her secret self-confessions, as poetry.

But I have written bundles of poems that I have tortured and worried into fussy shapes, which I have come to despise; and then again, over time, learned to meet even them with surprise.

Unsettling thought:

A state of mind, persuasively real at times, in which there are no bad poems.

Quid 11

Received: Quid 11: Three US Poets, edited by Keston Sutherland, featuring new work from Laura Elrick, Heather Fuller, and Carol Mirakove. This is a 32-page stapled document containing two critical commentaries apiece on each of the three poets, one by a US reviewer who knows her work already, and one by a British reviewer engaging with her work for the first time. The line-up is: 1) Andrea Brady and Taylor Brady (no relation, I'm assuming) on Laura Elrick; 2) Kristen Gallagher and Ian Patterson on Heather Fuller's Dovecote; 3) Brian Kim Stefans and Keston Sutherland on Carol Mirakove.

This is a great format. I wish there were more mags like this. The commentaries by and large share an emphasis on the role of the poetry in the social-economic sphere, its capacity for negotiating the disheartening process whereby American capitalism generates an aesthetic culture that absorbs and co-opts artistic gestures of critique and resistance. All of them offer rewarding reading. Taylor Brady's piece is exemplary in its political-theoretical rigor: erudite, understated, powerful. Sutherland's work, both in the introduction and in his own commentary on Mirakove, is similarly compelling. He is a tough-minded, dazzlingly intelligent young Marxist with an urgent, uncompromising concern for poetry's well-being in the hostile environment of global imperialism. These are some of the most passionately articulate poet-critics writing today.

Not to neglect the poets themselves! Laura Elrick's 5-page "Serial Errant" deals with the abuse of women in prison, in a format that puts the journalistic reportage-content of investigative poetics through a disorienting series of disjunctive grids. The results are painful, confrontational, kinetic. Like Elrick's piece in the first issue of The Poker (as Nada Gordon notes in her blog), this is essential reading.

Heather Fuller offers a 5+ page excerpt from "Eyeshot" (a book or long poem?), a meditation on movie-watching and poetic community. As in her dazzling Dovecote, she uses subtle effects of delayed lyric repetition to create an unsettling semi-narrative of alienated compassion and skeptical belonging.

Four poems from Carol Mirakove, which draw richly deserved praise from Sutherland for her prosodic speed and agility. I am drunk just now with discovering Carol Mirakove. I recently picked up a copy of her new chapbook Temporary Tattoos, which deserves a blog entry unto itself. In these new poems as well as in the chapbook, Mirakove's ear (see, or don't see, earlier blog entries on "ear") is impeccable. Which is to say that she struts her stuff so as to make any notion of peccability seem vulgarly overthwart. It's a matter of confidence, and this is some straight-up confident composition. I haven't yet seen her book Wall, which Sutherland discusses, but it's now first on my must-read list.

Buy this magazine. And read more work by these three terrific poets.

Here is the URL for the Quid website: www.barquepress.com

Venus and Adonis & The Passionate Pilgrim

First essay assignment for Shakespeare course: after reading Venus and Adonis, write a 3-4 page close reading of one of the four poems in The Passionate Pilgrim (4, 6, 9, & 11) that overlap with the material from V&A. One of them, Poem 11, is not included in the Pelican paperback edition, because it is known to be by Elizabethan sonneteer Bartholomew Griffin, from his sequence Fidessa (one of the more egregiously mediocre sonnet cycles of the period). This typical editorial omission is strange on a couple of levels. First of all, all the omitted material from PP (which also includes a couple of poems by Richard Barnfield as well as Marlowe's "Come Live with Me and Be My Love" and the reply poem by Ralegh) takes up about four pages, tops. Why not just include it, whether it's by Shakespeare or not, so readers can see what the book was like in its entirety? Second, the version in PP is somewhat different from the one in Fidessa, especially in lines 9-12.

I might as well reprint the poems. Here's the version from Fidessa (1596):

Venus, and young Adonis sitting by her,
Under a myrtle shade began to woo him;
She told the youngling how god Mars did try her,
And as he fell to her, so fell she to him.
“Even thus,” quoth she, “the wanton god embrac’d me,”
And then she clasp’d Adonis in her arms;
“Even thus,” quoth she, “the warlike god unlac’d me,”
As if the boy should use like loving charms;
But he, a wayward boy, refus’d the offer
And ran away, the beauteous Queen neglecting,
Showing both folly to abuse her proffer,
And all his sex, of cowardice detecting.
O, that I had my Mistress at that bay,
To kiss and clip me till I ran away!

And here's the version from The Passionate Pilgrim (1599):

Venus with young Adonis sitting by her
Under a myrtle shade began to woo him;
She told the youngling how god Mars did try her,
And as he fell to her, so fell she to him.
“Even thus,” quoth she,.the warlike god embrac’d me,”
And then she clipp’d Adonis in her arms;
“Even thus,” quoth she, “the warlike god unlac’d me,”
As if the boy should use like loving charms;
“Even thus,” quoth she, “he seized on my lips,”
And with her lips on his did act the seizure;
And as she fetched breath, away he skips,
And would not take her meaning nor her pleasure.
Ah, that I had my lady at this bay,
To kiss and clip me till I run away!

Granted, the variants don't do much either way to raise either version any further out of the doggerel zone. Frankly, it seems downright banal even to comment on the difference in interpretation they make: "in the earlier version, the poet takes Adonis to task for his failure to fulfill the requirements of his gender role, etc." But isn't it worthy of notice in and of itself that there's this poem assigned to Shakespeare, and that it appears in some other poet's book in a slightly different form? Wouldn't including this poem (even both versions) in the edition serve the valuable function of illustrating for students the radically unstable status of authorship in the early modern period?

Are these poems supposed to be bad, like dirty limericks? Do they fail even on that level? Is it possible to reconstruct Renaissance canons of taste for vulgar ephemera? Some have consigned Venus and Adonis, and the epyllion as a genre, to that category. Is the difference purely formal/stylistic? I.e., some soft-porn verses are more skillfully versified than others? Or are there elements of V&A that "elevate" it—morally, philosophically, however—above other Elizabethan smut?