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(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Scathing Online Schoolmarm

How Not to Argue About Poetry





Stranded [Pun on the poet's last name is fine.]:

Poet Mark Strand Preaches Political Indifference at UCI [Doesn't seem to have done anything of the sort. Read on.]


Mark Strand is one of the most talented poets currently writing, producing beautiful and evocative lines like:

Soon the house, with its shades
drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.

He’s been greatly -- and justly -- lauded for his skill; he has served as the nation’s poet laureate and received a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. [Also fine - he knows he needs to start with admiration so that this doesn't look like an ignorant or resentful hatchet job.]

But to paraphrase another, greater poet, there are more things in heaven and Earth than are evident in Strand’s philosophy. [The Hamlet quotation is tired and, in this context, hokey. The author's recourse to a too-often-used quotation makes us doubt his own capacity for fresh language, and therefore doubt his qualifications to attack Strand.] Ostensibly lecturing at UC Irvine on “the future of poetry,” [Ostensibly comes across as sneering.] Strand -- the first recipient of the university’s Nichols Award for Humanities -- managed the January 27 talk without locating any of the issues confronting contemporary poetry. [How can that be if, in the title of his essay, the author tells us that Strand took a strong position on politics and art?]

Indeed, what Strand delivered that evening was Poetry 101, a series of short -- if mildly amusing -- parables that attempted to define poetry. [The problem with this condescension is that the author is unknown, Mark Strand well-known. Strand may have earned the condescension, to be sure; but rhetorically it's a too-big-for-his-britches problem... And it's never a good idea - though academics in particular are fond of it - to attack adversaries by calling them naive and simple-minded (Poetry 101) -- unless they truly are. Mark Strand is not. And it's a venerable move among some social activists to say that artists interested in broad themes miss the turbulent, immediate particularities of political life. But art's value resides precisely in its removal from the chaos of the moment, and its worked, formal clarity about the experience of being in the world.]

“At the center of each poem is a mystery,” Strand said amiably, describing how poetry allows people to touch something greater than themselves and how poetry allows the author to communicate his own, personal world in that world’s unique symbolic language. But Strand never answered another, grander question: Why should anyone care? [Answer: Only a few people will ever care, even about the greatest poetry. It's difficult to understand. Its themes are often morbid, and most people can't stand that. The few people who care will care because they're compelled by the beauty of the poem's language, and the intriguing complexity of its ideas.]

Answer that question, and you might answer other interesting ones -- like, “Why has poetry fallen from public grace?” Or, “How can poetry reclaim its place in everyday American life?” [Challenging poetry never had public grace, and never will. Sentimental poetry does have a place in American life, whether in Hallmark card or rap form.]

Poetry’s fall was evident in Strand’s offhand comments and his responses to questions throughout the evening. “Some, particularly the Academy of American Poets, like to criticize Wallace Stevens for being too privileged, for not writing about social causes,” Strand said at one point. “Poetry should be about reaching beyond all that.”

Strand isn’t so much a leader in the movement to divorce poetry from politics; rather, he’s part of a crowd that has misconstrued the mundane for the real. Between Ginsberg’s “Howl” in the ’50s (“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed upon their skulls and ate up their brains and imaginations. . . Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!”) and Marc Smith’s “I’m for the Little Guy” in the ’80s, few poets addressed the interests of average Joes. And among those few, most were black; many, like LA’s Watts Prophets, found their work consigned to a poetic ghetto until relatively recently. [Note that for this writer you're a privileged quietist if you're not writing for the little guy, the average Joe. Gotta be about poetry or politics; the poetry of Wallace Stevens or Mark Strand can never be construed as in some sense political, in some sense about how we move and feel in the public world. No. Since it's not explicitly and theatrically about injustice, it has to be about smug indifference to suffering.]

Strand would likely discount the Watts Prophets as poets. They’re often cited as the fathers of rap, and as Strand stated flatly at UCI, “There’s no connection between rap and poetry. . . I can’t listen to it. It’s like being blasted up against a wall.”

Well, then, there you have it.

It was a curious statement from someone who, mere moments before, had praised poetry as the communication of real feeling and said, “The poet’s vision of their world should not always be a comfortable one.” Perhaps some internal worlds -- like those of black Americans -- are more uncomfortable than others?

Like so many academics, Strand values stillness, and poetic stillness, unfortunately, is a luxury, an accouterment of the tenured and speculative classes that have lately signed an armistice and linked arms in their face-off with more revolutionary art forms. [Well, then, there you have it. What we're really attacking here is repose and meditation, the long silent practice of creative thought that generates the greatest poetry. And prose. James Baldwin left the turmoil of America and moved to France so that he could have enough stillness to write his novels. This writer is forced to find this contemptible.]

(Strand’s Nichols Award was endowed by medical-technology bazillionaire ---and, let it be said, generous spirit -- Al Nichols.)

Never mind that rap incorporates more elements of formal poetry -- particularly metric rhyme -- than the free verse so popular among Strandians. Rap -- and the street poetry that gave birth to it -- is not about stillness; much of it, particularly the less commercialized stuff, addresses the social issues Strand maintains poets should “rise above.”

And it’s true. No poetry that addresses politics has survived. Except Shakespeare and Marlowe, who peppered their verse plays with direct commentary on current events. And Percy Bysshe Shelley’s invocation to the masses in “The Masks of Anarchy” to

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you--
Ye are many -- they are few.

And T.S. Eliot’s evident compassion for the alienated in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in which he describes “the muttering retreats / of restless nights in one night cheap hotels.”

[The writer's problem is sentimentality. He insists that poetry be about high dudgeon, raw feeling, outrage on behalf of the alienated... But T.S. Eliot isn't expressing compassion in Prufrock... The poem is about self-hatred, and fear of other people... The highest forms of poetry will never appeal to people like the author, because he is too full of restless feeling to be patient enough to read it.]


An old Chinese adage observes that the first thing tyrants do in taking hold of a country is round up the poets. Strand needn’t worry. Speaking before a mostly upper-middle-class audience, he finished to rousing applause and then signed books for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, local poet Jaimes Palacio is reading his heart-rending poem about Arthur Carmona, a wrongly imprisoned teenager from Costa Mesa; LA’s Jim Natal is reading his hymn to the endangered Bolsa Chica wetlands; Sherman Alexie is recounting stories of Indian reservations; and DJ Renegade is talking of Christmas in the Washington, D.C., ghetto, his mother polishing the same Christmas ornaments year after year. [The writer seems unaware of the bathos of the language he's bringing to these descriptions.] Everywhere, there are beautiful, well-crafted poems that acknowledge the politics of loss and suffering -- poems that connect to Strand’s “greater mystery” while comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

And Strand? Strand remains above it all. And from that perspective, he misses it completely.




-----------------------------



Here's the full Strand poem that the writer quotes in part at the beginning of his piece.


My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer



1

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,
my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon's ash-colored coat
on the black bay.



2

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.
And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour's spell,
she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.




3

My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace, small creatures --
the mouse and the swift -- will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.





Start with the paradox at the very end: Not yet; and yet much too late. The earth, like the poet's mother, is ashy, vague, unfulfilled, full of nothingness, not knowing itself, not alive. Mother and earth are both too young, in the sense of unknowing, and too old, in the sense of having arrived at this late summer night after eons of late summer nights, none of them with any clarity, none of them yielding light as to the meaning of existence. The light is "veiled and dust-filled," his mother is about "shadow" and "smoke," and the moon wears an "ash-colored coat." The smudgy half-life of the earth mirrors our half-life.

The heart of the poem's in the second stanza, where his mother stares into the vast emptiness between the stars and thinks "how we yield each night/
to the soundless storms of decay..." -- how our lives quietly rush away from us even as we are unaware of the violence of our daily demise, even as we fail to understand why we are here.

The cricket sings his mother's song -- one note only, in the "rimless dark," a world without clarity, boundaries, meanings. The world does not sing to us, or to her. It is not a garden, or a poem. It is an ashen enigma.

Like most great poems, this one's existential, approaching with great subtlety and love the vulnerability of human beings. Language worms its way into this perplexity and suffering as nothing else can; language allows us to sense our essential condition. Poetic language does this through indirection, since it's impossible to grasp the condition directly.