“Concepts, too, have feelings,” Carter Ratcliff says in his afterword to “Arrivederci, Modernismo:”
I am not saying that a concept — “number,” for example, or “constitutionality” — is literally capable of emotions. What I mean is that there is an emotional tone to the understanding of such things.
An art critic, a writer who specializes in the analysis of mute artworks, who intuits the messages and emotional tenor of physical objects — perhaps such a writer is more comfortable talking about “emotions” in this broad way. But by 1974, when the poem first appeared, Her Majesty Modernismo had already been deposed by poets who said “I wanted to be more myself,” including James Merrill, who went from writing poems such as “The Black Swan” to writing more personal, personable, poems that explored — among many other things, of course — his immediate family. I could never really understand this historic shift.
Carter betrays the fact that he never really said goodbye to Modernism; about poetry as dramatic monologue he says: “the point of a poem is not to present evidence about the poet or anything else. Poetry is not forensic. … A poem puts meaning up for grabs, permanently.” And as poets like Merrill and James Schuyler and Robert Lowell, et al., got chattier, it was they who said goodbye to Modernismo. Or put it up for grabs, permanently. I am sitting on this fence, wondering.
There is this lovely essay “Mozart and the Music of Intrigue” on the website of Caffeine Destiny. Its author writes:
The same nineteenth-century prejudice which charged Mozart with being frivolous upheld an artistic ideal that was the antithesis of Mozart’s. Ever since, art which aims to disclose the “authenticity” of the self has asserted a primacy it has refused to relinquish. Linked to this was an erosion of the idea of music as pleasure, as opposed to the emerging Romantic view of music as “expression.”
This classical taste was characterized by an indifference toward the self, and toward the need for the “improvement” of either the individual or society. As such, aristocratic mores constituted a personal and social danger: the nineteenth-century taste wished to be uplifted and edified, not beguiled or seduced.
I read this about the time I listened to this Poetry Foundation podcast contrasting poems by Stevens (pleasure) and Merrill (expression). The interviewer must speak for many when he says he prefers Merrill’s poem to Stevens’s. So I wonder if the shift from classical to romantic in music is comparable to what happened here between Stevens’s poem from 1950’s and Merrill’s poem from the 1990’s, or between the earliest Stevens and the latest Merrill.
“Why am I so often drawn to glamorously hopeless causes?” Ratcliff remarks, tongue in cheek. I double-starred it. There are stars in my copy on every page. Modernismo lives to dazzle.
Ange,
So are you saying that we/you find it impossible to say goodbye to Modernism because though at its core it wrestles with the art form, its emotional tenor is dazzling? Isn’t this because its “circularity, recursion and mirroring” offers up not so much meaning as a means for our “self-absorbed, tyrannous” selves to respond out of all our complexity? These selves always seem to be vacillating between intuiting and conceiving, and so cannot seem to choose between Merrill’s oracular imagination and Steven’s Apollonian one.
Your posts also made me think of a parallel in the visual arts world: Duchamp’s “readymades”—his anti-art as art (urinal, snow shovel, bottle rack) were partially his way of both saying goodbye to Cubism and condemning the art world for assigning monetary values to paintings while ignoring the material conditions in which they were made. And yet now his urinal and bottle rack are priceless (though they are only replicas of the original objects) and his “new thought” is outdated. And yet they remain as tantalizing to visual artists as Modernism is to poets in part because they absolutely altered the direction of the art form.
In light of this, I thought it strange that your comment on your own post was a link to a “manufactured” blog, meaning that the blog you pointed to was clearly the creation of a web spider, a program that crawls the web to find content so that it can sell ads. The companies or people paying for the links, or keywords, generally don’t know the contexts in which they’ll be displayed. So in this case, a web spider found a student poetry club at a university in Dallas, and then placed ads from poetry.com (a web site that traffics in dreams, in people’s desires to become published or famous poets) and from a Christian t-shirt company disguised as a poetry site. That you linked to this seems to eerily nod to how the Modernists and Duchamp insisted on including the industrial in their art.
Emily
Whoa, Emily, I didn’t post that comment. That’s spam — I don’t know how it commandeered my name.
I’m definitely not clever enough to have thought of linking to a web spider to illustrate my own argument about ice swans.
I definitely think you’re right that Modernism offers up a means, not a meaning, but as for reflecting ourselves, that’s the rub. Modernismo is the mirror that leaves us out no matter how long we look into it. It doesn’t tolerate the personal, the individual. It is the opposite of Confessional poetry.
Hi! Long-time listener, first-time caller.
I confess I’m a little perplexed by some of this above. “Modernismo is the mirror that leaves us out no matter how long we look into it. It doesn’t tolerate the personal, the individual.” Really? What am I to make of the WCWilliams of “Danse Russe”? Or of Mayakovsky, Reznikoff, O’Hara, Robert Desnos? Are these not modernisms?
I hope I am not being naive if I suggest that what’s “up for grabs” here is not meaning in some general way, but the meanings of the words “personal” and “individual.” They seem here to be required to stand in distinction to groups, clubs, classes, gangs, filiations and collectivities: to take on an existence in opposition to such things, rather than to take on existence as parts of those things.
That of course is a very particular and historically charged development in sense of the words. It takes on real force quite conveniently in the place and time when there is an global ideological combat between liberal individualism and its communist other.
Which is to say, I can certainly see your point in distinguishing between the confessional mode and modernism. But it seems not quite right to make that a distinction between personal/individual and not. Modernismo perhaps “leaves us out” only if we insist on looking in the mirror for our selves as things magically independent of social existence; a better distinction between the modes might be in consider how the individual is conceived to come into being and live a life, rather than whether or not she is disallowed.
I hasten to point out that I am quoting from the Carter Ratcliff poem, whose “Modernismo” is probably more the Modernismo of “Bird in Space” than “A Cloud in Trousers.” It is he who calls Modernism the mirror that leaves your reflection out. It’s a mode of art that denies self-expression. When I bring up Stevens and Merrill — particularly as they are contrasted in the podcast, with Stevens in High Modernist mode and Merrill in a direct, self-expressive mode — I am merely wondering how we got from there to here, from Modernist to Confessional.
“Arrivederci, Modernismo” seemed to be grappling with fatigue with the strenuous demands of Modernism, i.e. the strenous demand to leave oneself out of the mirror.