My sons’ pediatrician is keenly interested in temperament. Observing my chest-beating, bellowing, early-walker of a one-year-old this morning, he suggested a book that might help me negotiate the difference in temperament he perceived between mother and son. Little does he know the general consensus in the family is that this baby bull is a Mlinko. His placid father and brother look on in amusement as Mom wrangles with genetic payback.
I mention this — the fact of temperament and its ability to mask itself, to go undercover, like that demur mother in the doctor’s office — because of an interesting exchange between two poetry blogs this week. Musing on the brilliant work of Joseph Ceravolo (1934-1988), Jack Kimball i.d.’d the great American poet as eccentric by temperament. Gary Sullivan pointedly disagreed. He took the stock avant-garde position that art is social and that great art — art that advances its genre — is a group effort. He accused Kimball of perpetuating that old bourgeois-individualist cliche of the loner artist.
I’m simplifying a bit here because some of the terms they bat about (e.g. “folk” art) are superfluous. Essentially, it’s an old standoff, but Jack’s isn’t an unnuanced position. Of course art is social; of course Ceravolo himself studied with Koch, was not writing in a vacuum, etc. But the poet has usually been an eccentric. From Whitman and Dickinson to Moore and Stevens to those poets in Other Traditions*, the point is not that these poets didn’t edit magazines, have correspondences, or have their lives changed by an Armory Show. But they were already imbued with their own intractability. They could only become more deeply themselves as they aged.
So this is the stubborn fallacy of the avant-garde (apologies to Kenny). In their utopian zeal, they (like the computer science geeks I occasionally met in college seminars, awaiting the day we’d all get our brain chip implants) dismiss temperament as an epiphenomenon at best, an ideological construct at worst. Reason trumps temperament, or should. The “loner artist,” on the one hand a capitalist plot to ensure we all stay in our cocoons, is simultaneously a capitalist dupe, resisting the deeper satisfactions of communal life.
God help those of us who just want to stay home and read a book! Sounding suspiciously like pastors of a flock (”No reading Seven Story Mountain in the back pew allowed”), the avant-garde wants you to know that if you aren’t going to services (readings), who knows what other liberal vices you’re hiding. Why, you probably vote too! In those little individual black-curtained booths!
* which isn’t limited to American poets. See, for another example, Hopkins.
I don’t get how in the discussion with Jack, Gary dismissed temperament (when he was really arguing with the term,”folk artist”) or how you could put forth the bizarre assertion that Gary is some kind of hardline neo-Maoist avant-gardist who denies individual distinction or differences, or in ANY way privileges “reason” over “temperament.” That seems to me a profoundly inaccurate take on the debate (as well as on the character — dare I say TEMPERAMENT — of the man as we know him) — hardly, if I may say, “disinterested.”
“Imbued with their own intractability” — whatever. It isn’t intractability that makes people interesting; it’s sensibility. And if you haven’t got that you can’t write interesting poetry either as an individual or a member of a group (which we all, duh, simultaneously are).
Hi Ange,
I miss you, too.
You may not have seen the post to my blog from last night, but you’ll see if you read it that I’m not dismissing the idea of individuality or temperament at all. I certainly don’t believe that the individual is merely a social construction.
The “divide,” as Jack called it, between temperament and group production was really my only problem with his original argument. I don’t believe that they are mutually exclusive, and I felt his argument suggested that they were.
Here’s an excerpt from my post last night:
“This is not to merely plug Stein in to the ‘cubist’ slot–no argument from me that artists, even those associated with movements, are individuals–but to question whether her carafe is the product of a singleton or someone, as I’d argue, as much involved in group process as, in Stein’s own words, ‘writ[ing] for myself.’”
Keep the fun coming,
Gary
Thanks, Ange, for some big questions in such short space! If being eccentric means a poet is not socially engaged enough, but if being too socially engaged means that a poet numbs individual insights that could be the soul of her work, then what’s a poet to do? It is a problem parallel to the question of pride (not that this has anything to do with poets, of course)—one could be confident to the point of arrogance, or one could be proud of the fact that one is definitely not arrogant but sees oneself as a citizen among many. But, an almost bigger problem is, what if someone becomes conceited about how NOT proud they are?
This is I think a problem that can plague artists; to want so much to align themselves with the common immediacies of the world, but to do it distinctly. A Whitmanian paradox, right? Because for all his lush lists of characters and locals, his praise of crowds and folks and busy streets and bridges, he still writes after a catalogue of people he meets (in some of my favorite lines) “These come to me days and nights, and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am.”
Ange,
This is a delicious post. Thank you. I love your word intractability. Cranks are intractable; buttery sycophants are not. Of course, crankiness is not enough. But what’s more likely to be the engine of art: mutual ingratiation, or the stubbornness to resist it?
Rachel Loden
Hi Gary & Nada – I linked to Gary’s blog so readers themselves can see the discussion. The debate at its inception was what interested me — the question of whether the lone artist is a “cliche;” the question of to what extent, say, Stein was an outsider or an insider ….
The emphasis on group formation does get a bit oppressive. And the emphasis on group formation is a legacy of left Modernism. I apologize if by inference I was accusing Gary of being a Marxist! I’m describing a general tendency, especially as received from Language poetry but also from other strains filtered through the Poetry Project.
Thanks Kate & Rachel. Kate, as to what a poet should do: be herself, I hope! I certainly wouldn’t will an Emily Dickinson model on a feisty poet any more than I’d will a Brechtian model on a contemplative….
Someone who can’t take his or her own side in an argument; that works pretty well as the definition of a poet…
Maybe what we recognize as originality – the characteristic & inimitable sound of a particular artist – has something to do with the artist’s compositional problem of synthesizing 1) subject-matter, 2) artistic means, and 3) personality or temperament.
I can imagine the special tone a certain musician gets out of an instrument might be as much an attempt to ESCAPE from temperament as an expression of it.
The attempt is probably futile; it’s the struggle itself which adds resonance to that tone.
A work of art is partly the end result of “composing” these (3 & more) intractable elements. Maybe that’s why artists often impress us as “intractable”. See the sign? (ARTIST AT WORK)
When an artist “personalizes” a subject with such intractable responses – well, it’s how they humanize the world for us.