A few months ago I read Toni Bentley’s and Gelsey Kirkland’s ballet memoirs, and acquired a bad case of self-pity: here was an art so unlike poetry, where the practice was excruciatingly difficult, but the reward so concrete.
As in sports, one can still speak of beauty in ballet. Brian Phillips, in his article “Poetry and the Problem of Taste,” in this month’s Poetry magazine, claims it’s been two centuries since we could speak confidently of beauty, and asks “When was the last time ‘sublimity’ was a relevant idea?” Well, it’s relevant to Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery, and David Shapiro, and dozens of poets who haven’t completely acquiesced to the literalism of society in the age of mechanical reproduction. It’s relevant, possibly, to those of us who find the pop scientism of our day—“Blondness evolved in the north so that men could tell who was young under all those clothes!” “Music evolved so men could impress women!”—so banal as to make Creationists look good. At least, they have better stories.
So maybe the old sublime, our-reach-exceeds-our-grasp aesthetic, which some of us hang onto for dear life, is not dead, just—like ballet—not popular. But one thing we know for sure. Beauty doesn’t mean putting blinkers on against the ugliness daily churned out of our media outlets (you see, I haven’t been able to give up the news after all). I think Wallace Stevens’s insight is severely underestimated: that the imagination is violent in proportion to the violent pressure of reality.
Great poetry is violent in the same way ballet is violent: it reshapes our “natural” contours. It is not realistic.
Simon DeDeo has a few things to say about the sublime here:
http://rhubarbissusan.blogspot.com/2007/06/encountering-sublime-recipe-for-poetic.html
Well, I agree with Simon. That’s why I thought Brian dismissed the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime too quickly. The concepts just need to be re-articulated. And it needs to be emphasized that something like Simon’s “uncanny” is still part of the mix; it’s not going to go away just because smart poets like to think themselves enlightened, no-nonsense materialists.
Thanks Don there for the reference to my work. And let me buttonhole you qua editor of Poetry magazine to suggest that they immediately put their content online. Hey, I do it!
Ange, your reference to “pop scientism” is spot on I think. I’m a scientist myself (a cosmologist, now at University of Chicago) and whenever I see science in the media (with important exceptions) I want to say “that’s not it at all.” Science is a process — I think a process in many ways parallel to poetric production — it’s not a collection of wacky facts, but that’s all most of the media want to present.
There’s a fantastic critic currently at Yale, William Deresiewicz, who has been talking quite a bit about the banal influence of “pop scientism” in literature. His essay in the Nation on critical darling Richard Powers is terrific.
Re: “evolutionary psychology” (music for mating, etc.) — required reading is a short little book by a professor of anthropology. The book’s “Neo-liberal Genetics”, and it’s by Susan McKinnon.
Rather than a beauty/sublime on/off switch, one can complicate one’s notion of beauty. Beauty can be severe, purgative, challenging, critical. “Beauty is difficult, Yeats”, wrote Pound, or something like that. Beauty is not necessarily pleasing, diverting, ingratiating, as in entertainment. Beauty in a moral sense is akin to justice. (wrote more about this in recent essay at HG Poetics).
Simon, the McKinnon just leapt to the top of my wishlist. Thanks for that.
Henry, the idea that beauty is difficult was the whole premise of my post! Ballet is difficult. Young children apprentice to it for years, working 8 or 10 hours a day, for a career that will end around age 30 (earlier if there’s an injury). The pleasing, diverting aspect of ballet is just on the surface. Likewise poetry.
I know we’re on the same track there, Ange. I just wanted to dwell a little more on the concept of beauty, rather than leap too quickly over to sublimity and violence. I don’t actually like the notion of “violence” in art, myself; I think it’s a very “20th-century” attitude…
Here’s an alternative : the order and proportion of beauty are analogous to the equilibrium of justice. Justice often suffers from injustice, but works to overcome it – not through violence, but through its own persuasive fairness. The old word “fair” exactly bridges the two realms of beauty and justice.
Simone Weil thought a lot about this.