“Emily Dickinson was one of the three most intelligent people who ever took up writing poetry.”
I’m pretty sure that’s an exact quote. It was Galway Kinnell talking. Like Simic before him, Kinnell was the lone voice of self-doubt on the panel: “I’m the last person to speak” he insisted, on his own influences. His advice, nonetheless, was: Follow a Master. That was what Emily Dickinson did, a strong mind amid weak contemporaries.
Robert Hass, who opened the panel, waxed eloquent. His guiding trope contrasted the ideas of the money economy (in which one is always accounting and balancing) and the gift economy (in which we live in voluntary obligation to those who give us gifts). Poetry is of the gift economy. You receive the “power of art that opens the world to you” and express gratitude toward those works of art that give you the feeling “this is what life is about.”
Nathaniel Mackey stressed “lineage” over “influence” then emphasized “lines don’t have to be straight.” That is, “have your own mix,” or too stiff a sense of lineage will impede originality. He quoted Robert Duncan’s “I’m a derivative poet” then echoed Olson’s idea of field composition: “We’re in a field, a field of commotion, a vibration society.”
Ellen Bryant Voigt picked up on Mackey’s statement that poetic influence should be “unanxious.” “It doesn’t have to be Freudian,” she said, contra Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. There needs to be sufficient difference and sufficient compatibility in the predecessors you choose to guide you. When Philip Larkin fell for Yeats, she recounted, what he loved was the master’s sense of “distanced emotion.” That was the last thing he needed! Voigt laughed. He needed, and eventually found, the opposite in his next great influence, Thomas Hardy. “Hardy taught one to feel rather than to write.” And after that, combining the two opposing influences, Larkin wrote his first great poems.
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Once again, what I’m struck by listening to these poets is their earnestness and generosity: Robert Hass gushing about reading Heidi as a child: the description of the grandfather and the goats and the Alps! Ellen Bryant Voigt rhapsodizing about the art of the sentence poised against the art of the line: this is what poems are made of, and—fiercely—“This is what I love!”
Poets, teachers, imparting their passion and wisdom to the next generation. What else is there? Actually, there is something else and both Hass and Mackey hinted at it when the moderator, Herbert Leibowitz, agitated against the “monotony” of younger poets who deal in fragments. Hass pointed out that the old metrical poetry invites the trance state. It signaled to the unconscious that we are about to enter a realm of enchantment, much as the phrase “once upon a time” does. But Modernism brutalized that.
I wish I could quote Hass, but my imperfect notes must suffice: Modernism’s “first move” was a call to attention, not enchantment. William Carlos Williams’s By the road to the contagious hospital is a signature Modernist first line. Rhythmic imperative develops slowly after that; the important thing is that the first line signals “a profound suspicion of enchantment.”
Mackey picked up immediately on this. Contra Leibowitz’s suspicion of the fragment, Mackey proclaimed a generation-wide “suspicion of totalization” where the sentence was concerned. Breaking the sentence, or “statement,” down into phrases was a way to combat a false sense of truth—“totalization”—thus to replace it with a sense of contingency proper to our experience in the new world order.
Of course, this is where I perked up. I’m for enchantment, and yet …. Emily, in my comment box, is right to point out that no one thus far advocates what Levertov advocated. But right here is a hint of the kind of negtivity that undergraduates can only foggily apprehend. To enchant or not to enchant? To believe or not to believe? Not only do we live in a fucked-up world, we live in a fucked-up world in which our best evidence suggests we are little more than monkeys. What say you, Rilke?
Oh, in case you were wondering? Kinnell said the other two most intelligent poets were Shakespeare and Mandelstam.
I think I agree with Galway Kinnell’s intelligence pantheon. Except I’d put Chaucer in there too. Ben Jonson was no slouch either, nor John Donne.
Posted By: Henry Gould on October 24, 2007 at 7:29 amThe greater part of a poetic intelligence remains beneath the surface, it’s implicit in the poetry itself. The lit-world can talk & talk about it. . . but the poetic intelligence soaks up what’s going on around it and transmutes it into something effective on a different plane, exponentially more powerful.
I’m for enchantment, that is, fluency. . .
Who says it’s a fucked-up world? The poet intuits an order of beauty and justice. . . seeks a verbal equivalent to the way a hidden loving universe might possibly be.
When baited at a lecture by Stalin’s apparatchiks to answer the question : what is poetry? Mandelstam shouted out : “the poet’s sense of being right.”
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To enchant and to disenchant, I think. As Yeats at his best usually knew.
Posted By: Steve on October 24, 2007 at 5:19 pmI’m surprised that Kinnell believes, or appears to believe, in a unitary measure of intelligence, otherwise known as Spearman’s g. But we can all agree that Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Mandelstam were very smart.
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I’m playing Devil’s Advocate, Henry, partly because the negativity is in the air and partly because I’m trying to imagine what “difference” might have looked like on the poetry panel. But I’d like to believe that the poet intuits an order of beauty and justice. I’d like to. It’s hard, though, not to agree with Steve — “to enchant and disenchant” … and that’s my optimistic side.
Posted By: Ange on October 24, 2007 at 8:02 pmReport this comment
Well, “intelligence” as Steve points out is loaded — politcally as well — I think Spearsman’s g factor hit the public consciousness with the publication of The Bell Curve. And it’s funny, there are few black poets that I think would qualify as as “displaying their intelligence” in the sense of analytic workings à la Donne. Carl Phillips, A. Van Jordon spring to mind, but not too many others.
Posted By: Simon DeDeo on October 24, 2007 at 9:14 pmThis may have to do with the greater proximity poetry has to the affairs of African-American culture; one does not have to reach as far back in the canon and thus there is less need for interpretive work and all the syntactical and semantic complication it induces. You see it also in Irish poetry, which I think supports the thesis.
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Well on the one hand, Eliot said that the best method is to be very intelligent, and on the other there’s WCW’s ethos that smart’s not good enough (”if it ain’t a poem, it ain’t a pleasure”). Take your pick! (Seriously, I don’t think these two comments are really at odds with each other.)
Posted By: Don Share on October 24, 2007 at 10:08 pmReport this comment
Simon : your comments about Af-Am poets are patronizing. & as I tried to suggest, “intelligence” in poetry is not about “display” or braininess. It’s more an intuitive rightness, stemming from intense engagement on many levels simultaneously – ethos, pathos, logos. . .
Posted By: Henry Gould on October 25, 2007 at 7:15 amAnge : I would suggest that the angst you express about the existential situation is in part a consequence of the very academicization of the poetry culture which your panel report describes. America is full of poet-pedagogues, offering pretentious nostrums to young students, creating a subculture which combines poetry, self-help, “life-lessons” & vocational advice, presenting itself as the official “world of poetry”, much like the state-sponsored Writer’s Unions of the former Soviet Union, & similar authoritarian societies.
Edmund Wilson, in an essay on Yeats of 70 yrs ago, wrote about the old-fashioned (& now scarce) “dignity” of the poet – which he thought Yeats tried to maintain : partly by means of an elegant craft of heightened speech, but more importantly, by means of a personal, moral engagement with the people and politics of his time. Yeats understood that it was not scholars, fellow poets, or professors who provided the social sanction for poetry : it was the ordinary reader, people at large. The relation between a poet and a people is one of mutuality, mutual recognition (not always position – but recognition nevertheless). It is not a pedagogical relation but a public one.
My attitude should not be taken as promoting anti-intellectualism, “social poetry”, or demagogic rhetoric. In my view it’s the ideological-verbal tokens and abstractions emanating from the groves of academe which do most to debase the rhetoric of poetry itself, which trap writers in angst-filled generalizations like “fucked-up world” : generalizations and abstractions which are a measure of one’s disengagement from the particulars of social and historical reality. The academy both over-emphasizes the political effectiveness of literature and trivializes it in the process.
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Sorry : typo in penultimate paragraph of previous. Should read : “not always positive – but recognition nevertheless”
Posted By: Henry on October 25, 2007 at 9:20 amReport this comment
My comments are not patronizing in the slightest, neither to African American poets nor to Irish ones.
Posted By: Simon DeDeo on October 25, 2007 at 12:12 pmYou may wish to use the word “intelligence”, like Humpty-Dumpty, to mean whatever you like (for you it appears to mean “good poetry”), but I proposed a quite specific definition — a certain “on display” working out of intellectual problems.
The dominant tradition in African American poetry today does not do this, although I mention two authors who do. Similarly, if you go back and look at what Yeats and his acolytes and influences were doing with Irish literature, you do not find the kind of focus on elaborate hypotaxis that you associate with, say, the Donne moment.
Yes, that means I’m saying Yeats is not a poet “of the intellect.” He is not at home in analysis. Your view of the intellect in poetry seems to be a highly stereotyped notion that might as well have been ripped from the New Criterion. Most “academic” poets — meaning poets employed “as poets” by the University system — are not writing writing with the intellect at all. They might name drop something from the syllabus, but they are most sentimental (in the technical sense.)
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Simon, we’re obviously arguing at cross-purposes. We’ve applied differing notions of “intelligence” to Kinnell’s initial comment (on the intelligence of Shakespeare, Dickinson & Mandelstam) – which, I would remind you, made no reference to “analysis” or “problem-solving” or “display”.
Posted By: Henry Gould on October 26, 2007 at 7:46 amAs far as I’m concerned, the idea that scientists can go about “measuring” the intelligence quotient, in biological terms, of complex intellectual activities (such as poetry), is a very stupid idea. The ant will never comprehend the elephant.
You want to criticize Kinnell for using a loaded term, because for you “intelligence” simply refers to some criteria drawn from biology – the g factor, the Bell Curve, etc. The application of such supposed measures to ethnic or racial groups does indeed have loaded and controversial implications. But your attempt to turn that particular controversy into an issue regarding African-American or Irish poetry is an imposition of your OWN notion of “intelligence”, not Kinnell’s. And I find it patronizing and manipulative to import that particular brouhaha by way of a comment on the nature of African-American poetry in general.
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I do not believe the g factor is anything other than the product of a particular culture. I do not believe intelligence can be measured in a quantitative fashion, and I believe attempts to do so will be distorted snapshots of a culture’s neurosis. I never stated, suggested, or insinuated that the g factor or any other intelligence measure be “applied” to poetry or poets, or, indeed, to anyone.
Posted By: Simon DeDeo on October 26, 2007 at 9:15 amWhile I am trying to make a point about different rhetorics in different traditions, you seem deeply invested in ignoring what I am actually saying and calling me racist even after repeated clarification. I will not respond further to you in this thread.
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Not trying to give offense, Simon. Nor attack you personally, nor call you racist or anything else. I apologize if my comment seems ad hominem or antagonistic.
Posted By: Henry Gould on October 26, 2007 at 1:24 pmI do have to take issue with your statement, however, that you never “suggested that the g factor or any other intelligence measure be ‘applied’ to poetry…”
Here is your first post :
“Well, “intelligence” as Steve points out is loaded — politcally as well — I think Spearsman’s g factor hit the public consciousness with the publication of The Bell Curve. And it’s funny, there are few black poets that I think would qualify as as “displaying their intelligence” in the sense of analytic workings à la Donne. Carl Phillips, A. Van Jordon spring to mind, but not too many others.
This may have to do with the greater proximity poetry has to the affairs of African-American culture; one does not have to reach as far back in the canon and thus there is less need for interpretive work and all the syntactical and semantic complication it induces. You see it also in Irish poetry, which I think supports the thesis.”
- Tell me if I’m wrong, but I find it pretty clear that in this comment you are associating – ie., suggesting an application of — intelligence measurement to African-American poetry in general. And then you are offering a supposed rationale – the proximity of Af-Am poets to the affairs of their culture – for the supposed evidence of the poetry’s lack of “display” (of intelligence). This kind of thing bothers me, whether you AGREE with such supposed “applications” or not.
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