I had thought I should begin my stint here at Harriet with a kind of introductory blog, one that would discuss, what else, my ideas and me. But I’ve changed my mind.
Three days ago Kenneth Goldsmith’s post took up a question which, in a word, begs the question. It has already received over sixty comments, which makes it a kind of overnight sensation.
His premise is that “avantists”, as he classifies himself and brethren, have a hard time of it all the time, no matter what the state of the Union, and he couches that “state” in economic terms: boom or bust.
He starts out by quoting Brecht: “I shrugged and quoting Brecht, stated that it’s always [a] bad time for poetry. In the United States, it was lousy during the boom and promises to be lousy during the bust. It was crappy to be a poet during the Bush years and will most certainly remain crappy under Obama.”
At this point I guessed he might go on to take up the subject of Obama’s choice for inauguration poet, Elizabeth Alexander, not to mention his choice of Pastor Rick Warren as God’s envoy. But he didn’t go there, a responsibility disappointingly shirked.
Instead, he gives us a sketchy account of the depression years (the analogy to our present predicament is implicit) and how they drove the avant-garde to ground (Cummings trounced by MacLeish, etc.). He goes on to conclude, with a tip of the hat to Ahmadinejad, that they “wiped innovation off the map.” They “pretty much derailed the avant-garde in the United States for two-and-a-half decades.”
And yet this is simply not true. Just to take a few examples, Both Elliot Carter and Joseph Cornell thrived during this period. And Louis Zukovsky was actively at work on “A”, which he started in 1927. American poets and novelists abroad, Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Stein, were rigorously funneling the news back to America. Rothko, Barnett Newman, Milton Avery were on the verge of creating the most radical movement painting has ever known. Crane’s White Buildings was published in 1926 and The Bridge in 1930. Laura Riding’s first collection The Close Chaplet, was published in 1926. And The Partisan Review was founded in 1934. All of these artists came into their own during the years of the Great Depression and the war years to follow. Not only that, exiled musicians, writers and other artists struggled to reach America, both during the war and afterwards, as Europe was left decimated by its own great depression and the German occupation of most of its nation-states.
Simply stated, trying to link the productivity and the health of artists, as Goldsmith does, to the societal conditions they find themselves in, smacks of Arnoldian “sweetness and light”. Hart Crane was not silenced by the Great Depression, but by his own depression, and his battle with alcoholism, in spite of which he managed to leave us with the poetry he did.
What if Kenneth Goldsmith had found himself in Mandelstam’s shoes? That certainly wouldn’t have been a good time for poetry.
Curious as well is his reliance upon Brecht as a kind of moral anchor. Schlechte Zeit für Lyrik (A Bad Time for Lyric Poetry) was written, as gorgeous and as forthright a poem as it is, in seriously bad times.
There is a war inside me.
Between my excitement at the blossoming apple-tree
And my revulsion at the speeches of the Dauber…
The “Dauber” is, of course, the failed artist, Hitler.
Is Kenneth Goldsmith sure that he wants to draw an analogy between his own situation and Brecht’s right before he fled to Denmark in the winter of 1933 from a newly Nazified Germany? That seems not only seriously strained, in terms of one poet’s historical imagination, but also verging on self-pity, self-pity of an instrumental kind, a tactical self-pity. There is a kind of fundamentalism in his attitude that refuses perspective, misreads history and seems unfamiliar with irony. As Peter Thompson reminds us in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (pg. 210) that “for all the seriousness of the situation, an element of tongue-in-cheek” is in these poems, and that behind “the political writer’s proud conviction that only when it is political is literature worthwhile,” behind his “aesthetic ‘self-denial’” lie “formal structure and rhetorical sophistication.” Good poems written in bad times.
As well, and paradoxically, Brecht, too, finally fled to America, fearing Stalin’s ruthless unpredictability in Moscow, where he had ended up after continually attempting to sidestep the advance of the Wehrmacht as it trundled across Western Europe. Of course the poetic America of Brecht’s imagination that had so sustained him during the 1920s did not live up to the real America of the 1940s. He suffered the neglect of the film industry, abuse from the House Un-American Activities Committee and the ire of his fellow émigrés, Thomas Mann, W.H Auden and Theodor Adorno among them. It is common knowledge that, as with Beethoven, Brecht’s talent was in proportion to his nastiness as human being. But, of course, what matters most is the art, and not the circumstance in which it was made, or the man who made it. That he kept plugging away at his work, even while being sheltered in the States from certain imprisonment and death in a war-torn, fascist controlled Europe, speaks volumes, not about Brecht, necessarily, but about poetry, theatre, translation and how they pretty much thrive in all conditions. Art saves the artist, not the other way around.
I would suggest that Kenneth Goldsmith consult that old Nazi, Heidegger.
“To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy. This is why, in Hölderlin’s language, the world’s night is the holy night.”
Goldsmith assumes that our “time” is destitute as well. It is, perhaps, for bankers and the like, and for people who have to make a living in small businesses and gas stations and Walmarts. It is, tragically, for the victims of war, and the citizens of failed states. But for American poets who have nice jobs at universities? Heidegger’s destitution is quite specific and has little to do with outward circumstances, or the quotidian, however bad they might be. The poet’s destitution is directly connected to what he calls “the default of God”.
“The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it.”
In Heidegger’s view, Hölderlin as the poet who most emblematically suffers this “default”, is a maker in constant shock, ever steeped in a colloquy with an absent God. The destitution of his time has nothing to do with the circumstances of his time and everything to do with the philosophical, religious and functional heritage that poets work from and rely on. The shock, for Hölderlin, is the result of talking to a wall, when his conversation is still deserving of the godly audience, when his emotional world is dependent on godly succor.
Whether or not we have gotten over Hölderlin’s destitution is the more appropriate question. What kinds of grants we are getting, which teaching positions we hold, or what variation of democracy we are, as citizens, subjected to, while important in many ways, has nothing to do with real poetic destitution.
Yes, yes, yes, to this wonderful post. Thank you!
Ha! Ange beat me to my kudos (although I would have added an extra “yes”). Anywho, seconded.
I’ll second that (i.e. Mlinko’s assent). Thanks for the post.
martin earl has been one of the west’s most closely guarded secrets for years. i’m thrilled that his perspicacity and insight are finally being deployed in a wider world. may his targets cower.
Heidegger’s right in that there’s no consensus about the gods (”no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself”), but why is the poet dependent upon cultural homogeneousness? Considered as a contemporary position, it’s really weird; and, if considered politically, potentially ominous.
Not that it matters, not that anybody would believe me or care, but I’m over Hölderlin’s destitution; and I would guess that most of us are. I don’t experience the breakdown of Christian imperialism as a lack. Nor do I believe that the Divine has an Ear that is listening to my speech, nor do I experience that as a lack. I do believe in the Divine (again, FWIW, IMHO, and YMMV), but more as a Mystery & a Process, a Rhythm & an Energy; and what I seek in art is not communication, and not expression, but communion — with my fellow humans, and with the Mystery, the Process, the Rhythm & the Energy.
And, truth be told, while communion with my fellow humans is delightful and deeply satisfying, communion with the Mystery (etc.) is enough.
You’re definitely wrong about that, John. There is at present time a full consensus about the gods. There are just two of them : Mammon and Rebel. These two began cohabiting about — years ago, and it was recently announced (just this morning, in fact) that Mammon and Rebel are actually one god : Mabel. To be safe, you should worship the Mabel Label, at least while in public. The Mabel Label is a small bright sticker which has been placed at convenient locations around most urban, suburban & rural centers. The canonical obeisance is a slight nod of the head, and a muttered, “Hi Mabel”. That’s all you need to do. But you do need to do this. Or else.
“Man is an eternal sophomore.”
- Wallace Stevens (Adagia)
Thanks for throwing open a window and letting some fresh air into the Harriet hothouse, Martin. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t know you’re “one of the west’s most closely guarded secrets,” [so saith Pope Godlove (really?)] but soon as I click “Post” I plan to find out more about you and your work. Thanks again!
Ah! I’ve quoted Stevens without realizing it! His “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” — “In which being there together is enough.”
Yup.
I started my last comment before Henry’s appeared; how funny to see another Stevens quote!
Thanks, Henry!
Rexroth in the ’50s had a great line about how Madison Avenue loves nothing better than the rebel artist.
Sophomorically yours, etc.
I second what Joseph said: thanks for the fresh air!!!
I don’t know if you guys have heard, but the gods were just away for a brief vacation (& then only from western Europe, mostly). They’re back. Their names are Jesus Christ, who has been running American foreign policy for the last eight years, & Allah, who has been very angry about the visibility of women’s skin. Mammon doesn’t really like either of them, but he’ll play along if he has to. Welcome to the new Theocratic Enlightenment.
“Hart Crane was not silenced by the Great Depression, but by his own depression….”
Oh bravo, Mr. Earl. I feel less destitute already. Are you fired up? Ready to go!
Actually, I don’t think Hart Crane was silenced.
I do think his amazing verbal music is surrounded by a mysterious silence… but this may just be an effect of the music.
There IS a debate about Crane’s “reception” (see interesting book titled “Janus-Faced Modernism”)…. but reception is famously debatable – & in a lot of cases (see history of reception of Willa Cather, for just one).
In fact we love to debate “reception”. It’s fun. It relieves us from the hard work of actually encountering poets, poems.
Powerful post. But fresh air? It just seems more of the same swing and defend. My destitute is better than yours. Or who do you think you are? Sincerity good, avant garde bad, etc. I suppose it’s a rhetorical style we can’t think our way out of and which many seem to like, as comments such as “may his targets cower,” suggests. Perhaps I’m engaging in it here too. But do we really need targets cowering in the poetry world? Or any world for that matter?
In any case, always happy to hear about Hölderlin (could do with more about him), and yes, very nice to hear new perspectives and new voices outside of the small dialogs that seem to swirl here. It is a big world. What’s happening out there?
Sorry, Henry, I didn’t make it clear—I don’t think he was either: “…in spite of which he managed to leave us with the poetry he did.” I received him, as it were, at the hands of my instructors; so I was given the opportunity to take his poems themselves very seriously.
Comment to my Commentators
Rather than respond right away to those of you who have commented, I thought I should give it a day or two to watch how things played out. (Is there a danger in becoming a blurker at your own blog?) When I was blogging before (though I don’t think I called it blogging then) for Webdelsol, there was no facility for threading comments. People would e-mail me, but there was less interactivity in general. It was more relaxed; “real time” hadn’t yet replaced human time. Webdelsol started, if memory serves me, in 1994, and I was pretty much in there at the beginning with my (what I called) column, Cyber Rambler. If anyone’s interested you can still, amazingly enough, read it. It’s out there – sort of like space garbage, I guess.
http://webdelsol.com/LITARTS/Cyber_Rambler/
Since my brief at the time was to review literary websites, there is probably some historical value in checking out what I had to say, and how I said it – at a much greater length, generally, than blogging etiquette allows for today. But that was then and this is now. Fifteen years in net-time is indeed a generation or two. These days we are aging faster than dogs.
As you can see, by scrolling up and down, Kenneth Goldsmith has not gotten back to me. I assume he’s a very busy man.
At any rate, thank you all for taking up you time to get back to me with your thoughts on this first blog, especially Ange Mlinko, Michael Robbins, Jason (whose wonderful mediation on the art of “slowness” in his own first blog is a must read – I’ll be taking that subject up myself in the near future) and Pope Godlove, who seems privy to some rather arcane knowledge. You were the first four on the scroll.
I’m glad John is over Hölderlin’s destitution. I wish I were. But when I read Hölderlin, or Heidegger, for that matter, I feel the slipperiness underfoot. John, what is a “contemporary position” for a poet? I too doubt the “Divine” has an ear (unless it is the one Van Gogh cut off). I am a non-believer, but that does not stay the vacuum. Your alternative, since you do believe in the Divine is “Mystery & a Process, a Rhythm & an Energy”, “communion” rather than “communication” with your fellow humans. I would suggest an antidote to that might be in a reading (or a re-reading, if you’ve already read it) of Elias Canetti’s 1935 novel Auto-da-Fé (Die Blendung). I certainly agree with you that political consideration of anything is always ominous, and we should not shirk that responsibility, nor be fooled by it.
Henry Gould bypasses me (which I sincerely enjoyed) to scold John. Since I live abroad, I have not yet come across Mabel Label. Thanks for the Stevens, though. (Adagia should be central in our reading, along with Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Color. )
Mr. Joseph Hutchison, what did you find out? And do you have any information on John and Henry. Do they know each other?
Former Berkeley girl, thank you too! If you’re “former”, what are you now?
Michael, again, I’m not sure they’re back, but the politicians have definitely appropriated their names. Indeed, Western Europe is the most secularized society on earth. I am always taken aback when in the States at how thoroughly religion has taken up residence, in spite of the constitution, in the various white buildings of our nation’s capital. We are living in dangerous times, and they are made more dangerous by the misdirected imaginations of the most powerful. I’m looking forward, or cowering perhaps, to hear what the good Pastor Rick Warren has to say at the inauguration next Tuesday. Check out Christopher Hitchens’ two recent columns on the man in Slate.
Dear Unreliable Narrator…we will have to spend some more time on Crane. Let us put that at the top of our agenda. Let’s take his poems seriously, but not too seriously. Perhaps levity is the one thing missing from Crane’s poetry. Which is why Stevens is a relief after Crane. Crane is our American Rilke, he had angels in his underwear.
Indeed, Mr. Henry Gould, Hart Crane has certainly not been silenced. That is what I meant when I said “in spite of which he managed to leave us with the poetry he did.” But suicidality is a disease-induced consequence often with terminal results. My point was that it was not the economic hardship of the times (Goldsmith on the Great Depression) that killed Hart Crane and deprived us of a “later phase”. (Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Ashbery, have all given us the chance to see how poets reinvent themselves, how they begin to see the world in ways that they hadn’t done in their earlier work. Imagine if Crane had had some medical help.)
As well, I could care less about Crane’s reception. I don’t even know what that means, reception, since I have never, myself, been received. And I don’t think “encountering poets”, by which I assume you mean reading them, is hard work at all.
It’s one of my greatest joys.
And finally, Dr. Lemmon Hound. You’re absolutely right about “more of the same swing and defend.” You should try it; it will make you leaner. But if you want to see some real boxing, and some of the best prose of the day, you must read our colleagues in journalism. Their approach, based on assignments, money (in terms of a good wage) and engagement with the issues, is more relevant for poets than it has ever been. They are the ones pushing prose art; they are the ones getting their hands dirty, getting shot at. Poets, with all their myriad talents, and their powerful capacity for empathy, have still not learned how to properly “file” a poem, to get the news back from the front, to learn the difference between what is adequate and what is gratuitous. To not get in the way of their own products. Read journalism, the new aesthetics start there, in the mud.
One more thing, if you want to know about engagement, check out Bill Knott’s incredible comment on Kenneth Goldsmith’s post. It’s close to the bottom of the scroll.
I’ve certainly read Hitchens’s latest articles — Slate’s not exactly Critical Inquiry, but really, looking to him for insight on religion is like asking a creationist to explain punctuated equilibrium. Which is more depressing, religious fundamentalism or Dawkins-style ignorance parading as common sense? Someone who thinks the earth was created 6000 years ago & gays will burn in hell is pretty easy to dismiss, but intelligent people who think they’re bringing news by lecturing other intelligent people about how God is not such a beneficent chap make me want to join a church.
Hello Martin -
Hart Crane. Of all American poets, perhaps the most difficult for British poets to digest.
The mix of Marlovian bravado with New-Englandy, vinegary-antiseptic, rancid-squealing rhetoric…. must sound like a very scratched old LP… seemingly no colloquial East End balls…
(”Island Sheaf”, though, might land somewhere in the middle (around Bermuda)…)
I suppose the toughest aspect to assimilate is the utopian-Atlantean… since, for one thing, it’s based on an (homegrown, Ignatius-Donnelyesque) ideology of the NEW WORLD…
Maybe the ultimate binding agent here is W. Blake. AMERICA.
Y’all make me happy.
Isn’t “reception” that thing after the wedding, with cake frosting and drunken bridesmaids? Or is it the thing where you wiggle the television antennae wildly and accomplish nothing? Either way, in common parlance it often seems to signify the opposite of what we meant by it….
I second Mr. Wm. Blake, Printer & Engraver—he’s got something for everyone! Voluntary poverty, alienated outsider status, mental interestingness, self-publication, and, oh yeah, that’s right, a devastatingly singular, significant, culture-altering oeuvre. Which is also crazy fun to read.
Martin, why would I seek an antidote to my beliefs? What are you talking about? If you think my beliefs are mistaken, say so.
I surely missed part of the point of your post, but you were all over the map, as the saying goes. Let me swing and defend through the elements of your penultimate paragraph.
“The destitution of his time has nothing to do with the circumstances of his time and everything to do with the philosophical, religious and functional heritage that poets work from and rely on.”
There seems to be an element of self-contradiction here, because the functional heritage — which I’m, perhaps mistakenly, taking to mean “social function” — that we work from has everything to do with the circumstances of our time. And in that sense, our time is incredibly destitute, as poets have no social function in the U.S. outside of the university and the culture-guilt-ridden precincts of the book-reviewing industry (nothing against poets getting reviewing gigs; I love Ange’s reviews in “The Nation”), and besides embarrassing window dressing for vain Democratic presidents — and I hope Ms. Alexander surprises me on Tuesday. Really, there’s no social role, no social function. It’s disappeared. I have no good ideas (and several mediocre ones) as to why that has occurred, but it has. I’m not crazy about it, but no use complaining.
Philosophical and religious heritage — now we’re talking. Walter Kaufmann tore Eliot another one for this self-pitying quote, similar to Heidegger’s, from “After Strange Gods” (which I haven’t read): “the damage of a lifetime, and of being born in an unsettled society, cannot be repaired at the moment of composition.” Kaufmann’s case: society has never been settled. So, Heidegger’s romantic nostalgia for cultural homogeneousness is no doubt wrong too — I was giving him too much credit.
I’m tempted to wonder whether the philosophical and religious heritage you mention could be, in your view, localized, community-based, and/or self-created, but your coupling it with functional heritage makes me think, probably not, since functional heritage can’t be self-created; again, I could be wrong. And again, our philosophical and religious heritage, in the public sense, has everything to do with the circumstances of our time. My own personal heritage includes an enthusiastic reading, about 20 years ago, of that Heidegger essay from which you quote, “What Are Poets For?”, the title taken from a Hölderlin line. And looking at the essay again right now, I see that I would be Exhibit A in Heidegger’s indictment of our time: “The time of the world’s night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute. It has already grown so destitute, it can no longer discern the default of God as a default.” Oh, OK, sometimes I discern the default as a default, sure, yeah, I feel abandoned, caught in the contradictions of consciousness and existence, pissed off about having been ejected from Eden; but other times it’s just . . . what it is. What we’re given. The contradictions are the juicy stuff. “The imperfect is our paradise.” (Love that line, though sometimes it does sound like the cynical chops-licking of an insurance salesman.)
So yeah, all over the map. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
“The shock, for Hölderlin, is the result of talking to a wall, when his conversation is still deserving of the godly audience, when his emotional world is dependent on godly succor.”
Well, I certainly don’t deserve a godly audience, and I’m sorry that you depend on godly succor. Best wishes with that.
And thanks for the thought-food. (Much juicier than the K. Goldsmith post to which you were responding.) Gotta re-read Hölderlin. Thanks again.
p.s. Never met Henry. Never, to my knowledge, met any Harriet commenter. I have corresponded with a handful of Harrieteers, relationships for which I am grateful.
“But if you want to see … some of the best prose of the day, you must read our colleagues in journalism.”
You have got to be kidding me.
Michael,
Just remembered this morning: a song I wrote shortly after the declaration of the War on Terror, and first performed in Nov. ‘01 (before the invasion of Iraq), that responds to the malevolent role of religion in international relations; it attempts to encompass some of the complexities of religious fervor and Godly abandonment from an imagined vantage within those experiences, and it shifts vantage points (and please forgive all the self-back-patting explanatoriating; I only mean to say that it’s not a predictable “protest song”):
http://thatsoundsgood.net/09%20Apocalypse%20again.mp3
Martin,
Here’s Walter Kaufmann on Eliot’s lament “of having been born in an unsettled society”, from “From Shakespeare to Existentialism”:
“This self-pity and self-deception involve, among other things, a comprehensive distortion of history. It is not uncommon for modern writers to talk themselves and others into the fancy that our generation is unique in having lost the motherly protection of a firm religious faith, as if Socrates and Shakespeare had been reared with blinders and as if the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth century were all contemporary inventions.”
I regret any implied insult of Ms. Alexander in my comment of 2 evenings ago. I think the job of “inaugural poem” is untenable in our culture, but hopefully I’m wrong.
Another social function of poetry in the U.S. today: to provide embarrassing window dressing at weddings. Embarrassing because it’s there because our culture is supposed to value it, not because we do.
Destitute time, yes.
1. The destitution of his time has nothing to do with the circumstances of his time and everything to do with the philosophical, religious and functional heritage that poets work from and rely on.
This is the crux. I’m looking forward to hearing more.
2. The shock, for Hölderlin, is the result of talking to a wall, when his conversation is still deserving of the godly audience, when his emotional world is dependent on godly succor.
Whether or not we have gotten over Hölderlin’s destitution is the more appropriate question.
As Linh Dinh’s Lauterbach post + comments suggests, the real dividing line between the hard “a-g” and everyone else may be a total & uncompromising stance toward poetry as a social practice. Spirituality, transcendence, metaphysics — even couched in terms of a mysterious past and unknowable future, a la Susan Stewart — is verboten. Those of us who haven’t gotten over Hölderlin’s destitution can find good company in Stewart, Lauterbach, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Ashbery, Armantrout — really, there are too many to mention.
3. Poets, with all their myriad talents, and their powerful capacity for empathy, have still not learned how to properly “file” a poem, to get the news back from the front, to learn the difference between what is adequate and what is gratuitous. To not get in the way of their own products. Read journalism, the new aesthetics start there, in the mud.
See 1. Free verse divorced from a cultural heritage can’t get the news out because it’s always still figuring out how to carry information and yet do the work of lyric…
More posts please!
See, the problem is that this -
The destitution of his time has nothing to do with the circumstances of his time and everything to do with the philosophical, religious and functional heritage that poets work from and rely on.
- is a ridiculous statement on its face. Of course the destitution of his time, like everything else of his time, had everything to do with the circumstances of his time (was, in fact, one of those circumstances, so the statement is almost tautological), which included the philosophical, religious & functional heritages of poets.
Postscript: Someone who thinks the earth was created 6000 years ago & gays will burn in hell is pretty easy to dismiss, but intelligent people who think they’re bringing news by lecturing other intelligent people about how God is not such a beneficent chap make me want to join a church.
I am so with you on this, MR!
I like what Ange says here: “the real dividing line between the hard ‘a-g’ and everyone else may be a total & uncompromising stance toward poetry as a social practice.” Two things interest me about this: one is that the “total & uncompromising stance” seems pretty clearly, at least in the American case, an import from visual art traditions, an inheritance from LeWitt and Rauschenberg and others that Conceptual Poetry announces in its name. The other interesting thing is how many poets, even people who are supposed to know better (see Ange’s list), have resisted that “total & uncompromising stance.” However quaintly Heideggerian it may be, I keep trying to pin that resistance on some unique aspect of poetry. (I haven’t convinced myself completely on any of them yet.)
And Michael, I think you’re reading that sentence tendentiously. What Martin means by “the circumstances of his time” is pretty clearly indicated by his last sentence:
I’m well aware of what Martin means. I do not think it’s tendentious to point out that the circumstances he dismisses are entirely relevant to the presence or absence of imaginary vatic forms of destitution.
Right, but you accused his statement of being ridiculous on its face and a near tautology. With that last sentence in mind, though, it’s neither. Maybe it’s true that “the circumstances he dismisses are entirely relevant to the presence or absence of imaginary vatic forms of destitution,” but that at least deserves an argument, no? (Or maybe I’m just not so ready to accuse Hölderlin of false consciousness as you are.)
Well, after bad-mouthing the idea of an inaugural poem, I figured I might as well give it a whirl.
Corny and sappy — which is . . . how I feel.
http://utopianturtletop.blogspot.com/2009/01/inaugural-poem-mr.html
Good luck to us all.
Speaking of journalism & poetry : the most powerfully poetic statement I have heard for a long time, which kept me sitting in my car in the driveway with the engine running for 20 minutes, was an opinion piece by the late Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga, which was read in its entirety on the BBC a couple days ago. In his article, Mr. Wickramatunga predicted his imminent assassination; all but named his murderer; and defended, with great moral & intellectual force & eloquence, his decision to continue his work as an independent journalist & editor in Sri Lanka, despite the murder of dozens of journalists there, and the foreknowledge of his own fate. He spoke about his choice as an act of conscience, on behalf of the Sri Lankan people, since nowhere would they learn the truth about their own government & society, except in the pages of independent, uncorrupted newspapers.
Over 5000 ordinary Sri Lankans attended his funeral.
*
& yet, it must be said, poetry per se is something else. If you want to speak the truth & be morally relevant to your society, why write poems? Why not just report the facts and analyze events and take part in public debates?
I think ultimately one must realize that poetry is an art form, like painting or music; and as such, there is a circle around it, which creates a distance between the work of art and the immediacy of contemporary events. This distancing does not mean that poetry has nothing to say about society & the news : in fact the distancing may be a factor in making its message much more powerful. But poetry renounces a certain immediate communicative transitivity for something else : a kind of intransitive, internal equilibrium (like a gyroscope or an artificial environment). Proportion, balance, order, beauty : the concrete values of the artwork-in-itself.
There are no hard & fast rules about this – there is a shifting scale of values, & a kind of dialectical process at work. Nevertheless, just as the journalist must assert his or her independent record of the truth as an act of conscience, so I think the poet – as poet – must assert poetry’s freedom to be itself.
I suppose these are just truisms. But it seems to me that contemporary poets put a great & unnecessary burden on themselves, when they think of poetry as a professional career. It creates vocational pressures which sidetrack the poems themselves, and foreground, instead, movements, theories, -isms – all designed to defend certain social attitudes or ideologies at the expense of poetry itself. There is a danger from both “avant-garde” and “socially-committed” trends, of subsuming poetry to something supposedly more important or relevant.
Poetry, in the end, is just as simple and naked and bereft and alone as it’s always been. It’s just words, set to a kind of music, which people remember and recite to themselves & each other.
Well, to point out my cards on the table, the phrase “circumstances of his time” is clearly chosen, it seems to me, with reference to historical-materialist explanations of forms of consciousness. I’m not really accusing Hölderlin of anything as much as I’m suggesting that Martin might be too quick to imagine spiritual poverty has nothing to do with material conditions. (I’d not use the term “false consciousness,” a poor conceptual substitute for the complexities of ideology.)
Henry, at the moment I’m listening to Obama’s inaugural address live on NPR, but I was persuaded by your last post (Speaking of journalism & poetry) to stop listening to his speech and concentrate on your words. Guess I’ll listen to Elizabeth Alexander now.
Henry, I thought your comment was more than reasonable. Thanks for it!
Thanks, Mary & Jason. But I still don’t think I got it right.
I listened to Elizabeth Alexander’s fine & stirring poem just now too. & now I ask myself : why, exactly, does this majestic public occasion make room for humble, ordinary poetry?
Maybe, again, it’s a sort of dialectical paradox : poetry is respected BECAUSE it maintains the freedom & dignity of language. In an odd way it underwrites all the eloquence of the surrounding oratory. It does this through asserting its own artistic independence & integrity.
I also think this sentence didn’t quite get it right : “Poetry, in the end, is just as simple and naked and bereft and alone as it’s always been. It’s just words, set to a kind of music, which people remember and recite to themselves & each other.”
It’s risky to reduce poetry to anything in particular. We have to remember that a poet has at least the potential capacity to marshall & display ALL the rhetorical & literary resources available : narrative, drama, song, discourse, argument, description… in other words, there is no subject & no style – no matter how topical & immediate on the one hand, or obscure & arcane on the other – which is outside the range of its capacity.
Henry, I almost quoted this sentence in particular, which I think you got particularly right:
“Poetry, in the end, is just as simple and naked and bereft and alone as it’s always been. It’s just words, set to a kind of music, which people remember and recite to themselves & each other.”
Thanks again, Mary. I should learn to quit while I’m ahead. But saying “what poetry is” is one of those obsessive & useless games I can never stop playing.
Martin,
I went back and reread “Bread and Wine” (trans. Michael Hamburger), the Hölderlin poem with which Heidegger commenced his essay.
The poem has little to nothing to do with the role that philosophical, religious, or functional heritage plays for poets.
The time is destitute in the poem, not because poets have no place in society, or the role of religion has grown weak, or the gods have willy-nilly abandoned us, but because people are too weak to endure the presence of the gods. That’s the destitution: the weakness of people.
Fascinating image. Heidegger doesn’t convey it. Maybe his essay is self-descriptive. He’s so weak that he doesn’t understand that his weakness is part of the situation described by Hölderlin.
Still, in the Hölderlin — a mad nostalgia for “things were better when.” When people were strong enough to hang with the gods. I’m ambivalent. I’d love to be strong enough to hang with the gods, but the idea also strikes my “that’s absurd” bone; and then the culturally Christian agnostic pantheist in me thinks, what? I hang with the gods every day! But that’s no doubt self-deceptive.
Anyway, thanks.
John,
Thanks so much for this comment (and others), I guess I was too easily taking Heidegger at his word. I’ve lost my Anvil edition of Hamburgur’s translation…Did you find the poem on line by any chance? I’d love to read again. I think the subject is worth keeping on the table.
Martin
Here’s Hamburger’s rendition of the 7th strophe of “Brot und Wein.” Note that he has “lean years” for Heidegger’s translator’s “destitute time.” The German is “dürftiger Zeit.” “Zeit” is time; “dürftiger” is poor or scanty. “Destitute” seems a Latinate and poetical rendering — it’s hyperbolic.
Note: every second line should be indented.
7.
But, my friend, we have come too late. Though the gods are living,
Over our heads they live, up in a different world.
Endlessly there they act and, such is their kind wish to spare us,
Little they seem to care whether we live or do not.
For not always a frail, a delicate vessel can hold them,
Only at times can our kind bear the full impact of gods.
Ever after our life is dream about them. But frenzy,
Wandering, helps, like sleep; Night and distress make us strong
Till in that cradle of steel heroes enough have been fostered,
Hearts in strength can match heavenly strength as before.
Thundering then they come. But meanwhile too often I think it’s
Better to sleep than to be friendless as we are, alone,
Always waiting, and what to do or say in the meantime
I don’t know, and who wants poets at all in lean years?
But they are, you say, like those holy ones, priests of the wine-god
Who in holy Night roamed from one place to the next.