Sunday’s New York Times Book Review featured an essay by NBCC award-winning poetry critic David Orr, in which the laywer/poet/critic explores the idea of greatness in contemporary poetry.
An excerpt:
Poetry has justified itself historically by asserting that no matter how small its audience or dotty its practitioners, it remains the place one goes for the highest of High Art. As Byron put it in a loose translation of Horace: “But poesy between the best and worst / No medium knows; you must be last or first: / For middling poets’ miserable volumes, / Are damn’d alike by gods, and men, and columns.” Poetry needs greatness.
Or so the thinking goes, anyway. The problem is that over the course of the 20th century, greatness has turned out to be an increasingly blurry business.
Orr goes on to discuss poetry’s perceived lack of ambition, the curious case of Elizabeth Bishop, the G.I. Bill, and, of course, John Ashbery (Harold Bloom: “since the death of Wallace Stevens in 1955, we have been in the Age of Ashbery.”)
The essay has not stirred up the kind of storm William Logan’s review of Frank O’Hara did a few months back, but it has caused some internet grumbling. A sample:
“What a strange turn, to discuss greatness, in relation to The Sounds that Wakes Me . . . But I think all the poets in MFA programs will looks up from their gin and begin to take notes.”
-The Fray
“Perhaps Orr hasn’t read much recent Ashbery, but a line from “Phantoum,” in his A Worldly Country, strikes me as both cogent and hilarious here:
Grape and cherry were the flavors. Later they added mushroom.
We were grape children, trying to cope in a mushroom world. ”
-Best American Poetry
“David Orr’s lament that it’s all over for the School of Q.”
-Silliman
“We’ll take two extra-large diet Cokes, a family sized popcorn with extra butter, one package of peanut M&Ms and some gummy bears for the lady? Thanks.”
-Vowel Movers
“As I see it, the great poets command a kind of cultural-artistic force field, a magnetic power – which intrudes upon and fuses with the history of their people in toto. With them, biography becomes fate. Suddenly events are no longer ruled by chance, but are transformed into a drama (of mind, art, originality). Reality is personalized through the medium of the work.”
HG Poetics
“Ashbery is the last great American Poet of his generation, perhaps, but he isn’t the last great poet this country will ever have. Saying so, I think, falls into the fretting, hang wringing sub-Spenglerites who want to predict the death of various arts and institution–the novel, painting, theatre, whatever is old, venerated and in need of a bullet to the head.”
1800 Blogger
“Based upon Orr’s description and his observation about a perceived lack of greatness or unique ambition in particular younger poets, some might suggest a pessimistic outlook for American poetry. However, just as I believe the profile of American poetry may have shifted in the last century from a focus on the greatness of individual figures to an additional and equally important glimpse at the greatness of a collective generation of contributors, I view the new model of American poetry in the future as one that will prove even more inclusive and democratic, concentrated not only in the powerful works of a few individuals, but also in the strength of the whole production of poetry by the nation’s poets.”
–Edward Byrne
“this article feeds into nostalgia for that weird masculine initiation ritual that was the writer’s workshop in its inception. And while we’re talking about that “generation,” where’s the mention of Adrienne Rich? In her writing, she covers topics that certainly fit into even this article’s narrowly-defined criteria for “great” poetry”
–De-Cidered
And we all know that Patton Oswalt is actually responding to Orr here, though he is much too polite to say so:
(Thanks, Fred)
Greatness seems out of place now mostly because poetry has become a business, an academic career. Mediocrity rules the day. You don’t have to write for the public, just live your lives in the poetry bubble. In the old days, the challenge of writing for the public kept most amateur poetry where it belongs, at home (near the wastebasket).
Posted By: Henry Gould on February 24, 2009 at 1:30 pmBy the way, Travis snips my statement out of context. Here’s the post in its entirety :
“Orr regularly comes up with interesting insights. But don’t we already know what greatness in poetry involves? Where’s the mystery, here?
The in-house poetry scene is like a 24/7 Academy Awards show, everybody wondering who’s on top, who (if anybody) is any good this year.
But literary force & greatness do not depend on the scene, the status quo, current opinion. Greatness shifts all the markers.
Orr glances toward this, but not very decisively. & surprisingly he quotes Samuel Johnson, equating greatness with “exquisiteness in its kind” – which seems pretty limited as a defining characteristic.
As I see it, the great poets command a kind of cultural-artistic force field, a magnetic power – which intrudes upon and fuses with the history of their people in toto. With them, biography becomes fate. Suddenly events are no longer ruled by chance, but are transformed into a drama (of mind, art, originality). Reality is personalized through the medium of the work.
This may sound Romantic. It’s not. It applies in every era. Poetry doesn’t depend on philosophy or criticism; the poet’s critical faculties (along with the imaginative) are fully deployed in the creative process, making possible an artistic microcosm, within which everything is filtered & shaded by the poet’s vision. As Nicholas Cusanus wrote, with regard to the creative human personality : “The world giulianizes in you, Giuliano.”
It seems to me there are 3 characteristics, displayed by the great poet, which determine this unusual situation :
1) A powerful, synthetic intellect, able to grasp wide spheres of life & discourse, and translate them into a new, unique order.
2) A strong will, determined to engage with the world, with its most difficult practical, moral & theoretical cruxes, riddles, problems. A dramatically-engaged personality.
3) An original, masterful combination of artistic talent and sensibility.
Such people don’t come along every day.
p.s. but let me be clear : I’m not a believer in Supermen, Ubermensch (literary or otherwise). I’m pretty much with TS Eliot on Tradition (& Individual Talent). A poet becomes great through a sense of allegiance & service to a larger, older world (of art, of history). “The greatest among you shall be your servant.” “
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And thanks to Eugenia at Literago!
Posted By: Fred Sasaki on February 24, 2009 at 1:39 pmhttp://literago.org/site-bulletins/the-five-forbidden-poetic-death-talents/
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Here’s my 0:28.
Posted By: Bobby on February 24, 2009 at 1:49 pmReport this comment
Langdon Hammer does an excellent job of putting Adam Kirsch (and, by extension, others of the literary brat pack like Orr) in his place in this relatively recent New York Times review of Invasions and The Modern Element:
Posted By: Aaron Fagan on February 24, 2009 at 2:02 pmhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/books/review/Hammer-t.html
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I’m sharing a bucket of popcorn with Vowel Movers on this one… but I’m amused to reflect on how unkind time has been to Whitman’s “to have great poets there must be great audiences too” – infamously adopted by Harriet to serve as Poetry’s motto for a time, in order, she said, “to arouse a sense of responsibility in the public.” Ezra Pound hated the Whitman motto, and argued that the “rabble, the multitude” are “aimless and drifting” without the great artist – to which our Harriet retorted:
Posted By: Don Share on February 24, 2009 at 2:29 pm“… the greatest danger which besets modern art is that of slighting the ‘great audience’ whose response alone can give it authority and volume, of magnifying the importance of a coterie… Art is not an isolated phenomenon of genius, but the expression of a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public… nothing can stand alone, genius least of all.”
Maybe a 21st-century corollary to the Whitman would be: To have not-so-great poets there must be not-so-great audiences too…
But I digress, having only a limited degree of greatness myself…
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I agree completely with Ms. Monroe.
Posted By: Henry Gould on February 24, 2009 at 2:38 pmJ. Longenbach wrote a whole book about the Yeats-Pound nexus of elitism (Stone Cottage). (Well, I exaggerate. The book was about other things too.)
Much as I raised up an oversize model of the Great Poet as Genius-Monster in my earlier comment here – still, the Great Poet is only the signal flowering of ordinary human sensibility. Great poems are NOTICED by such sensibilities. “The whole race is a poet,” as Stevens wrote. The quote from Nicholas Cusanus – “the world giulianizes in you, Giuliano” – was from a letter addressed by Cusanus not to some Renaissance genius, but to an “ordinary” monk. & Cusanus meant by this that every person “personalizes” the universe.
This is a Great Audience, by the way.
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Oh, and here’s another response… Barbara Jane Reyes says on her blog:
Posted By: Don Share on February 24, 2009 at 2:42 pm“Orr believes that American poetry will soon be running out of greatness because he is looking in the wrong fucking places.”
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Thanks for linking BJR’s response, Don. I’d like to see her blogging here.
Posted By: Francisco Aragón on February 24, 2009 at 3:13 pmReport this comment
Well you can’t argue with Barbara’s sentiments. The world of Harriet and Silliman, the whole poetry world you create collaboratively with your mutual mythologising is so insular and so far up its own arse, so full of sucking up to each other and creating ‘controversy’ that noone who isn’t scrabbling down the hole to catch up to you cares about it. Greatness could be sitting next to you and you wouldn’t notice. Great poetry would be read by people without MFA’s, who aren’t American, who aren’t poets, people who read it because they enjoy it which means it ain’t ever gonna cross your radars.
Posted By: Paul Squires on February 24, 2009 at 3:18 pmReport this comment
What Pound missed (whose poem in the first issue of Poetry called Americans “a mass of dolts” despite the fact that he probably resented being from Idaho and Eliot, St. Paul) along with others is that Monroe and Whitman seemed interested in more the qualitative, less the quantitative, aspect of great audiences. Strikes me as an argument for literacy more than anything.
Posted By: Aaron Fagan on February 24, 2009 at 3:25 pmReport this comment
More on Orr (via Matthew Simmons): http://htmlgiant.com/?p=4696
Posted By: Travis Nichols on February 24, 2009 at 4:05 pmHenry, sorry to take you out of context. I was trying for some kind of representative quote from all-comers and was bound to fail. Thanks for keeping watch.
I think Don has a bead on the real argument, which is about a “greatness” contract between audience and author. I’m asking this sincerely: where are the great audiences in poetry? The ones I can think of off the top of my head all seem to come from bookstores (which is a little scary, right?): There is one here in Seattle centered around Open Books, one in Amherst through Amherst Books, another in Iowa City via Prairie Lights, Salt Lake City’s Ken Sanders Rare Books, Woodland Pattern, . . . non-bookstore-centered: The Green Mill has its audience in Chicago (is it great?), 92nd Street Y in New York, the Gist Street Reading series in Pittsburgh, Arizona State Poetry Center . . . hmmm.
And Paul Squires! Yikes! Are you talking about my particular radars, which shall evidently never be crossed by greatness (cuz they are up my arse? Am I reading that right?), or just some generalized idea of the radars held here in Harriet-land? Just want to be clear to tell how I’m being insulted, or not insulted, or whatever is happening.
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No problem, Travis. I have no complaints.
Posted By: Henry Gould on February 24, 2009 at 5:41 pmAaron, Eliot was from St. Louis. F. Scott Fitzgerald was from St. Paul.
Paul Squires, I too believe in the Great Ordinary Reader. But guess what, poetry is also “the scholar’s art”. As Aaron said, it is (somewhat) a matter of literacy. There’s room for both ends of the spectrum. That’s why you’re here, talking with us dolts. That’s why Franz Wright is probably listening in, although he seems to agree with you. You just can’t keep away, can you?
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Oh no sorry, Not you personally, just practicing my drunken outsider voice for my next great poem. Sorry.
Posted By: Paul on February 24, 2009 at 6:04 pmReport this comment
genius seems to be a chance operation, something that not even the greatest seem to be able to yield at their discretion–how else to explain how quickly it can be exhausted in some poets, how limited its form can be (if, as orr claims, poetry is the akme of literary arts, then what do we do with great poets incapable of serious criticism, or who write bad novels?–in fact, greatness often is razor thin). that is, it doesn’t even seem to be a matter of character, of a perfect intellect or abiding curiosity–is often labored up out of years and years of failure.
Posted By: james stotts on February 24, 2009 at 7:17 pmthe canon problem always has the effect of causing critical panic for anyone willing to buy into the canon–because all their heroes, or geniuses, or whatever, have been filtered through hundreds and hundreds of years, reconfirmed for generations. the present moment, the augenblick, offers such a small window of opportunity to find the contemporary genius, that to recognize even a handful in a 50-years span should seem like a golden age, but instead makes the critic despair.
especially since the critic who uses the canon available at the time is engaged with the very formal tradition that a genius will by definition reformk, which means their paths will only tangentially intersect, if at all.
we despair and attack the canon because it seems so stable, definitive. that’s the survivor fallacy. and the same fallacy also comes to our aid when we pretend we can define genius by finding common characteristics. if we could infinitely recover the past the way we can reach out and touch the infinite present, we would find a million things we overlooked, but what we are ultimately left with really is a tattered, almost completely incomplete, wayward thing–so limited that we are able to sift through it and see patterns that were invisible until it was all made past; and that compromised inheritance is what we must make our whole culture out of. in the same way, greatness is not so stuffy, conservative, and easily accepted a concept as it seems, but a fashion. it is not the traditional domain of the elite (as homer proves) or only possible when great audiences exist (as dickinson proves), not a product of the academy, not enabled by the leisure class, not necessarily stifled by censorship, and not necessarily enabled by extraordinary circumstances. great poetry can be inspired by terrible times, mystic nonsense, english gardens/ it can be thoroughly provincial or cosmopolitan, can be practiced by the magnanimous or the bigoted, can be recognized in its time, or much later, or forgotten if it was ever recognized at all (and i’m certain the better part of it is).
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Mr. Orr has answered his own question in his third paragraph. The rest is superfluous.
Posted By: Gary B. Fitzgerald on February 24, 2009 at 7:22 pm“Does being ‘great’ simply mean writing poems that are ‘great’?”
Yes. Of course.
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I await with relish your great drunk outsider epic, Paul. The Puzzle Box of Franzia?
Posted By: Travis Nichols on February 24, 2009 at 8:27 pmReport this comment
‘Greatness talk’ is blather w/out Touchstones.
Posted By: thomas brady on February 25, 2009 at 3:06 pmTouchstones—point to an example and support with examples.
Seems pretty simple to me, and unbelievably, no one has done that, not David Orr, and none here on Harriet, and none of the commentators linked from here.
Hello?
Elizabeth Bishop? Robert Lowell? John Ashbery? Are you kidding me?
It is a truism to say we cannot measure the essence of X, we can only measure what X exerts, what X emits, what X produces.
Orr writes, “One could argue that it also made the poetry world more receptive to writers like Bishop, whose style is less hoity-toity than, say, Eliot’s.”
“Hoity-toity?”
Eliot is less ‘hoity-toity’ than Bishop? This is how we write an essay on ‘greatness?’
Touchstones, with examples—let me demonstrate.
This is off the top of my head. Any undergraduate could probably do the same, with different examples:
Dante
Secularized religion with his ‘Beatrice poetry,’ creating the pop singer (troubadour) and the English major.
Shakespeare
Disguised Plato’s dialogues as morality plays by adding poetry, slapstick and horror, giving religious muscle to the secular; raised the drama to its highest peak.
Poe
Influences: Detective Fiction, Sherlock Holmes (see ‘Dupin’ stories), Science Fiction, (see ‘tales’) Einstein (see ‘Eureka’), the Prose Poem (see ‘tales’), Symbolist Lit., (’collected works’) the Literary Hoax, (see ‘tales’) Moby Dick (see ‘Pym’), Twain (see ‘Gold Bug’ and ‘tales’) T.S. Eliot’s criticism (see ‘reviews’), modern French Lit., (see ‘collected works’) Dostoevsky (see ‘tales’), U.S. WW II cryptographer hero William Friedman (see Poe’s work on cryptography).
There you go.
Actual examples of greatness with reasons for the greatness.
Here are the scales…
Dante, Shakespeare, Poe.
Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery…
Was that so hard?
If we are really going to talk about greatness, how can we afford to shy away from what I have so easily demonstrated?
Well, how can we?
Give Mr. Orr an ‘A’ for effort.
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Travis, thanks for the video. I’ve watched it three times and am still laughing. I love the idea of a “rhyming pit”, if I’m hearing that bit correctly…
Posted By: Jason Guriel on February 25, 2009 at 4:41 pmReport this comment
Yes. Thank you, Thomas Brady. You said it so much better than I did, with examples. Great.
Posted By: Henry Gould on February 25, 2009 at 6:42 pmReport this comment
“I await with relish your great drunk outsider epic, Paul. The Puzzle Box of Franzia? “
Posted By: Gary B. Fitzgerald on February 25, 2009 at 9:24 pmPOSTED BY: TRAVIS NICHOLS ON FEBRUARY 24, 2009 8:27 PM
Mr. Nichols:
Assuming that you actually know the identities of those posting here with pseudonyms in supposed anonymity, why would you even attempt to expose and then embarrass them? Your comment appears to be somewhat bellicose and personal. I would think that when important voices speak others would listen.
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“Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them”
Posted By: Desmond Swords on February 25, 2009 at 9:52 pmAct II Scene V
The above line of Shakespeare’s, were the first ones to spring to mind on reading Nichols’ reaction to Orr’s somewhat convoluted but thoroughly engaging thoughts on the concept of and relationship between, greatness and Poetry.
I couldn’t remember the name of the play they came from, or the Shakespearean charcter who speaks them – though of course, they are among the most well known lines of the Warwickshire Bard’s. The originiating one off genius without whom the English language as we know it – I can say – would be very different. Whether or not this is an accurate statement – as the most recent WB bard used to say when he got his incredibly nuanced and delicate theoretical constructions mangled or mispronounced: “does it really matter?”
Whatever the status of Yeats in relation to William Shakespeare, as a betting bore I am willing to receive fifty bucks of Orr’s NY Times salary, for declaring that Bill Shakes is – if not top of the list in the tight literary circle whose sole admission policy is the possession of poetic greatness – certain to receive a complimentary entrance, should mister Orr relax the nationality requirements.
Racking my brains on the above quote, I got to work on Google and discovered that the reason they were so fresh, was because it was I who spoke them — to a packed school hall as a preciciously talented boy-actor barely five months past 13 and three quarters, over the course of several evenings in the April of 1981: at St Bede’s High School, Ormskirk, Lancashire, England, Europe, Earth, third planet from the sun.
Ah ! greatness assured to thee Deasmhuman, I assured myself during the three night run of Twelfth Night, when time spread towards the horizon of the never reached eternal terminus – before those everlasting lightning strikes of youth’s displaying riches, had yield to the backdrop
of approaching middle age
And states of self delusion
Apparent by their absence
And faculties once sharp, now dulled
And dwindled in significance
By the passing of our time
By torrent slowing to meander
And by increments stacked up
These changing storms of wonder
Now rage less fierce to herald clearer skies
Leaving words upon the pallet of my manhood
To paint the thoughts
Which once lay less defined.
What struck me first as sensible in Orr’s piece, is the advice from Donald Hall in his Poetry and Ambition essay, where he advices that our aim exceed our reach in order to achieve our fullest potential. To try and write words that will live forever, like Dante or Shakespeare, thus – “the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best” – says Hall and to which Orr naturally responds “Heady stuff” and which Charles Bernstein would conclude, that of course we will fail: indeed, the freedom to fail is a pre-requisite for any serious artist with ambitions of greatness, as failing leads to the loss of ego and accepting the reality of who we are – human beings capable of producing great poetry if our aim exceeds our reach and we have no compulsion about falling flat on our face in front of mockers and critics and non-practioners, then getting straight back up again and repeating the process, until gradually we learn to skate and eventually become as melting Frostean ice on a hot stove, beginning in delight and ending in wisdom, approcahing the Audenesque understanding that poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
That is all we need. A facial aperture, the ability to flap, a dream, capacity for cerebral labour, a tradition and belief in whatever gods come with it – be it a self-made post modern TV Disney Poetic of cartoon lore, or the Tuatha De Dannan – we can only seek our own unique road to what home is the one we have within. Segais Well in Sidhe Nechtan, Lethe, Styx, Mississipi or the Hudson, the sole measure of success is the self-created calibrating flow with which we grade our acheivements and those of our peers up to the same trick of appearing as the poet knowing what it is, the business of speaking verses, the actor and perennial child who beleives in faeries who are the Tuatha De Dannan, the penultimate (fifth) race of gods who appear in Irish myth and whose Poet God is Ogma, who has a harp of three strains – discordance, joy and sleep.
These things are (not) important to learn but it helps for the aim to exceed your reach, and the Irish bardic filidh (poets) tradition, ran for 1200 years in print, and has been all but forgotten to all but a few addicted to discovering the truth of what couirse they studied, what tales a bard really took on, and it is only now with the web and dissemination of ancient texts, bluffers can find stuff previously buried in the darkest recesses of dusty cloisters and inaccesable caves where little light shone, and this, learning this tradition means, you can’t go far wrong.
gra agus siochain
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yawn.
Posted By: daniel rounds on February 26, 2009 at 2:01 amReport this comment
Perhaps Patton Oswalt SHOULD be our poet laureate?
Posted By: thomas brady on February 26, 2009 at 7:53 amWhy not? His youtube will get more viewers than readers of Kay Ryan’s poetry.
If Comedy Central or Hollywood or David Letterman announced their Poet Laureate, I think the one the U.S. Congress picks would have to defer, don’t you?
More people will hear and enjoy Patton Oswalt than Kay Ryan, so if he says he’s poet laureate, then I think he IS.
Furthermore, doesn’t the laurel leaf really belong to the Comic Muse?
Certainly the Tragic Muse no longer works in poetry. When is the last time you saw a roomful of people weeping at a poetry reading? Aren’t poetry readings judged a success these days if the audience laughs now and then? Come on, you know it’s true. The Tragic Muse belongs to the film industry. I leave the cinema, not poetry readings, with my face covered in tears.
Even the standard ‘Sonnet about Death’ is really not courting the Tragic Muse. We only THINK so, because the old poem deals with an unfunny subject: Death. Yet Donne and Shakespeare tell us to be happy in the face of death, just as Socrates did. The subject (death) disguises the fact that the Comic Muse is doing the work, even in so-called ‘tragic’ poetry.
Orr wants a return to greatness, but what he really wants is a return to Tragedy.
But how is that possible in a world with Patton Oswalt?
Patton Oswalt is cuddly, and Kay Ryan is not.
Patton Oswalt makes us laugh when he does poetry.
Poetry belongs to the Comic Muse.
Even Dante named his poem the Divine Comedy.
In the rooms the women come and go
Talking of–Michelangelo.
Orr wants weeping.
And all we do is laugh.
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Thomas, why should ‘greatness’ have anything to do with influence on literary history? Can’t someone write great poetry that gets permanently neglected, for whatever reason?
Posted By: Matt on February 26, 2009 at 8:48 amReport this comment
Matt,
Posted By: thomas brady on February 26, 2009 at 9:49 amYes, a writer who is ‘permanently neglected’ could be intrinsically great.
If examples are at hand, however, we might as well use them in order to gain an understanding of greatness in the realm of writers who are NOT ‘neglected.’
We shouldn’t let the tragedy of the ‘permanently neglected’ destroy ALL investigation.
Thomas
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One thing that might be fun, and certainly more interesting than Orr’s piece, is to ask and answer the question: What poets think they deserve the title of Great, act like they are Great? Orr’s thoughts don’t really matter. Time will shake things out. But it’s always a charge to bump into, read, see read, poets who already have laid claim to the Greatness mantle. The entitlement is awesome; they live their lives differently than non-Great poets. I’m thinking of a range of people, from Pinsky to Gluck to Silliman. And younger poets, too, ordained for greatness by the Greats, like Illya Kaminsky, who has gotten more mileage out of one book than most poets get out of a lifetime of writing. And I write this simply to wonder about the worrying that goes on about being Great. Why?
Posted By: Frank Flagella on February 26, 2009 at 11:03 amReport this comment
Frank,
Posted By: Henry Gould on February 26, 2009 at 11:23 amIlya Kaminsky must be one of those new “hybrid” poets.
How does somebody KNOW they’re great? Megalomania helps.
But seriously… it seems to me that highly-gifted people – in art, science – often have a real prescience (from childhood) about their own worth, an intuitive estimate of their capabilities. “O my prophetic soul!” wrote Shakespeare, somewhere. (& they say he was pretty great.)
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Orr is just clearing the skids for the plural: The Great Dickman Brothers!
Posted By: Aaron Fagan on February 26, 2009 at 11:29 amBy the way, the U.S. poet laureate is chosen by the Librarian of Congress, not Congress.
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My mother wrote once in her journal (long, long ago) that she got annoyed when she heard me say something out in the yard, surrounded by my usual “gang” (of 7-yr-olds).
Posted By: Hnery Gould on February 26, 2009 at 11:54 amOne of the kids said to me – “You think you’re so GREAT.” & I replied, magnanimously, “We’re ALL great!”
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Airlifting another take from Barbara Jane Reyes’ blog. She expands on Evie Shockley’s comment “whiteness and american poetry. the volumes that could be written…” with this:
Posted By: Travis Nichols on February 26, 2009 at 12:23 pm“Whiteness and American poetry is really a subset of American = white, I think. Oh, and ‘foreign,’ as represented by Milosz, is European. Forget the rest of us; we don’t have literature.”
The whole thread is here:
http://bjanepr.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/on-poetry-on-greatness/#comments
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The poster up-thread (Hi, Aaron! Library of Congress, right!) who didn’t realize T.S.Eliot was from St. Louis shouldn’t feel too bad.
Posted By: thomas brady on February 26, 2009 at 2:51 pmMr. Orr wrote in his ‘greatness’ essay that in the good old days, before poetry became a workshop “guild” run by Paul Engle-ish ‘good-but-not-great poets,’ poetry was, in the early 20th century, a “country club.”
But Orr failed to pull the trigger, just as he failed to illustrate ‘greatness.’
Orr provided no examples.
It is this failure of nerve which afflicts poetry today, for examples do abound. We simply choose not to look at them. Maybe we are too busy ‘not being great.’
We fail to research the facts, and, instead, glide on surfaces, satisfied with partialities such as “T.S. Eliot was from St. Louis.”
Well, not really.
This is not the whole story by a long shot.
The Eliot family’s roots are in New England.
T.S. Eliot’s grandfather attended the Harvard Divinity School with William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson, knew both men, and followed Horace Greeley’s advice to ‘go west.’
T.S. Eliot’s grandfather followed the advice of Horace Greeley (also part of Emerson’s intellectual circle) and Grandpa Eliot co-founded Washington U., as well as a Unitarian church in St. Louis.
As editor of the New York Tribune, Greeley employed “Dial” co-founder/co-editor Margaret Fuller.
T.S. Eliot and Scofield Thayer were students together at Milton Academy in Massachusetts; Thayer, who had money, funded the new version of Emerson’s “Dial,” which awarded the “Dial Prize” in 1922 to T.S. Eliot for his “Waste Land.”
Other recipients of the annual “Dial Prize” in the 1920s were E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore (who became editor when Thayer had a nervous breakdown).
Professors, stroking their beards, (apologies to Joaquin Phoenix and professors with beards reading this thread) call Cummings, Williams, Pound, Eliot, and Moore “Modernists.”
They do NOT refer to these distinguished and ground-breaking writers as “Scofield Thayer’s friends.”
But if we are going to talk of poetry as a “country club,” we SHOULD speak of the modernists this way.
Examples, Mr. Orr, examples.
Greatness will always elude us; but how shall we glimpse it without examples?
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That’s great, Tom – that’s Great Tom.
Posted By: Henry Gould on February 26, 2009 at 10:51 pmBut Eliot was from St. Louis, not from St. Paul. No one steps twice into the same river.
Genealogy doth not great poems make. Though Tradition helps (that’s great,Tom. Great).
Hart Crane was a screwed-up son of a Lifesaver manufacturer from Cleveland. No great background – a lot of ambition. Mom’s great Hope.
Yet he’s up there with good old St. Louee Tom (compare their passages downstream – I think Crane wins out.)
& so
the River is a Strong Brown God.
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The video is a riot, one reason being that it takes to extremes the typical poetic attitude re audience nowadays. We may think Monroe was right (and I also think that she was), but Pound’s idea clearly won the day, and POETRY soon enough abandoned the “great audiences” motto. In these post-romantic times we take for granted the idea of the misunderstood genius poet. But that misunderstood genius so proudly free of audience is a brief figure, in the great history of poetic greatness. Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope (yes, Pope), Whitman, Barrett Browning, Yeats, Millay, Hughes, Frost, B.Dylan –all unthinkable without the great audiences who needed them. The romantic/modernist model has begun to pass; slam poetry is one cuttting edge of the change. When it does pass, then Orr may get what he’s looking for. . .
Posted By: Annie Finch on February 26, 2009 at 11:34 pmOne aspect of greatness that I don’t think has been touched is Eliot’s idea–just as true, I think, as Monroe’s, and perhaps connected with it–that a great poet performs a creative situating of the poetry in a tradition of other poets. So, to Henry’s synchronic list I would add a fourth, diachronic, quality of greatness, the claiming of a place within the long tradition of poetry, and a sense of responsibility for continuing that line.
Which is actually the subject of my own Harriet thread.
Annie
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Wow.
Posted By: Michael J. Martin on February 27, 2009 at 2:30 amReport this comment
The poet’s instrument is the poet’s own body and brain but if poetry is to avoid shrinking to a self-referential, self-enclosed, detached, and isolated unit of a larger world, then the psyche upon which the poet calls must not be the poet’s own, but the world’s. Therefore, a poet needs to develop resources of information and experience that connect with the rest of the world — socially, culturally, historically, and politically — thereby enriching the poet’s instrument that is required to write.
Posted By: Aaron Fagan on February 27, 2009 at 9:31 amReport this comment
Are audiences who equate minor poets like Whitman with major poets like Shakesspeare “great?”
Posted By: thomas brady on February 27, 2009 at 10:43 amWhen we say ‘audiences,’ do we mean populations or salons?
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After AWP, I’m tempted to say we mean saloons!
Posted By: Doodle on February 27, 2009 at 11:00 amReport this comment
David Orr’s essay is nothing more than introspective masturbation masquerading as literary critique. It’s 3,000 words of nonsense. Just ignore him and perhaps the New York Times will make him go away in their next round of budget cuts. Orr and William Logan should shack up together since they’re cut from the same bitter, elitist cloth.
Posted By: Collin Kelley on February 28, 2009 at 10:51 amReport this comment
Greatness?
Posted By: Manoel Cartola on February 28, 2009 at 9:32 pmThe obvious moral is we should focus on great poems instead of great poets. However, that is too easy of an equation and we all have egos to deify.
The video was quite amusing. Good Shew.
Here is a ver recent supplement that is highly relevant:
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=lgpr5t1c6f9r0prghwmp5ytxyds9tmnf
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Henry,
Posted By: thomas brady on March 1, 2009 at 1:06 pmHave you read T.S. Eliot’s “From Poe to Valery?” (1949)
Eliot’s roots in Emerson and New England make his attack on Poe (who didn’t like Emerson or New England) in that volume easier to understand; Tom was simply taking care of old ‘family business.’
Henry James, esq. of London, a family friend of Emerson’s, too, whacked Poe with the same stick Tom used–Poe was “juvenile,” and this attack is better understood as well, if we see it as ‘family business.’
With the literary genius, ‘family business’ and ‘tradition’ are not that far apart.
Emerson deeply admired the British–he lauds the type brilliantly in his ‘English Traits.’ The ‘New American Religion Emerson’ which Harold Bloom so admires is, as Poe himself would be the first to point out, a French-hating, Catholic-hating Anglophilic Puritan. After all, why did the puritans hate the Catholics? The Catholic religion was a fake one–in other words, it was aesthetic. And who does Emerson bash in his ‘Poet’ but the poet (like Poe) who is merely aesthetic. Emerson’s argument was bound to appeal to non-poet critics everywhere–Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, etc.–and of course it did. Emerson’s triumph was complete when the poet who took his prose and turned it into poetry, Walt Whtiman, was lauded in England by the pre-Raphaelites, and Walt’s reputation, almost non-existent in America, revived.
Poe’s ‘juvenile’ status was merely code for ‘French.’
(Eliot had a French side, true, but that was youthful slumming, the way upper class Brits would learn the world serving in India.)
Religion, country, family, and tradition. Eliot knew what it was all about. And so, unconsciously more or less, do we.
Thomas
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Manoel,
Posted By: thomas brady on March 1, 2009 at 1:53 pmThere’s a good reason poets will always be loved over poems.
Poetry is a human activity, so the human animal itself will always be more fascinating, finally than the poem. This is a truism, of course, but no less true for being so.
But there’s another reason, too, I think. Poems are dead, like hair upon our head. Poems cannot organize themselves, nor is any organizing principle itself displayed in the poem beyond what that particular poem is forced to do to exist as that particular poem.
As we walk in the existential forest then, it is not poems which catch our attention, finally, but poets, for what we understand as human lives in those micro-moments, those empty spaces, when we are not paying attention to the poem, even if these spaces are only occupied by our own thoughts and feelings. Likewise, the gaps in the poet’s projected life are inevitably filled with poetry; we cannot contemplate Keats, for instance, simply walking along, without contemplating the poetry-ness of Keats–walking. Poems finally defer to this poetry-ness which finally attaches itself to where the most human warmth is–the poet, even if this attaching ourselves to a poet is merely an imaginative act.
Finally, since human-centered ingenuity is so remarkable, is it any wonder that a genius will be the owner of the poems in the audience’s eyes, and not the poem as owner of the poet? The efficiency of the human mind, working solo, without inhibition or obstruction, will win the contest with cold poems scattered throughout the universe; the poet is the godhead, not the poem, and ego, if we examine the matter carefully, is only a secondary condition of the phenomenon I am describing.
We should not feel ashamed, then, when, upon reading a poem in some anthology, our eyes race, almost against our will, to the place in the book where we might discover–the name.
Thomas
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Thomas
Posted By: Manoel Cartola on March 1, 2009 at 6:42 pmI appreciate the sermon, but you are preaching to the… well, you know.
The gist of what I meant to say is not that readers focusing on the poet. It is true that, as I’ve learned, some poets (often the ones who are most difficult) you have to “get to know” before you can understand their poetry and appreciate it. That being said, if one is writing a poem thinking only of what will make them famous then more power to them (or less), but personally I’ve always enjoyed the act/process of writing for what it is in itself. Pumpkinification is a word that comes to mind.
And I can speak at length against what you are arguing but I really don’t want to get in the embroglio of back-and-forth, pseudo-intellectual blogetry. However, most poets, after reading their biographies, are poets/people whom I’ve grown to dislike quite a bit. I really dislike Eliot as a person (admittedly I didn’t know him too well). Furthermore, the late-mid-century confessional from New England, to my sensibility, usually have an air of entitlement that seeps into their verses, even if their verses are great. Also, I diametrically oppose Auden’s aesthetical stances regarding poetry but I still love his poems independent of Auden and recite them from memory. Then there are poets who I think I’d like as people/poets but whose poems I do not enjoy (most of the Beats might fit into this category) and Gary Snyder is a first-rate candidate for the phenomena of liking a poet but not the poems (for me).
I am digressing, I know that it is the human element that gives readers something to cling to (or fixate upon, whatever your conception of this phenomenon is), But I think you saw in my humble little comment something that really wasn’t there and missed the general message and interpretd in terms of readership rather than writer-ship. Heck, anonymous is my favorite writer of all time.
-manny
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Thomas,
Posted By: Henry Gould on March 1, 2009 at 9:30 pmthat’s all very interesting – but I think you’re exaggerating for effect (a very Poe-ish kind of provocation).
Eliot was highly influenced by both Poe & the French poets – & not just in his early career. He admired Valery all the way through. & what is “Four Quartets” if not a poem aspiring (a la Symbolism) to the condfition of music?
There is NO MAJOR FIGURE in 20th-century poetry in English who sounds more like Poe than Eliot. Stevens has some of that jingle-music, but not the spookiness (even when Stevens is trying to be spooky, it just sounds FUNNY to me, most of the time. Hoobla-hoobla-how. His spookiness – Stevens’s – is not so funny in the late poems – but then he doesn’t sound much like Poe anymore…).
& to try to distance E. from Poe on the basis of some sort of Anglo-mafioso attachment seems a long stretch. What is Eliot’s whole career but a rejection of Emersonian-American-Romantic “exceptionalism”, on behalf of Anglo-CATHOLIC tradition? (Closer, again, to Poe’s sense of fate than Emerson’s.)
But you’ve certainly put Poe back in my range of curious lore… want to read more of his criticism, & the Eliot essay you mention (which I must have read a long time ago…).
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Manny,
Posted By: thomas brady on March 2, 2009 at 11:43 amI agree. I hate embroglios, never mind those of the pseudo-intellectual blogetry kind. God forbid. I wasn’t raised that way, certainly.
Sorry for the lecture. I didn’t quite make my point. Ya win some, ya lose some.
Hey, I’ll trade ya my W.H Auden bubble gum card for three John Ashberys and a Jorie Graham!
Thomas
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Henry,
Posted By: thomas brady on March 2, 2009 at 12:36 pmYou are absolutely right about Eliot and Poe. I’ve gone through their critical works with a fine tooth comb and Eliot definitely picked Poe’s pocket. Commentary on either side doesn’t mention this, however. It will be our little secret.
Edgar’s under-the-radar influence on Tom surely broke Uncle Waldo and Granpa Eliot’s New England heart, but when you read “From Poe to Valery,” to increase your pleasure, I advise you read the work while listening to Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ soundtrack: Eliot is Anthony Hopkins and Poe, Janet Leigh. Tom’s blood-lust is ferocious, as if bloody revenge is all that will cure him; as Eliot attempts to hide the body under the floorboards, you may have to put the book down.
Those who convert to a new sect with great fanfare are rarely sincere. If you don’t think Eliot was a puritan, read his opinions of Shelley. How convenient for Eliot that his Church was situated in England. “Four Quartets” is overrated, in my opinion, and it’s named for places in England and New England. After Eliot won fame with ‘The Waste Land’ he went a little soft–at least until the war cry that was ‘From Poe to Valery.’
For all of Eliot’s talk of ‘Tradition,’ he rejected great swaths of literary history: “Hamlet,” Milton, and the Romantics, just to name three pieces.
As I said in my previous post, Eliot’s experience in France was slumming. Eliot came face-to-face with Poe as he explored French literature and…well, read, “From Poe to Valery.” Tom did not finally betray Uncle Waldo, for Emerson encouraged subversion.
As for ‘the great’ in American Literature, these two are at the top of the heap, and their relationship is an underground and fascinating one: T.S. Eliot and Edgar A. Poe.
Thomas
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If it is our secret, Thomas – which I sincerely doubt – Mutlu Konuk Blasing was in on it 20 yrs ago. See her American Poetry : the Rhetoric of its Forms (Yale YUP, 1989).
Posted By: Henry Gould on March 2, 2009 at 2:47 pmReport this comment
Henry,
Posted By: thomas brady on March 2, 2009 at 9:40 pmOh yes, yes, of course Mutlu can join our little club!
Thomas
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Thanks to an invitation from Amy King, I’m joining the fray on this one. My response essay is too long to copy into a commenting cell, but here’s a snippet:
Posted By: Sandra Beasley on March 4, 2009 at 10:08 am“So what’s the problem again? Orr dredges up Donald Hall’s essay on “Poetry and Ambition,” suggesting epic drive is lacking in today’s poets. I just don’t believe that. A.E. Stallings is translating Lucretius. Thomas Sayers Ellis is not only writing provocative poems, he’s articulating a poetics of sound. Kenneth Goldsmith is probably tucked away in his conceptual mad scientist’s lab right now, giggling as he pours a test tube of adverbs into a beaker of train times.
Love or hate the contest system, I think it has caused more poets to think in terms of big, book-length “projects” than ever before. Some of the results are startling, whether they end up winning the National Poetry Series (Tyehimba Jess’s leadbelly) or come into the world via an Espresso Book Machine (Michael Schiavo’s Mad Song). Read Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life or Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler before you tell me today’s poets lack ambition….”
The rest is up at “Chicks Dig Poetry,” http://www.sbeasley.blogspot.com .
Thanks for hosting this discussion–it’s exactly the kind of thing Harriet should be hosting.
Cheers, Sandra
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Thanks, Sandra. Amy’s response came just a little too late for my roundup, but here’s a link to it for latecomers: http://amyking.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/on-greatness-them-that-do-it/
Posted By: Travis Nichols on March 4, 2009 at 12:34 pmReport this comment
“Walt Whitman was not a Great poet. He had an ear for musical, moving rhetoric that could have easily taken speech or essay form. He pandered to public opinion.
Posted By: thomas brady on March 4, 2009 at 4:03 pmPablo Neruda was not a Great poet. He lacked discipline as an editor and reviser. He wrote political poetry that bordered on propaganda, and had a weakness for lovelorn sentiment.
Emily Dickinson was not a Great poet. She absconded on her responsibility to address the issues of her age. Her work does not show any significant stylistic evolutions: those dashes mark the canter of a one-trick pony.
Now, prove me wrong.”
THIS IS GREAT!!!
Aw, rats.
Amy King was only kidding.
So Mark Strand says he was influenced by Wallace Stevens, and if a graduate student poet comes along in 25 years and says Mark Stand was his key to Wallace Stevens, Mark Strand will be ‘caught in the web of greatness?’ (nice phrase!) Nah…I’m not buying it.
I don’t know if I can define ‘the great,’ but here’s how I would define the ‘not great.’
Easily impressed.
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very funny.
Posted By: LH on March 4, 2009 at 7:33 pmReport this comment