Comments on: “I Pledge My Death Wattle to the Cause of Poetry”

By: LH

LH — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:33:42 +0000

By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:03:48 +0000

“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.
Pablo 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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By: Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:34:54 +0000

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/
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By: Sandra Beasley

Sandra Beasley — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:08:31 +0000

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:
“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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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 01:40:53 +0000

Henry,
Oh yes, yes, of course Mutlu can join our little club!
Thomas
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:47:26 +0000

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).
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:36:19 +0000

Henry,
You 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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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:43:43 +0000

Manny,
I 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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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 01:30:28 +0000

Thomas,
that’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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By: Manoel Cartola

Manoel Cartola — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 22:42:44 +0000

Thomas
I 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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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:53:08 +0000

Manoel,
There’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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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:06:14 +0000

Henry,
Have 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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By: Manoel Cartola

Manoel Cartola — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 01:32:05 +0000

Greatness?
The 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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By: Collin Kelley

Collin Kelley — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:51:34 +0000

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.
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:00:13 +0000

After AWP, I’m tempted to say we mean saloons!
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:43:21 +0000

Are audiences who equate minor poets like Whitman with major poets like Shakesspeare “great?”
When we say ‘audiences,’ do we mean populations or salons?
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By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:31:55 +0000

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.
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By: Michael J. Martin

Michael J. Martin — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:30:58 +0000

Wow.
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By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 03:34:04 +0000

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. . .
One 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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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 02:51:40 +0000

That’s great, Tom – that’s Great Tom.
But 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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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:51:51 +0000

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.
Mr. 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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By: Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:23:43 +0000

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:
“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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By: Hnery Gould

Hnery Gould — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:54:09 +0000

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).
One of the kids said to me – “You think you’re so GREAT.” & I replied, magnanimously, “We’re ALL great!”
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By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:29:44 +0000

Orr is just clearing the skids for the plural: The Great Dickman Brothers!
By the way, the U.S. poet laureate is chosen by the Librarian of Congress, not Congress.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:23:16 +0000

Frank,
Ilya 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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By: Frank Flagella

Frank Flagella — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:03:30 +0000

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?
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:49:02 +0000

Matt,
Yes, 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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By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 12:48:58 +0000

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?
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:53:35 +0000

Perhaps Patton Oswalt SHOULD be our poet laureate?
Why 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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By: daniel rounds

daniel rounds — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:01:14 +0000

yawn.
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