As for item two, the point is taken. I am surprised you didn’t pull out the really big gun, when it comes to language-ing means, and example James Joyce in his self-imposed exile. On the other hand, the case could be made that Joyce wasn’t standing on the outside looking in. Rather, that he interiorized the language in the same way, and to the same lively extent, he first interiorized the map of Dublin’s city streets, then interiorized a certain epic poem, ending up interiorizing the whole of ancient Irish mythology. I guess if I were in your position and an expat this would be something of how I would go after the language.

Terreson

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300124231

Why Poetry Matters, by Jay Parini

When you talk about a poet’s “strategy” of “style,” I think we have to realize that Gertrude Stein and her fellow High Modernists occupied a different world than poets like you and I.

As you know, with her brother, Leo, Gertrude was at the center of the Modern Painting movement, not only in terms of style, but in terms of influence, generally. Gertrude Stein was taught her automatic writing style by the distinguished philosopher, William James, while she was at Harvard.

All poets who get on the radar consciously do choose a style, one that, in most cases, a mentor suggests to them.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about in terms of the High Modernists:

Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?” which famously excoriates the academic insularity of contemporary po-biz, exempts the High Modernists from the whole thrust of his critique, holding them aloft as a shining counter-example.

Gioia would agree with you that the Modernists did not reduce style to a “strategy.” I would disagree. I think the Modernists most certainly did, albeit in complex, and naturally evolving ways.

The rise of the workshop, the migration of poetry into the academy, the diminishment of poetry as a popular art, occurred because of conscious actions by the High Modernists—yet Gioia, and Joseph Epstein in his “Who Killed Poetry?” which Gioia imitated, speak of High Modernism as the good old days–before all the trouble.

This is the most blinkered view one could possibly take.

I only bring up Gioia, Martin, because you have used the High Modernists in your example.

If we’re going to talk about “choices” of “style” that get a poet read, then, yes, all poets who have made names for themselves did absolutely make choices to manifest a certain style,’ and, in terms of the High Modernists, like Gertrude Stein or William Carlos Williams, whom you mentioned, I refer not only to the manifesto-ism of High Modernism, but practical choices and strategies, which led poetry in precisely the direction which Gioia found so appalling in his by-now-classic broadside.

In his essay, Gioia uses terms like “clubby” and “coterie” to describe contemporary poetry.

Now, “Can Poetry Matter” cites as a sign of health, the example of the ‘Kenyon Review’ publishing, alongside its critical essays, poems by Robert Lowell.

Is it possible Gioia was unaware that Lowell left Harvard to study with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, and that Ransom ran the Kenyon Review?

John Crowe Ransom, who is not mentioned in Gioia’s essay, was in the thick of High Modernism, not only as founder of the Fugitives and New Criticism, but he was also instrumental in making poetry an academic concern. (See essays such “Criticism, Inc” in which Ransom argues critics must be university-trained.)

Gioia nostalgically swoons over 1940, when there was “but one Writers Workshop,” recently founded at Iowa. What Gioia fails to mention is that Iowa workshop founder Paul Engle had connections to Ransom and the Fugitives (Engle was chosen for the Yale Younger in 1932 by William Alexander Percy, the Fugitive “godfather”). Allen Tate, a Fugitive/New Critic who is praised by Gioia in his essay, founded a Writing Workshop in 1942, at Princeton.

In brief, “Can Poetry Matter” favors those who were busily working towards the very result to which the essay objects.

Gioia makes much of the fact that most published contemporary poets teach creative writing for a living and that contemporary poetry anthologies consist of poets who teach each other.

Then Gioia names “independent” poets like Wallace Stevens, who had “real jobs” as businessmen, and poets like Ezra Pound, who “earned a living with their writing.” Gioia’s point regarding the incestuous nature po-biz may have a certain validity, but his Modernist counter-examples crumble under analysis.

Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot were shaped by the same two professors at Harvard, George Santayana and William James.

Wallace Stevens was a ground floor Imagist, part of the extremely well-connected coterie of Modernists which included Cummings (also at Harvard), Moore, and, of course, Pound.

None of these little magazine poets “earned their living” from writing. The Modernists were subsidized by all sorts of individuals and looked out for one another exclusively.

Gioia’s notion that the public is turned off by poetry today, and yet somehow everything was different when the public was buying up books by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens is a notion that prevents real headway on this whole matter.

Williams, Stevens, and Pound all began as Imagists. They all made that conscious strategic choice based on their affiliation with men like Santayana and T.E. Hulme. Modernism began narrowly, very narrowly, and with a strategy.

If we don’t acknowlege this, a truly historical understanding of modern poetry is lost.

There isn’t time to go into the whole story here, but the historical gap in Gioia’s thesis–through which the Modernists march untouched–needs to be sealed up.

The “style” of Imagism, and the subsequent “style” of the New Criticism (T.S. Eliot’s “difficulty” joined together with Fugitive theorists around Ransom), were “choices” every High Modernist poet made, and which every poet made in order to get known.

I’m sorry if this sounds cynical, Martin; and please do pardon the crudeness of my rhetorical sweep–which space constraints made necessary.

Thomas

I tried earlier today respond to your comment, but it seems to have gotten lost in the electricity.

I liked the way you put this: “…just because you look at it from the outside doesn’t mean you can’t also experience it from the inside, as well.”

Patrick Kavanagh’s great poem “Epic” (which I’ve cited before in this space, though I can’t remember where) speaks to your concerns in this comment. Just in case you haven’t read it, here’s a link:

http://homepage.eircom.net/%257Eodyssey/Quotes/Written/Epic.html

Pound is a very interesting case in all of this. He wrote, as we all know, his Pisan Cantos -some say his greatest poetry – sitting in a cage in a military detention center without any of his usual apparatus criticus and most likely in a state of some disorientation.

Martin

Just to respond quickly to two important points:

1. The question of “choice” – nature vs. nurture aside, do you really think poets chose to write in one style or another? This seems to reduce style to a kind of strategy? In my post, I was talking about a sudden realization that the style I was writing in, partly under the influence of my teachers, wouldn’t do. It took a few years to start writing in another way.

2. The idea that poets need contact with their language as it evolves has been debated forever. I think some poets do, and some do not. Gertrude Stein didn’t – she was happy – in France – to have English all to herself. Likewise Elizabeth Bishop. Yet Pasternak refused to leave Russia which turned into the Soviet Union (much to his own hardship when he was still a young poet) because he couldn’t imagine living without the Russian language in his ear. One can’t imagine Williams (though he did spend a good bit of time abroad) going to long without New Jersey. I take your point, but I think it has more to do with the particular poet. There are no rules about this and great poets have arisen out of both contexts.

Martin

Today we need the classroom, the M.F.A. professor in front of us, the modernist poetry text with its particulars, in order to make poetry.

I don’t think you were being snarky at all, Tere. I suppose others would respond by saying, well it doesn’t hurt to look at language from all directions; just because you look at it from the outside doesn’t mean you can’t also experience it from the inside, as well. And, in your example, Yeats and Pound are both right; you need ‘the village, the scene, the particular,’ but you also have to make it universal. But then a poet shouldn’t have to think, “Oh, I like this particular, now let me think on how to make it universal,” the whole thing should be more unconscious than that. Which is why nobody trusts Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” formula. We don’t trust anyone with a formula. But we seem to fall in love with half-formulas, timid, placid, compromising sorts of formulas. Maybe that’s a greater problem: blandness.

Thomas

The other comment whose sense escapes me is this: “These days, the best way to see the English language is to look at it from the outside, to hear how the world speaks it, and to learn to speak in their languages, as both a gesture of respect, and for the insight it provides into the relationship between the syntax of a culture and the way that culture manifests itself materially. It is only then that one can begin to understand the forces that have come to form our own contemporary vernacular.” This strikes me as counter-intuitive. Language is morphological. So to speak, it morphs. And the changes it assumes are environmentally produced. How then is a poet to keep responsive to language if she assumes a position on the outside looking in?

One last thought maybe. In his old man journals, I think it might have been in ‘33, Yeats commented on Pound’s notions concerning the creation of a “universal language of poetry.” (A notion pretty Imperialistic when you think about it.) Yeats said the notion was not for him. He said he needed the village, the peasant woman in front of him, the scene, the particular, in order to make poetry.

Terreson

Annie,

Thanks for the encouragement!!!!!!

This little incident, about the poem coming into your head in French as you say (“coming into the head” – that’s nice) is a major preoccupation of mine. I’m always trying to figure out how language is working in the brain. For instance, are different neurons firing and carrying information when we write different things, poetry, letters, commentary; or even when we’re sticking to a form, or writing more openly. I spent a few years after the events that I describe in the post above writing strictly in form (not as inventively as you do in your work, but nevertheless, with meter, rhyme, stanza patterns etc…in fact I wrote a book-length poem in rhyme royal which contained description of landscapes, philosophical passages, even recipes for making crack in your kitchen – crazy stuff. But I found that I could say more, bring a greater variety of material into the poem in the strict setting of the form – seven lines with only three rhymes – than I ever could in a more open approach. After about four years of writing in form I relaxed back into so-called free verse. But it still retained a quality of formalism.

I think foreign languages open up new space in the brain. Brain imaging shows that in multi-lingual children the spaces occupied by different languages are contiguous, while in adults who have learned a second language after, say, 18 or 19, those spaces are separate, as though the mind were looking for a place to store the new linguistic material. When I go to France, as I often do, or Belgium, it takes me several days to push the Portuguese out of the way to get at the French. Sometimes, in the States, in certain situations, or when I’m surprised, I’ll start speaking spontaneously in Portuguese, which of course draws the looks. Sometimes translating I’ll fix a sentence in my head in Portuguese, and then, instead of translating it into English, I’ll start typing out a paraphrase of the original in Portuguese. Sometimes, I’ll be reading something, when I’m traveling, like the inside of a tin of little cigars, and won’t know at first what language I’m reading. It’s all very strange indeed. But I think that moving from free verse to formal verse is somewhat similar to moving from language to language. One of my best friends, a Swedish painter, who grew up in France, lived in New York and now spends half of his time in Berlin, uses different languages for different things. He thinks in French, writes in his diary in Swedish, prefers reading in English, conducts his business in German.

King Charles V of Spain: “To God I speak Spanish, to woman Italian, to men French, and to my horse – German.”

Martin

Thanks for reminding us all of Van Wyk Brooks. That’s a book that I didn’t discover until I actually came to Coimbra. The University library was full of stuff from that period. I read a whole range of things that I probably wouldn’t have read in a more up-to-date library.

Please look up-thread to Erica’s concerns about the “English language empire.” As you call it. You’re absolutely right, the fact that English has become a global language has influenced our capacity to speak other languages. I take this up in my introduction to my English version of Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of the Tragic, Nuno Nabais (Continuum); you can see this at Google Books – Nietzsche and the metaphysics of the tragic – Google Books Result by Nuno Nabais, Martin Earl – 2006 – Philosophy – 204 pages). The issue I bring up there (similar to what your are describing in your comment) is the fact that most of current Nietzschean scholarship is conducted in English and that N. is more widely read in English than he is in German. This has certainly altered the nature of the scholarship.
As to your last statement, I would disagree. It’s impossible to know a country without knowing, even if imperfectly, its language. I love many countries in Europe, but I don’t know them like a know Portugal. For me, I have to be in the country to learn the language.
I would say, though, that there are plenty of ways, to make it strange. You can do it in Pittsburg or in Paris. And I totally agree with you that poets must do that. I think that somehow thinking that one is reduplicating the vernacular and thereby becoming more authentic, an obsession that runs from Wordsworth to Williams, or linking the poetic line to breathing (Olson and Creeley), are pretexts, descriptions after the organic fact of writing. Poetic speech is pure artifice, a blend of a lot of things: pseudo philosophy and music, colloquial speech and biblical pacing; it’s a narrative of what it feels like to be alive expressed in a language which is stretched, whether towards the minimal, or towards the expansive, the gothic or the baroque, but always stretched. As a mimesis of feeling, it has to be. Modern poetry (and for me that can go all the way back to Donne, but definitely kicks in with Shakespeare’s soliloquies and sonnets, utterly controverts Aristotelian plausibility, a quality which Chaucer, for instance still maintains.

Martin

I’m writing this on the train down to Lisbon, so it might not get sent until tomorrow. I still don’t have one of those “everywhere” gadgets. Sorry I overlooked your very important comment in the thread. I was just this afternoon banging letters back and forth with Peter Cole, who was sharply critical of the “husk” sentence, as you were. I told Peter about your comment, which I just came across in the thread again yesterday. Like Peter (who I have known for thirty years, and whose work in translation, poetry and the essay should be a model for all of us) and perhaps like you, I am a professional translator. That is, I make my living by translating. I wish poetry made up a larger percentage of the kinds of things I work on than it does, but the money is in scholarship, theatre, film. That’s still on the lucky side of things. Most translators work on pretty dreary stuff indeed. Anyway, all this just to let you know I sympathize with what you are saying and that I’m not talking through my hat.

You’re absolutely right to point out the inconsistencies in my argument. I think (to come to my own rescue) I could have been letting my professional sense get in the way of my critical and philosophical sense. Professionally, when I evaluate potential work I’m looking at things like profit vs. effort. This tends to push one into heirarchizing texts in a way that has nothing to do with looking at them from a more literary critical perspective, or political or social perspective. As the difficulty increases the profit (a derivative of time margins) decreases. So you can imagine where poetry fits in. But I love to translate poetry. If you have time check out this link: http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/onlinemagazine/2007May/20quintais-earl.pdf

I like your capsule description of the history of linguistic monopolies, and I think you should expand on the place that translation as “art” has in that paradigm. I’m concerned that that you interpreted what I am saying about the translation of poetry as a “failed derivative reproduction”, but I’m beginning to see how you, and Peter Cole, could have come to this conclusion. I need to think about this further.

I think that in your penultimate paragraph (while I agree with you) you don’t sufficiently distinguish between production and literary and political consequences, i.e., “de-centering our native language,” which is essentially, as I say in this post, and in the three posts specifically on translation, a de-centering of ourselves as producers of that language. In other words, the artist, as poet or translator, is looking for a way to extend her own capacities, to find a way to write; the transformation of the language, adding new capital to our literary heritage, is the result of that. We don’t set out to change the language; we set out to change ourselves.

My friend Richard Zenith, who I am on my way to see at the moment (lucky me for counting two of the greatest literary translators of the day among my best friends) considers translation a craft. Peter Handke, the Austrian poet, novelist and playwright considers it an art equal to writing in one’s original language. Who knows if they’re not saying something very similar? But I’m sure your ideas will come up in our dinner conversation tonight.

Martin