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The Wide Ecstasies of Influence
Jason Guriel’s recent post about acknowledgments, and all the places its comments spun, got me thinking about acknowledgments in a deeper sense. When we read a book of poetry, aren’t we just as alert to the unspoken acknowledgments–the poetic influences that surround a book like a halo, like roots, like an attic—as to those written on the acknowledgments page? Don’t those influences shape our reading, just as much?
I’ve recently seen two movies that were worth seeing: I’ve Loved You So Long and Synechdoche, New York. With the former it wasn’t until the movie was almost over that I realized how much it owed to one of the favorite movies of my adolescence, Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. What a deep, soaring rush of pleasure that realization gave me. It was as if Bergman’s film were alive again, as if it had been pulled into its place in a great, teeming, worm-filled, humming ecosystem, and I was part of the ecosystem too, just by understanding a connection. With Synechdoche, New York (which I’m still watching), it’s been a more conscious process, watching with excitement what seems to be a new tradition forming: it seems to be influenced by many of the movies I’ve enjoyed in the last decade, from Magnolia to I Heart Huckabees to David Mamet’s movies, but to be combining them in a new way, both building on the tradition and extending/transforming it simultaneously. I know that, in thinking about this movie, placing it among influences is going to be an important part of how I finally come to terms with it.
How rare it is to encounter a film, or a book of poetry, that actually forces one to think about its influences. Inevitably, when doing so, we are given the gift not only of the new work of art, but also given the gifts of its influences again. Perhaps, for all our attention to novelty and so-called artistic progress, we haven’t really gone so far from the Augustan age when the mark of a true poet was willingness to apprentice oneself to the themes and modes of the past. On another Harriet thread not long ago, there was a conversation following an article by David Orr about greatness in poetry. I said there and I still believe, with Eliot, that engaging actively with the changing and building of poetic traditions is an essential part of that definition.
So what a far-reaching tragedy it is to fail to recognize any vibrant, important poetic tradition simply because it doesn’t fit with one’s personal tastes, or the tastes of one’s culture, at the moment. If we block out the contributions of Gertrude Stein or Langston Hughes or Alexander Pope or Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale , not only are we losing the possibility of appreciating the work of those poets themselves; we are also blocking ourselves from appreciating the great poems that are engaging, reworking, and changing those traditions, morphing them, perhaps, into poems that might have a great deal to say to us.
2009-04-22
Posted in Group Blog, Uncategorized on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 by Annie Finch.
Comments (7)
Oh, Annie! I was trying so hard to avoid seeing “Synechdoche, New York” but now I will just so I can better appreciate this post. I adore you!
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Anything by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, especially Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and The Marriage of Maria Braun.
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Nice post, Annie.
As for Synechdoche, New York, I didn’t love it, but getting my head around the warehouse’s ‘Russian doll’ premise was good, baffling fun.
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Hooray for your post! Ecstasies are so much nicer than anxieties. One thing I love about being a formalist is being influenced by the forms, which always have a great deal to say to me, ecstatically.
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Dear Annie,
I hope you saw my review of _I’ve Loved You for So Long_ on my blog. http://server4.moody.cx/index.php?id=982
I did place it in a movie context, as one of several movies which can be said to be women’s films, and especially _The Remains of the Day_ and _Sous la Sable_ (Charlotte Rampling), even though these were mostly costume dramas. Really movies set in contemporary day are in costume too.
I didn’t think of Bergman, but yes _Cries and Whispers_ which I’ve seen imitated in costume drama (in a British _Mill on the Floss_ with Emily Watson).
One problem is the movie’s allusions are to tropes and not something literal. Most readers & viewers respond to literal things — this is also why they ignore context for individual poems and texts. I agree with all that you say about tradition, and would add it’s often narrowing when readers do come up with a more obvious literal context: the autobiography (or worse, a biography they’ve read, taken too literally).
There’s even a kind of conspiracy (that’s what it feels like and is the effect) of refusing to recognize a tradition. A number of the critics of poetry in _NYRB_ simply ignore any idea of a woman’s canon, and Vendler is on record laughing at Margaret Homans’s book.
For movies I feel they are not respected enough still. An enormous audience goes and so commercial people have profits invested in keeping them comfortable and saying this is just entertainment. So the traditions and subgenres of movies are only discussed in film studies, often too academic in language and not widely disseminated — the Net is helping here though.
As to _Synecdoche, New York_ both I and my daughter were so upset that we left about 3/4s of the way through. The continual humiliations of this man reminded me of an old German film I once saw in the Thalia and had to leave there too. Or Polanski’s _Repulsion_, which so distressed me it took a couple of hours to get over it. Polanski seemed to me much truer to the traumatic experience _Synecdoche_ was trying to convey and more authentic. There was something contrived in _Synecdoche_.
Ellen
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Good article. I especially agree with the last paragraph, last sentence. As you say earlier, it goes to the essence of the Eliot essay on tradition and talent.
Thinking associatively here I am remembering what Joyce wrote towards the end of his Portrait novel. Speaking of Yeats, and paraphrasing here, he said when WBY sees beauty she is always in the past. Joyce then said, ‘Not me. The beauty I see is not yet born.’ On the other hand the crazy Irishman was so steeped in the classics, and in ancient Irish lit., the stuff was in his DNA. No escaping that.
Terreson
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“So what a far-reaching tragedy it is to fail to recognize any vibrant, important poetic tradition simply because it doesn’t fit with one’s personal tastes, or the tastes of one’s culture, at the moment.”
We are in a strange, super-polarized, walling-ourselves-in-with-labels zeitgeist on many levels.
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