baby boomers sons and daughters from america middle class can go [expletive] themselves…”

-poet i was talking with yesterday

but camille,
oh lord and that Neruda quote was… ugh… the levertov quote and the bidart quote too…

ad thomas brady,
oh man… are you (and every e-poet alive) still criticizing the concept of “voice?” aww… is that still a debate nowadays?

take care,

Loki, Hannuman, Wizard of Oz!

Because of course the devil is always in the wording, and the moment we get too intimate with any word, Evil, let’s say, Democracy or Freedom, we use it to bomb the living daylights out of people who’ve never had a chance. How pathetic!

Like your Poetry is Taste post just above—do you even remember, dear Pinnochio/Umberto Eco? “Poetry is Taste,” you wrote, “nothing more, nothing less… Poetry has nothing to do with these vatic, profound, deep, pompous things that people traditionally assign to it. That’s not poetry, that’s something else…sly guru meaning/significance etc which poetry touches on, sort of by default.”

Wow, blown out are the cobwebs of Meaning once and for all, the true bugbear of our times! Because just look what being too intimate with “me meaning” has done to Anerican poetry, the demolition of not just irony and subtlety but of silence, as if talking the talk were always enough. What-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-love indeed!

So VOICE–how smart you are, dear Tom, in the points you make, but what ludicrous reductios you pull into the act. “The Voice School, as deeply sincere as its practioners sometimes are, traffics in small-minded fraud.”

But hey wait, doesn’t it?

Christopher

Art, in modern poetry, has been replaced by “voice,” which is nothing more than a secret handshake in which the reader appreciates failure.

I say ‘failure,’ because the Voice School, like any other school, still seeks perfection; but the Voice School reasons thusly: ‘the reason this quaint, old-fashioned poem does not please me is because it is artificial; the poem was obsessed with form instead of speaking with the poet’s unfaked voice.

But the reasoning of the Voice School is highly insidious, and kills art, for the old poem does NOT fail because it is artificial and lacks a sincere voice; it fails for the same reason all poetry fails: because of formal weakness.

“Voice” is a screen for a weakness we cannot put our finger on–we say a poem fails because it does not have a sincere “voice,” without even knowing what we mean by “voice.”

Since the desire to fake poetic excellence is ubiquitious, shouldn’t we be on guard against inexact terminology which attempts to validate mediocre poetry?

Shakespeare, Poe, Auden, Eliot–just taking four examples–each produced a myriad of “voices;” some of these voices, according to the reductive reasoning of the Voice School MUST be artificial, insincere, faked. But excellence in art is most often artificial, insincere, faked, and the four authors just cited proves this point with their very existence.

If I write a poem which sounds like ‘myself talking,’ how is this a more sincere ‘voice’ on my part, since poetry is NOT ‘myself talking,’ and further, ‘myself’ and ‘talking’ will ALWAYS be judged by more than just ‘is that REALLY ME talking?’

The Voice School, as deeply sincere as its practioners sometimes are, traffics in small-minded fraud.

As for this question of “voice,” I confess it has never made a connection for me. It is not something I can “see.” Not, at least, in the way I can see what Cocteau means when he strips style down to the shaping and handling, the cultivation, of one’s thoughts.

Terreson

Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares!
Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.
A. A. Milne
Vespers

“I believe fervently that the poet’s first obligation is to his own voice—to find it and use it. And one’s ‘voice’ does not only speak in the often slipshod imprecise vocabulary with which one buys the groceries but with all of the resources of one’s life whatever they may be, no matter whether they are ‘American’ or of another cultures, so long as they are truly one’s own and not faked.”
—Denise Levertov

In my view it wasn’t so much that Denise Levertov felt poetry should be multi-cultural, but that all significant and distinct “voices” inevitably are. For we are all a bundle of foreign impressions going right back to our childhood and on through the door to the womb—even if we’ve never been beyond our state border! Even the least travelled stay-at-home has integrated so much—the culture of a mother, the culture of a father, the culture of a first kindergarden teacher, of a priest, a plumber and a dog.

What I think Denise Levertov is saying here is that although there is multiplicity in all of us, some domestic, some exotic, some focussed, some not, those influences can only contribute to forming a real voice “so long as they are truly one’s own and not faked.” That’s what she’s emphasizing, honesty, integrity, our sense of personal worth—and how peculiar that can be at times too. I know there are plenty of prime influences in my own long life that I cannot integrate into my real voice, like my academic credentials, for a start, major CV items that add not one iota of height to my stature or breadth to me as a poet. And if I wrote in the dialect of my parents, for example, my mother from Boston and Stockbridge, my father from Maine, I would be lying—but if I write out of what they actually gave me, which is complicated to say the least, I fly. Like Paul Laurence Dunbar reluctantly writing dialect poetry when what he meant was the sensitive, refined poetry he wrote in becoming himself.

(I find that photograph you posted of him mesmerizing!)

Yes, that sort of irony in Paul Laurence Dunbar is painful and deep, and has to be factored in when considering any poetry with racial undertones—what is more racial credentials. James Baldwin knew that so well, and so did Langston Hughes—and they both suffered such agonies for it. But what voices!

Yes, and Eneimem can rap too, but Gregory Corso couldn’t (I’m basing that on the lack of voice I heard at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1965—later I think he did better).

What bothers me is that I hear so many voices today I’m asked to believe sound just like you know who—or if not the blurb must be lying!

Christopher

I’d say Merwin is precise in what he’s doing, double meanings, subtle meanings, line breaks,whispers, no punctuation, and all. To have heard him read his poems–is to hear the son of a preacher man, offering what he knows–honoring language, and giving it. Music, double meanings, and all. And often, utilizing a brittle less is more. He’s also written (I don’t have the quote at hand) — that his aim is to make the reader feel that the poem was written effortlessly. I don’t think the particular poem from the NYRB is the (very) finest example–a more personal favorite is “The Vixen,” but so what?Your points written from your paradise, Christopher, are well taken.

And I’d add to the subject here, my favorite quote of late, (a sharpened a knife) : “Beauty is the purgation of superfluities”— Michelangelo Buonarroti

Margo

I’ve never been a big fan of the Line Break School.

Richard Blackmur, the New Critic, who befriended and helped the career of John Berryman, and also helped to turn Berryman into a tragic drunk, at Princeton, also taught Merwin at Princeton.

Berryman, a wretched man whose friends–Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell–were also wretched, were part of that sorry band who venerated the Modernists to a high degree, but had even less learning themselves (Schwartz, who barely knew French, was ridiculed when he published his translation of Rimbaud, etc) and the men they venerated were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Blackmur, and Mark Van Doren–the professor at Columbia, Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (1940) and father of the quiz show fraud Charles Van Doren for the show ‘21,’ who was instrumental in helping the careers of wayward youths, Berryman and Ginsberg. Standing behind the career of Allen Tate, who stood behind the career of Robert Lowell, was Ford Maddox Ford (Tate’s wife was Ford’s secretary and Ford introduced Lowell to his first wife and introduced Lowell to John Crowe Ransom) who worked in Britain’s Bureau for War Propaganda during World War One.

Anyway, Blackmur, Merwin’s teacher, wrote this piece of tripe, which sort of sums up for me the stupidity and arrogance of the Line Break School:

The art of poetry
is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse
by the animating presence in the poetry
of a fresh idiom: language

so twisted & posed in a form
that it not only expresses the matter in hand
but adds to the stock of available reality.

“Language!”

“Reality!”

Gosh!

Thomas

I think you read that poem better than Merwin wrote it!

You’ve made a good point that the quotes we choose likely reflect our own attitudes about the pursuit of poetry. I must admit that I narrowed my list down to 6 with some difficulty, and a different list might reveal an entirely different Camille Dungy, but this list I did choose certainly reveals some things I believe about what poetry can and should do.

I will say that one of the things that strikes me most about the Levertov quote, which has come under scrutiny various times in this thread, is not so much her interest in “the voice” but her openness to the idea that sources for poetry can come from beyond a “homegrown” American context. As you likely know from my previous posts, this is an idea I support.

I’ve had fun reading this stream and seeing what people have to say about the idea of having something to say about poetry. Keep the comments coming!

–Camille