What a thread, what a wonderful celebration and critical re-examination, and how suitable that the longest thread Harriet has ever thrown up should be this one — 254 posts up to the moment I’m writing.

And what a surprising place to end up too — Thomas Brady fantasizing about the job he’d really like! And look at the ingredients of that fantasy, all based on poetry, creative writing, living it, defining it, and having so much fun at its expense! A wonderful satire — imagine what Jonathan Swift could have done with it, or the play Oscar Wilde could have written starring our poetry’s first lady, Jorie Graham? And how she would have revelled in it, and how much everyone would have laughed and loved her all the more for what she had done with such panache and brilliance, just like in an Oscar Wilde play. And how the poetry would have flown on it’s wings too, clearing away the miasma of the profligate, proletarian gasses!

That’s funny, but this thread has had it’s serious moments too, very, and I am sure that in the future historians will come back to it to review the arguments and see how people thought back then. Also about Hayden Carruth, but only indirectly — because the dialogue has been mainly about ourselves, not about him. Indeed, how little actual discussion there has been of his special talents either as a person or a poet. Only two poems were put up, for example, and both of those discussions were aborted. That will be important to see too, as it will be to see the startling performance of Bill Knott and the reverence accorded to him — and I say well-deserved, but then that’s just my opinion..

The historians will know by then that American poetry was in fact moving through a very difficult transition following the post-war explosion of almost universal university education. Creative writing had suddenly appeared on every curriculum throughout the country, and staff had to be found to teach the courses and publishers to keep them supplied with raw material. That will be the context, and this will be an astonishingly rich vein to mine, or mirror to fathom.

Christopher
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British Empire’s East India Co./Opium Trade division’s prime directive: foster discord in other cultures. Imagine if you had a job like this. Spread hedonism and be a hedonist yourself. Travel. Perhaps be a professor at Oxford. Go to cool parties. Be respectable, but slum. Experiment in wild pleasures and pass them along. Be cutting-edge and modern in outlook, while taking a strong stand against industry and progress. Be sympathetic to ancient peoples. Take the latest and grooviest drugs. Marry rich women and have numerous affairs. Wear comfortable clothes and affect insightful intellectuality. Write poems, novels and the occasional essay. Be disciplined, however; as soldier for the Empire always remember your duty. Keep secrets. Find recruits who ‘get it’ with a mere wink. Don’t be found out. Promote incendiary politics on the left, on the right, it doesn’t really matter which. Stir up fires, discord, orgies, and revolutions whenever and wherever you can. If the Chinese don’t like opium, convince them of how wonderful it is. If the Americans don’t like bad poetry, convince them of how modern and important it is. Always have LSD or mushrooms handy. Convince the West to loathe and despise itself. Convince the East to worship its primitive habits. Aldous Huxley and Robert Graves! Go!

Man, I wish I had a job like that.
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A little known aspect of the title is that the name ‘Ernest’ had only recently begun to be spelled ‘Earnest,’ itself an indication of the degree to which the Victorians admired that most absurd of Victorian qualities. It was, after all, the quality that the Marquis of Queensberry most affected.

In fact his son Bosie got the full sexual training he needed to become a prominent member of the British upperclasses at that time at his Public School, Winchester, which I also attended. Although I was there a bit later, the sexual atmosphere, like the plumbing, was I feel sure much the same as in Lord Alfred Douglas’ day. What the boys really learned is that all sex is servile and compromising — which is one of the reasons they became such superb imperial administrators out there in the bush or up in the hills all alone. It wasn’t that they were all gay, far from it. They just all knew that sex was trouble, and you steered clear of it. The stiff upper lip’s not a dick.

Of course it was also the time that the East India Company was doing its utmost to develop its most lucrative market by far, the opium trade — the British Empire was at the time the largest drug cartel the world has ever seen, and it subverted whole cultures!

Oscar Wilde’s brave and eccentric moral stance has to be seen in the context of all that, as does Sasha Baron Cohen’s. That’s why there are so many ambiguities in the latter’s work, which makes me, in any case, feel as angry as hysterical. Wilde ditto.

Christopher
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In “De Profundis” : “Where there is sorrow there is holy ground…Some day people will realize what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do.”

“…the dreadful thing about modernity was that it put tragedy into the raiment of comedy, so that the great realities seemed grotesque or lacking in style.”

”He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind, mechanical forces of society, and who does not recognise dynamic force when he meets it either in a man or a movement.”

“I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. …”

& finally to bring these quotes back, maybe to the conversation of that poem of Carruth’s which we were looking at, the wagon-rider, weary as a Christ:

“To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”

Sleeping in fields would be enough “provided I had love in my heart. The external things in life seem of no importance to me now.”

All told, it may be his “De Profundis” that has the strongest relevance to Carruth’s poem, in this case. And for him, Wilde, making the imaginary into art, was his urge to truth. And, albeit, the agnostic, he compares Christ to a work of art: “Indeed, that is the charm of Christ, when all is said: he is just like a work of art. He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something.”

So, yes, John, and Thomas, a moralist, in a true-ist sense. And no mere wit.

And as for beauty: “Forgive your enemies,’ it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one’s own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than hate.”

Again, sufficient unto the day.

margo
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Every moment in “The Importance of Being Earnest” is moral, and exposes layer after layer of social hypocrisy. “The Importance of Being Hypocrite” could equally well have been the title if the name had existed–and which is, of course, the whole joke about earnest.

I haven’t seen “Bruno” yet, but that’s more of the same. Isn’t it fascinating how Sasha Baron Cohen also gets misunderstood in everything he does? The 21st Century is simply not ready for such intense moral scrutiny. Has anybody seen the Ali G fashion interview on You Tube, for example, the one that ends up with the question, “Do you think consistency is important?”

That’s a most wonderful moral moment.
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“To me, poetry and goodness are almost synonymous. They go together . . . To be a good poet, you have to have a vision at some point.” — Hayden Carruth
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I thought the passage in question was aesthetic, not moral.
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Is that bit about the ‘historical sense’ an exercise in ‘moralizing?’ Do you really think so?

Thomas
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John, you call Wilde a moralist, and I agree with you up to a point. One cannot write of society without involving oneself in moral issues.

We weep at a play, however, from sentiment, not morality. Sentiment manipulates moral precepts, but is not moral in itself.

One could define sentiment as that which presents morality in an unfair light.

Thus, authors without morals can be sentimental.

Thomas
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Here’s a bit of moralizing, in the voice of Gilbert, from Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” -

We are sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into song. The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its steep scarped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Our historical sense is at fault.
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We had a party once where we read aloud “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” one of his romantic comedies, and by the end, people were in tears.

He may have invented a rarely-seen but powerful archetype: The-compassionate-person-as-worrier. My favorite representation of this archetype might be Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolfman in “Abbott and Costello Meet the Frankenstein Monster.” Chaney *knows* he’s the Wolfman, he *knows* he’s bad, and so, face furrowed with worry, he manhandles Costello and makes him promise not to open his hotel room door on the night of the full moon. He gets out, of course, but . . . well, I won’t give the story away any more than I have.
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Tragedy? I guess it would depend on who your mother is.

Oscar Wilde ignored morality until it killed him. Why does Wilde want Plato and Christ put ‘into the sphere of art?’ Plato and Christ have more than enough art in themselves.

Wittiness is not truth, but truth purified; Wilde’s wit is like Poe’s poetry, popular, deft, pure, but surely Wilde knew morality colors everything human, even art, even wit.

Wilde’s wit ignored morality, but he couldn’t.

Thomas
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It’s believed we owe something to our parents & forebears.

A good Oscar Wilde sentence: “I remember saying once to Andre Gide, as we sat together in some Paris _cafe_, that while meta-physics had but little real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its complete fulfillment.”

Then, also Wilde: “Every woman becomes her mother. That is her tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”

I find more in these.

margo
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Here we go. I have not changed one word of the Emerson passage.

It doesn’t get any better than this.

1. EMERSON AS WALT WHITMAN

What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions,
if I live wholly from within?

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.

Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this;

the only right is what is after my constitution,
the only wrong what is against it.

A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition,

as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he.

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names,

to large societies and dead institutions.

Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right.

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass?

I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.

I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.

I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.

–Wald O. Whitman

2. EMERSON AS ALLEN GINSBERG

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members!

Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater!

The virtue in most request is conformity!

Self-reliance is its aversion!

It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs!

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist!

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind!

–Ralphy Ginsberg

3. EMERSON AS EZRA POUND

If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.’ Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

–Emerz Pound

All excerpts are from ‘Self Reliance’ by R.W. Emerson

Whitman IS Emerson, and so IS Pound, and so IS Ginsberg. This does not necessarily reflect well on any of these men, but Emerson, it should be noted, did come first…

Thomas
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You might it up with Mr Whitman if you choose. I’ve noticed that you have certain agendas. But then, so did he, and the line I quoted seemed apt to the discussion, if not necessarily to your own ongoing fascination.

“23
Endless unfolding of words of ages!
And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.

A word of the faith that never balks,
Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time
absolutely.

It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,
That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.
….”

etcetera.

margo
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I will give you positive science and exact demonstration.

I’ll bet that I can take a single passage from Emerson, and give you Whitman, Pound, and Ginsberg.

Not a parody of them, but them.

Do you think I can do it?

What will you wager?

Thomas
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Poet! Shy, stuttering, singer–
In the random is your significance sought–
Your image teaches only what
The moral cynic taught,
Oh! Massive metaphor!
I cannot feel your meaning anymore,
Or see your meaning’s thought.

Is your sympathy symbolized
By this leaf of grass—
Or should I see you as you are–
A prating ass?
Remember what the philosopher
Socrates, the wise one, said?
A thrice-removed truth
Is festering in your head.
Lose your inhibition,
Climb the globe’s stage,
Sing of times which crush youth
And kill old age.
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I insulted the gods of the Dislikes themselves.

But I did it for you, Gary.
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The enormous balance between the one long vowel of SO and the many scurrying vowelettes of IRRETRIEVABLE, summing up a huge moral weight.
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I thought I was untying knots.

I promise not to google…I think it’s Whitman, (or failing that, Hart Crane) who got his style from Emerson, who derived his from Seneca. I would call the style moral impressionism: the poet/philosopher loads the page with sights and sounds which may, or may not, coalesce around some moral dimension afflicting or ennobling the addressee. This type of writing becomes overly metaphoric at once, since by implication every bit of information, every image presented, every tuft of grass described, is expected to ‘mean’ what the author says. It gives many of us fits, but it will tend to impress a lower order of mind.

As Seneca says, “What is required, you see, of any man is that he should be of use to other men—if possible, to many; failing that, to a few; failing that, to those nearest him; failing that, to himself.”

Who can argue with this? Who can argue with Emerson? Or Whitman? Or petals on a wet, black bough?

One can only be ‘swept away,’ as they say in the car commercials.

Thomas
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Sadly, I didn’t write this poem (this closing fragment of a section of a poem). I wish I had. Do you know who did?

It really shouldn’t be a trick question. You can google it and pretend you knew all along. It’s far less obscure than Andrew Marvell drunk on a packet-boat. No poem was ever written thus…

These so, these irretrievable.
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Christopher,

‘In a Station of the Metro’ and ‘The Red Wheel Barrow’ are both lauded in the textbook ‘Understanding Poetry,’ Brooks & Warren, which greeted the G.I. Bill soldiers who filled the universities following the second world war. Pound and Williams enjoyed notice in Aldington’s fat Viking press anthology of 1941 (Richard Aldington was H.D.’s husband) as well as Conrad Aiken’s Modern Library anthology of 1945 (Aiken was T.S. Eliot’s friend) and Oscar Williams and Louis Untermeyer were hardly necessary.

If you got in a textbook, it used to be that you were long dead, for a lasting fame it is to be taught in school, more so even that a statue by the side of the sea. But minted in school books while still living!

Unfortunately for American poetry, the public accepted the new fame of E.E. Cummings and no doubt thought the metro petals and the wheel barrow with its chickens something wonderful and passing strange, even if it were thought slightly that maybe these little odd poems were a little bit of a joke, (no matter how loftily and sternly recommended by the deep commentary of Brooks & Warren in the school book) and gradually the public grew to regard poetry as just that–an odd, tidy little joke, so that finally ‘the joke’ was turned against the poets themselves and the false fame of Pound and co. had to be payed for (and is still being payed for) in shame and obscurity for the art as a whole.

Poe’s recommendation of originality in metre and stanza was traded in for ‘the image,’ a gross error, since poetry is not recognized in our minds by its image, but by its rhythm; the seduction occured because image appears infinite, while rhythm is rather limited. Image seemed to offer more variety and was pursued by those with a poor understanding of art; no really wide scope is possible in art, the use of ‘stock images’ (herons, etc) is the retro-impulse of art seen playing out unconsciously in poets who cleave to a modern everything-ness. Art is not building so much as it is a negating–what we reject is always as important as what we put in, perhaps more so–but poetry was a palace, after all, Tennyson kept the hour and Shakespeare still roamed, singing in its rooms; Western poetry was not built in a day, and yet the Modernist manifesto-ists thought to remake it in a few hours; no wonder they instinctively carried to such an extreme the impulse of brevity and negation, which are the handmaids of the keen and the original.

‘What oft was thought but ne’r so well expressed’ was forgot by the Moderns. They strove for originality, for what had never been thought by anyone at all: a sweaty man on a hay wagon imagining he is christ and thinking of real suffering beyond his mere labor is too unique to be ‘oft thought,’ it is the expansion of the Imagist experiment into a dramatic inconsequence: the frozen image prosaically bursting forth into solipsistic speaker, reveling in sisyphean aches and self-congratulatory contemplations.

Thomas
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I personally like it a lot even though I find: a.) the title awkward and unmusical; b.) the assumptions about Chinese language untenable and, worse, insulting to the Chinese people (Edward Said called it “cognitive imperialism!”); c.) the assumptions about the process of translating Chinese poetry amateur (by the 80s everybody knew!): and d.) the choice of certain words too metaphysical for a poem that isn’t like that anywhere else. On the other hand, if this disjunction is deliberate it’s brilliant, and it would have to be specifically satirical!

What I like about the poem is the way it builds on the Cathay inventions of Ezra Pound, which have had such a profound impact upon all of us, and even upon the much later American translators of Chinese poetry from Arthur Waley to Tony Barnstone–who really do know what they’re doing. It also builds nicely on the whole ‘Oriental’ mystique of the 60s, though the poem is much later and, in my estimation, actually a commentary upon it.

The whole of this tradition is an important aspect of 20th Century American poetry, and by my way of thinking “Of Distress Being Humiliated by the Classical Chinese Poets” is one of the best in all of it. The poem has a certain ironical, almost satirical flavor which I find extremely attractive. It’s actually quite irreverent, you know, and it’s funny!–it knows exactly where it’s at and where we’re at. Yet we take it so seriously!

Christopher
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Pay the ‘dislikes’ no mind.

They mean nothing.

Thomas
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You cannot pile on bits of description in an effort to point to, or reflect, some gritty reality outside the description itself. You’d be adding bits ’til doomsday.

Your description must describe the poem in the poem; in poems, description can only describe itself. The primary experience is the poem; only when the primary experience is the poem can we identify poetry as such.

You cannot proceed thusly: let me keep adding gritty adjectives and naming objects of grit until I have sufficiently amassed a description of the gritty. No poem was ever written thus.

Thomas
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