After reading the latest book by a noted neo-formalist, I became aware of a few disturbing things. First, if he had taken all the good lines out of all the poems in the book, he might have ended up with one good poem. The second observation is related. While all the work in the volume is certainly well crafted and fairly well thought out (though this writer has a few pet words that show up in almost all his poems like Alfred Hitchcock cameos–“stone” being the most obvious, there being no pebbles or rocks in his poetic universe), most of the poems commit what is perhaps the most serious sin of contemporary poetry. That is to say, they are sort of boring.
Here are a few examples of what I mean:
This is a prayer to unbelief,
to candles guttering and darkness undivided,
to incense drifting into emptiness.
It is the smile of a stone Madonna.
Nicely played: some good interaction between the imagery of the candle failing as the faith does, the emptiness the sacramental incense drifts into. It’s just not terribly engaging. The first line of our sample shows promise: what could a “prayer to unbelief” be like? But that’s not followed up as such; it’s a meta comment on the poem’s imagery. Fair enough. But its mysteriousness and the troubled nature of such a declaration are followed up by some pretty hackneyed language: the “guttering candles,” the end-stopped “emptiness,” the “darkness undivided,” while cogent, dissipate the haunted agnosticism implied by the first line with cliché. And then there’s that “stone,” and the “smile.” The poem couldn’t take the risk of using “simile” instead. And the Madonnas I have seen have only been smiling in pieta arrangements, not exactly jibing with a
paean to disbelief. The poet can’t seem to decide whether he wants the ideas to work with his imagery or against it. He could do consciously do both, but does neither.
The “edgier” diction–the “darkness” and “emptiness” in particular–, while working with the ideas present, could have dropped right out of the rantings of any talented 14 year old who has listened to one too many Black Sabbath albums. We can’t necessarily fault our poet for this; I’ve listened to some Black Sabbath myself. But the use of such things at end-stops just draws attention to it. For a much better formalist treatment of the same ideas, try Frost’s “Birches.”
A page earlier, our man decides, for reasons beyond me, to tackle surrealism. This is an unlikely choice for a neo-formalist, and we see immediately why. Instead of doing the ballsy thing and try his hand at a poem that is surrealism, in the way that, say, a Russell Edson or a Charles Simic might do, we get a fairly staid poem about surrealists:
“Poetry must lead somewhere,” declared Breton.
He carried a rose inside his coat each day
to give to a beautiful stranger–“Better to die of love
than to love without regret,” and those who loved him
soon learned to regret.
I’m not sure this is poetry so much as reportage, not that I would have minded reportage so much as long as it was also poetry. One hopes that a poem will work aesthetically with or against its subject matter, or perhaps both. This poem’s aesthetic stance appears to be entirely neutral to its subject, leading me to think that it might as well be prose. With a subject that itself took such risks, this poem takes none at all, and the effect is to make an otherwise fascinating subject seem somewhat dull; the lives of the surrealists come off as annoying at best. No, it would not make me want to learn any more about them or their work. Perhaps that is our poet’s point: he wishes to deflate the surrealists, not memorialize nor even comment on them. Maybe he doesn’t really care. But if that is so, why write about them at all? Obviously, he must care somewhat, despite his poem, as he insists in his notes at the end of the book (not that these poems especially need notes) that all the things he writes about the surrealists are true. Blimey! I thought for sure he had been lying!
Actually, I hadn’t even suspected he would lie until I got to the notes that told me he wasn’t.
Not that it matters: it’s a poem, not a history. Who cares if it’s factual or not if the poem is written in such a way as to get at some truth? At best, the poet’s lack of faith in his readers’ sophistication is somewhat insulting. At worst, it makes us question his.
Throughout, our poet is afflicted with a certain timidity, all too common these days. It’s as if he is afraid of the very words themselves, that if they prove too spicy or exotic they’ll give us all heartburn:
She is moonlight, sovereign and detached.
He is a shadow flattened on the pavement,
the one whom locks and windows keep away.
A choice could have been made to use “shade” instead of the more modern but more flat
“shadow,” the former having many multiples of meaning and implications and the spectre of death to boot. Likening the woman to moonlight is sweetly romantic, but the old standard “Blue Moon” does it as well and sexier too. Ending on “detachment” is most telling, as that seems to sum up our poet’s whole program. The reverence he wishes to evoke is undercut by forms and diction that imply that the poet cares quite a bit less about his subject than we readers are supposed to.
I pick this particular poet because he is lauded as among the best the neo-formalist movement has to offer. He is famous for a book defending accessible, formalist works as being the way poetry can again “matter” (though I question that it ever did except for a small percentage of literati anyway). His work represents a point of view that a look at many respectable literary journals will back up: contemporary poetry is being written from a position of debilitating fear. We so revere the past, so worship the language, that we’re hidebound. We are doomed to repeat all the old forms and tropes, to tell and retell the same myths, to rehash without question a few bits of language deemed “poetical” by tradition and editorial taste. Contemporary poets are often so afraid of their basic medium, words, that they opt for the least meaningful, least interesting, least
confrontational verbiage possible. The first, unspoken, maxim of many creative writing workshops in this nation is “Take out all those words.”
It’s no wonder nobody reads poetry anymore. Duke Nuke’m is quite a bit more stimulating than the lace doilies that pretty up so many of our journals of fine writing.
To be fair, there are quite a few very good and innovative poets working today, but they are the exception. They tend to be established and from an era in which experimentation was less frowned upon, when one could admit to admiring the Beats in mixed company. But for a younger poet working today, it is often difficult to get recognition or even publication if one works more than two standard deviations from the mean.
In light of all this, I suggest the following rules for writing poetry:
1. Poetry is an art form that explores the aesthetic qualities of language: syntactical, semantic, sonic, phonic, visual. Because of this,
2. Poetry is both an aesthetic and an intellectual exercise. Verse that says nothing but does not also declare nothing is not art but mere craft, and therefore not poetry but simply pretty words.
3. Poetry need not challenge, but it should provoke; if it does not provoke, it should at least inspire.
4. Poetry should understand its traditions, incorporate them, accommodate them, remark upon them, reject or abandon them. It should never be bound by them.
5. Above all, poetry should never, ever, be boring.
First of all, shouldn’t the main character of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code be a professor of semiotics, not “symbology,” whatever that is? And had he been that, would we even be discussing Brown’s novel today?
Indeed, the problem with The Da Vinci Code is not the facts of the case but our failure as a culture to teach one of the basic liberal arts: the ability to tell fact from fiction and to understand the value of fiction as a cultural construction. Fiction means to go beyond the mere facts, to use narrative form to point to larger or less obvious or more difficult truths. Fiction is able to deal with troubling questions more honestly than reportage because it is not limited to what happened, when it happened, and who it happened to; it is not burdened with fairness nor with the laws and customs against slander or libel or character assassination.
By dispensing with a strict adherence to the facts, writers of fiction can speculate about the meaning of the life of, say, Jesus, in a way that religion, recalcitrant with tradition, would never be able to do. Fiction can explore how certain voices have been marginalized and othered and written out of history in a way that history may not be able to fully embrace.
And while we can quibble with the verisimilitude of many of the particulars presented in The Da Vinci Code, we cannot deny that even within our lifetimes the Catholic Church has been dangerously secretive about clergy sex abuse and has harbored the radical Opus Dei sect within its most inner circles. We can’t deny that trusted institutions of all sorts have conspired to hide what they were up to, and that such things have been, arguably, less than legal. We can’t lie to ourselves and say that archeology always agrees with scripture, nor can we dispute the fact that the voices of women, minorities and dissenters have been suppressed for most of Western history–an unacceptable state of affairs by today’s standards.
To think that The Da Vinci Code is really about theology or history is to miss the point. Like all art, fiction is about the here and now. To not recognize that is to lose the sense of art’s basic role, and a culture cannot survive without that functioning system of symbols and signs.
I note that it’s not so common only because we still cling to the notion that the common folk really are imbued with a greater sense of right and wrong, that they are somehow more pure, less apt to be impressed by sophistry and flim-flam. We genuinely believe that rural folk, uneducated folk, farmers and the like are innately more practical, more resourceful, more clever than those made mentally soft and physically flaccid by a whole bunch of “book larnin’.” And some of them certainly are: Thomas Edison was largely self-taught and certainly brilliant, as were Henry Ford and Benjamin Franklin. But while Einstein did poorly in school, he later proved himself through accepted scientific and mathematical means. And Franklin was an autodidact: he didn’t remain uneducated; he simply took his education into his own hands–by reading books, no less. By that
he was a better man, not perfect, perhaps, but sophisticated enough to out-fancy the French at a most sensitive time in Revolutionary history, and he certainly retained a much higher moral sense than the irascible Edison or the bigoted Ford. And for all his technical acumen, Edison would have done well to have taken a course or two in Economics or business, as he succeeded in those realms, when he did, despite his intuitions rather than because of them.
Statistics bear out the idea that the common folk aren’t quite as morally enlightened as our myths would have them: the most fundamentalist, least educated part of the country, the South, also harbors the most executions and the most divorces per capita. They are also the least compassionate, spending less for social programs and producing fewer good high-tech jobs. A few places, Houston and Atlanta come to mind, are exceptions, but they are also large metropolitan areas where ties to the “salt of the earth” type lifestyles we so revere are marginal at best. People go to big cities like these to escape their backwards hometowns, not to recreate the city in the image of them.
Yet we cling to the idea that the poor and ill-educated are wiser than the rest of us like leaky inner-tubes of nostalgia in these choppy seas of post-modernity. The exurban experience that feeds the mega-churches and the Republican junta that now controls things is a weak attempt to live both lives at once. We don’t really want to live the squalor, filth, and social isolation that is the rural lifestyle, but we also don’t want to admit to identifying with the slick sophistication of a New York or a Philadelphia. Instead of buying actual farmhouses next to actual fields that we might then be expected to actually farm, we build in what was a field last week. We can pretend to be rural, commonsense people and drive our pick-up trucks and listen to our George Strait. As compromises go, it’s a bad one, supplying neither the “true” life we claim to want nor the values we claim to live.
Those commonsense Red States are also much more likely to support aggressive war, excise sex and evolution from public education (or to not fund it at all), and to pollute their rivers and air. None of this should be surprising, of course. Common sense tells us that we should get revenge and hate our enemies, even though this flies in the face of the Christianity so popular among our good, country people. Common sense tells us that we can drive all we want and dump all we want in the water and on the ground; since we don’t see the effects directly they must not be real.
The humanities, that study of all that is effete and despised by our commonsense people, also tend to make us humane, more likely to see the value in those who are different, more able to imagine life from another’s perspective. But they require book learning and a sort of sophistication that goes quite beyond the gut reactions of a cornered cat.
Evolution, while in and of itself a fairly simple idea, requires a little more than an “ain’t biblical” approach to critiquing theories of the natural world. It took Darwin 20 years to really come to terms with his idea, and common sense just doesn’t have that kind of time.
And illicit sex, while much practiced by our earthy salts, is, perhaps, its singlemost sensitive subject. Biblical imprecations aside, the guilt of having made bad choices would be enough to make common sense people wary of “givin’ the young ‘uns any ideas.” But, naturally, them young ‘uns are going to have ideas no matter what, and rather than having them molest the family goat, a more sophisticated approach would say that we should inform them of better options. “Birth control” was once called “family planning” by its advocates not simply as a euphemism to placate the uptight but also because it is absolutely crucial for an industrial or post-industrial society to practice. More farm hands would be important if any of us farmed anymore, but even in the rural areas, very few do.
The commonsense state I live in, Kansas, has managed to pollute 90% of its rivers and streams to the point that contact with them poses a threat to health. Most of this is from “non-point source” pollution, aka agricultural runoff. There is no more commonsense a profession than farming, and the most commonsense approach to it is to maximize production per acre. That this spoils the very resources a productive ecosystem relies on to maintain its productivity isn’t factored in since that’s book larnin’ and therefore no longer common sense. The fact that this has created overproduction and depressed commodities prices also doesn’t seem to register with the commonsense farmer to whom more is necessarily more and thus necessarily better. Macroeconomics? Book larnin’.
Ironically, the old common sense, pre-industrial agriculture, called for crop rotation and moving livestock frequently to prevent overgrazing. It called for the recycling of agricultural waste as fertilizer and for producing only as much as your land could sustain. Today we call that “organic,” and it’s largely ridiculed as “tree hugging” and un-American by our pure, wise, unsophisticated folk.
Last, common sense tells us that the leadership of a single man is more stable than the insights of an enlightened populace, that the foreign is hostile, that the queer are evil. It tends to choose fascism and a politics of destruction. That the current occupant of the White House got there by presenting himself as a down-to-earth commonsense person is no irony, and that those commonsense folk who elected him bear the worst of his wars and regressive economic policies provides an uneasy sense of justice. That they have largely failed to learn from their error should be a lesson to us all.
I had a job scaring children for television. Not real kids–tv children. There was a closet and a stolen basketball. “I hope you’ve learned your lesson!” There was Gary Coleman. Upon waking, I could not breathe.
On the Bus / Metroline #714
Outwardly, of course, he was fine: striped chambray shirt, blue blazer, tie, idle chit-chat about the weather. But then, this:
“In the Mothership–that’s where they have a perfect clone of you they’ll use to replace the real you.”