Baudelaire: Scared the hell out of Poetry magazine contributor Daisy Fried
We now come to the prose part of Poetry’s January issue, which includes a series of “Reconsiderations” of well-known poets, called “Antagonisms” in the Poetry Table of Contents—which is a terrific idea, and we think it should be a regular feature.
Some of the Poetry hires go right after their famous counterparts, but others get cold feet, apologizing to the editors: I want to take apart Baudelaire b-b-but I just can’t!
Dylan Thomas is the first titan up, and Michael Robbins fearlessly takes him on .
“Reconsidering Dylan Thomas,” or ”The Child That Sucketh Long” begins with an amusing Michael Robbins observation: phrases from Thomas’ poems sounds like the names of Heavy Metal bands:
They appear to be the names of heavy metal bands: Plague of Fables; Star-Flanked Seed; Serpent Caul; Murder of Eden; Altar of Plagues; Seed-at-Zero; The Grave and My Calm Body; Dark Asylum; Mares of Thrace; Herods Wail; Christbread; Binding Moon; Red Swine. In fact they are phrases culled from Dylan Thomas’s poems — except that I threw two actual metal bands in there. Didn’t notice, did you?
When Robbins indulges in pure fun, as above, he’s enjoyable to read, but we’re afraid we’re going to have to take Robbins to task for his some of his Thomas-bashing.
Robbins faults Thomas for ”disregard[ing] what part of speech a word usually is,” but in Robbins’ example, “I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain, / Let fall the tear of time,” the culprit is metaphoric vagueness, not the word, “fellowed.”
Robbins errs again when he calls the following “sentimental:”
No. Not for Christ’s dazzling bed
Or a nacreous sleep among soft particles and charms
My dear would I change my tears or your iron head.
Thrust, my daughter or son, to escape, there is none, none, none,
Nor when all ponderous heaven’s host of waters breaks.
Robbins follows the quote with: “Who does the guy think he is?”
Modern and post-modern critics, habitually rejecting what has come to be known as Victorian sentiment, are often blind to every modern lapse which plagues contemporary poetry: obscurity, ugliness, and pretentiousness. Robbins is wrong: if there’s a problem with the Thomas passage it’s the failure to depict more accessibly its sentiment. It is Robbins, the critic, who is being sentimental here.
Robbins correctly finds the Hopkins influence: “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief…” and says,
Hopkins sincerely believed the state of his soul was at stake. All that’s at stake for Thomas is whether his self-pity has been gorgeously enough expressed.
Sincerely believed? Now who is being sentimental?
Expression is all—whether we judge Tennyson or Ashbery, and supplying biographical information to imply that one poet “sincerely believes” more than another is, well, sentimental. We are not sure how the desire to “gorgeously express a sentiment” translates into “self-pity,” but worrying about the “state of one’s soul” does not. The confusion Robbins suffers from arises, not because moderns are no longer mawkish, but because they’ve erected an anti-mawkish standard on what they don’t seem to realize is mawkish ground.
“Who does the guy think he is?” Robbins cries, but he should look in the mirror and see how he resembles the old Moderns who looked back at Keats and Shelley and Byron, cried, “Who did these guys think they were?” The response is, “Who do you think the guy has to be?”
Robbbins finishes his essay on Thomas by pointing out some other moderns who fell into what Robbins calls “mannered mush.” But here’s the problem: All poetry worth the name is, in some way, mannered and courts, to a some degree, sentiment. When we are shocked to find, upon careful inspection, that modern poetry rises (or falls) to mannered sentiment, well, we shouldn’t be. The critic needs to tell us how the manner and the sentiment fail—because of course they often do, in every modern poet there is—it is time we stop hiding, in our false modern haughtiness, behind the generalized and slap-dash accusation of “mannered mush.”
Like Hart Crane’s, Thomas’s faults protrude embarrassingly from the wazoo. Crane’s are easier to forgive, since he had vision, and Thomas was myopic. But at his best he has, like Crane, a towering presence of mind, a stranglehold on the language. Perhaps I’d love him more if I hadn’t loved him so much, so early. I’ve made my peace with other early crushes who came to seem so much mannered mush: James Wright, Rilke, Neruda. Rereading Thomas now for this piece, I found myself thawing toward him, as I slowly did toward those others, whom now I love anew, love more clearly. So get you gone, Dylan Thomas, though with blessings on your head.
We give Robbins’ essay C+.
Jason Guriel goes off on E.E. Cummings—who was at Harvard with T.S. Eliot and belonged very much to the Eliot/Pound/Moore/Williams Dial clique—who is an easy target, and Guriel doesn’t miss. The essay’s title, “Sub-Seuss,” bodes its take-no-prisoners approach.
The message Cummings communicates here — and which langpo types and concrete poets continue to internalize — is remarkably unambiguous: words are toy blocks, and poems, child’s play. No one else has made making it new look so easy.
But Cummings’s poems themselves were only superficially “new.” Beneath the tattoo-thin signifiers of edginess — those lowercase i’s, those words run together — flutters the heart of a romantic. (Is there a correlation between typographically arresting poetry and emotional arrestedness?) He fancies himself an individual among masses, finds the church ladies have “furnished souls,” opposes war. He’s far more self-righteous, this romantic, than any soldier or gossip — and far deadlier: he’s a teenager armed with a journal.
Guriel gets the job done. A-
Thank God for Laura Kasischke. She punctures Wallace Stevens with delicacy, modesty, and humor, and it’s a rip-roaring good time because she calls out this overrated, sometimes Sub-Seuss, poet.
I know only too well that it is my own failings as a reader, a thinker, a poet, and a human being that I don’t like the work of Wallace Stevens. I know that there are scholars who have devoted their lives to his work, and done so out of the purest motives. I know that there are poets who, without Stevens’s work to inspire them, would never have taken up the pen themselves. I know that there are students for whom “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” upon first being encountered, cracked open a world of thought and language and helped them to pull themselves out of the gutter of cable television and to worship forever after at the altar of Wallace Stevens. I know that hundreds — thousands! — of far better readers, thinkers, poets, and human beings love the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Spiritually. In all sincerity. And completely.
But, honestly, how can they? I placed a jar in Tennessee…?
“No! Don’t! Please!” someone (perhaps that poor secretary to whom he supposedly dictated the poems every morning) should have said. She should have said, “Wallace, no. Don’t use the word ‘placed.’ It makes you sound so… so … so full of yourself ! As if you think that every time you toss a candy wrapper out the window the landscape rearranges itself around you. The whole idea that someone (you) has put (I mean placed) a jar on a hill and then written a poem about it — that whole idea is so ludicrous and disturbing that it will be discussed for decades in cold rooms with bad lighting. And the music of it! omg! It did not give of bird or bush… You really are joking now, aren’t you? This is like that other line, the one with the concupiscent curds in it? Right? You’re just trying to make the kids in Poetry 101 with hangovers start up with the cold sweats, right?”
But perhaps she never dared to say that. He was a powerful man. He was never told by anyone that a poem with a line that required pronouncing the name “Tehuantepec” repeatedly, followed by a line about the “slopping” sea, was stomach-churning. And no one ever asked him to explain how, exactly, a man and a woman and a blackbird can be one. No one said, “Nuncle, you must reconsider this hoo-hoo-hoo and shoo-shoo-shoo and ric-a-nic. And, of course, ‘cachinnation’ is going to require yet another footnote, you know. Maybe just say ‘loud laughter’?”
Just now I took out the Norton, thinking I must be misremembering these lines. No poet as beloved as Wallace Stevens could have written them. But the first Stevens line my eyes fall upon is “Opusculum paedagogum. / The pears are not viols.” At least I don’t have to worry about those lines getting stuck in my head all day.
Was that “poor secretary” Helen Vendler, by any chance?
Stevens is often viscerally annoying—and any metaphysical apology misses the point. More than that: Stevens, as Kasischke reminds us, is pretentious (or just silly) in sound as well as sense—and it’s natural to get called out this way since we are talking about poetry.
Laura Kasischke, you get an A.
Peter Campion finds the novels and essays of D.H. Lawrence stronger than the poetry, but we think his best poems hold up better than his prose. But I suppose if one slogs through Lawrence’s “Collected,” the preachy pessimisim would probably overwhelm. We feel the best of his poetry will outlast everything else.
Campion finds the “fatalistic and tender” a important feature of Lawrence and British poetry (Larkin, Ted Hughes, Alice Oswald). We suppose he has a point.
We’ll give Campion a solid B.
Daisy Fried is clearly intimidated by Baudelaire, and in a fit of American self-hatred, finally succumbs to his lurid seduction.
After all, he and Poe invented poetic goth. It’s not Baudelaire’s fault his modern-day followers are goofballs. And not their fault I’m a boring middle-aged American.
Objections to sexism in this passage are anachronistic; Baudelaire’s always most revolted by himself. We in America could use more romantic self-disgust. (Frederick Seidel thinks so. Ooga Booga is the Fleurs du Mal of our time.)
Fried earns a B.
Ange Mlinko was given the most difficult task: Elizabeth Bishop, who is virtually untouchable these days. The dialogue format she chooses works pretty well, but the content isn’t terribly interesting. Mlinko finds Bishop chummy, congenial, wishy-washy, and formally rote. Which seems completely wrong. Bishop is actually quite surly in her poems.
We give Mlinko a C.
We now come to the final two January 2013 Poetry essays—by Ilya Kaminsky and Peter Cole; instead of short and sweet “antagonisms, these are lengthy, dreary affairs, tedious, and self-important, the sorts of essays that blot the literary landscape with cool quotes, cool locales, cool names—and rhetoric which serves no other purpose than background to the cool quotes, cool locales, and cool names.
Take Ilya Kaminsky’s “Of Strangeness That Wakes Us” (on Paul Celan).
Cool quotes: W.H. Auden: “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” Theodor Adorno: “It Is Barbaric To Write Poetry After The Holocaust.” Anne Carson: “Celan is a poet who uses language as if he were always translating.” Eavan Boland: “It is the poet’s process that needs to be translated.”Emily Dickinson: “I Felt A Funeral, in my Brain.” Robert Kelly: We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us with its strangeness.” Check.
Cool locales: Czernowitz, Vienna, Paris. Check.
Cool names: Paul Celan, Cesar Vallejo, Walt Whitman, Marina Tsvetaeva, Ovid, Breton, John Berryman. Check.
Kaminsky ponders at the start of his essay, “Is Celan’s work too obscure, as some claim?”
The answer is simple in ratio to the rhetorical labor Kaminsky expends to prove otherwise: Yes, it is too obscure.
If we are honest, and admit obscurity right away, we don’t have to waste our time quoting Emily Dickinson, Eavan Boland, and Robert Kelly. As long as Kaminsky can dance and beat a drum, he drags in another well-known quote to prove the impossible, and it is painful to watch.
Kaminsky quotes Zbigniew Herbert (of course!):
INTERVIEWER: “What is the purpose of poetry?”
HERBERT: “To wake up!”
But how does it wake us up? And it wakes us to what?
Kaminsky gives us the answer (rather gallantly) by quoting from Genesis (a Biblical quotation!) backwards and claims there’s “more poetry” when we read the passage in reverse.
“And there was light let there be God and said waters.”
I suppose it might please an atheist to read “let there be God,” but poetry isn’t meant to please one belief system over another, is it?
Kaminsky can’t seriously be saying any text read backwards will be more poetic, and thus, wake us up?
What Kaminsky does explicitly say is that lyric poetry “wrecks normal language,” but this observation, which is nearly a truism, cannot make obscure poetry less obscure.
In the Genesis example—the crowning jewel of the essay—Kaminsky takes sacred, elevated language (Genesis) and “wrecks” it.
The backwards reading of Genesis, altering the intended meaning, takes authority away from God and gives it back to language. Since humans are limited in their perceptions, the atheist position is how all humans (correctly or incorrectly) experience the universe. So the backward phrase, ”let there be God,” which finds the human-writing (truth) of Genesis, “wakes” us up to the atheist reality within a sacred text.
This is an interesting religious argument, but it has nothing to do with Kaminsky’s defense of Celan’s poetry.
Likewise, distorting or punning on famous words, as Kaminsky does with Genesis, is done all the time in the popular press—would Kaminsky call this “poetry” that “wakes us up?” If a pun gives a ‘haha’ moment, perhaps ‘wrecking’ language can give us an ‘aha’ moment.
This is an interesting linguistic argument, but it has nothing to do with reading Paul Celan.
Kaminsky is not writing an essay, but tip-toeing through the tulips of argumentation, dazzling with quotations; in Kaminsky’s rarefied realm of Zbigniew Herbert quotes, he appears to miss the common sense implications of his own rhetoric.
This is how Kaminsky reads Celan in the opening of his essay:
The deciphering of the text proves the worthiness of the reader.
Some of Celania’s poems are modern psalms; here is one:
Of too much was our talk, of
too little. Of the You
and You-Again, of
how clarity troubles, of
Jewishness, of
your God.Of
that.
On the day of an ascension, the
Minister stood over there, it sent
some gold across the water.Of your God was our talk, I spoke
against him, I
let the heart that I had
hope:
for
his highest, death-rattled, his
quarreling word —Your eye looked on, looked away,
your mouth
spoke its way to the eye, and I heard:
We
don’t know, you know,
we
don’t know, do we?,
what
counts.
— Zurich, the Stork Inn, tr. by Michael Hamburger“Extreme clarity is a mystery,” says Mahmoud Darwish. “Clarity troubles.” Celan, often considered a difficult poet, is in this poem at his clearest.
•
Is Celan’s work too obscure, as some claim? Is it too hermetic? Too difficult? Real poems, Celan wrote, are “making toward something … perhaps toward an addressable Thou.” I would argue that, for any poet writing toward such a subject, regular words and syntax soon become inadequate (Hopkins, anyone?). Celan is an extreme case though, because he also had to contend with the inadequacy of the German language to express the experience of the Jewish poet, post-Holocaust. His is the lyricism of privacy (prayer is private, no matter with how many fellow congregants it is uttered or in how many prayer books it appears), not of hermeticism. In fact, Celan insisted to Michael Hamburger that he was “ganz und gar nicht hermetisch.” Absolutely not hermetic.
Does Kaminsky read Celan’s ”modern psalm” backwards to understand it better?
No.
Is Celan a punster?
No.
Is Celan’s poem clear?
No.
Is Kaminsky able to make Celan’s poem less obscure for us?
No.
Is it at all clear what this “adressable Thou” is?
No.
The subject of Kaminsky’s essay simply doesn’t know itself.
Finally, Kaminsky’s main point is the ”privacy” of the lyric poet—and he ends his essay:
A great poet is not someone who speaks in stadiums to thousands of listeners. A great poet is a very private person. In his or her privacy this poet creates a language in which he or she is able to speak, privately, to many people at the same time.
But this doesn’t make any sense. If one hears a poet’s words in a stadium among thousands of listeners, one is still responding as a private person to those words. “Creating a language to speak, privately, to many people at the same time” could signify a poet speaking in a stadium to thousands. Why not? And so where does this leave Kaminsky’s definition of lyric “privacy?”
We must give Kaminsky’s essay a C, because for all it brings, it is hollow at its center, arguing from scattered quotes rather than from common sense.
Peter Cole has something called, “The Invention of Influence: A Notebook/A Notebook: Seeking higher powers in the Middle East” in which he rambles, endlessly; like Kaminsky, Cole proffers quotation after quotation, never stopping long enough to explore any one issue. It’s the School of Harold Bloom: peeling the onion of reference after reference after reference to find at the center nothing but a tremendous ego who reads a lot. Surely Peter Cole should be interesting—he reads so much!
Cole’s essay is more personal than Kaminsky’s, which makes it ‘warmer,’ but also more helter-skelter; Cole made a much freer space for himself—though you end up wishing he hadn’t. Cole tries to gives us: ‘here’s how I write/here’s how I think/here’s what’s going on,’ but ends up giving us, ’would you look how much I travel/would you look how much I observe/would you look how much I read.’ One cannot tell whether the failure of the essay is from the sort of person Cole is, or whether the failure is from the form the essay happened to take—and it speaks even worse for Cole that we cannot tell. The essay is briefly everywhere and thus, nowhere.
When you read stuff like this from Cole’s essay, one can only think, will you please shut up?
Why did I have such a hard time coming up with an “antagonism” to write about for Poetry? Do the dead bite back? Or is it that I’m by temperament and training now so fastidiously turned against myself that I lean into my antagonisms until they give way at a certain point like a secret door-in-the-wall to enthusiasm? James Merrill, for instance. Or Pope.
It’s a translator’s gift, and curse. A strategy of masking and, I suppose, also of evasion. Not only an ability to inhabit difference, but a desire and need to. As a source of pleasure, and nourishment — even wisdom. What others find in fiction?
Hence, too, the obsession of late with couplets, which I once despised. The desire to compose in rhymed couplets in such a way as to highlight the openness lurking in a certain closure. As organic as a pulse, or respiration.
It’s embarrassing to watch how ‘open and nice’ strive to hide ‘crazy and nasty.’ He’s too nice to give the Poetry editors an “antagonism.” Well, not so much nice, as fastidiously turned against himself. Too bad, Poetry editors. Mr. Cole fastidiously refuses.
Cole once “despised” couplets?? How can one “despise” couplets? Oh, but dear friends, Peter Cole is now obsessed with couplets—in order to highlight openness lurking in a certain closure—and this (of course!) is organic.
Good grief.
Cole gets a C-.
Finally, one lively Letter to the Editor is published, in which Philip Metres takes Clive James to task for “the idea that poems exist only for the page, [which] is lamentably myopic, and part of the predicament of poetry’s marginalization in American culture.”
The lesson here, as we judge Poetry’s prose in their January issue, seems to be: in Letters, antagonism is life and its opposite, death.
