Ezra Pound and Individuation

My latest realization has to do with Pound's hypostasizing of desire (rather than letting it flow, Deleuze and Guattari style). The poetic image is a freezing of desire, a metamorphosis of an active situation into an image of a beautiful natural object. I use "Alba," "Gentildonna," and even "In a Station of the Metro" to show how erotic situations of possible connection are frozen into images of wet leaves or petals. In other words, these "Imagistic" poems don't operate by laying one image over another; the second image is a consequence (or the result) of the first. The paradigmatic form of this metamorphosis is Ovid's telling of the Apollo and Daphne myth: Apollo, inflamed with desire, chases Daphne, who transforms into a tree. The tree is the unattainable; desire is hypostasized rather than spent.

The desire is repressed and read into the self. In fact, this is how individuation occurs. Freud's notion of the sexual-instincts and the ego-instincts is useful here. What Pound's speakers do not invest in (social) intercourse with others is invested into the self. These poems re-enact the separation from the mother, the individuation process. The mother must become a distinct and separate object (like a leaf or a petal -- still beautiful and desirable) in order for the child to become the subject. Pound's "Ortus" reveals this two-way individuation process: "How have I laboured to bring her soul into separation / To give her a name and her being!" To be distinct, the flows must stop; desire must be hypostasized. The poetic image is the metamorphosis into the tree, leaf, or petal -- but it occasions the poet's own birth. "Ortus" means "birth" or "springing out." The mother is conceived of as a separate being so that the poet can exist: "For you are no part, but a whole, / No portion, but a being."

The tragic part of this formulation is that this lost connection is always mourned. The poems, which represent individuation and hypostasis, are meant to connect with the reading audience. Pound is terribly concerned with the reader's reaction to the poem. The poem is a means toward reintegration, reconnection, (social) intercourse. And yet, they seem bound to fail because the flows required have been extracted, hypostasized in their images. Pound exhorts his poems: "Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions" ("Further Instructions"), or "Ruffle the skirts of prudes, / speak of their knees and ankles" ("Salutation the Second"). Even the suggestively sexual poems like "The Encounter" and "The Garden" are descriptions of possible but unconsummated desire. In the form of always-merely-possible lovers, Pound re-enacts the tragic separation from the mother that simultaneously allows him his subjectivity. The final lines of "Of Jacopo del Sellaio" summarize this drama quite well:

And here's the thing that lasts the whole thing out:
The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.

Ezra Pound and the Transformation of Genital Fluid

Ezra Pound's postcript to his translation of Remy de Gourmont's The Natural Philosophy of Love begins by accepting as a possibility the idea that the brain is "only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve" (295). Instead of merely being a kooky idea, however, this is a kooky idea that fits well with my reading of Pound's poetry, and in particular fits with the Apollo complex I've been developing to characterize Pound's poetic and philosophical perspective.

It's important to note that Pound uses this idea as a springboard for his aesthetic and practical concerns. In particular, he argues that Gourmont's idea "would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images" (295). There is a direct link between male sexual desire and the creative impulse. While this seems to simply play into that tired old differentiation between men and women as "active" and "passive" principles, it is important to recognize the relation of this idea to Pound's notion of the image. It is not simply that "creative thought is an act like fecundation, like the male cast of the human seed" (301); it is also that the "spermatozoic particle" has "a capacity for formal expression: is not thought precisely a form-comparing and a form-combining?" (301).

Pound exerts a certain pressure on the genital fluid to exceed its base beginnings in order to develop into ideas, form-combinings. So my earlier reading of
"Alba" can be developed further by suggesting that the seeming peacefulness of the poem's setting actually represents a dissolution of the self and a passing of the potential energy of the speaker's sperm. Because he is sexually spent, he is also spent of ideas.

Rebel Angels: New Formalism and Blandness

One pretty obvious problem with much New Formalism is the tendency to marry the worst feature of free-verse (i.e. vapid conversationalism) with the precision of formalism. Words empty of sentiment are so much more painful when you realized that someone wasted their time ensuring plodding meter and clunky rhymes. Perhaps it's too easy to peruse the anthology to find its weakest link, but anthologies should be the best of the best. So why does a poem like Tom Disch's "Bookmark" end up in this book. It begins:

Four years ago I started reading Proust.
Although I'm past the halfway point, I still
Have seven hundred pages of reduced
Type left before I reach the end. I will
Slog through. It can't get much more dull that what
Is happening now

Well, I would have to agree with this last point. Very dull indeed. Disch's reflections are not particularly stunning, so the high formalism and the low content mix into a strange and seemingly unintentional bathos. The poem almost parodies itself, but it's especially hard to take in light of the polemical preface that announces for New Formalism special access to "an entire realm of pleasure [that] was being denied to them" (xvi).

Strangely, one of the topics that New Formalists seem intent on exploring in their careful ways is sexuality. I say strangely because the ragged, breathless, and contingent process of free-verse seems more conducive to frank sexuality. (The agony of restrained desire, on the other hand, is more fitting for the strictures of formalism). And yet there it is. Charles Martin's "Satyr, Cunninglinguent: To Herman Melville" begins:

Twining her fingers through
His hair, fingertips drumming,
At last she brings him to
The sweet verge of her coming:

Her passion at its flood
Overwhelms all measure;
On articulation's bud,
Inarticulate with pleasure

About the only thing to appreciate in this poem is the next line: "She flops like a caught fish / Straining to be human." I appreciate it because it is at least an interesting and imaginative figure. For the most part, the poets collected in Rebel Angels avoid metaphor, personification, and symbolism. It's almost as if the labor of cementing everyday English into rhyme and meter is more than enough effort. But to return to Martin's fish...it is also, of course, a rancid simile for two obvious reasons. First, the blunt spondee "caught fish" serves to comically belittle the female orgasm. Just as important, however, it stinks as a simile. In my experience, caught fish struggle to return to the water. They've had enough of human air, thank you very much. It's this surprising lack of care and aesthetic concern that makes many of these poems ring hollow.

Ezra Pound and the Apollo Complex

Ezra Pound's "Heather" makes use of the figure of a familiar, a supernatural spirit in the form of an animal that is linked to a person:

The black panther treads at my side,
And above my fingers
There float the petal-like flames.

The milk-white girls
Unbend from the holly-trees,
And their snow-white leopard
Watches to follow our trace.

The male is represented by black and by flames, suggesting the burning of desire and the hunting of the sexual object. The female is twice described as white and is wary of the hunter.

This is a fairly typical scenario in that it relies on standard sexual roles, but there are a few things about this poem that make it worth discussing. First, it reflects the sort of "Apollo complex" identified in other works by Ezra Pound. I use the phrase Apollo complex to refer to a man's recognition of his own sexuality and the simultaneous recognition that he must control that desire in order to control himself. This tension is a fundamental aspect of male subjectivity. Again recalling the Apollo and Daphne myth, the girls "Unbend from the holly trees," suggesting that the spark of sexual desire is rekindled as the girls transform from tree back to human form.

There is also the suggestion that the girls' familiar, the white leopard, is in some sense the hunter: "And their snow-white leopard / Watches to follow our trace." The leopard follows the panther, and can be read as a sort of snare that catches the men -- just like Daphne, chased by Apollo, turns into a tree, but ends up encircling Apollo's head in the form of a wreath.

The concept of women ensnaring men is also found in Pound's "Portrait d'une Femme," in which women are depicted as a Sargasso Sea waylaying sailors. These are more than just unattractive portraits of women (although they are that); these poems are also condemnations of the drive to pleasure in men. Sex is a dissolution of self (as seen in "Alba"). For Pound, it is better to sublimate desire into forms of control.

Vernon Shetley and Poetic Difficulty

Vernon Shetley argues that poetry must become intellectually and personally challenging again. But part of this challenge is to chart a middle path between the opposite poles of a variety of continua of poetic practice. Or perhaps a better way of saying that is that there's a Golden Mean that exists between the too radical poetic ideals marking the twentieth century.

As one example Shetley discusses the difference between difficulty and directness, which, following Richard Poirier, he represents with T. S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg, respectively. Adding layer after layer of mythical references distances one from the immediacy of real life, while blunt immediacy denies one the aesthetic experience that challenges readers.

Another useful example is the opposition between New Formalists and Language poets. In their extreme forms, the former avoids the inequities of the social status quo by trying to recover past modes, while the latter interrogates so vigorously that it squeezes the life out of things.

Justin Quinn and American Errancy

Justin Quinn's American Errancy begins with some of the same building blocks used in Rob Wilson's book (e.g. the sublime and American imperialism), but for Quinn these coalesce around the notion of errancy or antinomianism. He examines how the work of various poets relates to the direction of American social and political history. So, for example, T. S. Eliot is seen as an expatriate who escapes American waywardness by attempting to reclaim orthodoxy in English culture and religion; A. R. Ammons naturalizes ideology and isolates American life as universal; and Jorie Graham details the small, personal acts of life in order to investigate the lost promise of America.

Rob Wilson and the American Sublime

I'm not sure if Rob Wilson's The American Sublime is a good book, but it's definitely a tiresome one. It's written in that hyper-theoretical style that distances itself from making immediate sense. That isn't to say it doesn't make sense, but the reader who struggles mightily through the dense, jargon-laden, poorly-crafted prose is often not quite sure. And by "the reader," I mean me. And a good example comes quickly; here's the first sentence of the introduction:

"If there is strength in America's size and numbers, there is also a threat posed to the subject of that sublimity: "Hey you! I say to the H-bomb. / Miami Vice says to me" is the way Bob Perelman stages this struggle between the democratic ego and the forces of technology and information that now threaten to magnify, dwarf, and abolish it."

Prose this bad should never have been published. I'm driven crazy by the first use of the word "that." What does "that" refer to? Well, America's "size and numbers." And why does the author so boldly assume the reader is going to agree that America's size and numbers are sublime? It would seem the author's priority, as an academic writer, would be to support such an assumption rather than sneak it in. And to develop a complex argument by both refusing to state it and relying on a poetic snippet to (barely) exemplify it is inefficient and off-putting. All of the parts of the book I read utilized this same frustrating style. There's also a befuddling attempt on Wilson's part to employ the word sublime in some form or another in nearly every sentence.

If value must be found in the opening sentence, it is that it gestures toward Wilson's primary argument (if parsed very carefully). According to Wilson, the American sublime involves one's interaction with a vast landscape of nature and technology that gets internalized, creating a subject implicated in American power and ambition. Through the twentieth century, the form of the sublime changes strategies in its relationship with American power, ending with postmodernism, which challenges "the long-standing American sacralization of force" (10).

I'm honestly not certain what I make of this argument, as it often comes across as tautological. For example, one of Wilson's goals is "to provide a definition of the American sublime as a poetic genre that implicates the lyric ego in the production of America as a site of the sublime" (9). So the sublime produces the sublime? Um, okay.

Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"

I suppose anyone dealing with Ezra Pound and Imagism must respond to "In a Station of the Metro." I'm going to provide what is likely an idiosyncratic reading, but one I believe is made available by the text itself and Pound's critical statements.

Before I attempt a closer reading, I want to take note of a point made by John T. Gage in his brilliant analysis of Imagism, In the Arresting Eye. He argues that many Imagist poems work by simply juxtaposing two scenes without identifying one as the "figure" and the other as the "ground." That is, the poems are made up of comparisons, but are unlike similes or metaphors in that they don't privilege one of the terms and use another simply to clarify it. By simply giving us the two scenes without a way to relate them, the poem introduces ambiguity.

The part I don't understand about Gage's argument is his contention that the function of this device "is to promote a belief in the harmony of words and things" (86). How does that happen? Gage suggests that this interchangeability indicates an underlying order. But I find this ambiguity potentially more upsetting. I disagree with that large collection of scholars, including Herbert Schneidau, who argue that Imagists seek or achieve some sort of objectivity, or even "the object" itself. Pound is very clear that he doesn't present the object. Instead, Pound defines the image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." In short, he presents a complex, not an object. The critic's task is to read the object as a means toward understanding the complex.

***

"In a Station of the Metro"

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

This is admittedly a complex poem. All I can do is try to offer a compelling interpretation, not necessarily the only interpretation. I'm going to start by suggesting that the two scenes have a much closer relationship than is often posited. Most critics suggest that the two descriptions are quite distinct from one another; the poem's meaning is created by the radical juxtaposition of the two statements. But I think they may be part of the same scene. In particular, I'm interested in the conflation of "faces" and "bough" into an image of human trees.

At first glance, this sounds ridiculous, but it gains more credence when one considers how frequently and powerfully Pound uses the myth of Daphne and Apollo in his work (in which, according to Ovid's version, the love-struck Apollo chases the nymph Daphne until her only escape from his lust is her metamorphosis into a tree). Pound's very early poem "The Tree" is explictly about the myth, and "A Girl" retells the transformation from Daphne's point of view. Other similarities can be found throughout his work, for example, from "Heather" ("The milk-white girls / Unbend from the holly-trees") or from "Dance Figure" ("Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark"). These examples provide a context for reading "In a Station of the Metro" in a similar way. The poetic speaker (or poetic "noticer," since there isn't a figure who takes the role of poetic speaker), mentally metamorphoses the faces into petals on a tree branch.

There are a number of tensions comprised in this fused image. It's perhaps a bit vulgar to rely on simple binaries, but here goes. First, there's insubstantial/substantial. An "apparition" a strange sight, but it's also a ghost, something airy or ethereal. This is contrasted by the heavy clinginess of the petals on the wet, black bough. Even the meter of the second line suggests heaviness with its final three stressed syllables.

A second and related binary is mobility/immobility. "Apparition" acts almost like a verb, like "to appear." The faces and the crowd can be imagined as in motion. But the petals and the bough are stationary, unable to move.

These binaries replicate the tension between the drive toward pleasure and the restriction of that drive. The reader understands that people in motion in the first line are made still in the second line; the animate is made inanimate. Like Daphne's metamorphosis, the move from the first line to the second is a restriction of (Apollo's) pleasure.

Of course, the immobility of the transformation is merely (Apollo's) desire made perpetual, not the satisfaction or quelling of desire. In Ovid:

"'Although thou canst not be my bride, thou shalt
be called my chosen tree, and thy green leaves,
O Laurel! shall forever crown my brows,
be wreathed around my quiver and my lyre"

Apollo carries this desire, this frustration of satisfaction, wreathed around his head and "quiver." Pound's poem captures this feeling not just by the substitution of trees for people, but by the stasis of the image. Pound's description of the genesis of this poem is also helpful:

"Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another, and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion" ("Vorticism").

The appearance of the beautiful faces was followed by the recognition that he could not obtain them, and it was only through the poetic image of the wet, black bough that he was able to obtain them. I would suggest that the poem's juxtaposition of images, without elaborating a logical connection between them, leads to the psychological complex about pleasure's unattainability. Like Freud's notion of the dream-work, in which a dream's manifest content is made up of condensations and displacements of the latent dream ideas (or wishes), this poem is an example of the dream-work. It requires not merely rhetorical analysis to make sense of it, but also psychoanalysis.

Postscript: I added the label "Apollo complex" to this post when I came up with the term on October 25, 2009.

Ezra Pound and Coherence

In Canto 116, Ezra Pound admitts to the inevitable outcome of his poetic project:

But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.

Though this seems like a stark admission of failure, he has actually been admitting this failure all along. The poems in Lustra, for example, show the provisional nature of any poetic creation. While he has great faith in his "songs," he also admits that they are naive ("Salutation the Second") or ineffective ("Further Instructions"). Pound's blustery poetic voice and the fierce imperatives addressed to his poems can be countered by the anxiety and tentativeness available to closer readings.

Rather than writing direct poems with pictures of the world, Pound wrote many poems in which the poet addresses the poem. While definitely lacking a "picture," I believe they do present an image (i.e. an emotional tension between two perspectives, which usually has the outcome of endangering an unproblematized perception of the self). In effect, there's a sort of doubling going on in these poems. That is, the poet exists as a maker, but the made objects are spoken to as if they are themselves actors in the world. The poet is the creator god, but his creations bound through the world, interacting with it in various ways. The tension caused by these poems is effected through their ineffectiveness, as in "Further Instructions":

You are very idle, my songs.
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about in the streets,
You loiter at the corners and bus-stops,
You do next to nothing at all.

You do not even express our inner nobilities,
You will come to a very bady end.

And I?
I have gone half cracked,
I have talked to you so much that

I almost see you about me

Insolent little beasts, shameless, devoid of clothing!

Pound recognizes an inevitable failure in poetic speech, but then he addresses his newest poems, speaking of his hopes for them. Poetry, from this perspective, is not just an iterative process, but a never-ending process. Like Lacan's chain of desire, Pound is always moving outward, searching. His songs are versions of the truth, examples of his passions, creations of himself that are always failures, but are the failures necessary for being.

In a way, his most emblematic poem is "Ortus," which means birth or a springing outward. Whether spoken to the poem, the reader, or the poet himself, the final stanza insists on the primacy of speech and artistic labor in bringing forth one's being:

I beseech you enter your life.
I beseech you learn to say "I"
When I question you:
For you are no part, but a whole;
No portion, but a being.

Albert Goldbarth and Spiritual Detritus

Albert Goldbarth is a prosy poet, given to creating small narratives full of vibrant and humorous detail. Rather than employing objects in nature, Goldbarth often includes the peculiar odds and ends of everyday contemporary American life. One of my favorite Goldbarth poems is "Sumerian Votive Figurines," which begins with a contemporary archaeologist's contemplation of the religious significance of ancient figurines and ends with the protagonist's trip past a lawn ornament shop. The descriptions of the ornaments are fantastic:

bulbous-bottomed hausfraus with their bloomers comically skewed,
globe-helmeted deep-sea divers with overspilling treasure chests,
a number of Iwo Jima flag-raisings, artichoke-derriered mermaids
and their trident-bearing paramours, guardian lions, borzois
. . . . . . . .
Okay then, pray for my people, he tells them.

What makes this poem work is the connection between ancient and modern, the recognition of continuity in our spiritual needs. The archaeologist's family troubles, especially, reveal the need to displace our concerns into another (even silly) figure to act as an intercessor between us in our earthly life and the prayers needed to see us through.

Suzanne Juhasz and Object Relations

Utilizing object relations psychoanalytic theory, Juhasz theorizes women's writing and reading as atempts to work through the primary relationship in life: the mother-daughter relationship. Desire, from this perspective, is not an essence of the biological body acting through or agains the world, but rather a result of the baby's subjective interaction with the caregiving mother. Literature, as written and read, enacts something like a psychoanalytic therapeutic session based on transference.

Jorie Graham and the Complication of Subjectivity

It's productive to read Jorie Graham's Swarm after reading Kristeva, for the concept of boundaries is pointedly interrogated in the series of poems with the title "Underneath." "Underneath (13)" suggests that existing explanatory systems fail:

needed explanation

because of the mystic nature of the theory

and our reliance on collective belief

I could not visualize the end

the tools that paved the way broke

While explanation is broken, it is still needed. What we have has been ossified as myths, like Freud's Oedipus complex. The difficulty becomes enacting a challenge without disestablishing the self. Like the abject, Graham's underneath is ejected from the body and forms a horror beside us, a doubling based on rejection. Graham brings us face to face with the form of this abjection:

this is the mother tongue

there is in my mouth a ladder

climb down

presence of the world

impassable gap

pass

I am beside myself

you are inside me as history

We exist Meet me

While the concept of the abject cannot be laid seemlessly over Graham's poem, the concern with surfaces as boundaries that contain the inexpressible hints at the void within the subject created by abjection. What remains after abjection is an ongoing epistemological struggle in which the one is two and the two are one. When Graham says "you are inside me as history," she insists on retaining the memory of the rejected detritus of being; she recognizes the corpse within us that is also the newborn separated from the mother. Existence is a matter of continually meeting the past and future corpse, the terminal ends of life that resist the efforts of the symbolic realm.

Julia Kristeva and the Abject

Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is not an object opposite the ego, but it is that part of the subject rejected by the superego. It is the rejected part of being which exists alongside the subject. Kristeva grounds the abject in the pre-object phase of separation from the mother:

"Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be" (10).

The abject is an instance of the failure of the symbolic to organize experience. The examples of the abject that Kristeva finds in twentieth century writers are related to an uncovering of a breakdown in the symbolic order, a passing away of stable meaning. She points out that Dostoyevsky's abject is found in both murder and suicide; for Proust it is in the proximity of the sounds of sex and death, the inevitability and uncleanliness of sexual intercourse. These are proximities of boundaries; these boundaries replicate the one between the self and other. Kristeva calls it "boundary-subjectivity," and credits twentieth century writers with the disruptions of narrative that reveal the abject. While Kristeva doesn't exactly celebrate the abject, she calls attention to its ability to reveal "the bankruptcy of the fathers" (172).

Harold Bloom and Poetic Influence

Harold Bloom constructs a complicated system of literary history based on poets and their anxieties in relation to their poetic influences. Bloom, employing Freudian concepts, describes a poet's relation to his influences as the struggle between father and son. He breaks down this struggle into six different possible dynamics: swerving, completing, purging, daemonizing, curtailing, and flooding. (Of course he gives suitably arcane names to these processes, which I have a hard time remembering, so I utilize some of his secondary terminology). In all of these processes, the later poet reacts to the power and authority of the earlier poet(s).

I suppose this theory of poetry is useful in keeping the critic focused on literary history rather than approaching a poet with a naive sense of that poet's originality, but I find in Bloom a more interesting underlying argument. Foundational to the primary notion of the oedipal struggle is the argument that poetry "takes as its obsessive theme the power of the mind over the universe of death" (34). He values the poet's struggle not just against his poetic forebears, but also the struggle for individuation, the attempt to establish the subject apart from nature's laws. So, for example, he praises William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" because it "awakens into failure, and into the creative mind's protest against time's tyranny" (9). I find this a persuasive argument not just because it's emotional implications can be discovered in so many poetic texts, but because it characterizes the process of individuation that compels a tentative and endangered subjectivity that remains open to the anxieties Bloom describes.

Linda Hutcheon and Postmodernism

Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism argues that postmodernism is a contradictory, historical, and political set of aesthetic practices. She attempts to carve out a middle path through the wildly disparate versions of postmodernism and its implications. Postmodernism is neither the revolutionary dissolution of metanarrative truths, nor is it a complicitous conservativism that serves consumer capitalism. It's primary feature, according to Hutcheon, is its ability to both establish and problematize truth. Postmodern works challenge the prevailing order while recognizing their own historical development from that order. So, for example, postmodernism's tendency to complicate the subject, or in fact dissolve the subject, never fully succeeds because the attempt dissolution requires an understanding of its cultural foundations. But these very foundations give rise to the problematized subject. Postmodern cultural texts, such as the historiographic metafiction upon which Hutcheon focuses, are always involved in what they contest. The primary tone of this involvement is ironic or parodic. If Hutcheon's "poetics" could be distilled into a single feature, it would be postmodernism's parodic treatment of a past from which it cannot escape but which it is determined to challenge.

Helen Vendler and Aesthetic Criticism

Helen Vendler advocates "aesthetic criticism," which she suggests is not primarily about determining meaning or declaring cultural value, but is rather about describing the artistic workings of a text. In other words, criticism should not just describe "what happens," but should also uncover "the music of what happens."

There's something immediately appealing about this bold argument made at a time when Theory was so insistent no such thing was truly possible, much less desirable. Vendler's is a call to get back to the text as a work of art and not just a puzzle or a political statement.

Unfortunately, this perspective is flawed. Yes, it is important to agree that literary texts are works of art; and, yes, the critic's task is largely comprised of exploring the operations of aesthetics; but the crucial and meaningful step in criticism is the contextualization of aesthetic principles in the cultural forces which give rise to aesthetics in the first place.

The biggest problem with Vendler's approach is that her social views determine her aesthetics, rather than the other way around. A good example occurs in her analysis of Adrienne Rich's two uses of the constellation Orion. Vendler approves of an earlier Rich poem ("Orion" from 1969) because it is "unsettled," but dislikes the later poem because it has "become more rash and violent" (383). And yet, looking at the poems, one sees that they both use Orion in a rather figurative way, once as a protector and once as a destroyer. I don't see that either view has any more or less aesthetic value. To decide which poem is more insightful, interesting, or powerful becomes a process of verifying its truth claims. Vendler has clearly done this (and declares for the former poem), but she does not elucidate the verification process, how the poem's art has led to the insight. In fact, she conceals her decision-making process under the guise of aesthetics. Committed writing become unartful, even if it is figurative and compelling, like the poem Vendler maligns:

Orion plunges like a drunken hunter
over the Mohawk Trail a parallelogram
slashed with two cuts of steel

A night so clear that every constellation
stands out from an undifferentiated cloud
of stars, a kind of aura

All the figures up there look violent to me
as a pogrom on Christmas Eve in some old country

The Confessions of Sylvia Plath

The temptation to jump neck-deep into Sylvia Plath's biography is strong, primarily because her life was tragic and important, but also because her life appears in her poetry. But it is significant, also, that her poetry did so much more than "confess." In fact, the term "confessionalism" wrongly suggests some kind of straight talk that objectively reveals personal feelings about autobiographical events. Or I should say that the term applies to some less careful poets, but poets like Plath get short-changed by such a label. Her work is carefully crafted, laden with pointed symbolism, and set in a gruesome phantasia of dangers. This transcends mere talk. Take the following, from "Edge":

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

Life is frozen into a cold and mythological approximation of life. The four heavily stressed syllables ("Each dead child coiled") emphasize the critical accoutrements of the perfected (i.e. dead) woman. But they are not just children; they enter they mythical by becoming serpents, suggesting the dangerous result of the promise of the tree of knowledge. Children are the notice of our mortality. As the poem describes, they live in symbiosis with the maternal body, at once a parasite and the petals of a rose. Plath is also a poet who uses nature as a figure for human experience, but not in a straightforward way. The garden stiffens in a process meant to signify death, but we also get the personification of odors that "bleed / From the sweet, deap throats of the night flower."

These are effective lines whether they are drawn back to Plath's biography or not. Their power comes not because they act as documentary, but because they harness our imagination and tempt it to follow the treacherous path, to contemplate death, to experience the full range of human emotion.

Poems about Albas

I find so many of Pound's poems in Lustra vexing because they don't work like "Alba." They don't give us the naturalistic picture that "Alba" and other Imagist poems do. Many of them are the poet's addresses to his poems, or songs. Here's a brief example:

"Ite"
Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young and from the intolerant,
Move among the lovers of perfection alone.
Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light
And take your wounds from it gladly.

The difficulty in approaching these poems lies in the fact that they don't seem like poems; they implore poems to do things, and as such do not work like poems themselves. I've been considering these poems in light of (my conception of) Pound's theory of poetic images. My conception, again, is that the poetic image is a conflation or tension between two things that leads to a productive and meaningful burst of insight.

I would argue that there's an aspect of the image even in "Ite." The surface reading seems pretty straightforward: the poet requires that his songs be held to the highest of standards. But underneath that reading is the understanding that perfection is never possible. There is a tension between moving and standing. The poems are told to "Seek ever" toward the possibility of stasis, the ability to stand in one place. The poet wants the poem to stand "in the hard Sophoclean light," as if that is the great achievement of being, but the poem is inevitably wounded in the glare of that light. As Ruthven points out in "A Guide to Ezra Pound's Personae," Sophocles is invoked to refer to cutting through the dreaminess of the poetry of the 1890s. His essay "A Few Don'ts" encourages poets to eliminate unnecessary words, working toward greater concision. But the poem that seeks this light is ever wounded, suffering continual amputations toward perfection. Being, for the poem, is most fully realized by submitting to the ultimate concision that erases it from being. The tension of this paradox is the image.

Albas

I guess I've made a promise to write about the poetry of Ezra Pound.... Whoever wrote my oral exam paper proposal promised to shed light on "the structure of desire" in Ezra Pound's early poetry and poetic theory. And now I have to do it...and soon.

My most significant problem is that Pound's theory and his practice don't overlap very well. After reading some of the theory ("Vorticism" and "A Retrospect"), I was convinced that Pound was not interested in -- or at least not only interested in -- a poetry of scientific precision and concision. To me it seemed clear that he saw the image as a productive sort of confusion of objects, a conflation of attributes. The tension or energy of these conflations cut through sentimentality, flaccid commentary, and our received ways of knowing.

This seemed fitting when I read H.D.'s "Oread" and the examples in Pound's critical work. Then I read the poetry, mostly from Lustra. Now I'm confused. At times, I run across examples of Pound practicing what he so fervently preached, but not very often. "Alba" is a great manifestation of his principles (as I see them):

As cool as the pale wet leaves

of lily-of-the-valley

She lay beside me in the dawn.

The most immediate contrast here is the simile that links the lover to physical coolness rather than the warmth of an embrace or of lying next to each other. The cognitive difficulty of this simile slowly disrupts our habituated notion of lovers and warmth. We recognize that the lovers lie together at the end of a night together. Warmth is lost; passion has concluded. The surface tension of coolness where we might expect warmth leads us to the underlying concept of this poem: a contrast of beginnings and endings. As an alba (i.e. a poem about the dawn), the poem celebrates the beginning of the day. But at the same time, it mourns the passing of night's passion. If one takes the beginning of day as a poetic figure for the beginning of life, then we live in a post-pleasure, postlapsarian world. This fits with the origin of lily-of-the-valley in Eve's tears after expulsion from Eden.

So far so good, but then there are so many poems in Lustra that simply don't work this way. Since it's getting late, I'll have to pick this up on another night.

Lucille Clifton and (Personal) History

Lucille Clifton often writes at the intersection of personal past and history, attempting to recover what is personal about even large-scale historical events. In particular, she is concerned with speaking for those who have not had a voice in shaping official history, as in "at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989":

among the rocks
at walnut grove
your silence drumming
in my bones,
tell me your names.

She looks beyond the "inventory lists" that enumerate the property belonging to the plantation. Historical documents and historical narratives are windows into lived experience, often figured in terms of the body or its labor. For Clifton, the reading of these documents is not just a means to intellectually understand the past, but to physically hear and feel the past in order to help shape our lives in the present.

Two Alienations: Jean Baudrillard and Georg Lukacs

In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs performs a close reading of Marx's Capital in order to focus on the effects of commodities. Lukacs is primarily interested in how workers are alienated from their labor due to the fetishization of commodities in the capitalist system. Further, the alienation is read back into self-consciousness; the subject understands itself in terms of the commodity form.

Jean Baudrillard argues in The Consumer Society that human society has become a profusion of consumer objects which are part of a signifying system governed by consumption as a metonymical means toward happiness. The logic of consumption, however, tends to the needs of the order of production rather than the needs of human beings -- and does so primarily by inflating the subjective perception of these needs. The subject becomes a collection of desires walking through a shopping center of magical objects.

These analyses are valuable because they reveal the material basis of such concepts as "the self" and "desire." Taking Lukacs and Baudrillard into account forces readers to consider the role that literature plays in social and economic developments. I don't claim to have a well-developed way to do this, but I would suggest that an awareness of these perspectives can add depth and complexity to our interpretations of poetic texts. Let's use a short poem as an example. Here is "The Scour" by A. R. Ammons:

It was so windy
last night the snow
got down nowhere
except against something.

Without the benefit of a social analysis, this becomes what it at first appears for so many critics: a poem about nature. One might actually group the possible readings of this poem into three types. First, the poem can be seen as an attempt to get at "the thing," a sensible object in nature. The natural world operates in peaceful and violent ways.

It's difficult to remain in this rarefied field of interpretations without jumping to the second level, which involves the individual subject in the instantiation of nature. This can happen in two ways. First, the poetic speaker can recount his experience of nature and reflect on the intersection of man and nature as two objects. Second, the object or event in the natural world can explain or refer to some aspect of the poetic speaker's (or poet's) personal history.

It's possible to read the Ammons poem from either of these first two levels, and in fact the poet may have meant for it to suggest possibilities on these levels. However, the poem is just as open to the third level: the social. The process of snow falling on a windy night might be a figure for a social process as much as it may stand in as a figure for a personal revelation. In this case, one's standard understanding of snow descending peacefully is disrupted in order to show that nature has different modes and can enact violence. In other words, instead of a 'natural mode' in nature, there is a set of fluctuating possibilities. Among these possibilities, the poet recognizes the potential for violence.

If the earth is taken as a figure for the subject, this means that there are a variety of processes leading to our definition by the falling snow. That is, the contours of our subjectivity are determined in part by the material relations covering us. Ammons' poem encourages the reader to consider not just the violent scouring of snow and wind, but also its innocuous counter-possibility: the inevitable and more natural-seeming slow covering by falling snowflakes.

Marjorie Perloff and the Other Tradition

Marjorie Perloff explores the non-symbolist mode of poetry in The Poetics of Indeterminacy. She speaks of a tradition that is non-representational, which defamiliarizes our strategies for making things cohere. Like the poetry she treats, however, it seems Perloff does not have an aggressively explanatory metanarrative for this tradition. Instead, she proceeds down an explanatory path for a while, and then, after confronting disruptions and discontinuities from the poetic text, she reverts to the concept of ultimate undecidability. When performing this reversion, she doesn not complain about the text, but uses it as a chance to extol its virtues; defamiliarity is valuable in itself.

I focused especially on her chapter dealing with John Ashbery. In it, Perloff writes that "Dozens of provocative and possible stories suggest themselves" (258). This is true, of course, and Perloff spends some time with some of these stories. But it isn't very long before these stories, with which we've travelled with Perloff, are tossed up into the air and we're told to admire how they create a "precise tonality of feeling" (260). A series of perhapses is given up for a tonality. After pointing out these bland but true observation like "we never come to know the larger story," Perloff quickly transitions away, as if to say 'Let's talk about something else': "Here it is illuminating to compare Ashbery to Beckett" (273). Okay, but what about getting to some conclusion? No: "In this context of absent causality, even familiar things become unfamiliar" (274).

Of course, any great conclusions are forestalled by the poetry to which Perloff insists on responding. Ashbery isn't going to give any conclusions, so why should I fault Perloff for failing to deliver one? Because I'm sick of being told that non-representational texts like Ashbery's (or postmodern texts in general) are about disrupting or defamiliarizing the meaning making process or denying the reader an easy overarching metanarrative. I'd rather read a critic's own story through an Ashbery poem -- even if it isn't (and cannot be) the one and only accurate reading. As long as it's interesting and it makes some commitment.

Deleuze and Guattari

I'll confess up front that I haven't read the whole of Anti-Oedipus, but I don't think Deleuze and Guattari would be upset. After all, my desiring-energy pursued its own schizo course in a series of conjunctive and disjunctive flows through the pages. I found much of interest, but I found much with which to disagree, as well. I was struck by comments like this: "desire produces reality [....] It is not possible to attribute a special form of existence to desire, a mental or psychic reality that is presumably different from the material reality of social production" (30). This gives important reality to desire as a force in the world, rather than relegating it to a realm of psychological phantoms.

I also find myself agreeing with their conception of capitalism as a social form that "deterritorializes" desire. Unlike the social forms that precede it, capitalism requires flows of desire. But Deleuze and Guattari critique capitalism as a reterritorialization, as well. Psychoanalysis participates in this reterritorialization through the construction of individual egos (and superegos) that internalize prior forms of territorialization: "The great territorialities have fallen into ruin, but the structure proceeds with all the subjective and private reterritorializations" (308). Psychoanalysis, through the Oedipus complex, produces subjects based on the concept of lack. It's prohibitions create the desires it prohibits.

But in other ways, I sense a problem with this theorizing. I appreciate that Deleuze and Guattari insist that we must not get caught up in the historical garbage heap of mythical territorialities, but then what do we get caught up in? How do we come to value things? If "we are all handymen: each with his little machines" of desiring-energy, where do we point these machines? These may seem like quaint questions to those who like the idea of a schizo's walk, but too many important ideas get thrown out with the bathwater -- such as the idea of importance itself.

The biggest conceptual problem I have with the text is that Deleuze and Guattari posit a "free" desire when they talk about decoded flows, but what makes it suddenly free? How are its directions and obsessions determined? They write that "the schiz came into existence only by means of a desire without aim or cause" (378), but it's not clear how desire can be without aim or cause. They suggest that desire just is. Perversely, this is the same type of thinking used to argue that whatever is is right.

Charles Altieri and the Challenge to Affected Naturalness

In Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry, Charles Altieri investigates the dominant mode of contemporary American poetry (in the 1980s), which he suggests is made up of poems that affect a sort of naturalness and move toward a moment of visionary closure. (He gives a nod to Jonanthon Holden, who made a similar diagnosis earlier). Altieri argues, however, that the very rhetoric needed to achieve these ends undercuts them. He provides a model of reading that seeks to understand the pressures that lead to such rhetorical strategies rather than getting swept up in the desired effect of the strategies.

In a sense, Altieri asks for a metapoetic reader, one who considers the tensions that give rise to the poet's rhetorical performance. That is, the poem's content does not constitute its meaning; the story of the poem's creation does. The poetic speaker is not natural, but is, rather, the result of a collection of concerns within a dominant rhetorical framework.

This perspective explains why Altieri values John Ashbery's work, which according to Altieri establishes a self of "various desires and [...creates] a mobile field of lyric attachments" (19). But it seems to me that Ashbery is so diffuse regarding the subject that tension dissolves. The reader is left with only the play and not the results of the examination. After one of Ashbery's diffuse performances, the reader (and critic) is left to wonder what has been mobilized. What does the blur of these transitory attachments mean? How does a poem, like "Laughing Gravy" for example, become anything more than a blank?

"Laughing Gravy"
The crisis has just passed.
Uh oh, here it comes again,
looking for someone to blame itself on, you, I...

All these people coming in...
The last time we necked
I noticed this lobe on your ear.
Please, tell me we may begin.

All the wolves in the wolf factory paused
at noon, for a moment of silence.

We cannot attach ourselves to the fate of the crisis because it goes unnamed. The "you" is generalized and is not more perplexing than the wolves, who are not given a relation to the speaker or the unidentified "you." In short, these attachments are too "mobile" to gain purchase on the reader. In a way, many of the discrete statements in Ashbery's work are like philosophical declarations or conclusions to arguments in which we can't participate and which deal with experiences and consequences that aren't provided.

John Ashbery and the Accumulation of Emptinesses

By pure, happy accident, I happened to be reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria" on the same night I was trying to read the poems of John Ashbery. Coleridge argues that the imagination can be conceived of on two levels. The first level is related to perception. Human beings have some capacity to organize sense data as they perceive the world. For Coleridge, perception is a form of creativity. Secondary imagination is what poets utilize in reshaping perceptions into re-creations of the world. According to Coleridge, this secondary imagination "struggles to idealize and to unify." Coleridge distinguishes these two notions of the imagination from the term Fancy, which is used to refer to that faculty of the mind that begins with the material of memory, but is "emancipated from the order of time and space."

I think that many poets probably do operate through the secondary imagination. The form, import, and consequence of this integration are wildly divergent, of course, but the tendency is unity. One can turn to a poet like Ashbery, however, and ask whether he is trying to idealize or unify that which has been perceived. Most would agree that the answer is no, but I'm interested in the nature of this refusal. On the one hand, this could be seen as a typically postmodern complication of epistemology, but Ashbery's poetic concerns suggest otherwise.

He is not as interested in problematizing how we come to know objects as he is in exploring how we come to know emptiness. He reminds us in one of his most characteristic poems, "The Absence of a Noble Presence": "You've got to remember we don't see that much." What we see, however, is less than what we don't. We are surrounded by a vacuity. He rarely mentions specifics, as if they are unattainable or not meaningful in the ways we hope they are. The poem starts with:

If it was treason it was so well handled that it
Became unimaginable. No, it was ambrosia
In the alley under the stars and not this undiagnosable
Turning, a shadow in the plant of all things

That makes us aware of certain moments,
That the end is not far off since it will occur
In the present and this is the present.

The first line repeats the pronoun "it" three times without naming its referent, but the word presumably refers to the "absence" of the title. If this ultimate absence is treacherous, it usually seems okay because the perception of nothingness is "unimaginable." In other words, perception tends to focus on things so the horror of emptiness might be averted. The poetic speaker insists instead that the absence is "ambrosia / In the alley under the stars." But it's too late for the reader: the concept of absence cannot be filled by the epinorthosis that tries to provide a sensation and a location. One must try to perceive absence. Ashbery seems to force the reader back to the first level of imagination: perception...with the added difficulty that the journey of his poems starts with an absence. Here are two recent examples:

"Meaningful Love" begins: "What the bad news was / became apparent too late / for us to do anything good about it." "Lost Footage" begins: "You said, 'Life's a hungry desert,' / or something like that. I couldn't hear."

But "The Absence of a Noble Presence" has a lesson for us: "And since this too is of our everydays / It matters only to the one you are next to." This recalls Whitman's poem "On the Terrible Doubt of Appearances," in which the great ontological and epistemological questions are, if not resolved, at least deflated by the touch of a lover's hand. Though Ashbery does not seem like an objectivist or an intersubjectivist (if there is such a term), his poems do suggest that absence or emptiness are merely states from which perceptions emerge. Another of his well-known poems, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons," ends with the assertion that "The poem is you." And while there are no doubt many levels to this evocative phrase, on the most fundamental level, it suggests that something comes into being from the perception of nothingness.

Galway Kinnell, the Primal, and the Civilized

In "Lastness," the final poem of his sequence "The Book of Nightmares," Galway Kinnell calls a poem a "concert of one / divided among himself, / this earthward gesture / of the sky-diver." In these two metaphors, Kinnell enunciates a profound and carefully wrought idea of poetry. It becomes that harmonizing act that unifies the manifold and activates the condemned. While he accepts the concept of the divided subject, he ultimately recognizes the need for a gesture, the coordination of the body into some attempt at expressing a symbolic meaning. Though condemned to fall and ultimately to die, the skydiver clutches for the earth.

In many ways, these two metaphors exemplify my approach to reading poetry. I try to read the tensions of subjectivity and desire expressed in the poem -- even those poems that at first come off as unified reflections of a confident poetic speaker. In other words, how might the concert be understood as the presentation of divisions among the players? Of what do these divisions consist and how do they arise? And second, how are subjects instantiated by their gestures? That is, how do we become through our actions?

"Lastness" provides its own statement on these questions. The fifth section of the poem recapitulates Kinnell's perspective:

That Bach concert I went to so long ago --
the chandeliered room
of ladies and gentlemen who would never die . . .
the voices go out,
the room becomes hushed,
the violinist
puts the irreversible sorrow of his face
into the opened palm
of the wood, the music begins:

a shower of rosin,
the bow-hairs listening down all their length
to the wail,
the sexual wail
of the back-alleys and blood strings we have lived
still crying,
still singing, from the sliced intestine
of cat.

The section begins with the height of civilization: the Bach concert, and yet it is made possible by the "sexual wail" of the bow across strings made from animal intestines. This is an example of Kinnell's oft-used strategy of mixing the primal and the civilized, suggesting that the latter should not be recognized as the expulsion of the former, but rather a special refinement of it. In fact, the trajectory of this section -- and much of Kinnell's work -- is backwards, stressing the recovery of the primal from within the civilized. While he often takes as his material the wild stuff of nature, he does not jettison civilization; he brings the two together into a tension that marks contemporary life.

More specifically, he continually returns to the question of poetry and expression -- even in his well-known poem "The Bear," which otherwise seems to be a narrative of a hunt, a possession, and a transformation:

the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

In this final moment, the speaker of "The Bear" has not transformed into a bear but rather recognized the importance -- and difficulty -- of speaking the primal.

C. G. Jung and the Unconscious

I put Jung on my reading list because I felt that I would need to confront his concept of archetypes in order to fully consider poetic images. I should have focused on his theoretical works rather than his biography. That being said, I gained some insights about the man behind concepts. In the early part of "Memories, Dreams, Reflections," one is immediately struck by how seriously Jung takes his dreams. Many of his anecdotes are preceded by dreams, and he understands his experiences through his interpretations of these dreams.

It's a bit off-putting at first. But later, he begins explaining his perspectives on the unconscious. He writes that "nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves" (300). He argues that a scientific perspective -- one which only recognizes as real only that which can be proven -- is dangerously myopic, in fact, "the disease of our time" (300). Scientific rationalism may work on the level of the intellect, but the emotions operate on a different level.

Regarding life after death, Jung insists that "we must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence" (301). While many of us might be quick to condemn feelings that are generated by unsubstantiated beliefs, Jung suggests that these assumptions are important because they are experienced as important. Furthermore, Jung isn't content to simply accept these beliefs. He insists that we must dig underneath them, not to debunk them, but to understand them. He doesn't recommend blindly trusting the unconscious; instead we must work to make the unconscious conscious. He summarizes his argument thusly: "As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being" (326).

John Berryman

John Berryman's "Dream Songs" give us much to appreciate with only the small price of a little also to bemoan. The formal regularity of his 18-line poems forces him to be concise. Like a sonnet, each burst of eighteen lines must suggest and explore a single problem, though Berryman usually withholds a resolution. Though he doesn't depart too severely from standard American speech, Berryman's effort to incorporate rhyme and meter encourages productive phrasings. Here's an example from #95:

The surly cop lookt out at me in sleep
insect-like. Guess, who was the insect.
I'd asked him in my robe
& hospital gown in the elevator politely
why someone saw so many police around,
and without speaking he looked.

A meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep
across my nervous system some time ago wrecked.

The phrasing of "some time ago wrecked" preserves the rhyme, but it also emphasizes the damage by condemning it to the end of the line, broken over a full stop.

Thematically, Berryman often focuses on both the desires and the brittleness of the human body. While these interests sometimes manifest themselves in pure adolescence, they have compelling truth value, especially to those who stress the importance of "embodied knowledge." In Berryman, however, the body always seems to be in a state of disintegration. In #140, for example, "Henry is vanishing." Later in the poem "the poor man is coming to pieces joint by joint." This fading occurs in conjunction with anxiety over sexual impotence. In fact, the poems are structured by the same physiological and psychological stresses that mark impotence. This is not to say that the poems themselves are ineffective, merely that their effectiveness lies in the exploration of desire that recognizes its inherent unattainability: "Snowy of her breasts the drifts, I do believe, / although I have not been there" (from #248).

Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead" is a fascinating read because it challenges the lyrical form to bear more narrative and documentary material than usual. In some ways this really succeeds, but in other ways it seems to fail. The more prosaic sections are very flat indeed. Here's a sample from "The Doctors":

-State your education, Doctor, if you will.
Don't be modest about it; just tell about it.

High school Chicago 1899
Univ. of Illinois 1903
M.A. 1905, thesis on respiration
P & S Chicago 1908
2 years' hospital training;

I could go on, but it's painful to type such drudgery. This material has documentary interest (if slightly), but poetry (as we've come to expect) should be more concise, more evocative, more verbally or symbolically layered, and just plain more poetic. Although these are expectations that can be challenged on certain grounds, I wouldn't challenge them if "The Doctors" was used as an example text. More artistry, please.

Thankfully, Rukeyser also has a fine lyric voice, as can be seen in this section of "Juanita Tinsley":

Even after the letters, there is work,
sweaters, the food, the shoes
and afternoon's quick dark

draws on the windowpane
my face, the shadowed hair,
the scattered papers fade.

Internal rhyme, assonance, and even metrical punctuations like the spondee "quick dark" all work together within a moving thematic mood. That "The Doctors" and "Juanita Tinsley" lie next to one another in the same poem is a marvel. I appreciate Rukeyser's social motive in taking on such powerful material to make an important social, cultural, and economic point, but the power of the poem sometimes falls short of the power of the material. Even William Carlos Williams's misguided use of documentary materials in "Paterson" is less unfortunate than Rukeyser's because his at least had the aesthetic value of making the reader wonder what it was doing there. That is, the reader's creative labor in reconciling the sharply juxtaposed material seems to me more valuable than piling on details in a largely unified work.

Delmore Schwartz and Life in the Middle

It's a bit surprising that Delmore Schwartz doesn't appear in either the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry or the Gioia/Mason/Schoerke anthology "Twentieth-Century American Poetry." I understand that his work was uneven and that he often reached for philosophical meaning that he failed to obtain, but there are some real successes, too. I enjoy "A Dream of Winter, Empty, Woolen, Ice-White and Brittle," a meditation on potentiality that sees the present as a fitful motion toward ripeness.

His work often investigates what it is to be in the middle of something, that is, to be between one choice and another, or one perspective and another. I believe he fails to achieve his aims in much of his work because he forgets that the key concept of this investigation is "being." He interrogates the concept of middle-ness, but leaves being behind. He pursues an abstraction rather than an instantiation. This, from "The First Morning of the Second World," is Schwartz at his worst:

Suddenly and certainly I saw how surely the measure and treasure of pleasure is being as being with, belonging
Figured and touched in the experience of voices in chorus.
Withness is ripeness,
Ripeness is withness,
To be is to be in love,
Love is the fullness of being.

This flow of abstractions misses any sense of living in love. Some of this could be accepted if we had been given an intersection of lives -- even the sight of someone else's toothbrush in your bathroom might help convince me that withness is ripeness.

But what I like about Schwartz is valuable, too. He has fun with language. He displays a tumbling, word-over-word ebullience that recalls Gerard Manley Hopkins. For example, here's a dashing burst of metrical bounce, alliteration, and assonance from "The Deceptive Present, The Phoenix Year":

Who could believe then
In the green, glittering vividness of full-leafed summer?
Who will be able to believe, when winter again begins
After the autumn burns down again, and the day is ashen,
And all returns to winter and winter's ashes,
Wet, white, ice, wooden, dulled and dead, brittle and frozen

And there are occasions when he remembers how compelling details can be. My favorite poem of his is "During December's Death," in which the world of tragedy and dread, "in which the only light / Was the dread and white of the terrified animals' eyes," is balanced by a particularity like: "I thought I heard the fresh scraping of the flying steel of boys on roller skates / Rollicking over the asphalt in 1926." To be caught in the dialectic of hope and despair is so much more moving when one does it rather than considers it.

William Empson, New Criticism, and Dream-Worlds

There's no doubt much to say about William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, but I want to hone in specifically on what he has to say about the English Romantic poets because I think it highlights a problem about criticism that I will have to solve if I ever hope to make sense of contemporary poetry. Before even getting into his description and exemplification of the first type of ambiguity, Empson takes the time to viciously (though humorously) dismiss the English Romantics. His primary complaint seems to be that these poets mine their childhood for private experiences and perspectives upon which they reflect as adults:

"Almost all of them, therefore, exploited a sort of tap-root into the world of their childhood, where they were able to conceive things poetically, and whatever they might be writing about they would suck up from this limited and perverted world an unvarying sap which was their poetical inspiration."

The psychological material of childhood is not, for Empson, a suitable subject for poetry. And if the above quote isn't slighting enough, his specific charge against Wordsworth turns blistering: "Wordsworth frankly had no inspiration other than his use, when a boy, of the mountains as a totem or father-substitute." Ouch. Snarky. But I don't believe it's as damning as it seems. Empson unknowingly confesses his shortcoming when he continues his sharp criticism:

"One might expect, then, that [these poets] would not need to use ambiguities of the kind I shall consider to give vivacity to their language, or even ambiguities with which the student of language, as such is concerned; that the mode of approach to them should be psychological rather than grammatical" (emphasis added).

In essence, he admits that it is his critical perspective that fails to respond to the poem. He reveals that his contempt is based on the inapplicability of his tools for the job at hand.

But I think this is an unfortunate admission. I don't think that psychology and grammar necessarily oppose one another. The poetry of quality that uses the "tap-root" he describes still creates the ambiguities and ironies that New Critics love to uncover, but they happen at a different level.

I could probably only prove this point by mobilizing a full interpretation of the type I'm describing, but I don't have that kind of time. Instead, I'll suggest that a poem like Wordsworth's Prelude is not a direct route to the past; it is a speech act like an analysand's, full of its own grammar of desire and restriction.

Lorine Niedecker and the Condensery

The question one must confront in reading Lorine Niedecker is "What is produced through reduction?" For the reader, I think this often depends on the the extent to which a thread can be woven through the material that remains. The thread is obvious in sections like this from "Bombings":

I wrote another,
longer, starting

Homage
of love for, to
the young

but the pain's too much now,
for me to copy.

The reader is given a poetic speaker who speaks about the inability to speak at length. Though syntax is chopped up, the form mirrors the content and it can all be attributed to a unified speaker. In fact, the theme of the cost of poetry appears throughout her work. Here's another example from "Thure Kumlien": "To print poems / is as costly / as to drill for pure / water."

Like short ragged breaths, these concisions are a disrupted attempt to communicate the important bits of what the speaker believes important. What is left is overloaded with emotion, but strangely insufficient for communication. Or it might be more appropriate to say that communication itself has changed from a fully realized grammar to a series of staccato bursts, like a Morse code that must be reconstructed.

Elizabeth Bishop and the Tragedy of Desire

There's a tendency in vulgar Freudian criticism to transform images of verticality into dramas of male sexual desire, and I usually shun such reductive readings, but I'm having trouble avoiding it with Elizabeth Bishop's "The Man-Moth." The narrative involves a sub-surface creature who periodically emerges from the depths, strives to a great height, and attempts to pierce the moon (which he believes "is a small hole at the top of the sky"); his only possession is one liquid tear. Without excessive effort, this narrative can be seen to resemble the sexual act.

If one accepts the poem as a sort of metaphor for sexual energy and desire, the first task is to probe the aspects that most challenge this reading to determine if they represent some new and interesting recognition about desire. The most intriguing intersection of the perplexing and the obvious is the idea that the Man-Moth fears rather than desires the moon; that is, the moon is simultaneously marked by both fear and desire. That the moon is taken as a hole in the sky "proves" that the sky is "quite useless for protection." In this sense, the poem emphasizes the fearful desire to prove one's own vulnerability.

But this is a great repressed desire which most of us do not recognize: "Man, standing below him, has no such illusions." Human beings overtly desire invincibility, and the ego is comprised of that desire. The Man-Moth, by contrast, appears as a sort of tragic outcast, but, like Oedipus, he is a figure that transgresses a fundamental restriction. In this case, his desire to prove his vulnerability reverses the gains provided by the individuation process: self-consciousness, autonomy, and power. The Man-Moth's desire represents the impossible reunion with the mother, a reintegration with the universe, the extinction of self.

But he is unlike Oedipus in that he ultimately fails to accomplish his attempted transgression. Bishop's poem dramatizes the Man-Moth's failure to escape individuation, suggesting that one of our great repressed desires is a drive to erase the self that cannot be satisfied. Freud's concept of the death drive seems particularly useful here. The Man-Moth's residence deep underground suggests that there may be an aspect of our psychological makeup that continually attempts to undo that which protects us as discrete beings.

e. e. cummings

The rap against e. e. cummings that he was formally inventive but not philosophically challenging is, I think, a fair one. His typographical techniques and formal innovations are entertaining, but not often insightful. He has a way of expressing positions we've always felt, but is less able to draw out new feelings or sufficiently complicate our positions. Here's a poem I've always enjoyed:

IN)
all those who got
athlete's mouth jumping
on&off bandwaggons
(MEMORIAM

The substitution of mouth for foot is nice, especially because it plays on the phrase "putting one's foot in one's mouth," but it simply reaffirms a commonplace position. There doesn't seem to be enough at stake to make this a poem of the first order.

When he does write something that draws out new insights, the process is too often disrupted by his formal innovations rather than supported by them. For example, poem VII from section two of "Is 5" is a good poem because the diction and lack of punctuation creates a productive tension between the serious subject matter and the mind that can't stop itself from running through it:

you know what i mean when
the first guy drops you know
everybody feels sick or
when they throw in a few gas
and the oh baby shrapnel
or my feet getting dim freezing or
up to your you know what in water or
with the bugs crawling right all up
all everywhere over you all me everyone

The terror is made more stark by the poetic speaker's recognition that the events don't need poetic diction to elevate their importance. The poem is a mad dash through a deadly environment. But I have yet to understand why the poem starts with:

lis
-ten

and ends with:

to
no

This doesn't seem to support the organic form of the poem and is more about cummings's whimsy than it is about careful construction. It is the benevolent distribution of this misplaced formal whimsy that makes me wish cummings had perhaps written less and treated with more care his choice of poetic subjects.

Timothy Steele and Metrical Poetry

Timothy Steele's 1990 book is an interesting salvo in the conflict regarding the relative value of free verse and metrical verse. Steele considers the growth and current dominance of free verse a striking development when placed against a 2,500-year history of metrical verse. In my opinion, he is more interesting when responding to many of the criticisms of metrical verse than he is in pointing out the misguided choices of modern/contemporary poets. His spirited defense encourages readers to discover what is valuable about meter and what might be lost in the era of its near-demise.

But on the other hand, his firm devotion to meter paradoxically threatens to undermine its importance. Points which seem compelling at first undergo a strange transformation after further scrutiny. Take for example this point: "Shakespeare, for instance, wrote thirty-seven five-act plays in iambic pentameter and approximately 150 sonnets in the same line" (164). Steele employs this strategy throughout his book: cite the use of meter by all the great poets in the history of Western civilization. Unfortunately for Steele, the point about Shakespeare makes me wonder what it is about Shakespeare other than meter that make him such a fascinating writer. In other words, meter being equal, there must be something else that sets him apart from other writers using iambic pentameter. The plenitude and longevity of certain metrical forms forces one to consider non-metrical matters when attempting to discover what is unique and provocative about poets and poems.

Steele easily refutates the reasons often given for the rise of free verse, but he does not convincingly provide a positive explanation for its dominance. It seems to me that the death of meter is largely due to the duration of its unquestioned dominance. That is, the Victorian age so valued meter that other poetic qualities in late Victorian writing moved to fiction or simply dried up. There is so much dreadful verse that flows so metrically. Without the support of meter, poets are forced to search for some other unifying method. In order to invigorate poetry, new writers needed to resuscitate and highlight other techniques. The New Critical revolution emphasized poetic figures such as irony, structure, imagery, repetition, etc. Steele condemns Eliot's concept of "music" over meter, but Eliot's point is well-taken: a poet must do more than search for every purling spring (to quote Sir Philip Sidney).

W. K. Wimsatt on the Unity of Imagery

W. K. Wimsatt's essay "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery" is a typical -- and typically useful -- New Critical essay. He argues that Romantic nature poetry employs images of nature that are modified by imagination in order to uncover a subjective similitude (or insight of similitude) that exceeds the result of intellectual comparison only.

To exemplify his point, Wimsatt distinguishes between the "tenor" and the "vehicle" of a given poem. I understand them better as the "tone" or "emotional teleology" of the poem and the "content" of the poem. Wimsatt points out how the content of a Wordsworth poem works with its tone to achieve an organic unity. He writes that "[p]oetic structure is always a fusion of ideas with material." For Wimsatt, Romantic poetry leans toward sensory experience of nature rather than an intellectual exercise that characterizes neoclassical poetry. But the Romantic poet reads the spiritual into these sensory experiences, especially by confronting the mysterious in nature.

Though Romantic and neoclassical poetry find quite different places on the spectrum from "sensory" to "rational," the good poetry of each mode achieves the type of fusion Wimsatt explains. It's interesting that one of the New Critics finds something to admire in poetry of the Romantic era. I've started reading an essay by Allen Tate, who is a good deal less favorable when he discusses a poetic figure by Shelley. Maybe I'll write about that tomorrow.

John Crowe Ransom and the Transformation of Desire

John Crowe Ransom's 1947 essay "The Iconography of the Master" begins in typical New Critical fashion by pointing out syntactical figures at work in a poetic text (by Shakespeare). Interesting, but standard stuff. The second half of the essay gets into a fascinating discussion of "teleological speculation." In other words, what is the purpose of a given poem? Ransom argues that this is much more complicated than it might seem (at least, for poetry of quality).

I'm interested in Ransom's use of Freud to answer this question. Ransom begins with a binary opposition between thought-work and substance, which reflects a more fundamental opposition between the ego and the id. (He uses this distinction earlier in the essay when he asserts that mixed poetic diction indicates an interplay between the id and the ego). But in teleological terms, he has trouble fully contrasting these two. If most critics tend to pit the two against each other in a zero-sum power struggle, I think Ransom is trying to remind us that the two were originally theorized to work in concert with one another. That is, the id is too "childish" and demanding to actualize its needs. It needs the special qualities of the ego, one of which is the ego's "aggression against the environment" to help procure the satisfaction of the id's drives.

While the two may work toward the same end, it's also possible that the ego may "fixate" on natural objects in a way that doesn't satisfy the id's drives. While he doesn't provide a lucid discussion of this prospect, nor does he give a clear example, he seems to set up a continuum upon which the two psychic entities interact. The task of criticism then becomes assessing a poem's placement on this continuum. He writes, "we must see how our psychic fixation serves the long-range needs of the biological organism."

With these concerns as a backdrop, it is interesting to look at a Ransom poem like "The Equilibrists," which situates two lovers between their physical desire and the "honor" that requires its restriction:

At length I saw these lovers fully were come
Into their torture of equilibrium;
Dreadfully had forsworn each other, and yet
They were bound each to each, and they did not forget.

And rigid as two painful stars, and twirled
About the clustered night their prison world,
They burned with fierce love always to come near,
But Honor beat them back and kept them clear.

The poem is a complex and ambivalent tale of desire left unfulfilled. While the lovers appear to be the primary figures of the poem, the real subject, the teleological catalyst, is "Honor." The egos fixate upon honor as the sort of restriction instituted by the ego to ensure a later pleasure. But the poem interrogates the possibility of this later pleasure, leaving the lovers in cold graves eternally separated from one another. Honor does not seem to serve our long-range physical needs.

But in true ambivalent style, Ransom also hints at the danger in caving to one's desires:

Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones
Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones;
Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss,
The pieces kiss again, no end to this.

What a terrifying image, the body torn into ever smaller bits, each of which continues to seethe with desire. This ambivalence leaves the question of desire in the poem in the same sort of agonized equilibrium experienced by the lovers. I would argue, however, that the aesthetic pleasure of these representations of equilibrium is its own sort of consummation, and the reader who encounters it on the page has obtained the satisfaction unique to poetry.

T. S. Eliot, Tradition, and Phylogenesis

Eliot's important essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" has been roundly criticized because it actively deplores the one thing that so many people see as the purpose of poetry: to express one's emotions. Eliot insists that "the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past." This consciousness of the past comes at the expense of the poet's consciousness of self: "What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

A close examination of the essay, however, reveals that this "extinction" is complicated. Of what is the poem comprised if not the poet's personality? Eliot suggests that poetry is made of the "pressure" that fuses feelings into emotions: "For it is not the 'greatness', the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts." Poetry is the combination of disparate impressions and experiences, rather than the expression of emotion.

I'm intrigued by the distinction made here between feelings and emotions. We tend to think of these as synonyms for one another, but Eliot sees the former as separate "floating" processes and the latter as unified under the poet's personality. The concept being disparaged here is "unity." The act of poetry has something to do with the dissolution of the order imposed on the world by the ego. Poetry, as Eliot thinks of it, is meant to dissolve the ego itself.

But it is not just this negative project; it also is a sort of assembly. Poetry is "a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences [...]; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation." In other words, poetry is the new experience of experiences, not the distorted unification of emotion expressed by the poet's ego.

This, of course, is Freudian language. Eliot seems to advance a notion of poetry in which one sees through the productions of the ego for the unconscious impressions and experiences underneath. But Eliot does not seem interested in advocating a celebration of the id, either. It's important to note that his discussion takes place in an essay on both tradition and poetry. This means, first of all, that he doesn't merely substitute a physiological self of seething drives for the unified ego. Instead of glorifying selfish drives, he invokes the "tradition" of history. We do not exist as beings in a simple present; rather, our present is layered over by the successive waves of the past. Our drives are not our own, but have instead been received at the species level. This combination of drives and history evokes Freud's concept of phylogenetic drives that exist as a part of the transmission of culture. Eliot tries to recover this inheritance that has been too vigorously denied by that precious construct, the individual ego.

A second and related issue is that the process of poetry does not celebrate an eruption of drives in real life, or even an understanding of drives through their phylogenetic recovery. Instead, the process Eliot describes is an aesthetic one. He writes: "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." We suffer as individuals, but the artistic project requires a suspension of the self that allows us access to greater combinations. Eliot references Keats's "Ode on a Nightingale" as a poem that operates not by the expression of the poet's emotion or the actual experience of viewing nightingales; instead, it operates through the productive intersection of separate "feelings" brought together in the words and images comprising the poem.

I find in these two connected perspectives an emphasis on a collective unconscious of images and experiences phylogenetically deposited in the modern subject who might aesthetically recover this inheritance through the contemplation of poetry. At the very least, Eliot's essay should be seen as more than a simple veneration of the English canon.

David Porter on the Modern Idiom

In writing about Emily Dickinson as a nineteenth-century precursor to modern American poetry, David Porter slowly constructs a definition of modernism that deserves to be judged apart from its relation to Dickinson. In many ways, Porter's modernism is a series of losses; coherence, meaning, unity, teleology, order, and similitude are all lost. But Porter conceives of two strains of modernism that respond to these losses. Different as they are, Stevens and Frost counteract these losses by providing some sort of organizational principle, Stevens through the constructions of the imagination and Frost through the "inner mood" of the poet and his connection to society.

According to Porter, Dickinson replaces none of these losses. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, representing the second strain of modernism as Porter sees it, make the same refusal (at least during parts of their careers).

Porter provides some great readings of individual Dickinson poems, but his ultimate understanding of Dickinson seems uncharitable at best. He spends his entire book discussing what Dickinson does to language and consciousness, but then denies her a poetic project, a "life-centering angle of vision" (144). For such a sensitive reader, Porter seems incredibly short-sighted to complain that "this Dickinsonian idiom speaks fear without understanding, force without purpose, art without redemptive intention" (261).

I would argue that Dickinson explores the ineffible divergence of the opposed terms in each of these binaries rather than offering the former without the latter. She understands one's longing for the second term from within the first. But they must be separate. If she was to offer understanding, then she would be unable to create the experience of fear. Rather than refusing to replace what is lost, she presents the tangibility of loss. To me, the value of poems like Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" emerges from this same sort of tangibility.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" --
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."

Recognizing the inevitable failure of communication is its own gain; the loss of connection presents its own materiality. Desire itself is a material absence, and Dickinson's exploration of extreme desire -- extreme separation -- is a substantial poetic project, indeed.

Edmund Burke and the Sublime

Edmund Burke insists that aesthetic responses are first and foremost physiological responses. When he suggests that the sublime operates by terror and the beautiful operates by love, he means that one has the physiological experience of these "passions" (e.g. tension or relaxation). As physiological reactions, these extreme experiences elude reason. Confronting the sublime, Burke writes that "the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it."

Up to this point, there is an exclusive relationship between subject and object: each object gets experienced directly by the subject. But this relationship enters language. Burke contends that words elicit a physiological reaction based ontheir uses in the subject's past, even though these connections are no longer conscious:

"Such words are in reality but mere sounds; but they are sounds, which being used on particular occasions, wherein we receive some good, or suffer some evil [...] and being applied in such a variety of cases that we know readily by habit to what things they belong, they produce in the mind, whenever they are afterwards mentioned, effects similar to those of their occasions."

From this perspective, words create physiological responses because they refer back to earlier experiences to which the word was applied. Rather than being a signifier in a hermetic signifying system, the word possesses a history for the subject. Each use of a word relies upon earlier uses. The direction of this movement points back to childhood. Although Burke doesn't mention this specifically, the word comes to activate childhood memories, those experiences during which children learn language. A complex word gets laid over an experience from the past, and when that word is used, the past is in some way recovered.

In this argument, Burke provides the warrant for a shift to Oedipal terminology. He takes this step fully when he writes about the father: "[t]he authority of the father, so useful to our well-being, and so justly venerable upon all accounts, hinders us from having that entire love for him that we have for our mothers, where the parental authority is almost melted down into the mother's fondness and indulgence." The authority of the father is associated with the sublime, while the love of the mother is associated with beauty. Our aesthetic responses to objects take place within this paradigm of memories.

In spite of these similarities, however, it rewards the careful reader to distinguish between the "delight" of Burke's sublime and the pathology of Freud's repression. Burke describes the sublime as a terror mitigated by distance. He writes that "terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close." For Burke, the viewer is not truly endangered by the sublime object. Instead, the somatic symptoms are aesthetically recreated to enforce the sublimity of the law-giving father. In this way, the initiate is brought into existing social relations, a sublation involving the assumption of social power through the denial of selfhood.

In speaking of the Deity as the ultimate authority, Burke writes: "whilst we contemplate so vast an object [...] we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him." But he reiterates the social value of this subjection by again stressing the benefits gained through this process: "If we rejoice, we rejoice with trembling; and even whilst we are receiving benefits, we cannot but shudder at the power which can confer benefits of such mighty importance." The sublime is a delight because it dramatizes one's initiation into the law of the father, through which the assumption of power takes place. To relive the terror aesthetically is to reenact one's emergence into social power.

Sigmund Freud's theory of repression and the unconscious focuses on drives which cannot be sublimated into aesthetic responses, i.e. energy which must be repressed. For Burke, that which exceeds reason is given a harmless aesthetic release as the sublime, while for Freud the uncanny represents the return of the repressed in a truly terrifying form: "among those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns" ("The Uncanny"). Whereas Burke posits a vast, obscure sublime into which one both disappears and is created, Freud presents "[s]evered limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm" as examples of a self constructed as guilty and implicated in crimes of desire that exceed the power of aesthetics to sublimate. While Freud's conception creates its own problems for the subject's autonomy, it avoids what is, for Burke, ultimately a complicity with the status quo based on one's acquiescence to the authority of the sublime object.

Aristotle on Discovery

I set myself a difficult task by promising to read Aristotle's On Poetics. The goal was to gain insight into how poetry works, but Aristotle is primarily interested in narrative. It's refreshing to read a carefully structural analysis written by someone who still believes that there's such a thing as the Perfect Plot. His ideas make particularly good starting points for discussions about drama and fiction, but their applicability to poetry is complicated.

It seems more productive to work negatively; that is, start with something that Aristotle focuses on and then chart its absence in lyric poetry. The thing that jumps out at me is the fascinating discussion of "discovery." He lists the ways in which characters may discover information about themselves or others and what these discoveries can lead to. For Aristotle, the greatest discoveries are those that lead to a change in fortunes for the hero. His fate or the fate of others hangs in the balance.

I turn to modern lyric poetry and ask myself what the "characters" discover and what hinges on these discoveries. Because I'm focusing on Ezra Pound for an upcoming project, I think of his work. But I discover that overt discoveries are rare, at least within the bounds of the poems themselves. First problem: often the only "character" in a lyric poem is the poetic speaker. Second problem: these poems are often aestheticized statements of previously-held positions. There is not a change but an attempt articulate or confirm a given perspective. This is especially true of Pound, who spends a lot of time asserting rather than searching for discoveries. Here's the first two lines of "Salvationists" as an example:

Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection-
We shall get ourselves rather disliked.

Pound has a position and he asserts it. There's a certain amount of bluster in poems of this sort. Perhaps more useful in this discussion are those poems (unfortunately more rare) which most faithfully hold to the Imagist ideal. "Alba" serves as a good example:

As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.

There is something to this poem, but the poetic speaker does not actually make a discovery. That is, there is no before the discovery and after the discovery. Aristotle joins the discovery to the peripety (the change in direction or fortunes). Instead, the discovery seems to be the reader's prerogative. The poem is basically a simile offered to the reader, but one that isn't dramatically experienced by the speaker. What do we make of this equivalence? It seems that narratives structure discovery, while lyrics juxtapose suggestions, bequeathing discovery on readers.

Claude McKay and the Ghosts of our Heritage

It is fascinating to open the Selected Poems of Claude McKay after first perusing poetry anthologies. First, the anthologies have been very selective. The second edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry features five poems by McKay; Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited by Gioia, Mason, and Schoerke has six; the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry has a whopping twelve.

The anthologist's imperative to be selective, however, forces these unfortunate editors to decide which McKay they want to present. While all the notes agree that McKay's most important and influential work was comprised of angry yet controlled poems of social protest against racism and racial violence, there's another McKay that has gone missing: a poet so firmly shaped by the experiences of the landscape of his youth that he remains haunted by memories of place. McKay's childhood in Jamaica roils just beneath the surface, and his early Songs for Jamaica explores the ruptures of past into present.

"North and South" begins "O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!" These tropic lands burst into the conscious mind as the speaker inhabits a much different place. For example, the speaker in "Home Thoughts" imagines a connection back to the island:

Oh something just now must be happening there!
That suddenly and quiveringly here,
Amid the city's noises, I must think
Of mangoes leaning to the river's brink

There's a sort of synchronicity that allows the adult to overlay his current urban surroundings with the Caribbean of his youth. The speaker experiences two places simultaneously. This is its own sort of doubling; though the speaker is still one, he inhabits and is acted upon by two worlds.

I think this sort of synchronicity or dual subjectivity establishes an important argument that can help us read his more well-known protest poems. The adult is shot through with unconscious memories of the past; he cannot deny or erase his heritage. In fact, the poem "Heritage" begins:

Now the dead past seems vividly alive,
And in this shining moment I can trace,
Down through the vista of the vanished years,
Your faun-like form, your fond elusive face.

The important question about youth, then, is what sort of spirit is released into the future. In perhaps his most well-known poem, a sonnet called "The Lynching," McKay's final couplet is: "And little lads, lynchers that were to be, / Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee." The most wrenching lines of the poem, and the ones that cause such outrage, are those that condemn the next generation to the sins of their fathers. If McKay's boyhood yields "O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!", then one shudders to imagine the worlds that lads in "The Lynching" will inhabit in the future.