My new adviser just gutted a poem of mine and gave me some wonderful advice. On a practical level -- on the level of judgment -- he was totally correct about what the poem needed. But on a theoretical level, I am puzzling about this advice as a general stance.
He told me to review the poem and to merely look – as a formalist would – for the strongest language and excise the rest. In one sense, I totally agree: that was what this poem needed. In another sense, I am not sure I agree at all (nor actually that he does, given his respect for Eliot’s Four Quartets... but more on that later). In a way, I think it could be the strongest thing my poems ever do if I actually manage to keep that “weak” language and reuse it.
To reuse that language would be to do a pastiche.
John’s thesis at MIT was on pastiche. He presented a renovation of a movie palace in
I think in contemporary poetry we have a similar predilection for simplicity and consistency. We prefer language that does the same thing throughout, that deploys itself smoothly and with a bang at the finish. What if a poem went, dribble, Bang! Bang! Dribble dribble. Pop. And the end was so unsatisfying that you needed to start again? I think that might be interesting, and that very few people would like it.
Our preference for poems that – like my advisers's own – take one tone is a matter of taste. Of judgment.
Where do we get our sense of taste? Why is the one better than the many? Western metaphysics prefers one god, one good, and apparently Western poetry prefers one tone. We know that the subject dissolved, that god was gutted and replaced with the multiplicity of the world, but when we see art, we still want to know who made it, who’s speaking. Even when we read Joyce – with his multiplicity of styles undermining our search for “The narrator” – we read Joyce and we know who he is. We give exams to graduate students and ask them to identify authorial styles. We assume that a style commits a work to an author, and in poetry, I think we still identify a style with a tone.
Next summer, I think I might like to give a class on judgment. When we judge, we move from the singular toward the universal. For Kant, a determinative judgment – ‘all cows are bovines,’ or ‘this cow is black’ – collects the particular under the general ; an aesthetic judgment makes a judgment about the universal from the particular: ‘this chocolate is yummy’ or ‘this painting made of chocolate is beautiful.’ What is the beautiful? It is this painting I just encountered. What is a poem? It is this thing I just read. For Aristotle, we acquire phronesis from childhood; practical knowledge is acquired by practice. With Kant plus Aristotle – as in Arendt and Nussbaum – we find that aesthetic judgment is acquired gradually, from childhood, in history, by encountering many particulars: particulars so neatly crafted as to point the way toward the universal… without ever arriving.
In my course, I would begin with close readings of poems. I would say nothing general first; nothing about what poetry is. (The first words of the class would be “let’s read this poem.”) Rather, we would look at how one moves from a particular poem – and gradually, through encounters with many poems, in many circumstances – toward a general knowing of what poetry is. And, roughly, I found that to be this disruption of the logical “is/is not” with the metaphoric “like.” (Most recently, I saw this in the Carol Anne Duffy poem presented in a class...but again, more on that later...)
Indeed, more on all of this later!
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