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"Intellectual" Poetry?

Last night I was talking with another poet about who we'd like to work with and why. We began to make generalities about schools of thinking on poetry whether we liked them or not. One distinction to which we were (inevitably?) led between "intellectual" and "anti-intellectual" poetry. I said that anti-intellectualism piqued me and expressed frustration: it often implies that my philosophical training has no bearing on writing good poems which I think to be utterly untrue. My friend immediately offered that he appreciated intellectualism -- this is a person who can recite early Frost and Rimbaud by heart -- but that of course he also thought it was important that poetry feel. Reflexively, I responded that I thought that too, and that poetry that expresses "feeling" and "intellectual" poetry need not be opposed. We said yes, yes, and moved on... but I don't think we actually agreed on the definition on "intellectual."

When I say "intellectual" poetry, I mean poetry informed by wide reading and listening. The intellectual omnivorously consumes information and theories about experience and uses them to refine her understanding of her own experience. That is, we can still learn something of how the world works (science, technology) or how it came to be (history) or what it might mean (philosophy) and nonetheless emotively express our relationship to it. You might mention a fact, allude to a myth, or address a philosopher in a poem because doing so allows you to be more clear about a state of affiars. That can happen in third person or first person; it can be confessional or not. (That distinction needs a discussion of its own, by I don't see 'intellectual' and 'confessional' poetry to be opposed: think Hopkins or The Waste Land or Carl Philips.)

What I think a person might mean when she says "intellectual" poetry is writing that addresses conceptual distinctions: philosophical or political ones. For example, this kind of intellectual poet might tell you What Language Is or How to Relate To the Other. That can also happen in first person or third person.

Now, I should think of examples of each of these. In my sense of "intellectual," I think Anne Carson and Frank Bidart write this type of work, rife with allusion and informed by historical reading... but no less able to make you cry or moan or laugh. I don't think of any poets whom I really enjoy who fit the secondary definition, though I'm sure they exist. But I don't like reading them! If you want to give a theory of language, then you really should study and write philosophy. If you want to show experience,then you could write poetry and use some terms from a theory merely because they are more precise that other words. (Or, you could write a letter to your mother or a personal essay... poetry involves lines, meters, imagery, etc., not just commentary on experience)

Well, now I should get back to writing some poetry, intellectual or otherwise.

On praising "bad poetry"

Book Forum and The Poetry Foundation are talking about why people praise "bad poetry." Plunkett argues that "most of published criticism is positive even though so much of published poetry is bad." I am wondering whether this is true and if so, whether it is a problem. The world of poetry is cold and lonely. It's incredibly difficult to get a book published, and to do so and hear that it was "bad" would be devastating. For your hard work, you get no money, little public recognition or social affirmation (yes, it's "cool" to say you're a poet but society does not give you the full pat on the back that it gives the software developer or medical professional). All you receive -- if anything -- is a tiny bit of feedback from a tight circle of other people who have made it to that enviable/inenviable place.

But art means absolutely nothing if it isn't good art so why should even that tiny circle affirm work that is so poor it only diminishes the value of the whole field? That seems to be Plunkett's polemic. But I hope he is either best friends with Dickman or never meets him, because identifying his work as exemplary "bad" poetry is not going to start a convivial relationship.

Somewhere between or beyond pointing out the "bad" and rehearsing praise of the "good" lies real criticism. One can profoundly, rigorously and minutely critique a fantastic poem -- some of Rilke's elegies just don't make sense either -- or can re-frame and draw out insight a mediocre poem -- some of my favorite lectures in grad school managed that. Critique reflects the aesthetic judgment of the viewer/reader as much as the creator. Wallpaper, as Kant tells us, can instigate the play of the faculties and prompt aesthetic judgment as much as a beautiful painting. Literary criticism, as Eliot tell us, means understanding what a poem means in relation to all the other poems that come before it. So writing good criticism is not entirely limited by the work that is its object of study. Good criticism can be an opportunity for the critical writer to express and explore ideas not yet born in the work itself. Tell us not that Dickman is "bad" but that his work falls in a particular stream of current popularity and tell us when and why that stream diverged from other aesthetic possibilities.

Or at least I hope that opportunity is there for critique. All that said, I empathize with Plunkett's frustration and share a sneaking suspicion that a book only needs a certain amount of inertia to keep getting more praise.

Site Specific and Seattle Specific Art

As I get started writing about art in Seattle, I've dragged J along to a number of events, some more successful than the others, and I'm meditating on what is succeeding or not in this particular area. The best art in Seattle seems to be "happening": that is, the work involves an event, interaction, or performance. This, of course, is not unique to the Puget Sound; Roberta Smith just wrote a preview of the next New York season and notes a similar trend. That said, I like to think that performance art might have a particular appeal in this city that has a good record of getting audience out to live music. People here expect to go out in the evening, wait outside a door, and then hear and see something at a particular time. An audience prepped by music venues might be drawn to performances like SuttonBeresCuller's "To Be Determined" with its giant katamari ball recently at On the Boards or this weekend's "Swimming the List" by Susie J. Lee at Theater Off Jackson.

Of course, sometimes I just want to stand quietly between four white walls in the afternoon sun and look at some big forms. Or shift my weight while watching a nice old still life and wondering why people still paint. For that, I guess I'll have to go to the Met. One of the best site-specific sculptures I've seen recently, actually, was surprisingly at the gallery attached to U-Frame it in Ballard. "Ghost Dogs" had me gawking happily from the street for a good five minutes.

Jeffery Yang's epic

I'm still trying to get a handle on Jeffery Yang's work. Vanishing-Line, new from Graywolf, took me by surprise after I finished Aquarium. The narrator's vision in Aquarium had a fairly steady focal range and a consistent format; you looked sequentially at an alphabetized list of creatures through a set of binoculars or microscope set up and handed to you by the narrator. They are all about the same distance away, and you get about the same amount of time to watch each one. Then, on to the next exhibit. Your ecological tour guide does make comments that assess and contextualize the images, but rarely strays from the format, describing each creature from "Abalone" to "Zooxanthellae." Here are the representative opening lines of "Anemone": "Anemones are warriors, colonizing / rock and reef in ranks. The history/ of the world is told thru the eye / of the colonizer, who takes pleasure in / sticking his fingers into an anemone's / mouth until it starves." You see the sea creature and then hear remarks that transfer metaphorically that image to the stage of history. (In other poems, the image transfers to the philosophy or religion or politics.)

But Vanishing-Line follows both a radically different form and works at a different scale. This is a geographic and wide-lens historical view. I think of slow pan in the opening of vistas of There Will Be Blood. The first and last words of the book are "place": the first poem is called "place" and the book closes with a quotation from Robert Duncan on place. In each place he presents, Yang positions "facts." These facts -- about his Chinese grandmother and her context or about the dark history of Native Americans on this continent's east coast-- function as artifacts in an epic reenactment.

These facts form the focus and the medium of the poet, as they so self-consciously did for the Objectivists and Imagists. The echoes and interplays between Yang's work at George Oppen's Of Being Numerous are well, numerous. (Yang mentions Oppen in this book's bibliographic note and in a poem in Aquarium, assuring me that I do not image the influence.) Although the author speaks mostly in the third-person omniscient, he occasionally allows an "I" to appear intimately integrated into the large-scale landscape. In Oppen, that landscape is New York; in Yang, it is the east coast surrounding that city.

I call these poems "epics" because of this scale, and perhaps the most fascinating moments are when an "I" does step into the poem or when the poem shifts from microscopic detail to macroscopic reflection. For example, in one line zooming from the size of a nail in a canoe to the scope of a dynastic nation: "Canoes without nails, scoops for oars // They walked // as Portugal lost its monopoly..."

Lots more to think about and a few more reads before I can articulate clearly what he's up to in this complex book that I highly recommend.

Sprout and the Hyper Local Movement

I'm starting to blog here at Crosscut. This piece is about a great Seattle arts organization. J and I have been thinking a lot about the hyper local movement because of our salon (next one, November 12!).

Locality is old news in the realm of food – everyone (hip) goes to the farmers market and not just the grocery. In the last few weeks with flash mobs attack Cleveland, Atlanta and London, crowd sourcing and local movements have even take on a negative cast. But in visual art and cultural organizations, locality has at once an old history and a new one.

I very hesitantly offer the hypothesis that visual art and architecture has a stayed rooted in locality while other art forms – music, literature – have more easily been disassociated (for better or worse) from their physical origins (though there are now reactive movements turning back towards the local). Literature can and has been passed around more quickly from place to place. You can read Lolita in Tehran or Henry James in Idaho or Bannana Yoshimoto in Brussels. But it’s hard to move Bilbao or Falling water, but it’s also harder (though not impossible!) to move a Richard Serra or Tara Donavan piece to New Dehli. These works I select for their modernist, scale-based physicality in particular. That kind of installation/sculpture/etc. appears to be particularly resistant to displacement. That kind of art also dominates our cultural vision of what contemporary art is like. So perhaps it should come as less of a surprise that visual art has quickly taken to the local movement.

I’d like to keep thinking about this movement in “fine” art above and beyond the DIY culture. Yes, I know, craft and art need not be and cannot be entirely distinguished, but it does seem worthwhile to consider whether there is something special happening in that aspect of culture.

Funhouses and Madhouses

J and I recently enjoyed these two shows in Seattle: Funhouse, a show at Western Bridge Gallery, and MadHouses (exhibit now closed) in a row of former Capitol Hill residences sponsored by MadArt and 4Culture. Together, these two exhibits point to the strengths and limits of “public” art and gallery-constrained art.

Funhouse wants to be a party in your backyard. The winking drapes of Martin Creed’s “Work No. 990” flash open and close across the wide entrance windows, hinting that something playful and large hides indoors. In the main room, under the shadow of Creed’s wall drawing, you climb into the show’s center piece, Julian Hoeber’s “Demon Hill,” an optico-kinesthetic illusion: that is, a box with a titled floor. Two or three steps inside the brightly lit, ten by eight foot wooden crate-like structure, you immediately feel sea-sick, despite the plumb line hanging from the ceiling. The simplicity of this architectural gesture points to a strong modernist ethos that undergirds this piece and the show. Essentially, each piece asks the visitor to reassess her commitment to perspectival space, emphasizing constant physical relations just the way a Donald Judd or a Walter De Maria might. The show purports to be about “fun” and “funhouses” which might lead to post-modern pieces that tugged at cultural expectations, but in fact, the work focuses on light and space, the great mainstays of modernist architecture.

In the back room, perhaps the most exciting piece hides: Mungo Thompson’s Skyspace Bouncehouse, a Claus Oldenburg-like version of a James Turrell. On a wood pew in Turrell’s original, you look up to see a square of light from the sky you’ve been in the habit of ignoring rather than worshipping. Inside Thompson’s piece, you bounce over the inflated cushions of a county fair moon-walk beneath a similar hole in the ceiling.

Visitors’ reactions to Skyspace could be shouts of “The sky! The sky!” while hopping like children. But Funhouse is ultimately a gallery show. The hush and dark of the gallery space invites a quiet, “Ah” instead. The roof blocks out the sky that appears in the actual Turell and the white walls and air-condition muffled backroom of the gallery mute the art from an “event” to a set of purchasable pieces.

Madhouses succeeds in offering a more fun place to be than Funhouse, although the actual sculpture does not reach the subtly of those tucked away at Western Bridge. SuttonBeresCuller, creators of numerous architectural-scale works at, for example, Bumbershoot and the Lawrimore Project, installed the initially and outwardly striking, “Ties that Bind,” red bands winding through two houses. Laura Ward’s “Skin” transforms the exterior of a house into a fragile latex cast that underscores the structure’s vulnerability. By padding the interior with used clothing, Luke Haynes points toward the history of inhabitation by past residents and visitors and caretakers that patinas the houses.

The opening of Madhouses included artists and friends but also members of the Capitol Hill community of all ages who happened to walk by the show. Likewise, on a sunny Sunday, a wide swath of the Seattle community – much more diverse than the handful of visitors who make it to Western Bridge – wandered through the structures. The effect of the informal open door policy created the atmosphere of an estate open-house, but one where no one was buying, a trope emphasized by the barcoded price tag in Troy Gua’s “Crysalis.”

Lucretius, Greenblatt, and the scale of life

This article about Lucretius tempts me to trust it because it recovers such a lovely text, but Greenblatt makes too many over generalizations and errors to be believed. He claims we live in a “skeptical and secular culture,” reinforcing the secularization myth: the story that liberal atheism will, or has, inevitably subsumed simplistic, religious cult impulses. It simply hasn’t (See Charles Taylor on this non-shift). I live in a credulous, religious culture in which Lucretius is no more welcome than he was in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries that Greenblatt caricatures as dark, unthinking, unerotic times. (As a side note, I have to say that in that description, I think he errs again in over generalization: not every sect of Christianity after the fall of Rome rejected sexuality or thinking. We have the sensual, contemplative writings of Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, and Hildegaard von Bingen for starters. I’m no medievalist, but I know enough of them to believe that there are other conceptions of those centuries than as the “dark ages.”)

But Greenblatt’s discussion of Lucretius goes to the heart of issues at stake in our biopolar or schizoid era: hyper-religious and hyper-scientific at once. Most people don’t like the indifference of atomism; Greenblatt identifies this in the case of his mother, but overlooks it in his culture at large where masses of people pursue religions that guarantee them a loving or passionate or at least judgmental divinity, fully invested in their lives as any creator is in her products. No one wants to die and less do we want to find the intermediary of life to be meaningless. Fortunately, medieval credulity and secular skepticism are not the only options as worldviews. Foundations of meaning have been established on grounds other than immorality or even humanism. Greenblatt senses these alternatives in his frustration with Lucretius at the close of the article. But he does not pursue them in the short essay. I wish he had because those are the truly tricky accounts of how we should relate to this natural world the comprises us and composes us.

Nature can seem indifferent to us humans. We face the ocean, and we do not see any eyes or doors or gestures of welcome. But natural life is hardly indifferent to us or to most of its surroundings; to be alive is to have preferences, pleasures and pains. In that, Epicurus and Lucretius themselves may have overlooked the truly compelling qualities of nature. What fascinates me is that yes, we are made of the same atoms as granite and stars and computer chips, but our living systems contain a level of organization not apparent in these other natural bodies. That doesn’t mean we are supernatural or created by something supernatural. But it does mean that "nature" is not a synonym for "life"; it is a genus containing that species. Living nature contains more than the sum of its parts, its atoms. Atomism understands nature only in terms of parts, not wholes, in terms of the microscopic not the macroscopic. Natural lives that so interest us only appear at the macroscopic scale. That does not make them less “real” than their atoms, any more than a car is less real than its carbon and steel. Nor does it make them any more supernatural than a car.

Well, I can't cover the entire "Nature of Things" here. But I'm fascinated by our cultural fascination with giving nature a face or being frustrated in not finding one on her.

New Poetry I'm reading

I enjoyed Carl Phillip's new book as I discuss here on the KR.
Right now, I'm wending my way through Emily Wilson's Micrographia. Her syntax rivals Hopkins at times (but without the rhyme), and the imagery is like medieval miniature, a marvel of density, precision and patience. Zach Savich's recent book is on my table next, beside Vanishing-Line and Aquarium, two books by Jeffrey Yang. Looking forward to picking through each of these carefully.

Octavia Butler's Fledgling vs. Meyer's Twighlight

Somehow Octavia' Butler's Fledgling came out the same year as Meyer's first Twlight book, but to less acclaim. Butler's book is so much more subtle than Meyer's also compelling book. Butler adds dimensions of race, American history and first person narration that create depth from a quite similar plot line. Why then is Meyer's book more popular? Setting aside (unjustly) the quirks of publishing and timing, I think Meyer simply succeeds in plot where Butler dwells in character. Against Aristotle's advise, Butler privileges one character over plot that comprises many. I plowed through Twilight, skimmed the middle two books in the series, and admired Breaking Dawn. Meyer's characters accumulate momentum between them and drive the book. Butler presents one character, Shori, intimately. This device repeats the basic structure of Butler's earlier Kindred which also took you into the mind of a young women undergoing an unexplained and supernatural transformation. I enjoyed Kindred as I did Fledgling, but I could have put either book down half-way through or two-thirds of the way through with as much satisfaction as at the end. That's because by then I've absorbed the details of the character's peculiar situation and the premise of the novel. Beyond that, Butler's plot is mere footnotes. As a poet, I worry that I will let language enrapture me at the expense of plot. But here is another potential trap: character and premise at the expense of plot. But plot alone makes only the Twilight series and not Woolf's The Waves. I assumed there's something good in between ;) But what is it and how do I write it?

Thoughts on Carl Philips for the KROnline

A few of my longer, more carefully edited thoughts here in a review of Carl Philip's new book, A Dream in Horses.

Epistles and First person narrators

Reading Frankenstein after a few contemporary novels is odd because this book comprises letters and extended first person monologues. Not pages and pages of snappy dialogue that could be film script! (For example, I just finished The Eyre Affair which reads like a movie script; apparently the author wrote them for the industry before turning to novels.) The devices are so transparent. One character meets another and tells him he will tell him his story. Inside that narrative, he meets another character and that character says , "Wait! let me tell you my story." The book does include bits of dialogue and action, but much less than one might expect. I'm a bit envious of the nineteenth century writer... why can't I just tell everything in letter exchanges or long, retrospective first-person narratives? I suppose I could, but I also suppose it would be boring and/or trite.

I realize how little I know about the history of fiction or its progress, despite a few degrees that suggest I ought to. When did dialogue begin to take such prominence? I could tell you about stream of consciousness in Woolf or multiple narrators in Joyce, but I'm not sure about that more simple development.

Shelly's narrator on Past and Future "Natural Science"

“ ‘The ancient teachers of this science, said he, ‘ promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promised very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hand seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pour over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the inivisble world with its own shadows.’

“I departed highly pleased with the professor and his lecture, and paid him a visit the same evening.” – Frankenstein

Is Frankenstein Sci Fi?

In the horrible/uncharitable/anti-feminist introduction by Rieger to the edition I’m reading, he claims that we shouldn’t see Frankenstein as precursor to science fiction because: “The science-fiction writers says, in effect, since x has been experimentally proven or theoretically postulated, y can be achieved by the following, carefully documented operation. Mary Shelley skips to the outcome and asks, if y had been achieved, by whatever means, what would be the moral consequences? In other words, she skips the science” (xxvii). This reflects a simplistic notion of science fiction, both its motivation and its actual content. Predictive fiction – I think of P.D. James’s Children of Men or Asimov's I, Robot – considers the consequences of certain futures or developments. A gesture might be made to the “how” of such development but the emphasis is on postulation of consequences; the scientist (or more likely, technologist or engineer) deals with “how” and it is precisely the privilege of the fiction author to assess what would happen if such and such were possible, by whatever means. The scientist takes on supernatural (as in superintendent of nature) or natural powers; god-like or nature-like, she can bend or determine the laws of life. In this, she fulfills a role more like God in Paradise Lost than the author of a how-to-create-y text-book, as Rieger implies. Perhaps the science fiction reader enjoys the possibility than a person could accomplish y by “scientific” –i.e. human and natural – means more than by “magic” – i.e. supernatural in the sense of nothing-to-do-with nature – that tends to dominate so-called fantasy novels. But the effect of such accomplishments, the world brought about by a new technical or physical possibility, that is almost always the focus of “science fiction,” or again, as I would prefer, predictive fiction.