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via The Suburban Ecstasies by Seth Abramson on 2/24/09
There's no way to write this blog-post which won't seem like a transparent attempt to hawk the March issue of Poetry.And yet I assure you: I will be posting a transparent attempt to hawk the March issue of Poetry in about 72 hours. This post, in contrast, is legitimately prompted by what I see as a good-natured dispute over poetics. The principals in this good-natured dispute (though one of them doesn't know it yet) are Jason Guriel--whose reviews appear in the upcoming Poetry (and whose blogging appears now on the Poetry Foundation website)--and myself. I say that tongue-in-cheek, of course; any good review invites a response, and better yet a discussion, and I hope all I'm doing here is merely taking up Jason on the invitation (to me, to anyone) implicit in his review of Jane Mead's The Usable Field.
[NB: For what it's worth, I've both read poems from this book and heard them read in person by the poet herself].
I want to say, at the outset, that I'm no particular fan of Jane Mead's poetry. I think that, like many poets, her image- and context-dependent aesthetic is ill-suited to, and far too restrictive of, her concept-oriented designs (more on this below). Secondly, I want to say that I agree wholeheartedly with Jason's recalibrating of our expectations regarding poetry reviews. A review critical of a collection is only "negative" in the nuts-and-bolts sense of that word, and not in the sense that could (and sometimes does) send poets into fits of pique, angst, and anxiety. Jason's review of Jane Mead's most recent collection is certainly "negative" in this first sense, but it is also a negative presence of sorts in another sense, one that has to do with the "ethics of reading" (a term I'm stealing for the moment from a thoughtful and erudite workshop classmate--who, I should add, merely put the term up for consideration, rather than advocacy).
It may well be asked, I think, whether ethics are applicable to one's experience of art, separated entirely from the role ethics plays in the creation of art. My own view is that when we read for pleasure ethics isn't part of the equation; we are masters of what has been given to us to experience, and we need not justify our experience to the poet, any larger community, or even (I don't think) ourselves. We like what we like. But when one is reading poetry with an eye toward criticism I think responsibilities accrue, most notably the responsibility of taking a poem on its own terms, and gauging its successes or failures by that measure alone (assuming a minimum of craft is present, which it nearly always will be in any book that comes to be reviewed). Otherwise, reviews become mere popularity contests amongst warring aesthetic tribes--and, consequently, useful to no one.
Jane Mead, as Jason presents her in his review, is a poet fluent in the language of rhetoric. That's not a word Jason uses in his review of Mead, though I honestly (and, as best I can, humbly) believe he'd have been helped substantially in his reading of Mead's poems if he'd considered it. The simple truth is that for decades there has been a burgeoning class of poets in the United States who are not interested in describing things. Whose poetry is deductive moreso than inductive. Which is not to say that the poems these poets write aren't sometimes superficially descriptive, visually-oriented, well-wrought, both evocative and provocative. But their primary engine is not the tool--or any tool--of description. To Jason, poems which set out to describe things already visible, and thereby to lay judgment upon what is already known, reflect a level of attention on the part of the poet he feels is admirable. And I agree with him. But image isn't the only tool in the poet's toolbox; even as conservative an essayist as Tony Hoagland has conceded, (though, if one reads between the lines, somewhat grudgingly) that some poems are also made up of, at the very least, diction and rhetoric. In a certain sense, rhetoric--using the same sorts of philosophies, and with the same persuasive tendencies and intentions behind it, as the sort of rhetoric attorneys use--is more abstract than image, unappealing to the mind's eye however appealing it may be to the mind, and thus may have less "weight" or "immediacy" in the view of critics like Hoagland and Guriel. The notion, however, that rhetoric is without weight, or immediacy, or the capacity for tapping into a higher grade of emotion than even images portend, is belied by the fact that--for instance--attorneys often sway juries (and certainly judges) with rhetoric as much or moreso than imagery.
Jason, pre-inclined (in my view) as he appears to be, thus picks out instances of rhetoric in Jane Mead's poetics and decries such curios, in the space of a single (fairly short) review, as vague, blurry, lazy shorthand, muffled, meaningless gauze, obscuring, prefabricated, airy, hazy, vague, disjunctive, inconclusive, a gimmick, muddy, unreliable, and meandering. That's enough calumny heaped upon the poor head of the rhetorical--whose historical tradition is older than poetry itself--to cause one to question whether the reviewer's responsibilities are being met. Lest I be accused of being merely counter-reactionary, I'll say here that I think avant-garde writers have much the same hostility toward rhetoric as traditionalists do--albeit for different reasons.
When Mead writes of "the sound of cowbirds / in sudden excellence," we can see that she is attempting to write metonymically rather than (as Jason clearly prefers) metaphorically, because the anchor--or, to put a finer point on it, the foundation--of those two lines of poetry is not the image ("cowbirds") but the idea ("excellence") which cowbirds are being used to metonymically reify. Jason wants those cowbirds described to a tee; yet that's not what the poem or the poet wants. The poem, and the poet, are primarily invested in the notion of excellence, and how we manipulate this notion both internally (with our thoughts) and externally (in the landscapes we inhabit, and the images which come to us from that landscape). It can literally be said that describing the cowbirds is altogether beside Mead's point here. Describing excellence, instead, is the focus. The reviewer's pre-fabricated equation for assessing image must therefore be amended to become an equation primarily invested in (or, at the very least, one with some acknowledgment of the importance of) evaluating rhetoric.
Well-intended reviewers like Jason Guriel do other sorts of unintended harm to contemporary poetics. For instance, on the subject of narrative. The continued resistance to implied narrative, both in fiction and in poetry, and once again (oddly enough) as much among "experimental" poets as traditionalists, is the product of poetry reviewers over-defining what narrative is and can be. Narrative is of course made up of components--just like the notion of voice is, and like entire poems taken holistically are (hence, the usefulness of rhetoric as one tool among many). How those components are foregrounded determines not only the how much semantic content the reader will find within the narrative, but also the degree to which that content is emotionalized and (thus) received as authentic by the reader. Traditional (i.e. fully-determined, fully-resolved, fully-bordered) narratives have been regarded--by critics of Elliptical Poetics, as well as by general-interest essayists like Hoagland--as being inherently more emotional (let us even say weighty, given Jason's adjectival stylings, above) than non-traditional narrative. The irony in this--in the continued near-religious belief, in short, in the adjective--is that, whatever Jason may personally feel, many poetry readers are not particularly invested in hearing the sound a rooster makes described in the thousandth way it has ever been described (never the same description twice, mind you). I just can't attach any great emotion to a general movement I've seen over and over again in poetry, whether or not I've been specifically told in the past that a rooster's "dark, corroded croak" is like "a grudging nail tugged out of stubborn wood" (Eric Ormsby). That's beautiful--but is it truly powerful enough to overwrite all those intimate, hard-won, highly-personalized, highly-experiential associations I already have with the words "rooster" and "nail" and "wood"?
The fetishizing of image-based description both denies Keats's notion of negative capability--another concept I would have liked to have seen addressed or at least acknowledged by Jason--and also fails to consider that among the many components of narrative are mood and atmosphere. Mood and atmosphere are good examples of poetic values just as easily, and perhaps better, expressed through the absence of words as their presence. As it is the absence of words, not their presence, which often causes us anxiety, or produces intrigue, or makes us capable of participating in the creation of context, so too the absence of words (or of an otherwise-expected piece of description) in a non-traditional narrative can enhance the reader's emotional investment in such a sequence. Yet non-traditional narrative--narrative which has been "frustrated," to quote (I believe) Stephen Burt--is also inherently less descriptive than traditional narrative, and thus it is almost certainly unpalatable to reviewers of Jason Guriel's inclinations.
I was saying to a friend here in Iowa recently that sometimes I do feel like I'm not trying to describe anything in my most recent work. Again, that doesn't mean nothing is described--these poems are actually noun-heavy, and frequently take place in iconically-understood locales (the city, a bedroom, a prison)--merely that the description is incidental to a much larger and less visible construction. In this sense I see in poetry the same dichotomy that has existed in American/European jurisprudence for years: the dichotomy that exists between legal positivists and adherents to what is (as we all know) commonly called natural law. All my life I've been a legal positivist, and to a great extent I still am; I believe in the ground-up approach to most things. But in poetry I can't help but feel, and feel deeply, that I am trying to "bring something not visible down [to the level of speech, if not visibility]" rather than "raise something up [to the level of poetry, usually through the use of image]." And here at Iowa I've learned that this tradition is a very old one as well, though a significant percentage of it lies in how rhetoric is manipulated--and therefore finds certain of its origin-points in other venues besides poetry (for instance, politics, philosophy, the law, linguistics [semiotics], and so on).
I am happy to have read Jason's review of Mead, believe it worth reading, and am thrilled Poetry published it. It reflects, in articulate fashion, one way of seeing the world, and seeing poetry, and while it's not a viewpoint I necessarily subscribe to anymore, it's one whose legitimacy and internal coherence I acknowledge and admire. I only wonder whether exhibiting the internal coherence of a single theory--one in no way mutually exclusive of other theories or their truths--is enough work for a poetry reviewer to have done. Has Jason merely reified a theory in his review of Mead, or shed an important and instructive light on Mead's poetry and poetics? For me it's an open question, and a worthwhile one, especially as the future of poetry is likely to one of a continued hybridity of poetics--and those too recalcitrant to operate in multiple aesthetic spheres at once (intellectually, if not artistically) may well find themselves at a great disadvantage going forward.
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