Poetry Magazine

I might have something to say about Fanny Howe's new book, On the Ground which is trashed by the same reviewer for Poetry as certain New Formalist poets and poet-Laureate Ted "Cornhusker" Kooser. The reviewer, Brian Philips, gets off some good one-liners at the expense of poets of various tendencies. (tinny anitquarianism, etc...) He is not wholly wrong about Howe either, but I think his remark about her intellectual incoherence is off the mark--or maybe not... Unfortunately, this book, which I have been reading myself before I read the review, does have some obvious weaknesses, but surely a position of "bewilderment," in which I often find myself, is not incompatible with a desire for social justice?

I am a little uneasy about Howe's religiosity, myself. Supposedly it is made more palatable by the fact that it is shrouded in doubt and uncertainty. So she's not one of "those" religious people who think they have access to some actual "truth." But then why give so much weight to that particular religious tradition? Why not go whole-hog to doubt and bewilderment?

The actual poetry is uneven, which makes reading the book interesting. It does oscillate between language poetry and religious revelation in odd and unexpected ways. I guess that's what I like about it. I'm past my stage of enchantment with everything she writes. I'm getting a little more critical at this point.

One more thing that's always confused me: when Cummings writes

"when serpents bargain for the right to squirm
and the sun strikes to earn a living wage,
when thorns regard their roses with alarm
and rainbows are insured against old age"

Is he taking a position on labor relations? After all, you don't see the SUN going on strike, why should we allow YOU to form unions? "You want social security, you ridiculous creatures? Why, RAINBOWS don't have it, why should you! You don't see PORCUPINES suing doctors for malpractice, do you?" I know I should just sit back and enjoy the poem, not worry about the internal logic of the metaphors, a logic which so often turns out to be self-annulling.

Simian metaphors always confuse me anyway. I'm never sure whether we are supposed to be like them, or they are supposed to be like us.

But the poem is not about hermeneutics generally : it's about a particular 20th-cent. pathology of "secondary" language (ie., language about language, language about texts, hermeneutical writing, theory theory) - a pathology which applies its own secondary character to a definition of all language, language in general: in particular, the various mental products or monkey-screeches of the deconstructionists.

You attack the poem as irrelevant : but you're only able to do this by blurring or effacing the specific target of the satire

Doesn't the poem itself belong to this world of language about language? Wouldn't its critique apply equally to all linguistic endeavours (whether speech utterances of interpretations of utterances) not confined to simple warnings of impending danger, including itself? Are not the deconstructionst's writings the exact opposite of monkey screeches, if the latter are simple warnings of impending danger? To me the object of the satire is already blurred, since the satire could logically be applied to ALL human language. So yes, my critique of the poem depends on drawing a more general lesson than the specific (and rather lame!) critique of "theory" that Lake wants to make. I'm saying, if you rule out the "hermeneutics of suspicion" because you are afraid of being eaten by a lion, you are ruling out a lot of other things that also might get you eaten by a lion.

Is that particular poem about poetry?

It's about hermeneutics, or the interpretation of texts. Hermeneutics has its origins in the interpretation of enigmatic and poetic religious texts. Lake suggests that you don't need a sophisticated theory to interpret an utterance like "the lions are coming" in monkey language. What's the point? We all know this. We do in fact need a more sophisticated hermeneutics even to read a smooth and clever poem.

Satire is allowed (to answer the 2nd question) but the satirist can be skewered in turn. Lake ain't Swift. The satire is intellectually incoherent here, in my view, because it tries to say something about "hermeneutics" without any understanding of the complexities involved. Doesn't hermeneutics start with figural language? So what's the point of talking about it in a context in which figuration is not even relevant? Or am I being too literal minded?

A deconstructionist (which I am not) would say: The poem puts into play a certain deconstructive aporia between the figural and the literal. Read as a statement about human beings, it doesn't seem to have any traction, any play; it misses the point. Read as a tale about monkeys, it is simply obvious: monkeys scream and get out of the way of lions, with no need for fancy hermeneutics. So what?

Pugnacious Pinoy : The "Up-note" reading voice

This poem, "A Lesson in Hermeneutics" calls out for a good oldfashioned deconstruction. One could point out, for example, that the monkey who took the time to compose a warning about an approaching eagle or lion in iambic pentameter would also be eaten. Does Lake want to limit human communication to what monkeys are capable of? Consider the figures of speech that are off-limits to them:

allegory: they wouldn't understand Lake's own poem, which attempts to speak of human activities by speaking of non-human actors.

irony: suppose a monkey mistook a tree branch for a snake and raised a false alarm. Later on, the monkeys are talking: "Hey Fred, that was sure a frightening snake you warned us about this morning!"

hyperbole: "five thousand lions are coming!!"

litotis: "being carried off by an eagle is not entirely pleasant."

chiasmus: "working hard, or hardly working?"

Sure, I don't want my stoplight or my fire alarm to be ironical: "Well, sure it is red, but I'll go through anyway; it's a notoriously sarcastic traffic signal!"

But most of what we use poetry for rises above the level of simple fire alarms or APBs. If a monkey stopped to analyze the phonetic pattern of another monkey, "I think his accent is definitely from south of the swamp" and gets eaten up, does than mean we should we outlaw departments of linguistics too?

Evidently Lake wants us to pronounce the word "circling" as "cir-cuh-ling." Oops, I stopped to analyze the meter and was swept up by a hawk. Goodbye.

Nick Piombino's incisive and brilliant essay on paranoia has been translated into Spanish. The case Nick makes is quite convincing; I am happy to call the style of the current occupant of the White House "paranoid." I do have a few questions, though. When we use terms that refer to individual psyches and apply these terms to entire cultures or parts of cultures, what exactly are we doing? Is this a metonymy: society is dominated by those suffering from paranoia, or a metaphor: the culture acts as though it were a paranoid individual? Or is it some combination of the two?

If paranoia is caused by some chemical imbalance of the brain, how can the culture itself be paranoid? The culture does not have a brain in the sense that an individual does.

(Aside: I have no problem using the word "phobia" to describe those who have a pathological thought about the sexual orientation of Sponge Bob or Buster Baxter or Winnie the Pooh. But is this the same sort of "phobia" that we associate with people who cannot stand to be in elevators or see spiders? Are these psychological pathologies of the body politic located in individual brains, or are we using these terms metaphorically? If "homophobia" is similar to arachnophobia, should we simply see it as a mental health issue, without blaming those who suffer from this ailment? We could give anti-anxiety drugs to James Dobson)

How exactly, does the mental pathology make the jump to the level of culture? What is the mechanism? Is it when X number of powerful people succumb to the mental illness in question?

How fair is this to mentally ill people, to use their ailments as metaphors for everything that is wrong with the world? Isn't it more frightening that seemingly sane individuals, who would probably not have any malfunction of the brain, are paranoid in this cultural sense?

Finally, does the Piombino analysis, which rings true enough, depend on (largely discredited) Freudian ideas about the etiology of mental disease? If I accept Nick's analysis as valid (which I would like to do), am I also buying into a Freudian scheme? Do we still want to use Freudian concepts for cultural critique even when they no longer apply in the strict sense to the individual psyche? To what degree does our easy acceptance of these ideas depend on an atmosphere of uncritical cultural "Freudianism"?

Steve Tills wonders at my enthusiasm for the David Shapiro poem "Father Knows Best." It's a fair question, why do I find the poem so compelling? I'm glad you asked. First of all, I should clarify that "near perfect," in the way I'm using it here, refers to a quality of a poem that might have some minor imperfection, but that manages to convince me that it can do no wrong. In other words, one could easily quibble with a few details in the poem (as Steve does) but these details do not seem to damage the poem's luminous power. (I did make a typo, replacing the word "which" with "without" at the beginning of last line of penultimate stanza.)

I like the poem's transparency and emotional openness: you have no doubt at all about what the poem is about. Yet nowhere do you feel that the poem is stating its point in too unsubtle a way. It has the oddness of a dream, and demonstrates that Freud was wrong: you don't need to interpret dreams: their meaning has a transparent luminosity: it is only a matter of seeing what is there. Yet the language is oblique enough to avoid the flat obviousness that such a poem could easily acquire.

The reference to the 50s sit-com introduces a campy element. The Mary Poppins umbrellas too. There is a knowingness to the poem, but this element is not overdone either. The balance between the childlike dream and the adult knowingness of the autopsychoanalyst is "near perfect."

There is also that delicate balance between the "universal" and the "particular." In other words, the poem could only be about David Shapiro; it is his experience, his voice. And yet my identification with the experience is unproblematic. It could easily be my father in the dream!

Also, the tension between narrative transparency and lyric opacity, the way the poem builds and maintains the mood of strangeness.

In short, for me it is a "near perfect poem" in the exact technical sense of the term--if such a reckless hyerbole can have an exact meaning. I cannot oblige anyone to feel the same way about it, but I'm glad for the chance to explain what I meant.

Other books arriving: Antonio Méndez Rubio's Poesía sin mundo quotes me on page 39. Suddenly, my words take on an authority and conviction that they didn't have when they were only my words. The translation into Spanish helps.

Méndez Rubio makes basically the same argument that I make about recent Spanish poetry, but in a different theoretical language. I am happy, both that he reaches the same conclusions, and that his language is a different one.

A book of sonnets by Ben Lerner, from Copper Canyon Press: The Lichtenberg Figures.

Differentials by M. Perloff (this one I had to pay for.)

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Not to be Sillimanesque, but the hits to this blog in the past few days have been much heavier than usual. I can't really explain why. I haven't even been attempting to induce a gastrointestinal disorder in Mike Snider. Could it be my comment on the "poetry reading chant"?

Speaking of which, if anyone has an mp3 of this chant, I would like to have it so I can analyze it more accurately. Also, does anyone have an opinion as to its gender distribution? My first impulse is to say that women do it more often. What well-known poets use the "poetry reading chant"? I'm not talking about all pretentious modes of reading poetry, only the particular chant in which every accented syllable is extended and sung at the same pitch, and the voice drops a perfect fifth for the unaccented syllables.

The law of sabbatical: tasks expand to fill the time allotted them.

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Here's one of those near perfect David Shapiro poems:

FATHER KNOWS BEST

It is the old show, but the young son can fly.
He sees pink and blue and red umbrellas in the air.
They teach him how to fly.
Of course the family does not see and has resentments.

One day at a snow party he tries to prove he can fly.
But he only leaps a bit and loses the jumping contest.
Then Father realizes son must enclose but a few electrons in his fist
Then son flies high above the family garage and trees, branch by branch.

There are no umbrellas, there are only frosty parachutes,
Little angels who instruct him how to fly.
He must not struggle too much with his hands,
Which having practiced the violin now dog-paddle in air.

High above the invigorated gulf the air walks down to its own road.
And sister jumps up in a dual column of wind.
Inside, Mother serves breakfast; the bluejay gulps at the feeding station.
The family now knows he can fly, but still father knows best.

Perloff: "... paradoxically, the poems of Bruce Andrews or Harryette Mullen are at one level more accessible to students than are those of W.B Yeats or Ezra Pound. For however scrambled an "experimental" poem may be--however non-syntactic nonlinear, or linguistically complex--it is, after all, written in the language of the present, which is to say the language of the students who are reading it."

She goes on to say "... the idea of teaching 'beyond the familiar canon' that I have been asked to discuss here is something of a mystery to me, because there is no longer a canon beyond which to go! At Stanford University ... we have English PhD candidates who have never read Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' much less Milton's 'Lycidas.'"

"Teaching the New Poetries: The Case of Rae Armantrout."

A few recent gifts I should acknowledge here:

Several books from David Shapiro.

A new Carve, edited by Aaron Tieger. Contains poems by Anthony Robinson and others. Also a chapbook by Aaron in the same envelope.

A book by Rodney Koeneke entitled Rouge State..

And the interval between the high and low pitch of the poetry chant is a perfect fifth.