Pushkin & US (U.S.)

Individual poets, whatever their imperfections may be, are driven all their lives by that inner companion of the conscience which is, after all, the genius of poetry in their hearts and minds. I speak of a companion of the conscience because to every faithful poet, the faithful poem is an act of conscience. - Wallace Stevens

Have been reading interesting book on Pushkin and other Russian poets of his generation (The esoteric tradition in Russian Romantic literature, by Lauren Leighton).

Leighton explores the background in Freemasonry which, for the poets, included some knowledge & application of numerology, "cabalistics", and other esoteric codes in their poetry. She quotes Pushkin : "How fun it is to guide one's lines / with ciphers precisely row by row." & she investigates the incredibly sophisticated numerical design in Pushkin's gambling story, "The Queen of Spades". (Anna Akhmatova : "how complex, The Queen of Spades. Layer upon layer.")

But the numbers games of Pushkin and fellow poets (such as Bestuzhev, .a.k.a. "Marlinsky") were motivated not only by aesthetic "fun", but by a need for secrecy. In the early 19th century, revolution was in the air - Romantic poets (inspired by French & American models) expressed heroic aspirations for liberty, democracy, the end of autocracy.... & naturally, came up against the Czar & the secret police (cf. the Decembrist revolt, on which Leighton elaborates).

In fact, what strikes me, reading this study, is how (apparently) seamlessly knit-together were aesthetics and civics in the vocation of poet - in the poet's self- and public image. Poets were (re-)tellers of popular tales, romantic novelists, vox populi, "public intellectuals." They were also tangled up in webs of intrigue and complicity with the Czarist government, and the small (& murky) world of elite aristocracy. The oppressive might of a centralized, unaccountable government, in dialectical fashion, clarified the moral position of the liberal intelligentsia : & this continued even into the 20th century (see Mandelstam's remark - in one of his essays(?) - confirming his "sacred vow to the Fourth Estate").

I started thinking in a vague way, walking to work this morning, just how much this world of poets & literature differs from our own. Here, today, in the U.S., we tend to take political liberty for granted : the temptation is not so much in the direction of conspiracy or extremism, as toward a complacent kind of factionalism. The basic principles of government are not in question; instead, the debates are over how to apply them, and on what ethical-pragmatic-political grounds. We do not have so much a "liberal intelligentsia" as a political class, divided by party affiliation & allegiance to contrasting ideals. We have a nation polarized by partisanship, more interested in one-upping the opposition than in finding common ground. We have professional political careers maintained primarily by lobbyists & the media. Meanwhile, in poetry world, we have a sort of institutionalized "poetry class", dedicated to the idea of differentiating "poetry" as a special kind of substance and activity which requires special treatment, and distinct professional-academic institutions for its support. What is involved is a sort of abdication of the role of "poet" as free intellectual, of the poet as engaged writer.

I don't mean to assert this in order to cry "j'accuse" : I'm just as implicated in this abdication as anyone else - perhaps more so. I'm just trying to understand it. We hear the seasonal calls for more political engagement from poets and poetry : poetry should be more clear, more sincere, more virtuous, more popular. Meanwhile, in counterpoint, we have the seasonal & generational developments of special techniques & styles by means of which poetry is supposedly enabled to promote a more enlightened politics (cf., in their various ways, Language Poetry, the Cambridge School, Flarf, Conceptual Poetry...) .

Somehow I find something basic missing from both these wings of the poetry scene. Poetry is only hobbled by a dependence on either institutions or technique. Both of these approaches reduce poetry to a craft, a career, or a cabal. I tend, rather, to conceive of poetry as a gift and a spirit. The free-standing autonomy of the process of making art (& poems) is allied with imagination, a profoundly synthetic faculty of human intelligence. Yet this constellation of forces is not driven or motivated toward more autonomy (ie., indifference), but in the other direction : toward deeper participation. Here art is allied with science as free intellectual activity : and it's this essential freedom which allows art & poetry to bridge partisan divides, to question & evaluate political slogans & vested interests, to find common ground (often ironic) between supposedly bitter ideological opponents.

The kind of literary activity I am idealizing can only be developed on the fertile ground of literary tradition. We have to get beyond the knee-jerk experimentalism of the nouveau-nouveau (which is profoundly shallow & uninformed), as well as from the marketable brands of traditionalism which reduce poetry to a set of learnable skills. Poetry is a gift & a calling toward engagement. Craft is inseparable from intellect & worldview, as larger, holistic dimensions. On this basis, the dignity of poetry is something sustained by the inner, moral discipline of individual poets (integrity : Stevens' "conscience"), and granted by society at large : it is not an attribute of professional networking or social cliques.

Odd High Formalism

ODD HIGH FORMALISM

As the talking wheels of American Poetry World wring their hands over various issues (including hand-wringing), and gaze up at the unanswering blue sky crying "whither Poetry?" and such, I would like to outline, briefly, my prediction - not prescription, but prediction - for the general shape of the future, based on the general shape of the past. The past and future of American poetry lies with OHF, or Odd High Formalism.

Not "New Formalism," a 90s movement which called for a return to formal rhyme and meter and received forms (sonnets, sestinas, etc.). The generally reactionary attitude of that trend inhibited more profound experiments with form : as long as we went back to the good old tennis net so sadly neglected since Robert Frost's day, poetry would revive... no.

Nor do I refer to the formalism of the professional avant-garde, primarily represented by the descendants of the NY School, the Language Poets, and various offshoots of experimental Modernism. The formalism of these groups was terribly overshadowed by two influential & contradictory notions drawn from 20th-century philosophy and "theory," namely : 1) reality is constituted by language, and 2) language does not, cannot, really represent or refer to anything outside itself. It's not hard to see where such ideas might lead with regard to poetry : straight into very formal but also highly-mannered self-enclosed & solipsistic literary entities ("language poems" & such).

The perceived ailments & frailty of contemporary American poetry - it's academic effeteness, its anemic detachment from the larger, living world, its introverted fishbowl solipsism & narcissism, its loss of a public audience & the ordinary reader, etc. & so on - might be remedied by a clearer recognition of the main tradition in American poetry, which is none other than... Odd High Formalism.

What is the nature of Odd High Formalism? Here I can only sketch its main elements in a minimal way. Perhaps the best way to understand OHF is to consider the kinship between poetry, music, and public dancing. An era's leading styles of social dancing are paralleled in its poetry. A generation ago, in a series of books, Alastair Fowler analyzed the design properties of Renaissance poetry - combining number mysticism, seasonal or calendrical measures of time, the occasional thematics of major holidays, public events or persons. Poems were shaped to mimic the stately, ceremonial movements of social dancing. Think, on the other hand, about today's social dancing styles : mostly anarchic wiggle, bump & jump. & though fancier, more formal dancing seem to be making a comeback, it is still mostly limited to individual dancing couples, rather than the elaborate group dances of the past. And anarchic wiggle & hop seems like a pretty fair description of the formal approach of much contemporary poetry.

The poet launches into the poem : the audience or reader has no idea where it's going in a formal sense. It's free, it's experimental... it's of the moment, it's raw, it's real... these are the current values. Poetry wants to blend in with the prosaic activities of the world around it. It wants to be liked for blending in. But it will never be liked on this basis : it will only be held in slight contempt. Odd High Formalism accentuates poetry's difference from prose and ordinary life, by lifting its intricate and elegant formalities to another, higher, more intense dimension. Not a dimension of obscurity or elitism : rather a realm of highly-articulate order and elegance. The world of hip-hop and rap is closer to the ancient and Renaissance sense of poetry than anything being produced by the mainstream poetry factories. One may reject the hip-hop artist's often bleak, violent, selfish, cynical and misogynist worldview, yet still learn from hip-hop's focus on formal differentiation and intricacy (the meter, the rhymes, the word-play) - its separation from prose.

Most of the really great American poets of the past have been Odd High Formalists : that is, they have developed a highly-ordered & articulate formality which easily distinguishes itself from prose of any kind. It is inventive, personal, and suited to its own unique aims, rather than patterned on traditional schemes for tradition's sake (hence its "oddness"). Think of Marianne Moore's sui generis formal patterns; Elizabeth Bishop's elegant & playful designs; Emily Dickinson's construction of a poetic universe within a strict and minimalist formal pattern; Whitman's careful development of his own unique cosmic-bardic metrical form and manner; Melville's re-invention of the philosophical travel poem; Poe's highly-mathematical and calculated sense of poetry's rhythmic/tonal mesmerism; Hart Crane's re-invention of the Pindaric praise-song; John Berryman's manic formalism in the Dream Songs... the list could go on for pages. What these poets have in common is a bold - almost extreme - conception of poetry as an intense, highly-differentiated formal dance of sound, meaning, theme, occasion. The OHF poetry of the future will set a new standard of difficulty. This is not a poetry that will "blend in" easily with the prose world : it will be very much harder to write than what is offered at present in schools & literary communities. It will have to distinguish itself - by its formal qualities - from prose. It will have to offer a very high and strange dancing music, a relief - both from prose and from the mannered allusive theoretical academic obscurities which passed for "difficulty" in the last century. Only American Odd High Formalism will set the measures of the dance to come.

A Dissociated Writing Program (or, the Quiddity of Things)

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April 2010 ushers in the conjunction of National Poetry Month with the vast and bulbous Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Conference (in Denver this year), and so, under the lights of such stars, we non-attenders and outsiders are tempted to assess the national state of the art. But the first question is, is there such a “national state”? Should we call it “America” or “the United States,” or neither? I’m going to use “America” and “American” here for the sake of convenience. But simply deploying a name is not enough : you have to prove the name corresponds to something in nature. Presently we Americans are enduring a time of extraordinary divisions, partisan disputations, multiple balkanizations, political and economic stress, upheavals and dislocations, war and terrorism, (man-made) ecological threats, poverty, uncertainty, change and anxiety; is it possible even to speak of a single American nation and culture anymore?

I’m not going to try to answer that question directly. My interest here is in the character of poetry, especially American poetry, now – another vast and diffuse and elusive phenomenon; it seems the only proper way to begin talking about that subject is to try to describe the limits of one’s own perspective and method of approach. My method and perspective in this essay are going to be deliberately eccentric. I’m going to look at our subject through the lens of a single critical concept, which was articulated just 100 years ago by a Russian poet in St. Petersburg, a founding member of the fleeting Russian literary movement called “Acmeism” – Nikolai Gumilev. The concept or hermeneutic tool was something he called “chasteness.” Gumilev identified chasteness with a general sense of the integrity of individual, actual things in the world. The concept has religious, Biblical roots (the earth and universe are a creation, which God “saw was good” : the divine is present through God’s “incarnation”), but it is primarily (in Gumilev’s hands) a philosophical idea, with cultural and artistic consequences. Chasteness is akin to Joyce’s aesthetic of the “epiphany” : the artist’s sense to recognize, and to express, the brilliant, distinct particularity of individual things – their quiddity.

The philosophical roots of Gumilev’s notion are clearly planted in Aristotle. Aristotle’s intellectual modesty – that is, the essential humility of the scientific investigator, empirical, inductive – allowed for the substantiality of distinct things, for the “concrete universals” of poetic representation. In Aristotle’s Poetics, the integral wholeness of dramatic plot (beginning, middle, end) undergirds the unique architectonic of each work of poetic art, which in turn mirrors the chaste and distinct integrity of the matter which it represents.

It is indeed the architectonic dimension of Gumilev’s Aristotelian approach which seems particularly interesting and potentially fruitful. Like an Escher drawing, or a series of mutually-supporting vaults, this notion of chaste integrity bridges the distance between the distinct integrity of the poem, and the normative qualities of human experience, the ethos, which it expresses, guards and celebrates. It is an exercise in equilibrium. And there was (and is) a democratic or egalitarian aspect to this projected ethos, since, as Gumilev put it, chasteness represents the inherent dignity of each person and thing, as it is : that is, its right to be itself. (As Mandelstam wittily put it, Acmeism celebrated the “beautiful Law of Identity : A = A.”)

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So then – how do we apply this imported Russian aesthetic concept to contemporary American conditions? As noted above, we inhabit a time of particular storm and stress, of ideological polemic and conflict, of multiple challenges to any claim to authority or consensus. But the Gumilevian/Aristotelian idea of chasteness/integrity, when used as a lens, brings surprising things to light. First of all, it can possibly justify our concern for a specifically American poetry, in that, by the law of “epiphany” and chaste integrity, every culture has a unique history – a particular set of circumstances, characteristics, traditions, choices, events, which go into defining its quiddity. To base one’s approach on such a quasi-scientific, disinterested method is to push back against both ends of the current spectrum of polemics : that is, one the one hand, against neo-classical formalists and traditionalists, who center the norms of poetry in English, and the richness of culture per se, in the great works of past times and places; and on the other hand, against the anti-historical and anti-traditional relativism of the postmodern “permanent revolutionaries.” Our poetry, in such “chaste” light, will be seen as inevitably the expression of a distinct culture and nation (which will also, of course, inevitably include its own set of borrowings, hybridities, endurances, etc.).

Such might be viewed as a statement of the obvious; but then, lost in our byzantine labyrinth of literary jargon, polemics, and the Emperor’s ever-new clothes, sometimes the obvious becomes the necessary. Moreover, Gumilev’s concept rhymes to a striking degree with something very characteristic of American poetry : the sharp-eyed, down-to-earth affection for, and attention to, things-in-themselves. Robert Frost rendered this strain (out of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson) memorably and perhaps best : “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” In his introductory essay to the very popular (and still in print!) mid-20th century anthology, the Mentor Book of Major American Poets(1), Edwin Honig focused on the fond attention to particulars – the confluence of humble, everyday reality and poetic metaphor, in imagery – as the defining characteristic of American poetry (beginning with the Puritan poet Edward Taylor, and growing stronger from there). Imagistic realism, by itself, is an insufficient measure of American poetry (or any poetry) as a whole (in the same way that the Imagist movement of the early 20th-century had inherent limitations); however, when subsumed within the more general concept of integrity (as presented by Gumilev, Aristotle, Joyce), the architectonics of a national literature begin to become visible again (in outline or sketch) through the polemical mist.

In a recent study of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams(2), Harold Kaplan projects a similar sense of American poetry as integral and distinct, by contrasting Eliot’s and Pound’s attachment to traditional European cultural authority, with Stevens’ and Williams’ bent toward democratic humanism. Without referencing the Acmeists, Kaplan describes how Stevens’ notion of human “nobility” was part of an effort to define the social purposes of poetry in relation to more general ethical norms – that is, grounded in a similar “chaste integrity” of persons and things. (Interestingly, in an appendix, Kaplan underlines an affinity between the argument of his book, and a study by Michael Eskin, on the ethos and poetics of Emanuel Levinas, Paul Celan, and… Osip Mandelstam(3)). The integrity of both things and poems, according to Kaplan (and Levinas), is underwritten by the fundamental integrity of persons : and this ontology has consequences for theories of literature – for the status of reading, writing, language and meaning. Kaplan outlines a philosophical realism, grounded not in systemic abstraction, but in a sense of reality that begins, ends, and centers in consciousness – the reflective, affective, ethical, and expressive consciousness of the human person. Again, this affirmation of the distinct personhood of authors and readers is in harmony with what we have called the American (and Acmeist, and Joycean) affirmation of the chaste integrity of things-in-themselves – things, including art works.

Things, including poems. Rather than carry these proposals further into the realm of polemic, here I only want to suggest that such polemic might prove necessary, eventually. By this I mean that the more deliberately one defines the characteristics of an American literature, the more inevitably will disagreements follow – since we inhabit a contentious democratic culture, subject to change, growth and decline. Furthermore, as a critical perspective is articulated, its application to actual works (by both critics and poets) becomes more self-conscious and differentiated. The more it becomes possible to see the outlines of a particular poetic phenomenon, the more one begins to distinguish between the inherently aesthetic and the ideologically (or otherwise) tendentious. What I believe Gumilev’s Russian Acmeism(4) and Kaplan’s American humanism offer us are the beginnings of a “way of seeing” our own poetry – as independent art, grounded in imaginative freedom, in the substantial dignity of persons, and in the quiddity of things.

1) Mentor Book of Major American Poets, ed. by Oscar Williams and Edwin Honig (NY : Signet, 1962)
2) Kaplan, Harold. Poetry, politics, and culture : argument in the work of Eliot, Pound, Stevens and Williams (Brunswick, NJ : Transaction, 2007).
3) Eskin, Michael. Ethics and dialogue : in the works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan (NY : Oxford Univ. Press, 2001)
4) For an invaluable study of Acmeism and the poetics of Gumilev and Mandelstam, see : Justin Doherty, The Acmeist movement in Russian poetry : culture and the word (Oxford Univ. Press, 1995)