After The Death of Poetry
After The Death of Poetry
After The Death of Poetry
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AFTER
THE
PBATTBI
of
AFTER
THE
DEATH
OF
POETRY
AFTER Poet
THE and
DEATH Audience
OF in
POETRY Contemporary
America
VERNON SUBTLEY
and to my father
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments xi
Abbreviations xiii
Notes 193
Index 205
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Acknowledg
ments
ABBREVIATIONS
DIFFICULTY
AND THE
Nineteen forty-five may well have been among the last years in which
Tindall might have accused the institutions of education of leaving
readers unprepared for modernism. A body of criticism devoted to
championing and explaining modern poetry had been growing for
some two decades by then and was poised to take over the universi
ties. The movement into teaching positions of poet-critics identified
with New Criticism, and thus with the modernist revolution, like
Tate, Yvor Winters, and R. P. Blackmur, confirmed the triumph of
modernism—its movement from the margins to the center of lit-
erary culture—and coincided with a more general absorption of
12 cultural life into the academy. The enormous weight of the univer
sity thus was placed behind modernism, and techniques of reading
closely adapted to modern poetry were taught to a new generation
After of readers. The academy was now making modernist readers and
was rapidly becoming the only arena in which readers were made, as
~~ ~ the belletrist and bohemian social spaces where the art of modern
ism had been nurtured were gradually absorbed into the academic
orbit. The poets of the postwar years found a new audience, one ac-
of Poetry customed to making sense of modernist "difficulty" and fitted with
habits of reading and standards for judgment that enabled them to
grasp and respond to the witty, paradoxical, erudite, and fragmented
constructions typical of high modernism.
A large segment of the poets who emerged in the postwar years
availed themselves of this new, institutionally produced audience,
creating a style both institutionally sanctioned and "modern," what
W. D. Snodgrass once referred to as "academic experiment" (47).
Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Adrienne Rich,
W. S. Merwin, Donald Hall, and James Wright are only a few of
the poets whose work, at least early in their careers, recognizably
aimed itself toward the audience produced by the institutional dis
semination of New Critical reading strategies. Robert Lowell, the
poet who most successfully engaged this audience, made no secret
of the influence that New Critical writings had had on his creative
work: "When I was twenty and learning to write, Allen Tate, Eliot,
Blackmur, and Winters, and all those people were very much news.
You waited for their essays, and when a good critical essay came
out it had the excitement of a new imaginative work" (237). James
Breslin notes that "every stylistic feature of [Lowell's] poems marks
them as obscure, difficult—hard to write and hard to read" (18);
but he goes on to observe as well that Lowell's reward for his diffi
culty, in contrast to the outrage that greeted T. S. Eliot's early work,
was prizes and fellowships: "Eliot had to create his own audience,
Lowell received one ready-made—the one created (in the main) by
Eliot" (20). The local difficulty of Lowell's work was indeed formi
dable, but it was a difficulty of interpretation rather than the more
fundamental kind of modal difficulty that points to disagreements
about the very nature of poetry; few readers questioned the pro
priety of Lowell's writing a symbol-ridden, highly allusive poetry
whose coherence was achieved through imagery rather than through
logical argument or narrative.
This comfortable relation between poet and audience threatened
to eradicate the element of risk and dissonance that had been such 13
an important component of modernist identity. The academic mod
ernists strove to keep alive their quarrel with the world, writing
essays with titles like "The Isolation of Modern Poetry" and "The Introduc-
Obscurity of the Poet" in which they blamed their society for the
marginal status of poetry and poets in it. But as poets and critics ~
became increasingly established within the academy, postures of re
volt became increasingly difficult to maintain. For a generation of
poets raised on a myth of aesthetic vanguardism in which the extent
of readers' resistance to a work was an index of its value, the pass
ing of an age of antagonism between poetry and its readers was no
unmixed blessing.
Of course, a substantial contingent of poets resisted the academic
capture of modernism. A few eccentrics like Robert Bly rejected
the whole of Anglo-American poetic modernism. Most of his con
temporaries were not so thoroughgoing, though, preferring to em
phasize neglected aspects of the modernist heritage or to champion
romantic and prophetic traditions that modernism had devalued.
Allen Ginsberg and fellow Beats found inspiration in Blake and
Whitman, poets who had been specific objects of Eliotic suspicion,
while Charles Olson and the "Projectivists" chose William Carlos
Williams, a minor figure in the New Critical canon, as a central
influence. By 1960, the "war of the anthologies" had broken out;
the academic modernists gathered in New Poets of England and
America were joined on the bookshelves that year by Donald Allen's
antiacademic anthology The New American Poetry, which quickly
brought to prominence alternatives to the verse that had shaped
itself to fit New Critical reading practices.
The opposition between academic formalists and avant-garde
experimentalists in the 1950s and 1960s has been adequately de
scribed elsewhere, for the most part in terms that follow the self-
understanding of the insurgents, who saw themselves fighting for
spontaneity as opposed to calculation, immediacy as opposed to re
flection, innovation as opposed to tradition, freedom as opposed to
constraint (J. Breslin 1—22). Stepping back from the terms of the de
bate as it occurred, however, one can see a ground of shared assump
tions between the two camps. With the exception of a few eccentrics
like Bly, this contest played itself out as a debate over different ways
of embodying the values represented by modernism, or over which
set of values present in modernism was properly to be appealed to
by its inheritors. Lowell may have favored Eliot (as filtered through
14 Tate), and Ginsberg may have favored Pound and Williams, but both
located their most immediate and important sources of inspiration
in the high modernist generation. The two sides shared a sense of
After the enormous consequences of the decision to write in "closed" or
"open" forms; both exhibited what one might call an attitude of
technological determinism, an assumption that formal choices were
the Death
the central, defining distinctions in poetry. Both were at times given
to apocalyptic rhetoric regarding the unholy alliance of consum
of Poetry erism and the military-industrial complex; the political visions of
Lowell's "Where the Rainbow Ends" and Ginsberg's "Howl" mani
fest, at least in tone, some striking similarities. Indeed, one might
see the two camps as having split between them the audience be
queathed by modernism, an audience that had been defined by its
estrangement from bourgeois values and cultural forms, with the
academic formalists having inherited the elite intellectuals and the
New American Poets having inherited that segment of the mod
ernist audience whose antibourgeois energies were channeled into
bohemian life-styles and utopian politics.
Poets who began their careers in the period after World War II,
then, faced a set of options that presented itself with a certain clarity.
They could write according to New Critical prescription and avail
themselves of the substantial audience that had been created by the
installation of modernism within the academy. Or they could join
an antiacademic opposition that had shaped itself as a mirror image
of the academic formalism it was rejecting and so stage an appeal
to the alienated urbanites who had traditionally populated Bohemia
and formed the audience of the avant-garde. Spokesmen for the New
American Poets tended to represent their movement in the terms of
heroic rebellion, a liberation from academic constraints into a new
poetic of spontaneity and freedom. Not every observer, even among
those outside the formalist camp, agreed; surely John Ashbery had
Ginsberg and the Beats in mind in 1968 when he remarked that
protests against the mediocre values of our society such as the
hippie movement seem to imply that one's only way out is to
join a parallel society whose stereotyped manners, language,
speech and dress are only reverse images of the one it is trying to
reject Is there nothing, then, between the extremes of Levit-
town and Haight-Ashbury, between an avant-garde which has
become a tradition and a tradition which is no longer one? [393]
In my chapter on John Ashbery I try to discuss more fully the way he
places himself between the poles of an institutionalized modernism 15
and a reflexive avant-gardism. For the moment, I want to propose
that both alternatives lacked the dynamic quality that had charac-
terized the relations of the high modernist poets with their audience. Introduc-
Modernist rhetoric had acted to select, and in some measure to pro
duce, its readers from a diffuse reading public; the poets of the post- -
war period found their audiences for the most part already selected tton
and trained. David Trotter remarks that "the audience for poetry
today is no longer diffuse, having been to a large extent preselected
and trained by academic study. Whether or not a contemporary poet
is read for the right reason may well depend less on his rhetorical
exertions than on the way that audience has been taught" (148-
49). The New American Poets aligned themselves less directly with
the reading strategies through which modernism had entered and
conquered the university, so they wrote manifestos, founded maga
zines and presses, and engaged in the sort of audience-building mea
sures typical of the early days of modernism. But they were using
modernist values to appeal to an audience already imbued with an
appreciation and understanding of those values; the Beats and Pro-
jectivists, in their polemical writings and in their poems, were trying
to claim for themselves the values of experimentation and formal
innovation that modernism had privileged, rather than proposing
new measures of value. The New American Poets put forward an
idea about modernism and its consequences different from that of
the poets shaped by the New Criticism, but they depended on their
audience's identification and sympathy with modernism, and so, no
less than the academic formalists, addressed themselves to a reader
ship that had been created by the triumph of modernism in the
university. This is perhaps what Richard Poirier has in mind when
he remarks of writers like Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac (and William
Carlos Williams) that "such writers are simply not difficult enough
to persuade anyone not already given over to their ideologies" (41).
Poirier makes this remark, by the way, in a volume that contains a
sustained polemic against modernist "difficulty." I suspect that be
hind it is a sense that the writers he mentions (to whom we might add
such figures as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Olson) remain
too much within what he describes as "the idea that innovation in
the arts is a form of cultural heroism" (112), an idea whose propa
gation was dependent on the institutionalization of modernism that
the counterculturalists professed to oppose.
I can hardly do justice here to Poirier's rich and sinuous argument
16 against modernist difficulty, which is itself in part directed against
the notion that books have arguments that are available to summary.
But I want to consider for a moment his account of the sort of rela-
After tion between reader and writer established by modernist difficulty
as a way of introducing the three poets at the center of this book.
~~ ~ Poirier complains that the difficult modernist text places us in a kind
of double bind as readers; we are encouraged by many elements of
the text "to locate principles of order and structure beneath a frag-
of Poetry mentary surface . . . only to have it then suggested by other elements
in the text that we have been acting in a rather fussy and heavy-
handed fashion, embarrassingly without aristocratic ease" (102—3).
Poirier protests that "no one can be the right kind of reader for
books of this sort," which demand that the reader be "at the same
time casual and encyclopedic" (106). The allusiveness of modern lit
erature, he implies, is a form of bad faith; it demands study from
the reader at the same time that it suggests that the fit audience is
confined to those who can understand without study, who wield a
depth and breadth of knowledge and expertise similar to the poet's.
Poirier, then, is compelled to imagine a middle way between in
sufficiently difficult writers such as Ginsberg and others like T. S.
Eliot, the ostentatious difficulty of whose work masks, in Poirier's
view, an "extreme procedural hesitancy" (107), a profoundly uneasy
relation between the poet and the forms he creates. It's my view
that the most interesting and successful poets who have emerged
since 1945 have tried to find some kind of middle way between the
alternatives of a poetry descended from Eliot, which had become
all too well accommodated to its readers' habits and strategies, and
the oppositional poetics of a figure like Ginsberg, which seemed
too much a negative image of the academic mode, and which was
predicated on a no longer plausible notion of cultural heroism in
herited uncritically from the modernist generation. In their different
ways, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and John Ashbery sought to
place themselves outside the opposition described by the war of the
anthologies, to find audiences that could be addressed in terms out
side those that defined the conflict between the academics and the
antiacademics.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it . . .
[Some Trees 51]
While these lines may be taken to express no more than the distance
from "the world" that any love enforces upon those who share it, the
passage might also be read with specific reference to gay sexuality.
Lovers meeting surreptitiously might indeed arrange a meeting that
appears to be "by chance," and the odd syntax of the sentence, in
which the lovers themselves are made the measure of their distance
from the world, perhaps hints at a more profound disagreement
with the way of "the world" than can be easily or directly expressed.
The closing of the poem posits a self-protective enclosure of private
speech:
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
Again, the reticence of these lines defeats any attempt to attach their
need for "defense" to any specific threat, yet one can certainly imag
ine that in 1956, at least for the poet and his lover, and perhaps for a
certain range of readers as well, these lines may have been read with
a more specific form of self-protective silence in mind.
29
Introduc
tion
ELIZABETH BISHOP'S
SILENCES
It is of wood
After built somewhat like a box. No. Built
like several boxes in descending sizes
one above the other.
-he Death Each is turned half-way round so that
its corners point toward the sides
of the one below and the angles alternate.
of Poetry [Cp ^
But these scenes flee, and the poem ends with a confrontation be
tween speaker and weed:
A similar set of anxieties about the female body, and about the poet's
relation to a "nature" associated with the female body, recurs in
"At the Fishhouses," which like "The Weed" is structured around
an opposition between an "illuminated scene" and a knowledge
acquired in darkness. "At the Fishhouses" seems at first straightfor
wardly to follow the "Tintern Abbey" pattern of landscape descrip
tion rising to reflective meditation on the human relation to nature.
But just as Wordsworth's poem manages to subvert, by its baffling
hesitations, qualifications, and counterturns, the model it seems to
be in the process of creating, so Bishop's poem is careful to posi
tion itself at a distance from the reflective conclusions it offers. In
doing so, it establishes a distance as well from Marianne Moore's
"A Grave," a poem Bishop obviously had in mind. Moore's poem
is centered upon moments of deliberately reductive declarative syn
tax: "the sea has nothing to give," "the sea is a collector," "it is
neither with volition nor consciousness"; in "A Grave," conditional
syntax operates negatively, as the sign of deluded perception: "as
if there were no such thing as death," "as if it were not that ocean
in which dropped things are bound to sink." Moore's poem, then,
traces its lineage back to Wordsworth's "Peele Castle," in which an
earlier, deluded vision of human reciprocity with nature is replaced
by an awareness of nature's otherness and indifference to human 45
concerns. One source of the difficulty of Bishop's poem is the way in
which it tries to assimilate strategies deriving from "Tintern Abbey"
to the strategies of "Peele Castle," which undoes much of what the Elizabeth
earlier poem had constructed. Moore's poem, less conflicted about
its parentage, uses similitude and conditionality as tropes of nega
Bishop's
tion, marking the distance between the world and human ideas of
it; in Bishop's poem, similitude functions in a significantly more
ambiguous way. Silences
The poem begins with an extended passage of low-key descrip
tion; as in so many crepuscular poems, the observation of a scene
just on the brink of disappearance prepares for a later movement
from visible to visionary:
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished. . . .
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
[CP 64]
The first section notes the gangplanks that "slant up"; here the poet
describes the "long ramp descending into the water." This brief
verse-paragraph brings together the two dominant color schemes of
the poem, the silver of the twilit landscape in the opening section
and the gray of the last section's submerged stones. Silver is the hon
orific of gray, and so the distance seems small, and yet in its way
absolute, as the sense of human connection, however tenuous, of
the first section yields to a deep aloneness in the last. This interlude
perhaps marks too the moment in the poem where the light of sense
goes out, where darkness falls and the poem shifts from perception
to memory and "knowledge," for with the opening line of the final
section the sea, which had been rendered "opaque" by the evening
light, has become "absolutely clear."
This final section begins with a vatic rush of absolutes, in sharp
contrast to the looping, hesitant syntax of the poem's opening half:
"This ... is serious music," as the Irish poet Eavan Boland remarks,
and it is broken off as quickly as it appears by the appearance of
the seal, who seems to arrive, as Boland puts it, from "a whimsical
bedtime story" (87). This hesitation, this need to temper the move 47
ment toward abstraction with a countermovement toward anecdote
and irony, is as much a part of the meaning of the poem as are the
Elizabeth
statements that close it. The phrase that opens this section posits
an absolute distinction between the "mortal," here a synonym for
"human," and "fish and . . . seals," a distinction that is in turn placed Bishop's
in doubt by the poet's easy likening of the seal to herself as "a be
liever in total immersion." This is the only moment of this sort of
cleverness in the poem, and it takes away figuratively what it seems Silences
to give literally; the seal's form of "total immersion" is rather a
different thing from that prescribed by the Baptists. Where earlier
in the poem watery eyes and overspilling sea seemed directly con
gruent, simile here becomes a figure for dissimilitude, marking the
distance between human and animal, and the remainder of the poem
follows a similar pattern of ambiguity and equivocation between
likeness and unlikeness.
After this, the encounter between poet and sea is resumed, but
again not without a moment of hesitation, a kind of drawing back
or shrinking appropriate to contact with this unforgiving element:
The firs are the most direct recollection of Moore in the poem; like
the "firs" that "stand in a procession" and are "reserved as their
contours, saying nothing," in "A Grave" (49), Bishop's trees are
lightly personified, emblems of ceremony and self-containment in
their association "with their shadows." Only after a gesture back
ward to these humanized presences can the poet direct her gaze
steadily down into the sea:
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
After
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
the Death If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
of Poetry dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
[CP 65-66]
The sea is alien and inimical, and the poet can only imagine what
touching or tasting it would be like: the thought experiment carried
out in these "if" clauses brings back a metaphorical knowledge from
a situation in which direct perception cannot be risked. The poet
imagines testing the waters, but what she would find out would in
volve not the sea itself but her own bodily sensations of pain and
bitterness; and the sea is described in these sentences only through
analogy with another element, fire. The final sentence of the poem
seems to offer something like a moral, or at least a conclusion, based
on the encounter the poem records, but in fact this predication is
heavily qualified and proves to be more of a puzzle than might at
first appear. Early drafts read "This is what" rather than "It is like
what," showing that Bishop herself was concerned to add a fur
ther layer of insulation between tenor and vehicle in the course of
revision.
What seems clear enough at first is the characterization of knowl
edge as a cold, astringent, demanding medium that burns our mouths
as it seems to nourish us (the sea being likened to the milk drawn
from "rocky breasts"). Attending to the syntax makes us realize,
however, that no real connection is established between "knowl
edge" and "sea"; the sea is being likened to our imaginajtion. of
knowled^ejather than to knowledge itself. If the opening section of
the poem presents a world of similitude in which the human seems
easily to find a place, the relation between human imagination and
the world it inhabits becomes significantly more problematic in the
course of the final section. The seal is directly likened to the poet,
able to return her gaze, even as its name links it to the element it 4»
inhabits ("sea" and "seal"); the firs stand in a far more tenuous
relationship of likeness to the poet, their way of "associating with
their shadows" constituting an oblique reminder of separateness and Elizabeth
death, those final facts of human existence. Finally, the sea is likened
to an object of our imagining; we have traveled a long way from the
Bishop's
responsive landscape of the first section. Boland defines the "theme"
of the poem as follows: "An outward element—this almost intoler
able water—will be shown, before the poem finishes, to correspond Silences
to the cold interiors of human knowledge" (87). But as knowledge
itself recedes from our grasp behind a series of figures, the corre
spondence posited by the critic comes significantly into question.
"Our knowledge is historical," the poet tells us, but does that make
it similar to, or distinguish it from, the sea which is "derived . . .
forever"?
Likewise, the emotional tenor of these final lines is difficult to
pin down. Bishop seems to have been particularly interested in the
notion of freezing to death; the speaker of "First Death in Nova
Scotia" sees Jack Frost as somehow connected with her cousin's
death, while "The Baptism" involves the death of a young woman
who comes down with a fever after baptism by total immersion in
freezing water. The story "The Farmer's Children" seems particu
larly suggestive in this regard; in it, a stepmother sends her two
stepsons off to sleep in a barn, where they freeze to death. In "At
the Fishhouses," the personification of the "rocky breasts" shades
"the world" with a maternal quality but also hints that the world
may be as indifferent a nurturer as the stepmother of "The Farmer's
Children." Robert Lowell protested "the word breast," which he
found "a little too much in its context perhaps" (letter to Bishop,
21 August 1947, Vassar College Library); presumably Lowell was
v put off by the suggestion of a monstrously extended maternal body.
The suggestion is indeed disturbing and points toward a possible
source of the ambivalence in the lines. The opening section of the
poem seems to celebrate elegiacally the vanishing world of Bishop's
Nova Scotia grandfather, whom she always recalls with warmth in
her writings about her childhood. But looming up behind the figure
of the grandfather is that of the poet's mother, here displaced into an
image of a menacing natural world that nevertheless makes us wish
to touch and taste it, a knowledge that is unbearably painful and yet
Pmakes one desire "total immersion" in it. For Bishop, knowledge of
the mother must be double-edged: sought for to fill the vacancy of
50 !an orphaned childhood, terrifying in its connection to insanity.
1 The "dark and deep" woods Robert Frost once stopped by offered
the poet an attractive oblivion; the "dark deep" sea Bishop confronts
After seems instead an invitation to a painful awareness. The language
Bishop applies to her sea, its figuration as a kind of ice that burns,
recalls Renaissance love poetry, with its rich vocabulary of para
the Death
dox for describing the attraction of what causes pain, and recalls as
well another poem of Frost's, a little poem similarly indebted to the
of Poetry language of courtly love:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
["Fire and Ice," Complete Poems 2.68]
Frost's jaunty eschatological speculations are far away in tone from
the ending of "At the Fishhouses," but I think Frost can help us to
see here the apocalyptic strain concealed in Bishop's poem; read be
side Frost's famous poem, Bishop's ocean of fire/ice takes on some
of the urgency and elevation of the romantic rhetoric of apocalypse.
Bishop is often described as a poet of the visual, whose precise ob
servation is her signature trait, but "At the Fishhouses" seems to
leave the visual behind as it ascends, in darkness, to a visionary per
spective that encompasses "the world" in its glance. Bishop gives up
the making of aesthetic worlds that was so conspicuous a property
of her earlier poetry, but her attraction to world making remains,
to resurface at moments like this one, where she replaces the world
one can actually touch and taste with a world we can encounter
only in imagination, only through the speculative experiments con
ducted in these "if" clauses. Bishop once referred to herself as a
"minor female Wordsworth" (letter to Robert Lowell, n July 1951,
Houghton Library), but "At the Fishhouses," as it moves from a
world of fitting and fitted to a perception of the absolute otherness of
the natural and a counterassertion of the mind's powers of mastery,
explores a major Wordsworthian theme.
What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth. 53
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I—we—were falling, falling, Elizabeth
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918. Bishop's
[CP 160]
The child does not merely sympathize with the aunt's pain, does not Silences
merely imagine herself in her aunt's position, but seems to be her;
the copulative is twice used, and the poet insists upon the physical,
bodily nature of this identification: "in my mouth," "our eyes."
This sense of identification with the aunt is immediately matched,
however, by a sense of self-alienation, by a division within Elizabeth;
she loses her composure in more ways than one:
I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an J,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
[CP 160]
The child talks to herself, addresses herself as "you" a symptom
of self-division reinforced by the gap between "I said" and "I felt,"
which mirrors the gap between what "I knew," the child's feeling of
superiority, and the feeling of the aunt's voice being "in my throat."
The child attempts to place herself, prevent herself from falling into
the "black" space that has been identified with the otherness of
the world represented in National Geographic, but is prevented by
something that she "felt," by a sensation that seems at least in part
physical. Being forced to acknowledge her identity with "them"
with the rest of humanity, inflicts a frightening sense of self-division
upon the child. Similarly, the attempt to anchor her identity by say
ing her name only inflicts a further self-estrangement, for the "Eliza-
beth" that others refer to is a social construct, different from the
54
child herself, only an Elizabeth.
As it proceeds the passage recodes various elements of the poem's
After opening through the new feelings initiated by this cry and the child's
reaction to it. The "shy" child of the first section has here become
a more deeply frightened one; where earlier her shyness seemed
the Death social in origin, here her reluctance to raise her eyes is rooted in
deeper causes. Where the child of the first section "could read,"
here she "couldn't look any higher"; the mastery she earlier exer-
of Poetry cised through the glance is undone as she becomes implicated in
what she sees. While the "trousers and skirts and boots" point in
one way to sexual differentiation, in another the list, as it arrives
at the "boots" (which recall the unisexual dress of Osa and Martin
Johnson), collapses gender difference into identity, and humanness
into objecthood. Where before, the waiting room had been filled
with grown-up people, here people are reduced to an assemblage
of parts and pieces, knees, articles of clothing, hands; people have
been transformed into objects "lying under the lamps," almost as if
their heads had been replaced by these lamps in a fashion similar to
that in which the heads of the naked women had come to resemble
light bulbs.
In the prose piece "The Country Mouse," which ends with a ver
sion of the incident recounted in the poem, the child asks herself,
"How had I got tricked into such a false position?" (Collected Prose
33). The "position" of the poet, in relation to the child whose ex-
perience she describes, is similarly problematic. The child seems to
fumble for a word, with an interruption by the grown-up poet; but
it's unclear who finally provides the word: "How—I didn't know
any / word for it—how 'unlikely' " (CP 161). This uncertainty par
allels the sliding of tenses in this passage, in which the retrospect of
"I knew that nothing stranger / had ever happened" is immediately
followed by the present tense of "Why should I be my aunt, / or me,
or anyone?" The adult's recollection of the child's feelings are sud
denly replaced by the voice of the child's protest. The nature of that
protest makes "unlikely" an especially "false" word to have chosen,
for likeness—the likeness the child discovers between herself and
"them"—is precisely what is at issue here. The succeeding lines,
in their play on the likeness involved in rhyme, seem to underline
the irony:
Rime riche, the overly exact rhyme of a pair like hereIhear, always
seems to strike a false note in English; it is a sign of insufficient differ- Bishop's
entiation. In this free-verse poem particularly, this odd homophonic
rhyme seems to mark an unwanted similarity.
"How had I come to be . . . like them?" we may read this sen- Silences
tence as asking, and the child seems to expend an almost petulant
energy in the various repetitions of this question. A number of crit
ics have interpreted the burden of the poem as the child's sense of
"connectedness," to use Bonnie Costello's term (119). Critics like
Lois Cucullu and Lee Edelman imply a transformation of this sense
into a feeling of solidarity along gender lines. The poem's persistent
refusal to interpret itself, however, makes available another atti
tude toward the feelings of aversion and distress it so powerfully
generates. In a draft of "The Country Mouse," the child remarks
to herself, "I was in for it now. ... I would get old and fat like
that woman opposite me" (Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Vassar College
Library). When the poet asks, "What similarities . . . / made us all
just one?" this "just" indicates that the thought entails a sense of di-
minishment, one that makes the child resist this leveling equivalence
of self and other. The young Elizabeth might be seen as rejecting
with all her energies the horrifying knowledge that she is like the
people with whom she shares the waiting room. This knowledge
is presented in imagery that resembles that of "At the Fishhouses,"
where knowledge is represented as a burning, uninhabitable liquid:
The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
[CP 161]
Indeed, the entire world seems to become insufficiently distinct and
separate, as the "night and slush" outside echo the "big black wave"
breaking inside.
The feelings generated by Bishop's poem here recall those of
Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode," which likewise explores the loss
involved as a child's sense of separateness and immunity from the
56 human fate fades into a sense of similarity to others and an acknowl
edgment of shared mortality. As in the "Intimations Ode," sympathy
and pain are conjoined in Bishop's poem; human sympathy is the
After product of human suffering. But the thoughts Elizabeth has as she
confronts the universality of suffering are anything but soothing.
While Wordsworth wishes to persuade his readers that the fading of
the Death
the visionary gleam is no reason to grieve, the Ode remains suffused
with a longing for the feeling of absolute autonomy he describes
of Poetry in the Fenwick note: "I used to brood over the stories of Enoch
and Elijah, and almost to persuade myself that, whatever might be
come of others, I should be translated, in something of the same
way, to heaven" (Poetical Works 4:463). Bishop need not mount
so elaborate an apology for the antisocial element of her vision;
that element remains far more deeply hidden in her poem. Her reti
cence should not obscure, however, the side of the poem that strains
away from the feeling of connection and sympathy, back toward a
/ radically individualistic sense of separateness and mastery.
The poem is a good deal less explicit than the prose sketch, the
drafts of which are in turn more explicit than the finished version.
In the draft, the "fat and old" woman appears as an emblem of what
it is that Elizabeth is; the figure has been almost entirely subtracted
in the poem. The rhetorical question that ends the story, "Why was
I a human being," seems more pointed than any of the many other
rhetorical questions posed in the poem. The poem, then, artfully
prolongs and varies the moment of crisis, partly by refusing to make
its terms as straightforward, and the gain in aesthetic power is plain
enough. As in "The Weed," Bishop takes an unpalatable feeling—in
this case the hatred of being human, the hatred of feeling that one
is connected in some way to the "fat," "old," and "false" creatures
with whom one is surrounded—and embeds it in a narrative that
refuses to interpret itself, that approaches this content obliquely.
Wordsworth, expressing a similar content, resorts to an elaborate
insistence on denying any sense of regret at the loss of the antisocial
"splendor" he initially celebrates; Bishop equivocates, leaving her
attitude toward the fall into connectedness significantly ambiguous.
Sympathy grows out of pain, but sympathy is itself painful, and the
child resists. "In the Waiting Room" shows that Bishop is not afraid
to explore, even if only obliquely, a territory that borders on the
egotistical sublime.
S3
Elizabeth
Bishop's
Silences
PUBLIC AND
PRIVATE IN
JAMES MERRILL'S
Later I am shown
The erased metropolis reassembled
On sampans, freighted each
With toddlers, holy dolls, dead ancestors.
[WS 28]
No metropolis has appeared in the poem heretofore; it has been
elicited by the image of bombing, and yet it is referred to by the
definite rather than the indefinite article. It is a city Merrill knows,
and expects his readers to accept as familiar. The strategy is charac
teristically modernist—the very title of The Waste Land is a classic
instance—and serves both to include and to exclude, establishing
intimacy with the reader who understands this elision of a longer
specification into a symbol presented by a single image, distancing
the reader unwilling to make the leap, and establishing in no uncer
tain terms that the poem's images refer to a vision within, rather
than a reality outside, the poet.
In its final movement, the poem returns upon itself, taking up at
its end an image introduced in the opening lines:
73
A world. The cloak thrown down for it to wear
In token of past servitude
Has fallen onto the shoulders of my parents James
Whom it is eating to the bone.
[WS 19]
Merrill's
The definite article in "The cloak" again implies the reader's famil
iarity; indeed, the passage simply cannot be interpreted unless one
refers the image back to its function in the earlier passage. The Work
"cloak" of falling rain in the opening lines has become the water
seeping through the ground in this final passage, a transformation
readily enough understood, but only in reference to the previous use
of the image; the poem uses, as if it were conventional and familiar,
an emblem that it has itself established.
This sort of symbolist lyric, self-enclosed and self-generating, co
exists in Merrill's oeuvre with its seeming stylistic opposite, ballads
that, while they make little attempt to simulate the directness and
naivete (in Schiller's sense) of traditional ballads, nevertheless per
form the ballad's task of story telling. Ranged between these two
poles stands most of Merrill's work, manifesting various degrees of
opacity and transparency. To some extent the privacy of Merrill's
poetic is opened out by his ongoing elaboration of an autobiographi
cal myth; as similar concerns recur in the poems, and as a life story
is progressively revealed and filled in, the poems create a context
for themselves, create an interpretive framework that to some extent
retrospectively clarifies passages that had been opaque, and provides
the poet a shorthand that allows him to achieve a high level of con
densation. By Braving the Elements, this habit is so well established
that Merrill can insert into "Days of 1935" a sort of parentheti
cal footnote to a poem that appears only later on in that volume:
"(cf. those 'Days / Of 1971')" (17). So in "Lost in Translation" the
poet remarks parenthetically "I wander through the ruin of S / Now
and then, wondering at the peacefulness" (DC 10). Readers unfamil
iar with Merrill's ongoing lyric autobiography will be reduced to
guesswork on confronting these lines; those who know will recog
nize "S" as Strato, a former lover, and see that the "ruins" here
are entirely figurative, a representation of the poet's present feelings
about the affair. Stephen Yenser remarks, with reference to an earlier
passage in "Lost in Translation," that Merrill "has come to write as
though he could rely on the reader's acquaintance [with his family
74 history]. His allusions conjure the familiarity they seem to presume"
(12). This tactic of presuming familiarity with the poet's autobio
graphical myth is an extension of the strategy of using the possessive
After pronoun and definite article to a similar end in the presentation of
metaphor.
What this tactic indicates as well is the erosion of a shared ground
the Death
of culture between poet and reader. Merrill's is an erudite poetry
that frequently makes allusion to standard monuments of Western
of Poetry cultural tradition. Those allusions are generally limited to works be
longing to and preceding the high modernist period; although he
makes substantial reference to popular culture, Merrill for the most
part avoids assuming his reader's familiarity with any particular
segment of contemporary cultural or intellectual production. Freud
is often alluded to in Merrill's work, contemporary psychologists
not at all; nineteenth-century opera is frequently invoked, twentieth-
century opera scarcely ever. The one element of contemporary lit
erary culture consistently alluded to in Merrill's work is his own
poetry. I don't think this is in the least megalomaniac; what it means,
simply, is that contemporary readers of poetry cannot be counted
on to belong to the same universe of books and ideas; there is no
body of contemporary culture and knowledge (with the exception,
to some extent, of science) that readers can be expected to recog
nize, that the poet can take for granted. Under these circumstances,
it seems only natural for the poet who seeks the compression and
breadth that allusion makes possible to fall back on making his or
her own work a central repository of allusive possibility.
The project of creating an autobiographical myth itself implies,
however, a translation of private experience into public terms, no
small order for a poet whose experience has been anything but rep
resentative, and whose horror of the debased languages of public
discourse goes so deep. In "An Urban Convalescence," as noted
above, Merrill enacts his dissatisfaction with available public terms
by inscribing, then erasing, an instance of such discourse in his
poem. In "Childlessness," conversely, at the moment in which the
poem might fall into a recognizably public (in this case environmen
talist) mode of address, the poet insulates his language from that
possibility by translating his concerns into the language of the fairy
tale, by representing a set of economic and political facts through
the image of the "enchantress." But this tactic, Merrill must have
seen, is in itself a kind of tour de force whose success depends on its
placement within the sort of self-generating, self-referential frame- 75
work elaborated by that poem. While mythic or folk-tale analogues
continue to be important in Merrill's life writing, they have come
to be shaded with considerable irony as Merrill uses them as much James
to mockingly draw attention to the distance between contemporary
situation and mythic analogue as to liken one to the other; in this
way, he ironically inverts the mythopoesis that characterizes 1950s Merril
formalist verse. And the language of public discourse, rather than
being excised, as it is in various ways in "An Urban Convalescence"
and "Childlessness," enters the poems, but enters them through the
avenue of an ironic exploration, and exploitation, of cliche.
"The Broken Home," certainly among the richest of Merrill's
autobiographical reflections, exemplifies this strategy of ironic dis
tancing from both mythic analogue and the language of cliche. The
broken home of the title, of course, is the first of many common
idioms the poem holds up for scrutiny. That that idiom might have
been spoken sincerely, if euphemistically, by his parents' generation
but would hardly be used "straight" in his own social world serves
to indicate both the distance from which the poet views the events
he recounts and the gulf between the social mores, and thus the pub
lic language, of the 1930s and the 1960s, for Merrill was well aware
that a new vocabulary for describing social facts implies a new set
of attitudes toward those facts. At the same time, the definite article
again assumes the reader's familiarity, and when this image makes
its one appearance, in the last of the poem's seven sonnets, it has
clearly expanded beyond its specific reference to Merrill's childhood
to take on an emblematic quality. A kind of euhemeristic transfor
mation seems to be taking place before our eyes as "the broken
home" becomes separated as an archetype from "the real house"
whose entirely other fate is also recounted.
The poem begins with a schematic representation of the poet's
distance from "normal" family life, which he represents by an image
that, gilt and framed, seems to have come as much from medieval
religious painting as from contemporary life:
Crossing the street,
I saw the parents and the child
At their window, gleaming like fruit
With evening's mild gold leaf.
[ND 27]
76 The poet, in contrast, huddles around an artificial light:
In a room on the floor below,
After Sunless, cooler—a brimming
Saucer of wax, marbly and dim—
I have lit what's left of my life.
the Death [ND 27]
"Sunless," we realize, is a pun, a bad one, and the poet will test the
of Poetry limits of the reader's tolerance for bad puns at a number of points in
the poem. What he seems to ask of his life, at this moment, is this:
Tell me, tongue of fire,
That you and I are as real
At least as the people upstairs.
[ND 27]
This has been taken by at least one commentator (von Hallberg 107)
as an "ironic stab at his neighbors," an example of Merrill's "arch
ness." Here, at least, I think the complaint is misplaced; Merrill has
clearly shown the reader that the vision of this family presented by
the poem is idealized, thoroughly unreal; it is the childless (gay)
man's fantasy of what he does not and never will have. Merrill's
next move in the poem, then, his effort to make his life real to him
self, is to recast segments of his life story into quasi-mythic terms in
an attempt to elaborate a counter myth to that of the harmonious
family he has projected upon his neighbors.
The description of Merrill's father in the ensuing sonnet makes
him seem larger than life; at the same time, one of its chief means
of representation is the cobbling together of cliches, as if the man
himself were somehow a fabrication of the received ideas of his era:
My father, who had flown in World War I,
Might have continued to invest his life
In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife.
But the race was run below, and the point was to win.
Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze
(Through the smoked glass of being thirty-six)
The soul eclipsed by twin black pupils, sex
And business; time was money in those days.
[ND 27]
Merrill's punning etherealizes the language of his father's profes
sion; from the poet's perspective the world of investments and
finance seems as insubstantial as the clouds. The last line of the open- 77
ing quatrain, though, is spoken in another voice, a ventriloquism,
perhaps, of the father's tough-minded wisdom. A similar saying james
closes the second quatrain, though here the poet's distance is made
more explicit. The phrase "time is money" posits a universal law;
the poet's rephrasing denies its universality. "Time is money" again Merrill's
embodies the conventional wisdom of the hardheaded businessman,
a wisdom whose truth the poet both acknowledges and distances
himself from; his financier father may have transformed time into Work
money, but time retained its own powers of transformation:
Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit—rings, cars, permanent waves.
We'd felt him warming up for a green bride.
He could afford it. He was "in his prime"
At three score ten. But money was not time.
[ND 27]
In this passage the trappings of haut bourgeois life take on a kind
of uncanny menace. Describing the wives as "chilled" likens them
to drinks or desserts, while the word's deathly resonances turn the
father into a kind of Bluebeard. Under scrutiny, the phrase "perma
nent waves" too comes to seem disturbingly contradictory, suggest
ing an unnatural freezing of fleeting energies that echoes the father's
battle to overcome time. The quotation marks around "in his prime"
imply not simply that this is a stock phrase the poet separates from
his own voice, but also that this is the way people in his father's
world saw things, that his father's world implicitly accepted the
right of any tremendously wealthy man of "three score ten" (again,
a slightly archaic construction that belongs to the language of the
father's rather than the poet's generation) to take a much younger
bride. "He could afford it" means both that he had the money and
that society would accept the marriage, perhaps the one because of
the other. But the poet has the ironic last word here as he inverts his
father's businessman's proverb, registering an ironic protest against
the values his father represents.2
Those values are further scrutinized in the next sonnet:
When my parents were younger this was a popular act:
A veiled woman would leap from an electric, wine-dark car
To the steps of no matter what—the Senate or the Ritz Bar—
And bodily, at newsreel speed, attack
No matter whom—Al Smith or Jose Maria Sert
After Or Clemenceau—veins standing out on her throat
As she yelled War mongerer! Pig! Give us the vote!,
And would have to be hauled away in her hobble skirt.
the Death
[ND 28]
The sonnet presents the moment of the woman's suffrage campaign
of Poetry as seen from the poet's age, a perspective from which the passions
and intensity of that earlier era seem far away; in 1962, one should
remember, Merrill inhabited an America more like Lowell's "tran-
quilized fifties" than that of the fractious and chaotic decade the
1960s later became. "At newsreel speed" catches this perspective
exactly, making the woman seem somewhat ridiculous, in the way
that speeded-up figures in an old newsreel strike us as comic (Mer
rill was no doubt aware that the speeding-up effect occurs because
the two eras simply run on a different time scale, sixteen as against
twenty-four frames per second). The metaphor reminds us as well
that our impression of such an incident indeed derives from news-
reels, that our comic perspective on it is an artifact. The theatri
cal metaphor in "a popular act" mocks the stagy, publicity-seeking
nature of this sort of demonstration at the same time that "act"
might be taken without irony, the resolve of this "veiled woman"
being contrasted to the passivity of the poet. The octave's final image
is broadly comic, but reminds us again of the realities of women's
disadvantaged position; "the hobble skirt" becomes a figure for all
the restrictions placed upon women, as if this protester's having to
be "hauled away" were not merely because of her violent outburst
but also because her hobbling by social forms (beyond the forms of
fashion) has made her incapable of locomotion.
The sestet reads this scene as an archetypal emblem, though the
mythic continuity it posits is rather lamented than celebrated:
What had the man done? Oh, made history.
Her business (he had implied) was giving birth,
Tending the house, mending the socks.
Always that same old story—
Father Time and Mother Earth,
A marriage on the rocks.
[ND 28]
The tonal nuances of the first line of the sestet would take a great
deal of space to exhaustively unpack; what one can say briefly is
that its evident mockery might be taken either way: as a ventrilo- james
quism of complacent male triumphalism or as sardonic irony; the
nonchalance of the poet's "Oh" implies both that making history is
simply the natural thing for men to do, and that it's no great accom- Merrill's
plishment. The poet speaks from a moment in which the whole idea
that history is made by great men seems increasingly questionable,
and his rhyming of "history" with "story" encourages the reader to Work
perform the feminist dissection of "history" into "his-story." In the
final lines of the sestet Merrill obliquely returns to the subject of his
own parents, seeing their "marriage on the rocks" as an instance of
an archetypal situation. This archetype is handled, however, with
a broad irony. "Father Time and Mother Earth" have fallen by the
poet's time to the level of advertising images, while "on the rocks,"
like "broken home," is a euphemism employed by a society unable
to bring itself to say "divorce." It's exactly this disinclination to con
front matters directly, this way of seeing the conflict between the
sexes as immemorial and irresolvable, the poet implies, that leads to
scarred lives like his own. Bad language is a symptom of bad faith,
a bad faith the poet's ironic reworking of cliche is meant to expose.
The fourth sonnet, while posing few apparent problems of inter
pretation, nevertheless carries a deeply hidden subtext within it, for
it obliquely figures the poet's homosexuality, a fact he could rep
resent, at this point, only sub rosa. This representation turns on
an allusion to Freud's account of the Oedipal complex, an allusion
made through a set of extravagantly bad, but also unobtrusive, puns:
the Death Her eyes flew open, startled strange and cold.
The dog slumped to the floor. She reached for me. I fled.
[ND 28]
of Poetry
The shrinking of the setter, emblem of potency both because "satyr-
thighed" and because its rigidity in point becomes a metaphor for
erection, figures the poet's flight from heterosexual desire. This ac
count of the etiology of homosexual object choice probably strikes a
contemporary reader as outmoded, a feeling the poet now might well
share. But the intensity of the writing, at the same time that the scene
is distanced by a slight archaism of diction and syntax, indicates the
poet's emotional investment in this very qualified self-revelation.
The sixth sonnet explicitly reflects on the poet's distance from
the values of his parents, both from the public realm of politics and
business represented by the father and from the private domestic
world identified with the mother and devoted to procreation and
nurture; like the earlier poem of that name, "The Broken Home"
anxiously meditates on the poet's childlessness. The opening of this
sonnet picks up from the preceding sonnet's ending:
They [the parents] are even so to be honored and obeyed.
. . . Obeyed, at least, inversely. Thus
I rarely buy a newspaper, or vote.
To do so, I have learned, is to invite
The tread of a stone guest within my house.
[ND 29]
The poet's honoring his father and his mother "inversely" again
makes an oblique allusion to his homosexuality; "invert" at the time
was another term for "homosexual." Thus his self-comparison to
Don Juan; while the poet hardly resembles this stereotypical seducer,
he too stands outside society, is someone whose sexuality violates
social norms and so invites the vengeance of the father. The poet,
alienated from the ritual forms of public action, whose reduction
to newspaper reading and voting reveals the emptiness of the pub
lic sphere, nevertheless sees in that very alienation the mark of his
rootedness in his past; placelessness and isolation become a form, 81
diminished as it may be, of connection and continuity. The sestet
more explicitly recalls the themes of "Childlessness":
James
Nor do I try to keep a garden, only
An avocado in a glass of water—
Roots pallid, gemmed with air. And later, Merril
Just as the public world has been reduced in the poet's representa
tion to newspapers and voting, so the traditionally "female" world
of nurture is represented by the poet's false starts at growing an avo
cado. Something of a fad in the 1960s, the avocado derives its name
from a word for "testicle," and thus embeds an ironic reflection on
the poet's lack of offspring within this little narrative.
The final sonnet of the poem's seven presents another of the poet's
imaginary explorations of a scene; here the metaphoric broken home
is described as if it were a physical reality: "A child, a red dog roam
the corridors, / Still, of the broken home." The poet seems here to
achieve some distance from his feelings by concretizing them in this
image, then separating that image from an image of the "real" house:
The real house became a boarding-school.
Under the ballroom ceiling's allegory
Someone at last may actually be allowed
To learn something; or, from my window, cool
With the unstiflement of the entire story,
Watch a red setter stretch and sink in cloud.
[ND 30]
Her legs hurt. She wore brown, was fat, past fifty,
And looked like a Palmyra matron
Copied in lard and horsehair. How she loved
You, me, loved us all, the bird, the cat!
I think now she was love. She sighed and glistened
All day with it, or pain, or both.
(We did not notably communicate.)
[ND 54]
This description is neither flattering nor original; of course one's
Greek housekeeper is pious, fat, and warmhearted. At the same time,
Merrill is warning the reader not to take as truth the impression
this passage records when he remarks on the lack of communication
between the two. This lack is concretized in the incident that occurs
at the poem's middle, when the poet recalls laughing with the lover
to whom the poem is addressed over an encounter with Kleo earlier
in the day:
Poor old Kleo, her aching legs,
Trudging into the pines. I called,
Called three times before she turned.
Above a tight, skyblue sweater, her face
Was painted. Yes. Her face was painted
Clown-white, white of the moon by daylight,
After Lidded with pearl, mouth a poinsettia leaf,
Eat me, pay me—the erotic mask
Worn the world over by illusion
the Death
To weddings of itself and simple need.
[ND 55]
of Poetry Both parties, encountering one another outside the space of their
economic relationship, seem disoriented; Kleo fails to hear the poet's
call, or fails to recognize his voice, while the poet is startled to see
this woman whom he had cast in a maternal role ("She called me
her real son") in a very different garb, as a creature of erotic desire.
Later in the poem, the poet imagines the possibilities for misunder
standing in another sort of encounter with Kleo. As the poet catches
out Kleo when encountering her outside what seems her natural,
domestic sphere, so the poet would be caught out were his poem
to travel linguistically into her language and off the page (the lines
imply that Kleo cannot read). It's not entirely clear what the poet
asks to be forgiven for—for likening her to "lard and horsehair,"
for having laughed about her with his lover, or for putting her into
a poem at all. But the poet is clearly anxious about the way he
represents her; if in the course of the poem she goes from maternal
stereotype to a figure whose desires will not be so easily defined and
categorized, she also becomes subject to a kind of mockery that is
different from the bemusement of the initial description of her. The
poet and lover might stand here for the poet and his reader, those
on the inside of the ironies the poems direct toward received ideas,
while Kleo stands for those outside the circle of intimacy created by
the poet's ironies; the poet perceives in her made-up face the mask
of erotic illusion, but this perception is not available to Kleo herself.
The poet does not inform us whether Kyria Kleo has ever had
Merrill's poem read to her. Some idea, though, of what might hap
pen were the poet's corrosive ironies to leak out of their aesthetic
containers can be gathered from a story in the New York Times
(November 25, 1988), titled "Poetic Injustice? A Grocer Sees Insults
in an Ode" (Ravo). The story focuses on Merrill's poem "Novem
ber Ode," which had appeared in the October 27 issue of the New
York Review of Books. The poem takes as its subject the closing of a
local grocery in Stonington, an event the poet views both elegiacally
and ironically. The Times story notes that Merrill "has defended the
work as a lament on the dissolution of older communities every
where"; at the same time, the poem is thoroughly imbued with
Merrill's characteristically arch tonalities: James
The readers the poem imagines are not those who, patronizing
the "antique store or real estate office," are "charmed / by what
these offer." »7
The poet places himself and his reader, then, between the gen-
trifiers who belong to the new world and the Dickensian figures
associated with the grocery, with whom he shares a sense of belong James
ing to a world that is disappearing day by day, without, like them,
being frozen in time, unable to adapt:
Merrill's
There my
three were suspended:
Work
the aproned boy, head raised as if checking an order,
the young woman at her counter, the old one,
shawl held tight, mute in the gloaming still—
their living simply
switched off at the source by the electric company?
The poet's irony, in a sense, saves him. Robert von Hallberg dis
cusses Merrill's characteristic attitudes as an attempt to embody in
poetry the values of a particular class, though the class with which
von Hallberg finally identifies the poet is not that of finance capi
talists into which he was born but that of the self-styled aristocracy
of camp: "From the camp viewpoint, politics is stylelessly overladen
with content; it can be ignored because the camp sensibility is prem
ised, as Susan Sontag has noted, on detachment. Merrill—and not
just in his campier moments—claims an aristocratic aloofness from
political activity" (11o—11). Certainly in this case, such a judgment,
while pointing to a real aspect of the poet's tone, is too harsh. The
poet's solidarity with these figures is necessarily limited, and one
suspects the poet would consider it vulgar and dishonest to forget
the gulf between him and them, to pretend to more sympathy than
he can genuinely feel, or to a greater share in their plight than really
belongs to him. That gulf is represented in the poem by the oblique
angle of his vision of this scene:
Why, only
mornings before, a rip in wintry
blankness let me peer,
Peer like Thoreau, cheek to the skylight of his glaucous
parlor, down at wall-eyed denizens by cold
and apathy hypnotized.
Page
By page my pleasure in the pains he took
Increases. Yet pain, panic and old age
Afflict his subjects horribly. They lie
On pillows, peering out as from a cage,
Feeble or angry, long tooth, beady eye.
Some few are young, but he has picked ill-knit,
Mean-mouthed, distrustful ones.
n [CLS 79-80]
of Poetry While the poet here seems to speak on humankind's behalf (as he will
do again in the pleadings with Gabriel in Scripts for the Pageant),
the verdict on humanity Wendell pronounces doesn't seem all that
far from the one arrived at by the trilogy; what differs between JM
and Wendell is their response, artistically, to this perception. Having
found that the deceits and illusions of the self make it a shaky foun
dation for poetic construction, the poet seeks his "heights" in an
otherworldly realm; as Merrill remarked to an interviewer, "Well,
don't you think there comes a time when everyone . . . wants to get
beyond the self?" (Recitative 66).
The urgency with which many poets, from the 1960s on, have
been seeking alternatives to a poetry of the lyric self has been amply
documented by a number of recent studies. One strain of 1960s
poetry sought, as Paul Breslin describes it, to "exorcise the social
ized part of the self" (Psycho-Political Muse 9) and thus to uncover
a deeper, unconscious voice that precedes the constitution of the
individual ego; another found in ideological engagements, whether
defined in directly political terms or along the lines of race, gender,
and sexuality, access to a voice that addressed issues and a reader
ship conceived of in terms broader and more public than those of
lyric. For Merrill, neither of these approaches held any attraction,
despite his having in his poems conducted a critique of inauthen-
tic selfhood as searching as any in the works of his more explicitly
political colleagues. Merrill's skepticism, as poems like "Mandala"
show, could not be turned off to allow the poet direct access to a
"deep image," arising from the unconscious, to replace his hermetic
and highly self-conscious symbols. Gay identity certainly becomes in
the course of Merrill's career an increasingly open and constitutive
part of his work, but more in the sense of an intimacy-producing
shared secret with his readers than as part of a militant politics of
visibility, as in, for instance, Allen Ginsberg. The poet who neither
reads the paper nor votes hardly seems a likely candidate "to speak
to multitudes and make it matter" (CLS 82). Indeed, this phrase from 93
section W of "The Book of Ephraim" seems to indicate in the puzzle
of its own syntax Merrill's skepticism about such an endeavor. The
"it" lacks an antecedent, so that the reader is never told precisely 7awes
what might "matter"; this "it" is instead impersonal, as if the poet
were implying that the very project of addressing a broad public ;
GXYt
would necessarily entail the impossibility of anything specific's being
communicated.
"The Book of Ephraim" opens with the poet's apology for fail- Wor^
ing to write so as to "reach / The widest public in the shortest
time" (CLS 3). More is at stake, however, than disseminating the
otherworldly revelation:
Work
JOHN ASHBERVS
DIFFICULTY
Koethe: What was it then that made people like you, Frank
O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch more comfortable with people in
the music and art worlds than with people in university or
literary circles?
104 Ashbery: I think around 1950, with the rise of Robert Lowell,
everything became much more codified and academicized. It
seems that the fifties were stricter and more structured than the
After
forties and thirties. Randall Jarrell said in an essay I once read
that "in this post-Auden climate, it seems that a coat hanger
the Death could write a marvelous poem about the delights and torments
of being a college professor." [Koethe 79-80]
Ashbery forgoes the conventions, and thus to some extent the audi
ence, generated by the academic appropriation of modernism. The
difficulty of his poetry arises in great measure from this decision not
to write the sort of poem Lowell was writing, not to produce within
the paradigms offered by the New Criticism.
But Ashbery's reaction to the academic poetic and critical estab
lishment of the 1950s and 1960s is complicated by that establish
ment's identification with an experimentalist aesthetic. Confronting
an avant-garde that has become an establishment, Ashbery knows, is
vastly different from confronting an establishment plain and simple,
and this awareness runs through the often absurdist logic of "The
Invisible Avant-Garde," a lecture he delivered at the Yale Art School
in 1968. In it, the poet seems at times positively nostalgic for the
good old days when the experimental artist was ignored, rejected, or
denounced as a lunatic. In the early modernist period, Ashbery im
plies, the job of the avant-garde artist, though hard, was essentially
simple: one knew where the cutting edge was and what it might take
to be on it, and the outrage of the public provided a reliable index
to one's success in extending the boundaries of art. With modern
ism's move from the margins to the center, however, Ashbery sees
the contemporary avant-garde paradoxically as threatened by public
acceptance. Hostility toward experimental art having been replaced
by an avid embrace of aesthetic transgression, the element of risk
that produced the aesthetic frisson of avant-gardism is in danger of
disappearing.
Ashbery's talk begins with an admission that he is, in the very act
of discussing the problem, exemplifying it:
The fact that I, a poet, was invited by the Yale Art School to
talk about the avant-garde, in one of a series of lectures under
this general heading, is in itself such an eloquent characteriza
tion of the avant-garde today that no further comment seems
necessary. It would appear then that this force in art which
would be the very antithesis of tradition if it were to allow itself
even so much of a relationship with tradition as an antithesis
implies, is, on the contrary, a tradition of sorts. At any rate it
can be discussed, attacked, praised, taught in seminars, just as iQ^n
a tradition can be. ["Invisible Avante-Garde" 389-90]
An academic lecture series on the avant-garde is not merely an index
Ashbery's
but a cause of the situation Ashbery surveys, a situation that threat
ens to reduce him, if only in jest, to silence. The existence of an avant-
garde "tradition" is more than an oxymoron; it puts into question Difficulty
the very existence of the avant-garde. Ashbery contrasts this situa
tion to that prevailing at the time he began writing poems: "When
I was a student and beginning to experiment with poetry ... it
was the art and literature of the Establishment that were traditional.
There was in fact almost no experimental poetry being written in
this country" (390). Ashbery describes this state of affairs as "bleak"
(390) at the same time that he credits it with generating "tremen
dous excitement": "Most reckless things are beautiful in some way,
and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful" (391).
The artist had it better when he or she had it worse. So far, "The
Invisible Avant-Garde" seems a direct inversion of an earlier genre
of avant-garde manifesto; rather than decrying the ignorant, ossified
public's rejection of experimental work, Ashbery laments the pub
lic's too-ready assimilation of the new as a threat to the sensation of
risk that must accompany experimentation.
Ashbery goes on to inquire about the origins of the situation he
surveys, in which the experimental artist is threatened by acceptance
and "it seems no longer possible, for an important avant-garde artist
to go unrecognized. And, sadly enough, his creative life expectancy
has dwindled correspondingly, since artists are no fun once they have
been discovered" (392). Ashbery notes that this state of affairs is
usually blamed on "the media," but he rejects that explanation and
proposes instead that a natural appetite for heroism has impelled
the rapid decline in the "period of neglect" a new artist must suffer:
"Events during the first decades of this century eventually ended up
proving that the avant-garde artist is a kind of hero. ... So that,
paradoxically, it is safest to experiment" (393). Here, perhaps, is one
factor behind the deliberately paradoxical argumentation of Ash-
bery's talk: a reluctance to pitch his discussion in terms of heroism,
a desire to break down the binary logic of the modernist manifesto
that conduced so powerfully to constructing an image of the artist as
hero. Ashbery's argument comes full circle, to the logically absurd
proposition that it is "safest to experiment." The avant-garde, in
this formulation, becomes entirely absorbed into tradition, the ex
citement of risk it once embodied entirely dissipated in regimented
innovation.
Yet Ashbery struggles to find opportunity in this bleak situation,
though his optimism seems qualified: "On the other hand, perhaps
these are the most exciting times for young artists, who must fight
even harder to preserve their identity" (393). The talk ends with a
series of lengthy quotations from the early-twentieth-century Italian-
German composer Ferruccio Busoni, a deliberately eccentric choice
of ally, whom Ashbery admires for his ability to have inhabited a
situation polarized between the expressionist avant-garde, on the
one hand, and "pedantic neo-classicists," on the other, while pro
ducing music that "has the unique quality of being excellent and of
sounding like nobody else's" (394). Ashbery's image of the authentic
artist, then, is not so much one who is on the outside or the mar
gin but one who is between, who resists the dogmatisms of both
the vanguard and the establishment. Indeed, Ashbery's assessment
of the situation of avant-gardism rejects modernist assumptions of
progress in the arts, along with the heroic self-image encouraged
by such assumptions. The modernist rhetoric of innovation, break
through, and advance works by implicit analogy to the development
of technology, with its powerfully cumulative and linear logic. Ash
bery's analysis, though its absurdist flavor certainly bears noting,
turns ultimately on a circular or dialectical model of successive nega
tions, in which the avant-garde, which begins as the antithesis of
tradition, comes to constitute a tradition itself, and thus is trans
formed into its opposite. His response to this problem is not to posit
a series of ever more radical breaks with the past designed to repeat
the avant-garde's initial transgressive success, but rather to ques
tion the ongoing viability of the distinction between vanguard and
tradition.
It is scarcely surprising, then, that Ashbery and his work played
no role in the "war of the anthologies," the controversy between
formalists and the proponents of "open" forms that dominated the
American poetic landscape in the early 1960s. Whatever their points
of dispute, both sides in that battle agreed on a progressive account
of literary history that focused on poetic technology: whether the
combatants opted for "open" forms or "fixed" forms as the better
way of embodying and extending modernist literary values, both
viewed the formal disposition of poetic work as its crucial defining
feature. When, in the 1960s and 1970s, a number of onetime formal 107
ists, like James Wright and W. S. Merwin, abandoned forms for free
verse, their conversions were in most cases absolute. Ashbery, how
ever, has mixed free verse and fixed forms throughout his career. John
Fixed forms, in his view, provide an antidote to the mode of collo
quial sincerity currently widespread in American poetry (Remnick
Ashbery's
61); at the same time, he treats the forms he employs with a great
deal of irony. He favors forms, like the pantoum and the sestina, that
advertise their own arbitrariness; invents his own, rather gimmicky Difficulty
forms, as in the group of one-line poems in As We Know; or in "The
Songs We Know Best" writes a poem to the tune of a schlocky pop
song.1 He uses traditional forms in ways that undermine their au
thority. But using them at all involves a rejection of the notion of a
progressive advance in poetic technique that definitively outmodes
traditional options. For Ashbery, no stylistic choice, whether of dic
tion, form, or genre, is dictated unequivocally by the development
of the medium.
Even though Ashbery shared with the Beat and Projectivist camps
a disaffection from the reigning academic modernism, he rejected
both the progressive model of literary change they espoused and the
heroic self-image they cultivated.2 Ashbery did not appear in the
leading antiformalist anthology, Donald Allen's The New American
Poetry. And I suspect he had Allen Ginsberg, leading figure in the
anti-formalist opposition, in mind when in "The Invisible Avant-
Garde" he remarked: "In both life and art today we are in danger of
substituting one conformity for another, or, to use a French expres
sion, of trading one's one-eyed horse for a blind one. Protests against
the mediocre values of our society such as the hippie movement seem
to imply that one's only way out is to join a parallel society whose
stereotyped manners, language, speech and dress are only reverse
images of the one it is trying to reject" (393). Ashbery here expands
the frame of reference outward from art to life, and in the process
invokes a characteristically 1960s anxiety over the encroachments
of mass society upon the preserve of the individual. Whether for
mulated in the terms of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man,
David Riesman's Lonely Crowd, Theodor Adorno's Authoritarian
Personality, or Max Weber's various writings on institutionalization
and the routinization of charisma in bureaucracy, the disappearance
of difference into conformity, on the one hand, or into the space
of illusory freedom opened by "repressive tolerance," on the other,
was a dominant theme of both intellectual and popular reflection.
For Ashbery, then, the question of the possibility of the avant-garde
is not merely aesthetic, it is "a question of survival both of the
artist and of the individual" (393). Despite his sense of urgency,
After however, Ashbery elects not to confront the so-called establishment
head-on in his poetry; where Ginsberg inveighs directly against the
"Moloch" society he sees around him, Ashbery names the monster
the Death
only in a burlesque tone:
The rise of capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism
of Poetry And the individual is dominant until the close of the nine
teenth century.
In our own time, mass practices have sought to submerge the
personality
By ignoring it, which has caused it instead to branch out in all
directions
Far from the permanent tug that used to be its notion of
"home."
["Definition of Blue," DDS 53]
Poetry's answer to "mass practices" cannot be a straightforward
counterattack; poetry must rather provide within its own practices
the image of a possible alternative. Ashbery would no doubt want it
to be said of his own poetry what he wrote of Frank O'Hara's: "It
does not advocate sex and dope as a panacea for the ills of modern
society; it does not speak out against the war in Vietnam or in favor
of civil rights; in a word, it does not attack the establishment. It
merely ignores its right to exist, and is thus a source of annoyance
to partisans of every stripe" ("Frank O'Hara's Question" 6). In his
poetry, Ashbery seeks a way to reinvent some of the oppositional
energy with which avant-gardism was originally invested, a way to
resist the institutional form of modernism that had come to con
stitute the poetic mainstream, while at the same time avoiding the
romanticism of rebellion encouraged by a merely negative stance.
Translating from political to poetic, Ashbery resists the pressures
of conformity by ignoring the stylistic taboos erected by both New
Criticism and Beat or Projectivist poetics.
Ashbery's rejection of the audiences trained by the New Critics
and by their opposite numbers in the counterculture, however, raises
for him an urgent collateral problem, that of finding an audience at
all. Ashbery addresses this problem by re-creating what one might
paradoxically call an old-fashioned type of vanguard formation,
one that depends heavily on personal acquaintance and word-of-
mouth dissemination of reputation, circulates its work in fugitive 109
small magazines, and is linked to like-minded practitioners in other
arts. Ashbery, it is true, began his public career by winning the Yale
Younger Poets Prize, a thoroughly mainstream honor, and one that John
launched many of the most widely recognized poets of his genera
tion, including Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, James Wright, and
Ashbery's
John Hollander. But the circumstances of his receiving the prize
(judged that year by W. H. Auden) may in fact have persuaded Ash
bery that he would have to build an audience not through an appeal Difficulty
to established standards of poetic performance but rather in the
earlier avant-garde fashion of assembling a coterie. The manuscript
of Some Trees had been screened out early in the process of judging,
and his winning the award depended on his personal acquaintance
with Chester Kallman, Auden's companion: "I submitted the volume
to the Yale Younger Poets and it was returned by the Yale University
Press, not forwarded to W. H. Auden, the judge. He had decided
not to award the prize that year because he didn't like any of the
manuscripts that had been sent to him. At that point a mutual friend
of ours mentioned that I had submitted mine and he asked to see
it directly and accepted it" (Gangel n). The volume received only
one favorable review in a periodical, Frank O'Hara's gracious piece
in Poetry, and took eight years to sell out its eight-hundred-copy
pressrun, circumstances that made it plain to Ashbery that main
stream avenues for the dissemination of poetry were for the most
part closed to him (Tranter 95). Ashbery's recognition, for at least
the first fifteen years of his career, moved in slowly expanding circles
from the group of poets and artists, including O'Hara, Kenneth
Koch, James Schuyler, Jane Freilicher, and Larry Rivers, with whom
he was associated. Ashbery's pamphlet of poems, Turandot, was
published by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and it was John Myers,
Nagy's partner in the gallery, who first applied the label "The New
York School of Poets" in Nomad, a fugitive small magazine pub
lished in California (Sommer 298). Although Ashbery's sweep of
the three major book prizes with Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
in 1976 made him almost instantly one of America's best-known
poets, through the period in which his style was maturing Ashbery's
audience was a coterie, neither within the mainstream that Lowell
dominated nor a part of that mainstream's antitype, the Beat and
Projectivist opposition headed by Allen Ginsberg.
"Both of us" narrows the pronoun to "I" and "you," while the final
passage seems once again to open out to include the poem's readers,
all those who share the circumstances of their lives with the poet.
A similar expansion of reference takes place in "Prufrock" as the
"we" introduced in the final lines seems to exceed the "you and I" of
the opening, which denominates only Prufrock himself. Prufrock,
however, remains defined by his distance from the "human" society
around him, while in Ashbery's poem, in the last of its many re
visions and reframings, the lines of demarcation blur between this
"we" and the "society" in opposition to which it is defined in the
poem's opening. Prufrock's final "we" functions as if the poem had
suddenly reached out to take you with it as it goes down gasp
ing, while "Soonest Mended" shuttles fluidly among that pronoun's
various possibilities. "Prufrock" reaches out of the frame it has con
structed, but only to drag the reader in, while "Soonest Mended"
continually puts into question what is inside and what is outside the
frame. The marginalized poet has become a "good citizen," but only
"in a sense."
A comparison with what David Trotter, in his outstanding study
of modernist poetry The Making of the Reader, calls "external ref
erence" may help to illuminate the function of Ashbery's sweeping,
inclusive impersonal and relative pronouns. Trotter defines "external
reference" as the use of a relative term—possessive, demonstrative,
comparative—that refers not to something already specified in an
utterance but to "an object or person or event in the environment
of the utterance," and thus "call[s] upon the reader to supply infor-
116 mation from his or her own experience" (14). In Trotter's account
of The Waste Land, Eliot's use of external reference—"this red
rock," "this card," "that corpse," "that noise"—"revive(s) for his
After readers a perception of wholeness and immediacy" (45). The rela
tive terms project the image of a knowable world whose relations
~~ ~ to the speaker can be specified, even when the particular objects of
reference cannot. The pub-talk of Eliot's working-class women may
at first seem baffling in its heavy use of the unspecified "it": "And
of Poetry ^ you don't give nim' tneres others will, I said" (The Waste Land
1. 149). "If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said" (1. 153). "It's
them pills I took, to bring it off, she said" (1. 159). "Well, if Albert
won't leave you alone, there it is, I said" (1. 163). But while Eliot fails
to provide the antecedents his women gesture at, the reader never
theless has little difficulty supplying them. The device, while seeming
on the one hand to point up the poverty of these women's language,
on the other makes for an effect of community and intimacy; these
women can take things for granted with one another, understand
one another's oblique hints and pointings, and as we understand
them as well, we become included in this linguistic community.
If Eliot's external references may be said to create, from an initial
perception of fragmentation, a sense of a whole, a world whose rela
tions to the poet are known and measurable, Ashbery's have just the
opposite effect; they project a world that is fundamentally unknow
able, beyond the power of the poet to name or describe. "Loving
Mad Tom" provides a characteristic example of Ashbery's use of
the undefined "it":
Then to lay it down like a load
And take up the dream stitching again, as though
It were still old, as on a bright, unseasonably cold
Afternoon, is a dream past living. Best to leave it there
And quickly tiptoe out. The music ended anyway. The occa
sions
In your arms went along with it and seemed
To supply the necessary sense. But like
A farmhouse in the city, on some busy, deserted metropolitan
avenue,
It was all too much in the way it fell silent,
Forewarned, as though an invisible face looked out
From hooded windows, as the rain suddenly starts to fall
And the lightning goes crazy, and the thunder faints dead
away.
[HD 16]
In this passage the pronoun seems to live a weird, independent exis
tence, cut loose from responsibility to reference, continually shifting
ground. Whatever "it" stands for seems to be what we would ordi
narily call the subject of the poem, yet that subject remains obsti
nately indefinite. This vagueness presents the particular occasion of
the poem as if it were already familiar, as little in need of specifica
tion as the "it" of "it is raining"; indeed, the final "it" of this passage
could be, syntactically, either a third-person pronoun or part of an
impersonal construction. Ashbery's unspecified "its" move too fast
for us to get our bearings; they point to a situation that can be ges
tured at but not articulated. The New Criticism implicitly identified
"situation" with dramatic scene, a bounded and framed space held
at a distance from the poet. Ashbery's "it" wavers between naming
a specific situation the poet can observe and apprise, and naming an
encompassing condition that the poet cannot stand outside of and,
for that very reason, cannot formulate discursively. What remains
of the poet's attempt to do so is a trail of abandoned references
that trace the path of his efforts to grasp in language the fluid and
fragmentary world he confronts.
This foredoomed effort to follow the transformations of a shifting
and unstable object characterizes Ashbery's use of syntax as well.
The New Criticism's dramatistic mode of reading made modern
ist experiments with the fragmentation of syntax safe for readers;
shorn of ontological implications, discontinuity could be recuper
ated as a dramatic effect. Ashbery's mature work evades this sort of
reading by offering not a paucity of syntax but an excess; Ashbery's
sentences tend to extend themselves until the original impulse is lost
or entirely transformed. I quote from "Summer":
Syntax and diction together create the illusion of voice, but just
as Ashbery's syntax sometimes seems, in its apparently aimless ex
ploration of syntactical possibility, to arise more from autonomous
operations of language itself than from an individualized speaker,
so his diction seems as well to range so broadly across levels of
language as to break down any notion of a speaker who might be
characterized through lexical usage. Ashbery takes to an extreme a
device Donald Davie remarks in Auden's work, a deliberate oscil
lation "between a colloquialism which is slang and a literary pomp
which is exotic," thus "exploiting a source of calculated impurity
of diction" (26). In a few lines, Ashbery is capable of moving from
"Puaagh. Vomit. Puaaaaagh. More vomit" to "these abstractions /
that sift like marble dust across the unfinished works of the studio"
(SP 15). At times, as Byron and Auden did, Ashbery uses this strategy
to achieve an effect of raciness and urbanity, an expert play upon
the various registers of language; but at other times the effect seems
decidedly more extreme, as if the poet were prey to a compulsive
urge to impersonation. Given the range of voices that inhabit the
poems, it hardly seems accurate to speak of the poet's choosing or
adopting them; he seems rather possessed by these voices, which are
often not characters but categories. Rather than evoking an indi
vidual's idiosyncratic speech, the poems instead frequently contain
passages that fall into the patterns of stereotypical, anonymous dis
122 courses. So in "Grand Galop" a speaker informs us that "today's
lunch is Spanish omelet, lettuce and tomato salad, / Jello, milk and
cookies. Tomorrow's: sloppy joe on bun, / Scalloped corn, stewed
After tomatoes, rice pudding and milk" (SP 14); while in "The Skaters"
the answer to "Any more golfing hints Charlie?" is "Plant your feet
squarely. Grasp your club lightly but firmly in the hollow of your
the Death
fingers. / Slowly swing well back and complete your stroke well
through, pushing to the very end" (RM 58). While both Byron and
of Poetry Auden employed up-to-the-minute colloquialisms to strike the tone
of smart conversation, Ashbery often uses an outdated slang, delib
erately distancing the colloquialism of the poem from the language
we might expect to hear the poet use in conversation:
It looks as though the storm-fiend were planning to kick up
quite a ruckus
For this evening. I had better be getting back to the tent
To make sure everything is shipshape, weight down the canvas
with extra stones,
Bank the fire, and prepare myself a little hardtack and tea
For the evening's repast.
["The Skaters," RM 56]
This is neither contemporary idiom nor even the way somebody's
grandfather might talk; it seems closer to the kind of humorous rep
resentation of the language of a person who has become frozen in
time that one encounters in movies or TV commercials. Certainly
not the poet's voice, neither is it the voice of another speaker; it is,
rather, a representation of a representation, doubly removed from
the voice of any actual speaker. Though Ashbery cites Auden as
the inspiration for his use of slang, he often uses colloquialism in
ways substantially different from Auden's, to undermine rather than
enhance the impression of voice.
Yet the illusion of voice is far from entirely erased from Ashbery 's
poetry, as we may fairly say it is from that of the most radical of
contemporary Language writers. While at times the language of the
poems appears generated out of nothing more than a principle of
unlimited freeplay, one nevertheless finds, juxtaposed with passages
of broadly distanced irony, a language that seems expressive, that
seems to invite us to take it as personal and immediate. A further
look at the opening of "Definition of Blue" may help illuminate this
characteristic strategy, in which a burlesque tone slides into some
thing more recognizably Ashberyan without any clear indication of
transition: 123
The rise of capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism
And the individual is dominant until the close of the nine John
teenth century.
In our own time, mass practices have sought to submerge the
personality Ashbery's
By ignoring it, which has caused it instead to branch out in all
directions
Far from the permanent tug that used to be its notion of Difficulty
"home."
[DDS 53]
The opening lines, as David Bromwich points out, feel like a par
ody of a lecturer ("Poetic Invention and the Self-Unseeing," 122),
or perhaps a page from that "pocket history of the world" Ashbery
describes in "Grand Galop," "so general / As to constitute a sob
or wail unrelated / To any attempt at definition" (SP 16). And yet
by the time we arrive at the "permanent tug," we encounter a typi
cally Ashberyan paradox, one that dissolves fixity—"permanent,"
"home"—into gesture and impulse: "tug." Though the voice of the
lecturer resurfaces at moments in the poem ("But today there is no
point in looking to imaginative new methods"), no clear demar
cation ever emerges between the lecturer's and the poet's voices.
The degree of irony to be accorded any particular statement thus
becomes difficult to judge, and it becomes anything but clear that
we are not to take the opening lines as an "authentic" statement
of the poet's beliefs. Parody depends on some notion, even if only
implied, of what a nonparodic statement would sound like; in Ash-
bery's writing, the distance between parodic and nonparodic verges
on the unmeasurable.
An examination of "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" may help to
make the workings of this tactic clear. The title of this poem from
Houseboat Days promises a performance like the earlier "Farm Im
plements and Rutabagas in a Landscape," in which Ashbery elabo
rates a sestina-length scenario, involving the "Popeye" comic strip
characters, that seems to bear no reference whatsoever to anything
outside itself, that seems as much pure poetry, in its way, as any
Mallarme sonnet. "Daffy Duck in Hollywood," similarly, at first
appears to follow no organizing principle but the wild and senseless
aggregation of images, delivered in an idiom that similarly collages
archaic constructions sprung from chivalric romance with a sort of
124 pedantic slanginess, as if someone for whom English is a foreign
language were trying to write in a racy vein by using a dictionary of
colloquialisms:
After
Something strange is creeping across me.
La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars
the Death Of "I Thought about You" or something mellow from
Amadigi di Gaula for everything—a mint-condition can
Of Rumford's Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy
of Poetry Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller's fertile
Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on greige, deckle-edged
Stock—to come clattering through the rainbow trellis
Where Pistachio Avenue rams the 2300 block of Highland
Fling Terrace. He promised he'd get me out of this one,
That mean old cartoonist, but just look what he's
Done to me now! I scarce dare approach me mug's attenuated
Reflection in yon hubcap, so jaundiced, so deconfit
Are its lineaments—fun, no doubt, for some quack phrenolo
gist's
Fern-clogged waiting room, but hardly what you'd call
Companionable.
[HD 31]
This style of chaotic juxtaposition produces an effect of agitation
and urgency, which in turn is continually undercut by the humor
generated in the collision of elevated language with the mundane.
Daffy Duck's voice seems consistent in its cycle of inflation by allu
sion to chivalric romance, followed by farcical deflation, while at the
same time these contrasts seem far too great to subsume under any
notion of a coherent speaker. The title, "Daffy Duck in Hollywood,"
in its specification of speaker and situation promises a dramatic
monologue, but what the poem delivers cannot be brought together
within Brooks and Warren's notions of "fundamental character and
situation."
The poem's contrasts reflect those of its source, which is not
so much Tex Avery's 1938 cartoon "Daffy Duck in Hollywood"
as Chuck Jones's celebrated "Duck Amuck" of 1953. In "Duck
Amuck," Daffy swashbuckles onto the screen wielding a rapier, as
if to reprise his 1950 role, "The Scarlet Pumpernickel." The set
ting, without Daffy's noticing it at first, shifts to a barnyard, where,
after an ineffectual attempt to apprise the cartoonist of the problem,
Daffy chooses to switch rather than fight, changes to overalls, and
throws a hoe over his shoulder. Throughout, the scene keeps shift 125
ing in this fashion, with Daffy always a step behind. By the middle
of the cartoon nothing is safe; Daffy's body is replaced temporarily
by a monstrously absurd contraption, and his voice is reduced for a John
time to a series of animalistic grunts and squawks. Like the Daffy
of the cartoon, Ashbery's character is at the mercy of disconcert
Ashbery's
ingly rapid changes of scene which leave the speaker disoriented and
strange to himself, unable to face his own "reflection." Yet, at about
its middle, the frenetic motion of the poem gives way to a moment Difficulty
of syntactical calm:
I have
Only my intermittent life in your thoughts to live
Which is like thinking in another language.
[HD 32]
If the poem, to this point, has embodied the predicament of the
mind assaulted by the chaos of discourses that compete for priority
in our culture, here it stands back to reflect on that predicament.
Of course, a cartoon character lives only an "intermittent life" in
the thoughts of others, but here Ashbery generalizes this condition
with an oblique echo of a passage from "Soonest Mended" quoted
earlier: "Weren't we rather acting this out / For someone else's bene
fit, thoughts in a mind / With room enough and to spare for our
little problems" (DDS 17). While in "Soonest Mended" marginaliza-
tion seems potentially liberating, a way to "step free" of the narrow
concerns of the self, in the later poem it is shaded with some of the
pathos generated by the most extremely marginalized character in
English poetry, Milton's Satan, as Daffy continues:
While I
Abroad through all the coasts of dark destruction seek
Deliverance for us all, think in that language . . .
[HD 33]
Some
the Death There were to whom this mattered not a jot: since all
By definition is completeness (so
In utter darkness they reasoned), why not
of Poetry Accept it as it pleases to reveal itself? As when
Low skyscrapers from lower-hanging clouds reveal
A turret there, an art-deco escarpment here, and last perhaps
The pattern that may carry the sense, but
Stays hidden in the mysteries of pagination.
Not what we see but how we see it matters; all's
Alike, the same, and we greet him who announces
The change as we would greet the change itself.
[HD 34]
While these endings are not without their Ashberyan oddities, they
nevertheless fall into a number of recognizable paradigms for poetic
closure, much more so than Ashbery's transitions correspond to
128 familiar modes of transition. In part, this habit makes possible his
characteristic fusion of elegiac lyricism and a jagged, discontinuous
surface. Endings like "the crows peacefully pecking" write a satis
After fying finis to poems that might otherwise feel deprived of closure,
given the tenuousness of their internal structure, in which neither
narrative movement nor an apparent discursive logic seems to dic
the Death
tate the flow of transitions. Again, Ashbery's strategy of equivoca
tion permits the poet to inhabit the elegiac mode while avoiding the
of Poetry charge of sentimentality the skeptical consciousness stands ready
to make. The seemingly arbitrary arrival of these elegiac moments
distances them from the poet, as if they were merely thrown up by
the same energies of language that have generated the jagged struc
tures of the body of the poem. At the same time, the ending casts its
humanizing glow over the rest of the poem, making its puzzlements
legible within the context of the affective state they can, retrospec
tively, be seen as leading up to.
Ashbery's endings, though, are merely a special case of a more
general strategy, in which a language of lyric pathos wanders un
moored through the poems. This language is on occasion introduced
by conventionalized emotive gestures:
133
John
Ashbery's
Difficulty
THE RETURN
OF THE REPRESSED:
LANGUAGE POETRY
One might at first suppose that the rhythmic monotony of the poem
arises from an attempt at imitative form, in which the naivete of
the speaker's four-year-old self is represented by a deliberately un
sophisticated prosody. But the formal strategies of this poem are
similar to those of other poems in the same volume, and in any event
iambic pentameter would be a curious choice of meter for such a
strategy, given its extensive history of intensely sophisticated and
self-conscious application. The absolute construction of "my needle
caught" is, too, a sophisticated (and rather hard to follow) piece of
syntax, inappropriate if an effect of naivete is intended.
What produces the effect of monotony in this passage? One might
at first suppose that the lack of rhythmic variation is the source of
the problem. Almost all of the lines are perfect pentameters, varia
tions are largely unadventurous, and accent within lines falls within
a fairly narrow range; in "I twist my threads like stems into a knot"
and "The needle strikes my finger to the bone," for instance, the four
accented syllables in the line are very close to one another in stress.
But I think the problem lies, rather, in the prevalence of monosyl
lables and in the placement of caesura. While ten low words creep
in only one of the lines in this passage, monosyllables predominate,
which means that the boundaries of words and the boundaries of
metrical feet almost always coincide, a sure producer of prosodic
monotony. The treatment of caesura is even more problematic. All
caesuras in the passage occur after the fourth, fifth, or sixth syllable
of the line. This is technically unadventurous but not in itself a prob
lem; the difficulty occurs, rather, in the poet's penchant for repeating
line structures. In six of the first seven, and seven of the first nine
lines in the passage, caesura occurs after the fourth syllable; the last
three lines all break after the sixth. It's this repetitious line structure 157
that is the chief culprit, I think, in the impression of stiffness and
monotony in the handling of meter.
Good metrical writing involves a great deal more than filling out a Language
pattern of accented and unaccented syllables with occasional varia
tion. It requires an understanding of many other elements of poetic
Poetry and
form, an understanding that only an awareness of the historical de
velopment of prosody can provide. The ahistorical notions of form
embodied in Steele's argument and prevalent among the New For the New
malists obscure that awareness and so make a problematic guide to
practice. Persuasive use of "traditional" forms demands not simply
an adherence to a body of prosodic rules but an effort to master and Formalism
extend the technical resources available to poetry.
164
After
the Death
of Poetry
DIRECTIONS
FOR
POETRY
Many "we"s are addressed by this passage from John Ashbery 's
"Soonest Mended"; surely one of them is we poets, or we who care
about poetry. Ashbery acknowledges that poetry has been pushed
to the edges of our society, but at the same time he gently mocks the
pose of heroic alienation with which the modernist poets typically
confronted their isolation. We are on the margin "in" technological
society, in it and not of it, perhaps, and yet it is our society (our
belonging to it somehow makes it belong to us); the margins them
selves are inside the society we inhabit. As against the role of heroic
rescuer so often assumed by the modern artist, Ashbery likens "us"
to "heroines" of a heroic poem already heavily shaded with irony.
No longer able to rescue ourselves, our only recourse, as Ashbery
later remarks, is "forgetting the whole thing." Throughout, his lan
guage suggests a sense that this drama of danger and salvation has
been played out so many times that it is no longer possible to believe
in either alternative—destruction or rescue. And yet Ashbery seems
somehow confident that we, we poets and we readers of poetry, will
muddle through.
If poetry seemed marginal to Ashbery in 1970, some observers
in our own day wonder whether it has ceased to exist at all. The
conservative critic Joseph Epstein a few years ago opened up a still
ongoing debate with an article in Commentary titled "Who Killed
Poetry?" That debate has perhaps generated more heat than light;
even so, what Dana Gioia refers to as its "extravagantly acrimo
nious" character ("Can Poetry Matter?" 96) is itself testimony to
166 the extent to which Epstein's charges hit home, to which they raised
fears and anxieties among the community of poets that had lain dor
mant but powerfully alive before Epstein articulated them. I agree
After that the situation of poetry is dire, but I think we're well advised,
when imagining how poetry might be rescued, to keep in mind Ash-
bery's suggestions that such a project demands both a sense of irony
the Death
and a thorough awareness of the society poetry must inhabit. If
poetry is on the margin, it exists nevertheless within "technological
of Poetry society," a society "disenchanted" in Max Weber's sense, and any
hopes of a cure for poetry must take that context into account.
Epstein's article raises the question of the death of poetry without,
alas, shedding much light on it; those concerned with poetry can
only look with envy at the extensive, thoughtful, and philosophically
sophisticated debate regarding the "death of painting" that, while
ongoing throughout the twentieth century, seems to have taken on a
particular urgency in recent years. But envying another medium its
discourse of demise is perhaps too macabre, and a recent discussant
of the death of painting begins by cautioning that each of the various
rhetorics of ending which we have grown so used to hearing—the
end of ideology, the end of history, the end of the real, the death
of the author, the death of man—has its specific trajectory, its par
ticular tone,1 and there is unfortunately little in the debate on the
condition and possibility of painting that can be directly applied to
the state of poetry. Certainly photography, the mechanical, instru
mental, dehumanized other of painting, is far more radically alien to
the substance of that medium than prose is to poetry, and so photog
raphy's threat to painting has been formulated in sharper and more
coherent terms, by both artists and critics, than the challenge posed
to poetry by prose. Photography appears in the history of painting
as an intervention from the realm of technology. The way in which
the expansion of the domain of prose embodies a long trajectory
of development in the technology of writing is less obvious, which
permits Epstein to treat the increasing encroachment of prose upon
territory once held by poetry as owing to the deficiencies of poets,
and thus to ignore the larger historical dynamics at stake.2
Epstein entertains various hypotheses in answer to the question
asked in his title: that creative writing programs are "lowering the
high standard of work which is poetry's only serious claim on any
one's attention" (17), that science has undermined poetry's authority
to speak on important issues, that poetry's decline is merely part
of a more general decay of language. But Epstein professes him
self unconvinced by any of these explanations and falls back on an
archetypically conservative view that rejects historical and social de
terminations for a focus on individuals: "No doubt romanticism,
modernism, and other literary movements have all had their effect in
landing poetry in the position it finds itself in. . . . Institutional, lin
guistic, historical factors have also doubtless exerted their influence
in pushing poetry into the dark corner it now inhabits. Yet nearly
every explanation of the situation of poetry in our time . . . seems
to let the poets themselves off the hook" (17). If poetry is no longer
cared about and taken seriously by thinking people, Epstein implies,
it's the fault of poets, who have simply failed to produce poetry that
readers find compelling.
Most of the responses to Epstein's article were in kind. If Epstein
asserted that poets weren't writing poems that mattered, poets as
serted that they were; if Epstein wrote that poetry had lost its audi
ence, his respondents insisted that the audience was bigger than ever.
Donald Hall's is typical of the replies to Epstein both in the defen-
siveness evident from his very title, "Death to the Death of Poetry,"
and in his effort to deflect the blame for poetry's condition back
from his own cohort, the poets, and onto Epstein's, the critics: "Our
trouble is not with poetry, but with the public perception of poetry"
(74). Yet when Hall elaborates on this statement, he ends up sound
ing a great deal like Epstein. He acknowledges that journals for the
intelligent general reader, such as the New York Times Book Review,
Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and Harper's (in which
Hall's piece appeared), have largely ceased to pay much attention
to contemporary American poetry, and he goes on to remark about
this situation that "it is poetry's loss, and the poetry reader's—for
we need a cadre of reviewers to sift through the great volume of
material" (74). Epstein remarks that "contemporary poetry . . . has
been . . . released from the burden of undergoing tough criticism"
(19). Hall is calling for more reviews, Epstein for more bad reviews,
but both believe that the situation of poetry would be improved if
readers had more and better guidance through the enormous out
pouring of current verse.
Hall and Epstein agree as well that poems are being published
and purchased in America now in far greater numbers than in the
1930s or the 1950s, periods that for Epstein fall into a happier mo
ment when poetry held a place of importance in general literary
culture. For Hall this is sign of health, for Epstein a symptom of
poetry's retreat into a specialist subculture: "The entire enterprise
168 of poetic creation seems threatened by having been taken out of the
world, chilled in the classroom, and vastly overproduced by men
and women who are licensed to write it by degree if not neces
After sarily by talent or spirit" (20). Dana Gioia, in an intelligent and
deeply pondered contribution to the debate, extends Epstein's line of
argument into a comprehensive account of contemporary American
the Death
poetry as a subculture, inbred and marginalized, and increasingly
isolated from general readers and most of "the intellectual commu
of Poetry nity" ("Can Poetry Matter?" 105). Hall, focusing on mere numbers,
cites a good many statistics to buttress his contention that poetry is
enjoying a period of enormous popularity; Gioia looks not merely at
the number but also at the kinds of readers poetry has, and makes a
persuasive case that the expansion in the number of poetry's readers
has accompanied a decline in its cultural importance.
Though Gioia is himself a New Formalist, he's sufficiently dis
interested that his prescriptions for delivering poetry from its sub-
cultural imprisonment have nothing to do with returning to tradi
tional forms; they fall, rather, into the domain of what one might
call marketing. When poets give public readings, they should read
the work of other poets as well as their own; poetry readings should
be mixed with performances of other arts; poets should write prose
about poetry more often, and when they do should avoid mere log
rolling; teachers of poetry should stress performance over analysis;
poets and arts administrators should use radio to expand poetry's
audience; such are Gioia's suggestions for restoring poetry to a
position of cultural importance ("Can Poetry Matter?" 106). The
program is sensible in every particular, and yet strangely beside the
point. Gioia's aim is to return poetry to the general reader, and if
the general reader still existed, Gioia's program would stand every
chance of success. But as Gioia himself states, "Poetry is not alone
among the arts in its marginal position. If the audience for poetry
has declined into a subculture of specialists, so too have the audi
ences for most contemporary art forms" (105). He goes on to refer to
"the unprecedented fragmentation of American high culture during
the past half century" (105). That all of the arts (with the exception,
as Gioia notes, of the visual arts) have been subject to a similar mar-
ginalization and atomization probably indicates that a powerful set
of cultural forces are at work, and that it will take more than better
marketing to put poetry back together again.
The program proposed in Jonathan Holden's recent book The
Fate of American Poetry seems to found itself on similarly dubi
ous premises. Holden imagines a series of reclamations, proposing
that poetry can retake ground formerly ceded to prose; in succes
sive chapters he suggests ways in which poetry might "reclaim some
of its neglected didactic potential. . . . might reclaim some of the
storytelling functions that seem to have become virtually the exclu
sive province of the novel and the short story. . . . might reclaim
some of the discursive subject matter currently regarded as belong
ing in the province of nonfiction prose" (109). Holden's project to
some extent, then, parallels that of Robert Pinsky's The Situation
of Poetry (1976), which argued, against what one might describe
as the preciosity of the image-based poetics prevalent in the 1970s,
for the return of the prose virtues to poetry. For Pinsky, this is a
matter of a quality he calls "discursiveness," a combination of "per
sonal utterance [and] plain rhetoric" with "abstract definition and
vocabulary" (161—62). Pinsky tries to imagine a way in which the
intellect can appear in poetry without seeming mandarin or self
consciously clever. For Holden, the reclamation he imagines is more
a thematic than a stylistic concern: "It is in its subject matter, its
'content,' that American poetry, accomplished as it already is, can
further enlarge its capability" (137). Holden's vision of American
poetry's future turns on the unlikely proposition that readers will
want to get from poetry what they can more expeditiously and easily
get from prose. Like Gioia, he supposes that poetry's most urgent
task is to make contact with general readers, but unlike Gioia, he
sees the academic institutionalization of poetry as the development
that ensures poetry a broad audience: "The basis of the 'broader
popular audience' which Gioia dreams of . . . is the university" (14).
By the trick of identifying poetry's subcultural status with its health
as an art, Holden is able to grant many of Gioia's observations about
the situation of poetry at the same time that he shares with Hall a
sense that the art is fundamentally robust and flourishing.
As I made clear in my opening chapter, I'm unable to share
Holden's enthusiasm for the current state of poetry, or for the notion
that poetry should base its appeal to readers on "the types of sub
ject matter we find in novels, sermons, and essays" (14). Poetry,
for the most part locked into a self-justifying culture of lyricism in
creative writing departments, has suffered an enormous loss of intel
lectual respectability;3 the kind of people, both inside and outside
the academy, who have an appetite for challenging reading are no
longer much attracted to poetry. Rosalind Krauss's 1981 remarks are
even more true now, given that those she refers to as "students" have
170 graduated into teachers and critics themselves: "[Graduate] stu
dents, having experienced the collapse of modernist literature, have
turned to the literary products of postmodernism, among the most
After powerful examples of which are the paraliterary works of Barthes
and Derrida. . . . what is clear is that Barthes and Derrida are the
writers, not the critics, that students now read" (295). The specifics
the Death
of Krauss's remarks now seem dated—Derrida's star is very much
on the wane, and an enthusiasm for Barthes "places" one genera-
of Poetry tionally—but if the names have changed (we might for the moment
substitute Foucault and Baudrillard for Barthes and Derrida), the
point remains; what might broadly be termed "theory" now occu
pies the place in intellectual life that contemporary literature once
held. This is reflected in the way contemporary literature has increas
ingly become an academic subspecialty. It used to be assumed that
most people concerned with literature would be interested in the
literary productions of their own day; now, each literature depart
ment has a specialist who "does" contemporary, and when he or she
wishes to speak to colleagues, literary theory is likely to provide the
common ground of shared texts and issues.
Some members of the writing program culture have applauded
its isolation from the university literature department, seeing in
poetry's marginalization its chance for avoiding the contaminations
of theory. In a recent issue of the AWP (Associated Writing Pro
grams) Chronicle, D. W. Fenza, a confessed reformed deconstruc-
tionist, celebrated the writing program as a haven from the heartless
world of literary theory: "In the past decade especially, creative writ
ing programs have provided a refuge . . . from the babble of literary
specialists. Writing workshops and seminars have been places where
one could talk about books in a public tongue, and talk about them
as if they were extensions of one's life . . . [as] talismans or friendly
accomplices . . . rather than as texts with endless indeterminacies"
(2o). But however problematic the skepticisms that now dominate
academic literary study, if poetry simply withdraws into the writing
programs, shielded from the general intellectual culture of herme-
neutic suspicion, impoverishment will surely result. If poets refuse
to confront any uncomfortable challenge to their presuppositions,
they will remain marginalized and will have no hope of winning the
attention of the readers poets should most wish to attract, readers
who are not afraid of difficulty and who seek in reading complex
and thoughtful representations of experience.
Reconnecting poetry with the intellectual reader is an urgent mat
ter not merely for the health of poetry but also for the health of the
intellect. While the notion of a peculiarly "poetic" form of language
defined as a disruption or negation of language's ordinary state of
denotation and communication has in our moment understandably
been an object of considerable theoretical suspicion, imaginative
writing, and especially poetry, might still be seen as fulfilling a set
of functions that other forms of writing cannot. A program of skep
ticism invites its own form of complacency, an inclination to take
the abstractions in which skepticism necessarily deals as a wholly
adequate representation of its objects of scrutiny; resisting too quick
a translation of object into concept is a role poetry has long been
credited with playing, and one that remains valuable. Any skepti
cism must be tested against experience, to see how far it illuminates
experience and whether it can, in fact, be "lived"; whether, that is,
its insights are able to clarify in useful ways our experience of the
world. I've tried to suggest some ways in which the three poets at
the center of this book do that, and in particular the ways in which
they represent the experience of inhabiting the kinds of skepticism
in which the contemporary mind makes its home. I hope that recog
nizing and describing this aspect of their work may help to point
toward fruitful avenues for poetry to explore.
The speech of "the great dead stars" is not heard directly but is
Directions
rather represented through the artificially poetic language used to
describe it. The disappearance of the theater seems to stand for the
disappearance of the intensely artificial machinery of glamour that for
operated in the star system, and the representation of that language
as an intonation robbed of content parallels the language of the wild
man himself, as if the vanished voices of the film stars had been re- Poetry
incarnated in the voices the deranged man hears, which can only be
guessed at. And both become identified with poetic language, the
language that was fashioned to fit the traditional pentameter. The
poet thus identifies the pentameter with the vanished glamour of
the "great dead stars," which seems as out of place in the con
temporary world as the atavistic wild man in the environment he
inhabits.
In the final stanza the wild man becomes a kind of man on the
dump, as Ferry's poem swerves from Stevens's by restoring the social
and economic contexts that Stevens veils:
The reader will probably have noticed that the two poems I've just
discussed might broadly be seen as falling into two of the three pri
mary divisions of the landscape of American poetry I've been map
ping—mainstream and formalist, respectively. I'll discuss another
poem about the movies, Ellen Levy's "Rec Room," a poem clearly
influenced by John Ashbery's work and by some of the same kinds
of concerns about the ways in which culture constitutes subjectivity
that animate Language writing, without succumbing to the strenu
ously self-conscious avant-gardism that marks that movement. The
poem is most Ashberyan, perhaps, in its complex and precise syntax,
and in the way its diction freely mixes different levels of language
and terms from different kinds of experience:
The film assumes the texture of its screen
on the first projection. Audrey Hepburn's face
creases where the rec room paneling once
took exception to it for the sake of
rephrasing it slightly—a lesson
these late viewings have brought home. Home
screen or revival house, the print of her
quixotic photographer Fred Astaire
pulls from the fixative always
already bears the mark of my mother's
casual fault. He saw her as eyes and mouth.
Typically, she had her face buried
in a book the day he discovered it.
In the end she learns to renounce
a half-baked philosophy and to love
bearing the standard of the New Look.
Still, I can't detach her from the scene
of her earliest associations,
the philosophy section where she dreamed
of a possible love. Is that what she means
by "empathicalism"? Imagining
we can bypass the film that divides us
from former selves as from each other
by a poorly marked private detour
stumbled on, repeatedly, in the dark?
"How long has this been going on?" she sings,
her timbre unfixed in spite of lessons.
The story of the poem emerges only obliquely, partly because the
poem seems highly personal, such that the poet has no need to ex
plain the narrative situation to herself, and partly because the poem's
disjunctive style is meant, I think, to reflect the necessarily frag
mented and incomplete path of any self-knowledge. The poet, seeing
the film Funny Face, is reminded of her first viewing of the film, as
180 a child, projected on a wall because her mother had forgotten to
rent a screen (the "casual fault"), and the memory sets off a reflec
tion on the way movies embody a set of cultural narratives that have
After powerfully shaped the poet's sense of herself.
The poem assumes a good deal of knowledge, for the most part a
sort of knowledge that women are substantially more likely to have
the Death
than men. Funny Face, the key intertext, does not quite belong to the
canon of classic cinema; it's instead something of a "woman's pic
of Poetry ture." It enhances our understanding of the poem to know that the
"New Look," the fashion revolution imposed by Dior and Givenchy
in the late 1940s, was a refeminization of styles after the masculin
ized fashions of the war period. The specifically "feminine" range of
experience the poet invokes is meant, I think, to suggest how much
of the knowledge taken for granted in literature is, in fact, male
knowledge; allusion here becomes a way for the poem to define the
kind of reader it addresses. In Funny Face, Audrey Hepburn plays
a young bookstore clerk who is a devotee of the French philosophi
cal movement "empathicalism," obviously a sidewise reference to
existentialism. Photographer Fred Astaire "discovers" her and turns
her into a model, but only after she has encountered, in Paris, the
founder of empathicalism and found out firsthand that he is a fraud.
The film poses, then, a fundamental dilemma in the growing up
of many middle-class women—should I cultivate my looks or my
mind?—and answers firmly for looks.
The poem is about pedagogy; it assumes, in Simone de Beauvoir's
words, that one is not born a woman but becomes one; but it is
also about the complex patterns of shaping and resistance involved
in the process of acculturation. Watching the film, the poet overlays
onto the present image her memories of her first viewing of it, pro
jected on buckling paneling. The moment in Funny Face where Fred
Astaire shows Audrey Hepburn the first photograph he has made of
her is very much a scene of instruction; he is showing her how he
sees her but also teaching her to see herself this way. The paneling's
"rephrasing it slightly," introducing a flaw into the perfect image
the Astaire character, and the film, have produced, is an emblem of
the way memory reshapes experience to yield a "lesson" somewhat
different from the intention. The poet suggests at once the indelible
effect of her encounter with the film and the unforeseeable nature
of its effect on her; the image speaks both of the shaping power of
early experience and of the ways in which we inevitably inflect and
transform mass cultural goods in our consumption of them.
In the film, Audrey Hepburn learns both "to renounce" and "to
love"; the placement of the two terms at successive line ends re
inforces the sense of a necessary relation between those two actions.
In the poem's account, accepting the photographer's image as a defi
nition of herself means not merely removing herself from the book
in which she was "buried," but also acquiescing in her own objec-
tification; the poem describes the photographer as discovering "it"
(her face) rather than "her." The poet resists, though, the educa
tion the model accepts, finding that she "can't detach her from the
scene / of her earliest associations," a scene that formulates "a pos
sible love" different from her "love" for "bearing the standard of the
New Look." And yet the poet's attitude is a murky blend of resis
tance and identification; the poet herself seems unable to measure
precisely the ratio between the two: "Imagining / we can bypass
the film that divides us / from former selves as from each other /
by a poorly marked private detour / stumbled on, repeatedly, in the
dark?" The punning wit of the last line quoted, in which the cliche
"in the dark" is revitalized by its reminding us of the material scene
of movie viewing, should not obscure the urgency of the question.
The poet, now grown to skeptical adulthood, finds herself distanced
from the unreflective involvement in this Cinderella myth that char
acterized her childhood response, but she is also divided from the
person she might have become in a world less saturated by myths
of this sort. The film's only answer to the poet's repeated question
is another question, which in the film refers to Audrey Hepburn's
discovery of her feelings for Fred Astaire, but which the poem's con
text rephrases to mean something substantially different. How long,
the poet seems to ask, have the culture's myths been at work, shap
ing her sense of herself and of what her desires and destiny should
be? This sort of lesson, the poet implies, is what goes on "in the
dark," in the innumerable scenes of instruction staged continually
by the culture we inhabit, which shapes us without our realizing it.
And yet the poem's final line holds out a space of potential resis
tance; Audrey Hepburn's singing (despite the lessons she received
in the course of production) remains "unfixed." If her image has
been frozen in "fixative," her voice, the poem suggests, cannot be
so easily controlled, as the poem's own appropriation of her words
demonstrates.
The story I've been telling about the poem involves a critique—a
rich and subtle one, I think—of the film and the many mass cultural
works similarly built around this fundamental narrative, in which a
knowing man tells a young woman who she should be, and she in
turn is delighted to recognize the image he creates as her true, and
most truly desirable, self. The poet acknowledges the attractions of
that myth at the same time that she explores the space of resistance
any cultural narrative such as this one must, however unwittingly,
open. If the film instructs women that it is better to leave behind
books and accept men's definitions of you, the very need for such a
lesson suggests the possibility that women might not want, on their
own accord, to do so. The poem is clearly informed by contempo
rary feminist thought on the role of mass culture in the production
of gender, and by theoretical work on popular culture that seeks to
chart spaces of resistance within hegemonic narratives. The power
of the poem, however, is in the way those concerns emerge through
an account of experience, the way the abstractions of theoretical
discourse are made concrete by a subjectivity that reflects on its own
constitution. The assurance with which various abstract discourses
have been assimilated is most manifest in the poem's freely varied
diction, which mixes into its offhand slanginess ("half-baked") one
of the signature verbal tics of poststructuralist writing, the phrase
"always already." The poet's rephrasing of this by now empty verbal
gesture gains an added irony from our awareness of Funny Face's
parodic treatment of the fashionable French philosophy of its day;
but the joke has its serious side as well, reminding the reader of the
gulf between the portentous abstractions of philosophy and the mun
dane realities, the casual faults, of experience. Informed by a body of
skeptical contemporary thought, the poem nevertheless recognizes
that skepticism can freeze into a reflex itself.
These three poems explore the limits of imagination, crafting
formal strategies that trouble the illusion of voice and question
the place and viability of lyric subjectivity. At the same time, that
questioning maintains, in each poem, a firm hold on the particu
lars of experience as a stay against the formulaic quality that ges
tures of unmasking or deflation, in our culture of suspicion, can too
easily acquire. Hass's sudden shifts of metaphoric register, Ferry's
studied artificiality, and Levy's fragmented and oblique narration
make reading difficult by demanding continual readjustments on the
reader's part. In discussing these poems I've focused on formal de
vices that embody the combination of lyrical and skeptical attributes
that seems to me most urgently needed in our poetry. I now turn
my attention to some poems that, while perhaps not as formally
adventurous, indicate areas of subject matter particularly rich in
opportunities for the representation of contemporary experience.
Once James Balog had said her snout was soft as deerskin
but the rest of her hide had the rough tautness of a football
made of sandpaper that was ode enough.
In the facing photo, the hamadryas baboon snubs me, her
nose's uptilt such that the nostrils are mosques
dark with shed sins and the doom that opposes pilgrimage.
She is in love.
I'll buy that; what can't happen at a Florida circus
with twin monkey girls (their hair like pipeworks follows
the spines beneath their costumes exiting mid-rump slits like
prehensile tails neglected into dredlock rip off) and a resident
hawker whose chest hair grows in question marks. Also
Guernsey cow with six stomachs each separately fed by the
angle of head at grazing, the particulars of the lowing, variety
of the moo, the sweetness of the quackgrass and clover
and all the different mood-matched milks on country tables
in pitchers with pouring lips wide as a pelvic bone.
The rhino's horn hollowed out is cornucopian. I never
think of this when it would do some good. Already
the manatee and baboon are starting to taste extinction,
welcoming it as a resolution of a forgotten craving deep in
the proliferation of Guernsey cream white as a light-emitting
lake that makes manatee and baboon glow when they catch
sight
184 of themselves during their dive at the moment in which
the dive becomes inevitable, the cream displacing
into a crown as they enter, then settling
After as if they never existed.
[Rainbow Remnants 26]
the Death
The photographer's description of the manatee's texture is a piece
of found poetry, quoted directly from the caption in National Geo
of Poetry graphic. The poet defers to the photographer because of the simple
eloquence of his words, but also because he has actually touched this
soon to disappear animal, which the poet most likely never will. The
subsequent two stanzas further reflect on the ironies of our relation
to the natural; the baboon is credited with the human feelings of
disdain and love at the same time that it becomes an emblem of "the
doom that opposes pilgrimage," an otherness that discourages em
pathy. The "monkey girls" are paired with the cow; on the one hand
a wholly factitious fantasy of blurring between human and animal,
on the other an image of the natural converted almost entirely into
the cultural, nature as productive mechanism. As against the insis
tence on particularity and individuality in Balog's encounters with
the endangered animals, the Guernsey cow is multiple and generic,
one of millions. Moss communicates the contrast, however, by treat
ing the cow as if it and its products could be minutely particularized;
the poet's irony is deepest where her tone is most matter-of-fact.
The final stanza elaborates a deliberately bizarre extended image,
which embodies in highly compressed form a complex set of mean
ings. The poet posits a death drive at the root of the mechanisms
that are leading to extinctions, an urge toward sameness and inertia
that she ironically ascribes to the disappearing species themselves.
The cow's milk mentioned in the previous stanza swells phantas-
magorically into a "lake," parodic reminder of the "oceanic" goal
of the death drive, at the same time that it is identified with the
white background against which Balog has photographed the ani
mals. Extinction is figured as a plunge into this lake of cream, a
lake that figures both the generalized blankness and homogeneity
of a world in which the "natural" seems to have disappeared for
good, and also one of the chief contingent causes of extinctions—
the encroachment of human operations on wildlife habitats. The
poem's protest against destruction is embodied in the absurdity of
its imagery, a protest made all the more powerful by the oblique
and ironic means used to communicate it. The poem finally impli
cates the poet as well; its attraction to things-in-their-farewell is a
stock in trade of romantic poetics, but this taste comes to seem de
cidedly ambiguous and double-edged as it savors the "glow," which
might be defined as the aura that gathers around what is soon to dis
appear. The poet's skepticism extends even to her own celebration
of these doomed creatures as she acknowledges that their doom is
a good part of what makes them available as aesthetic objects for
both photographer and poet.
Who were they? The writer just calls them "sweepers," clear
ing
the streets, leveling a path for the army through the smolder
ing
debris of ancient houses torched and toppled all about them
their fingers blistering as they plied crowbar and boat hook,
dowel and axe, the pain a punishment for the dumb animal
persistence that so easily and thoroughly turned friend and
relation,
the whole rich tapestry of customary feeling, law, memory
and lore
into mere fill for gullies?—Did they resent the half-dead
for their clumsy fit, their ineffectual resistances,
the ones stuffed head down, legs above the surface
writhing pathetically to get away, like giant insects,
or the ones feet first, their heads above the surface
unable even to flinch as the horses trampled over face and
skull?
[Covenant 3]
The poet seems less interested in answering the question that opens
the poem than in imagining the quality of the experience these
sweepers undergo, an experience that brings together the excep
tional carnage and horror of war with the everyday pain of labor.
Without ever invoking the language of ethics, the poem becomes a
meditation on the costs of the "dumb animal persistence" that pro
vides the continuity in human history across moments of even the
most cataclysmic upheavals.
In the second section of the poem the poet draws away from
engagement and sympathy with these anonymous figures, neither
victims nor victors, to underline the disproportion between the "few
lines" they merit in history and the "six days and nights" spanned
by their labors:
The writer doesn't say. For a few lines in my Roman history,
for six days and nights, nameless, stateless, ever diligent
they clear the streets, they make the way smooth for Scipio,
who, it is said, was weeping, sunk in thought, as he looked on,
weeping at the fortunes of cities, peoples, empires:
the Assyrians had fallen, and the Medes, and the Persians
after them had fallen, and so too, latest of all,
latest and most brilliant, the Macedonians blotted out,
destroyed, as Ilion had been destroyed, and Priam,
and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear . . .
Here one turns the page, and goes on reading.
[4]
Scipio is the elite man of culture who looks at the destruction be
fore him and responds with a recognition of tragedy informed by
historical and poetic knowledge at the same time that this fatalistic
recognition comports with his role as destroyer of Carthage; culture
and barbarism are, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, near allied. The
poet is perhaps tempted to a similar indulgence in pathos but in
stead turns the page, implicitly aligning himself with the sweepers,
whoever they are, who bury the dead and living just like the poet
who turns the page on them. The pathos and heroism of the Iliad are
invoked, only to be quickly shunted aside; the poet's engagement
is neither with the conquerors nor with the brilliant doomed vic
tims, but with those who doggedly and blindly persist. And yet, even
those figures are finally beyond the range of the poet's identification;
his response, finally, is to turn the page. The prevalence of dramatic
monologue in the modernist era and after rested on the assumption
of a universal availability of sympathy, of the poet's ability to enter
the experience of others, no matter how remote their situation. In
their different ways Hass and Shapiro both subject this assumption
to a decidedly skeptical evaluation.
The poets I've discussed here by no means exhaust the ranks of the
contemporaries I admire; I regret particularly that I do not have
room to treat the works of Frank Bidart and John Peck. Nor do
the strategies and subjects I've examined in these poems exhaust the
possibilities I think poetry might profitably explore. In particular,
the impact of contemporary scientific revolutions, with their on
going redefinitions of some of the most fundamental terms of our
self-understandings, is a theme little explored by poets, an omission
all the more striking when one of our most powerful contemporary
After novelists, Thomas Pynchon, has made the languages and structures
of scientific inquiry a central focus of his work. But I've already been
sufficiently presumptuous on enough occasions in this study, and I
the Death
won't presume to prescribe the kinds of subjects poetry ought to
treat. Whatever its subject matter, though, any poetry that can satisfy
of Poetry the demands of the time will certainly need to find ways of bring
ing together the energies of intellectual abstraction with whatever
remains viable of the lyric impulse.
In doing so, poets will need to make things difficult, not merely for
their readers but for themselves. Neither of the current aspirants to
the role of poetry's rescuer, Language poetry and the New Formal
ism, promises to do that to a sufficient extent. The New Formalists
for the most part seem to imagine that poetry can stand aside from
the general tide of culture and restore an earlier form of community
by resurrecting earlier poetic forms. The Language poets, it seems to
me, attempt to embody too directly the skepticisms they subscribe
to; their poems are demonstrations of certain tenets of thought, but
we learn from them almost nothing about what it feels like to in
habit those thoughts, to believe those beliefs. I'm well aware that
any notion that poetry needs to provide some sort of experiential
grounding may easily be "interrogated," to use the dreadful current
idiom, as a reactionary mythification. At the risk of seeming more
tenderhearted than tough-minded, I propose rather that what we
need in poetry (and what we need poetry for) is a way to reconcile
or bring together the authority of skeptical reflection with that of
experience. Neither is adequate by itself.
Poetry is dead. With that judgment I have no interest in arguing,
if what it means is that poetry is unlikely in any foreseeable future
to regain an audience like the one enjoyed by Tennyson, or even
by Frost. But it seems to me that poetry still has an enormous job
of work to do, posthumously, as it were. If nothing else, poetry's
death should haunt the rest of culture; there seems something mon
strous about the notion that the form of expression which through
most of the history of human culture was considered the highest,
most powerful, and most prestigious should have now become a
sort of leisure sector of mental life, avoided by those who seek to
wield genuine cultural power. And marginalized as poetry may be,
the very fact of its apparent diminishment and anachronism may
give it a peculiar vantage and a point of leverage. Adorno, in one 191
of the maxims of the Minima Moralia, remarks on the role of the
"defeated" in history:
Directions
If Benjamin said that history had hitherto been written from
the standpoint of the victor, and needed to be written from that
of the vanquished, we might add that knowledge must indeed for
present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat,
but should also address itself to those things which were not
embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside—what Poetry
might be called the waste products and blind spots that have
escaped the dialectic. It is in the nature of the defeated to ap
pear, in their impotence, irrelevant, eccentric, derisory. What
transcends the ruling society is not only the potentiality it de
velops but also all that which did not fit properly into the laws
of historical movement. [98]
Poetry now seems to many observers "irrelevant, eccentric, de
risory." This, perhaps, is its opportunity—having been repressed, to
return to trouble the culture that has exiled it to the margins, both as
a reminder of what has been lost in the process that has diminished
poetry's status and as a carrier of values that resist incorporation
into the degraded language of public discourse or into the idioms of
the dominant intellectual skepticisms.
It's just this kind of resistant individuality I've tried to trace in the
work of the three poets at the center of this volume. Each combines a
fundamentally lyric apprehension of experience with an intense, and
intensely self-aware, skepticism about his or her poetic enterprise. It
is this self-awareness, this irony toward the claims implicit in their
own work, that distinguishes these poets from the contemporary
aspirants to poetic renewal. Poetry is not going to attract the atten
tion of thinking people unless it acknowledges its own diminished
situation in some forthright and tough-minded way. The poets who
inhabit what Gioia refers to as the poetry "subculture" do this only
by a limitation of claims and a narrowing of the intellectual scope of
poetry that for the most part ends up indistinguishable from com
placency. Neither the avant-gardist fantasies of the Language poets
nor the populist fantasies of the New Formalists hold much promise
in this regard. Both of these recent movements make things too easy
for themselves insofar as they place their faith in a body of tech
niques that, rigorously followed, will yield a renewed relation to
the audience as a natural consequence; they demand assent to their
192 premises as the price of admission to the writing. But if poets are
going to regain some of the stature they have lost, they will have to
show a willingness to reflect on and question their own assumptions
After to a far greater extent than either movement has yet done.
Poetry ought, then, to present its readers with exempla of the kind
of mind that continually guards against passing fictions upon itself,
the Death
that reflects on the operations of its own language and weighs them
against a tough standard. Poetry can offer us images of the activity of
of Poetry making language authentic, whether that involves rejecting a phrase
that "first enhances, then debases," or mining cliches for the core of
vitality that remains in them. But poetry can also warn us against
the temptation to imagine that we have arrived at an absolute and
unassailable lucidity. Poetry, because it has the potential to be the
most difficult kind of writing, can most effectively pose the demands
of experience, as they are sedimented and embodied in the language
we use, against their reduction in the formulas of skepticism that
now come so naturally to our minds and lips. It has become easy
for us to identify the categories and habits of thought produced by
the skeptical intellect with truth, even when we have dissolved the
notion of truth back into a language game or an effect of power.
Poetry, by bringing us to a greater awareness of the languages by
which we understand our experience, should help us resist the re
duction of experience to formulas, whether those are the formulas
of lyricism or of lucidity. But to do so it will have to be difficult.
NOTES
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