Poetry in Jackson

Town Square at night, Jackson, WY, January 2011

There is a good used book store here in Jackson, Wyoming. Every time I visit this store, which I do only once a year or so, which means every time that I am in town, I come away with some great books, often ones I've been thinking about or looking for. I have no idea if there's a poetry or arts scene in Jackson, as my interest here is primarily geological, and also a bit of personal history. (This is, after all, where I spent my summer after high school, studying geology, as my first college course: geology taught in the field, here in the mountains of Wyoming and the surrounding region.) I also have no idea of the scene because my presence in Jackson is rarely more than transitory.

On this visit, I am here for several days—as a sort of vacation I am treating myself to, and also to spend much of my time making photographs and video in the mountains (revisiting some of those same exact places I first visited as a geology student). I spent most of today in Grand Teton National Park, doing my visual artwork. But I also spent part of the day lounging about, doing nothing, existing on genuine djam vakasi, or vacation time. Which is a lot like djam karet, or rubber time: take off the watch, just mark your day by the sun's position in the sky, and forget about everything else. On American Indian reservations, they call it going on Indian time.

So, as part of my vacation time today, for reasons only of personal interest and pleasure, I wandered again into this good used book store here in Jackson, and once again was rewarded: I picked up three excellent volumes of poetry.

•

First, a sidebar: I have admitted to not writing much poetry lately, and not feeling like it, much. The truth is: I am saving my poetry-writing chops, if you will, for a set of lyrics for a musical project I am deeply engaged in just now, and for the next few months. Writing a song lyric is an exercise in "less is more," but also in making every syllable count, as you have maybe four or eight lines in which to tell an entire story. You have to be precise and detailed. It takes a lot of effort. Because of this project I am engaged with now, I can feel my poetry skills and abilities kicking in, but they are focused on these song lyrics to the exclusion of other writing. I'm not even journalling much at the moment. (Summation: I'm on a roadtrip. I'm in Jackson for several days. The altitude sickness is kicking my ass, because of my pre-existing other illnesses; so I've been feeling symptoms of anemia and tiredness that are illusory relapses, caused by the lack of oxygen at higher elevations. I'm drinking enough water to drown Kansas. I'm having to take it easy, again because of the altitude, and my exercise regimen is taking a hit, although I'm making up for it by hiking out in the cold, which takes a lot of effort. In short, I'm in heaven. I'm exactly where I want to be, at this exact moment.) But the song lyrics are starting to flow—which is interesting, because the "feel" of writing lyrics I know will be set to music is so similar to the "feel" of writing a poem, yet also very different, because the skills are also similar yet different.

Songwriting requires a kind of restraint that more discursive, "pure" poetry rarely attempts—of course that's one reason song lyrics often cannot stand on their own, on the printed page, as poems. The mistake most poets make, in their bias towards words over all other media, is in thinking that song lyrics are poems, and can be judged by the same standards. Wrong! Lyrics are meant to synergize with the music, not stand on their own: lyrics are never meant to be "pure" poetry. A great lyric in a great song works because of the total package, not just because the lyrics are genius—even when they are. This bias that poets have about words shows itself most clearly when they focus on the lyrics and ignore the power of the music. Music in a song isn't just ornamentation or decoration for the brilliant words; it's half, or more, of the power of the piece.

Most "pure" poets make lousy songwriters (although one or two songwriters really are good poets—and no, Dylan and Cohen are not of this number, despite their cults): they become so enamored with using every trick of their craft, so in love are they with poetry itself, with the magic and beauty of words, that the song lyrics they produce tend to be over-written, overly discursive, and far too self-consciously "poetic." I say most poets, here, even though many professional songwriters also have this failing: it's always a temptation to show off how great you are at writing poetic lines, at making the words beautiful, and forgetting that focused compression in song lyrics is critical. Poets who mostly write sonnets make lousy lyric-writers, in general; while haiku-writers tend to already know the virtues of compression and precision, of evoking a momentary emotion using economy of means. Perhaps many songwriters would benefit from formal study of haiku, from time to time.

And to be honest, I just haven't much felt like writing poems this past year. I've written a few good poems, I hope, after a long hiatus broken by a brush with serious illness; but the past year was mostly devoted to music, photography, and other artistic pursuits. Of course several poet friends have already expressed to me their disquiet at this turn of events—which is flattering, in a way—yet I can't help but feel that this once again shows a bias that many poets have towards their own artform over all others. It's a kind of tunnel vision. Will the world come to an end if I never contribute another poem? Hardly; although some comments have seemed to imply that it might—again, that's flattering—yet that doesn't take into account my basic practice of artistic crop rotation.

I suppose I just have to accept that some friends will never understand that I genuinely do not care if I ever write another poem. I probably will: but I genuinely don't care. I'm a heretic again, I suppose, in not caring about the same things others seem to care about, and in not viewing Poetry as either essential to my well-being or as my own primary artform. But if I were to force myself to try to write a poem, just now, it would be only to please others, not because I felt the urge and need in myself—and experience has proven the product of such misguided efforts to always have been a waste of time.

•

Anyway, today, on my vacation time, I picked up three books of poetry. Or rather, two books of poems, and one about poetry.

The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, ed. by Sam Hamill and Bradford Morrow. Rexroth has been much on my radar this past year, both for his poetry and his writing about poetry. Certainly he was one of the biggest influences on 20th C. poetry, both through the people he taught and influenced directly, and through his own work as poet and cheerleader for poetry. He was, after all, one of the first West Coast poets to look all the way to Asia for his sources, a neo-classicist who looked to Tu Fu and Li Po and the japanese poets, not only to Milton and Shakespeare. (His similarities to and greater differences from Ezra Pound largely revolve around this point.) My appreciation for Rexorth has been deepening the more I look into his work, and having this Complete Poems is going to be useful indeed.

Conrad Aiken: A Letter from Li Po & Other Poems. This is a hardcover of the 1955 first publication, possibly a first printed edition—although I can't be sure, as in those days it wasn't always publishing practice to label first editions as such; it depended on the publisher. Aiken, that most musical of poets, that poet most dedicated to the musical line, the sound and cadence of poetry, here is in his most reflective mode, in the long title poem. Another Asian influence on American poetry.

I recently read a poet's opinion that what makes American poetry uniquely American, as opposed to its early cultural enslavement to and imitation of European models, is when it creates a balance between the East and the West; something Rexroth, Aiken, Gary Snyder, and many poets of the San Francisco Renaissance were the first to accomplish; all of which came into fruition mid-20th C. (Granted, this doesn't account for Whitman and Dickinson; but it could be argued that they were precursors who were not ignorant of Asian influence, either, as it came through Emerson and Thoreau.) Poets like myself, who continue to balance East and West—in my case literally, being an American who grew up in Asia—are the next generation or two after Rexroth; which accounts in part for my interest in his work just now, as if I felt called to fill in the lineages in my own poetic genealogy.

Aiken was a poet I became enthralled by in my teens, precisely because his program was overtly musical, deliberately syncretic and sensual. Years later, I also discovered Aiken's Collected Criticism, which remains in my opinion a role model of elegant and insightful reviewing. This edition of A Letter from Li Po, whether or not it's an actual first printing of the first published edition, is satisfying to own, to fill out more of my Aiken collection; and the book, as a book, is beautifully typeset and designed.

The third book found today was Toward a New Poetry, by Diane Wakowski, one of the series of "Poets On Poetry" collections from University of Michigan Press.

Wakowski, writing thirty years ago about poets, poetry criticism, the poetry workshop situation, and everything both wrong and right with all of them, could have been writing yesterday. It's remarkable how little has changed. The same issues are still in the air—perhaps more urgently, as the condition of poetry publishing 30 years ago has both shrunk and exploded. Publishing itself has fundamentally changed. Wakowski's criticism, which she clearly states is that not of a critic but of a poet, contains many thoughtful insights.

Reading Wakowski here, noticing how little seems to have changed in poetry and literature, is dismaying. I guess poets just won't grow up. Oh, individual poets do—Rexroth and Aiken are both examples of individual poets who operated as independent-minded adults in the poetry world—but as a tribe, there appears to be a gravitational pull towards remaining infantile, self-involved, and disconnected from the rest of the world. Wakowski, in these essays, keeps trying to cajole her readers, which she knows are her peers, since most people who read poetry are poets, into a wider sense of appreciation of poetry (why can't I like very different poetry from very different poets?), into a style of criticism that is inclusive rather than dismissive and hostile, into, in a word, growing up and acting like adults. That so little has changed in thirty years is not Wakowski's failing, but rather an indication of severe cultural inertia. Clearly Wakowski cares passionately about the poetry world, and wants it to thrive. At the same time, she is clear-eyed about both its triumphs and its flaws.

Wakowski, whose poetry I admit I have never really liked all that much, has for me in this volume a much clearer voice. Reading these essays, collected columns, interviews, and lectures, I feel I have a much clearer understanding of her ideas, and her approach to poetry. I admit that reading these essays and other articles has given me new respect for her. Perhaps I will be able to go back to her poems, now, and appreciate them more.

This is a problem parallel to one I have had with many of the poets published by Black Sparrow Press, who published and still publish many of Wakowski's books of poems. There are many famed stalwarts of Black Sparrow Press who I have tried, more than once, to get into, yet in the end have always felt repelled. I've always had this problem with Black Sparrow poets; so perhaps it is my idiosyncratic problem. Or it may be an issue of the publisher's editorial preferences. Yet it seems to me that the majority of poets published by Black Sparrow have often been of that self-absorbed, urban-centric, narrow-focused West Coast big city variety that admits of no interest in anything other than the human drama. Many volumes are devoted to the dramas of human interaction among people who live in the big cities; the rest of the universe doesn't seem to exist. There's an insular circularity to many of these poets' concerns, which orbit around personal trials and interpersonal angers that I can't seem to care about. This type of poetry is opposite to the West Coast poetry of Rexorth, Robinson Jeffers, William Everson, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan—all of whom sought and found something transpersonal, transhuman and mythic in poetry. Of course I am making sweeping generalizations here, and there will be exceptions; yet this is an issue about Black Sparrow I have tried to address numerous times, without success.

I have a fondness for the "Poets on Poetry" series, as it collects criticism and essays about poetry as written by poets, which I think is often more interesting, and less fundamentally wrongheaded, than criticism of poetry written by non-poets. What poets have to say about their own work is fascinating, even if you end up disagreeing. Partly that's because reading what poets have to say gives one insight into the creative process, both theirs and your own.

Of course, in reading this collection of Wakowski's essays, one notes that, then as now, most readers of poetry are poets and/or teachers of poetry. That hasn't changed. (The whining about it has increased, though.) Wakowski openly embraces this situation as something positive, which is in contrast to most opinions on the topic. She is not afraid of being insular about a special interest which only a few care passionately about. She points out that, during her nomadic years of teaching workshops and being a poet-in-residence at many different colleges, wherever she went she encountered a small but dedicated community to talk to, who cared deeply about the same things she cares about. Wakowski's sense of poetry community is a positive one; she quite consciously presents it as an alternative to cynical views about competition and fragmentation. As often as I have myself felt a total lack of community in the poetry world, I applaud Wakowski for presenting this positive alternative. Maybe it could still happen; maybe it could still be so.

And the "Poets on Poetry" series is published at the University of Michigan, my alma mater, so that's an extra dose of interest on my part. I didn't know when I lived in Ann Arbor that it was such a hotbed of literary work, thought, and publishing.

Conrad Aiken: An Appreciation

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973), who I have written about before as a poet-critic, was born today, August 5th. (Hat tip to Frank WIlson for the timely reminder.)

Aiken remains underrated and lesser-known as a poet. He is probably best known these days for some of his short stories, a few of which were made into films, including Silent Snow, Secret Snow, which was nationally televised on Rod Serling's Night Gallery in 1971.

A lot of his poetry is philosophical meditation, sometimes enacted through characters, sometimes more purely ruminative, all the while tracking psychological experience in ways few poets ever have. What distinguishes Aiken from his contemporaries, the early Moderns and the Lost Generation, is his innate and cultivated sense of the musical line, and his virtuosity in his technical achievements attaining to musicality in poetry. Compared to the Imagists and other poets of the Pound/Eliot lineage, Aiken can seem almost overwhelmingly sensuous, lyrical (in the ancient sense of the word), and hallucinatory. Aiken's imagery is often so rich and dense, full of fragrance and sensual turn of phrase, that the reader is caught up with the sheer beauty and only later realizes that the poem is vatic and archetypal as well as sensual. This is the opposite of Eliot's cerebral astringency; it is more naturally allied to Lorca and Lorca's poetic descendants in Latin America; indeed, as a poet-reviewer Aiken understood Lorca more deeply than most. Aiken knew, for example, that Lorca was never actually a Surrealist, but, more accurately stated, was rooted in that chthonic level of consciousness out of which Surrealism also arose.

Some of Aiken's stories and longer poems delve into states of mind that verge on the shamanic, illuminating extreme experiences and altered states of consciousness, just as his poetic style verged on magic realism long before that term was ever applied to literature. Aiken was never quite sold on Pound's program; in this way I suppose he was an old-fashioned gentlemanly poet, as he has been accused of being; yet after reading his Collected Criticism or his Collected Short Stories, you realize that in fact Aiken was that more important rare bird: the truly independent mind. In some ways he remains ahead of our times. Superficially his poetry can seem merely lyrical and conventional, but the states of mind the poems explore can be disturbing, illuminating, ecstatic, terrifying, sometimes all at once. One section of The Jig of Forslin takes the dissolute protagonist through an experience of psychic vampirism, akin to and possibly inspired by Keats' Lamia. It's a disturbing read; it is also a sideways homage to, and critique of, Keats and his circle.

With Aiken it is sometimes as if the radical and experimental vision is cloaked within the apparently ordinary turn of phrase; the monsters of the id lurking behind the mask of comforting normality; there is often a violence just beneath the surface; sometimes it is the violence of emotional experience, sometimes it is more properly an existential crisis of meaning—which links Aiken as a writer to his peers amongst the early Moderns in terms of topic and question. Some of Aiken's best writing is about the gradual revelation of—or descent into—madness, disassocation, complex psychological catharsis, and man's search for meaning in a universe that has been discovered to be indifferent. But the poetry is also about overcoming crisis: in this mode it is akin to Camus' lyrical awareness of absurdity, and to Beckett's famous line that sums up so much of the worldview of this generation of artists and writers: I can't go on, I must go on, I'll go on. Aiken also notes the coexistence, amidst all these despairing Moderns, of those who calmly walk through chaos without it affecting their inner compass. In this worldview, simply coping with the world is redemptive. Simply being able to go on is an act of heroism:

It is as if his soul had become a city,
With noisily peopled streets, and through these streets
Senlin himself comes driving a small white hearse . . .
'Senlin!' we cry. He does not turn his head.
But is that Senlin?—Or is this city Senlin,—
Quietly watching the burial of the dead?
Dumbly observing the cortège of its dead?
Yet we would say that all this is but madness:
Around a distant corner trots the hearse.
And Senlin walks before us in the sunlight
Happily conscious of his universe.
—from Senlin: A Biography

Senlin as a poetic character has been compared to Eliot's Prufrock, but I think this is another among many lazy critical attempts to compare all ruminative poetic protagonists to Eliot's. The comparison is facile, as Senlin is both more aware of his world than is Prufrock, and more aware of his own self. Prufrock is a character in search of meaning, a numbed-out checked-out angst-ridden leaf caught in a whirlwind; Senlin, by contrast, is a character rooted in the solidity of the world, and in its eternity. He is both more empathic and more emphatic than Prufrock can conceive of being. In Senlin: A Biography, it is we, the readers who follow the voice-over of the narrator, who are lost at sea, while Senlin himself is mysteriously rooted and at home in the world:

In the hot noon, in an old and savage garden,
The peach-tree grows. Its cruel and ugly roots
Rend and rifle the silent earth for moisture.
Above, in the blue, hang warm and golden fruits.
Look, how the cancerous roots crack mould and stone!
Earth, if she had a voice, would wail her pain.
Is she the victim, or is the tree the victim?
Delicate blossoms opened in the rain,
Black bees flew among them in the sunlight,
And sacked them ruthlessly; and no a bird
Hangs, sharp-eyed, in the leaves, and pecks the fruit;
And the peach-tree dreams, and does not say a word.
. . . Senlin, tapping his trowel against a stone,
Observes this tree he planted: it is his own.

'You will think it strange,' says Senlin, 'but this tree
Utters profound things in this garden;
And in its silence speaks to me.
I have sensations, when I stand beneath it,
As if its leaves looked at me, and could see;
And those thin leaves, even in windless air,
Seem to be whispering me a choral music,
Insubstantial but debonair. . . .'
—from Senlin: A Biography

In writing about his own poetry and aims as a poet, Aiken often referred to musicality. His poetic line, which was usually but not always a rhymed metric line, was intended to be heard as music as much as words. He overtly subtitled some of his long poems and collections as Symphonies. He believed, as did Sidney Lanier, an earlier poet—like Aiken, from Georgia—whose musicality is his most notable feature, that music and poetry were very closely related; Aiken's program was less literal than Lanier's, however. His program was never hidden, although it could at times be a subtle sense of tone rather than an explicit lyric.

His musical line Aiken makes a wonderful poet to read aloud, as well as on the page; the word-choices are sensual on the tongue even as the imagery is liminal and often complex and cloaked to the rational mind.

Music I Heard

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved,
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart that you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always,
—They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

I discovered Aiken when I was 14, they year he died actually, when I found some of his published works in a university bookstore in my hometown of Ann Arbor, MI. I was browsing the used table, and picking up books that looked interesting. I picked up Aiken's long symphony-poem The Jig of Forslin and stood there reading about half of the poem before I came back to my senses, and realized I should buy the book and take it home. I re-read the poem several times that summer and over the next few years—often sitting shirtless in the sunlight in the backyard, my back leaned against my favorite rock, a giant granite boulder, a glacial erratic, that we had dug out of the back yard when my father was planning his vegetable garden; the boulder eventually became a dominant feature of the stone deck outside our family room, and a favorite place to sit and read—and the poem left a mark on me, some connection about music and poetry that I didn't yet understand but that led me deeper into exploring the interface between words and music, poetry and silence. I could hear within the poem, and its form, an innate music, a melody and orchestration that lay just behind the words; I was able to hear it with my inner ear, and although I never set the words to music myself, the poem awoke in me a growing sense of possibility. I can therefore give Aiken partial credit, along with Lanier, John Cage, Camus, Jean Valentine, and others, for directing me towards some of the work I did as a composition student in college, that used the spoken word as a compositional element in musical forms. The interface between music and poetry has continued to fascinate me—although as a more mature artist, now, I admit I'm less than charmed by many contemporary poets' claims for their own musicality, when all they focus on is superficial rhyme and easy rhythm, their poems containing less than a tenth of Aiken's inner music.

Instinctive scholar and compleatist that I am, in that I often pursue what I discover I like until the wells run dry, after discovering Forslin I searched out as many of Aiken's writings as I could find, eventually discovering his novels, collected short stories and criticism, and his many volumes of poetry. I still re-read Aiken's Collected Criticism for inspiration and illumination, and I have not changed my opinion that it should be required reading for all poets who dare to call themselves reviewers. There is a good Selected Poetry of Aiken's best poems in print, but as far as I know no readily available Collected Poems. Any publisher who gave us a good, well-documented, annotated and historically-footnoted Collected would be doing us all a great service, and would help to re-introduce to the world an often-great, often-neglected poet.

Meaning and Abstraction

Terry Eagleton wrote in a review of a new book about T.S. Eliot:

Eliot's poetry is not a question of meaning in the first place. The meaning of a poem for Eliot was a fairly trifling matter. It was, he once remarked, like the piece of meat which the burglar throws to the guard dog to keep him occupied. In true symbolist fashion, Eliot was interested in what a poem did, not in what it said—in the resonance of the signifier, the echoes of its archetypes, the ghostly associations haunting its grains and textures, the stealthy, subliminal workings of its unconscious. Meaning was for the birds, or perhaps for the petit bourgeoisie. Eliot was a primitivist as well as a sophisticate, a writer who made guerrilla raids on the collective unconscious. For all his intellectualism, he was averse to rationality. Meaning in his poetry is like the mysterious figure who walks beside you in The Waste Land, vanishing when you look at it straight.

This points at Eliot's real debt to the French Symbolist poets, such as Mallarmé, which is something that doesn't get mentioned by too many of the high priest's acolytes; one presumes many such would rather portray Eliot as emerging like Athena, virginal from Zeus' brow. The messiness of the man's life, his occasional critical reversals, and the difficulties around some of his opinions get minimized. Eliot was a complex character, a neo-elitist who proclaimed that the function of his many reviews and essays was to educate and elevate the unwashed masses towards a better understanding and appreciation of High Art. But he also enjoyed gutter-level humor, a good joke, and loved Marx Bros. movies.

Eliot himself did not always help matters: he could be quite deliberately obscure about his own work, even contradictory. He was consistent, however, and to me this again smacks of the Symbolists, that his keynote poem The Waste Land, hailed for its disjunctive collage method which was one of the new techniques of Modernism, wasn't about anything but being a poem: The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. (Tradition and the Individual Talent, from 1920) Eliot responded to critics who thought The Waste Land was about the Lost Generation, the disillusioned post-WW I generation which felt the world was coming apart at its seems, he stated, I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention. Yet the disjunctions in the poem have been pointed to again and again as the utter essence of Modernism, as a reflection of the disjunctions and fragmentation of modern life, as a representation of what it's like to live in such a confusing and shredded world. The poem has also been said to reflect the early Modern generation's nostalgia for a world in which things made more sense, could be more clearly understood, social roles were known, and in which we were the masters of technology, rather than the other way round.

The Waste Land was not hailed as a masterpiece by every critic at the time, despite what present-day Eliot acolytes would have us believe. Conrad Aiken, in my opinion one of the greatest reviewers of all time, commented in his review: What we feel is that Mr. Eliot has not wholly annealed the allusive material, has left it unabsorbed. Aiken did believe that the poem succeeded by virtue of its incoherence, not of its plan; by virtue of its ambiguities, not of its explanations. (New Republic, February 7, 1923)

And thus we see in The Waste Land, in which its method as well as its style has been oft imitated, one of the origins of an important Modernist trend that has reached its full flowering and become quite problematic in these post-Modern days: puzzle-poems, hidden meanings, and obscurity merely for the sake of being obscure.

I'm not saying that Eliot intended his poetry to be an obscure puzzle, but since so much ink has been spent on "decoding" his meanings, and since so many folks still worship him as the greatest Modernist, that creates an influence beyond any of Eliot's poems or intentions. It has become a trope, and some contemporary poets do nothing but create puzzles to be decoded.

Oddly, many of these same critics (and poets) who laud Eliot's "meaningless" poem also condemn his later poetry, such as The Four Quartets, as weaker poetry, somehow. Personally, The Four Quartets are my favorite work of Eliot's, the poems of his which I re-read most often, and which have the deepest meaning for me. (Ah, but meaning itself is the problem for these acolytes, ennit?) I make no claim to be an Eliot scholar (although I'm not ignorant of the scholarship). Yet the Quartets (and their overt structural connections to music composition) have occasionally been interpreted as a late-life return to some kind of spirituality or faith, as though that were a failing, a mark of senility or regression. Ignoring of course that Eliot was always a religious, and that his poetry was never anti-religious.

One suspects sometimes that the reason the Quartets are dismissed by some of the dry-stick academics is mostly because they view Eliot's late-life expression of something other than dry-stick conventionality as a personal betrayal of Eliot's own self-admitted dry-stickness. Their own acedia, so resonant within The Waste Land, cannot move past itself. But I think Eliot himself did move beyond Modernist acedia, eventually, and The Four Quartets are evidence of that.

A personal note about The Four Quartets:

When I was still in music school in my early 20s, I was in the recording studio at WCBN-FM making a tape piece when I heard the news that one of my closest mentors in music composition, George Cacioppo, had just died. The last thing he had been re-reading that week was Four Quartets—the book was next to his hospital bed—which I had also been re-reading earlier that week. I found the synchronicities meaningful. I felt quite close to Eliot that week, and the possibility, taken on intuition rather than scholarship, that he himself had found some measure of solace in his Four Quartets, after all the years of arid acedia brought on in the wake of The Waste Land. I'm sure some schlar would be quick to shoot that all down, but I trust my intuition.

And after all, one aspect of poetry is that it can evoke precisely such transpersonal experiences. Which is what makes it an artform rather than merely engineering.

The tape piece I had been making that night evolved into an elegy for my late mentor, and was one of many presented at a memorial concert in his honor, later that month. Here it is: elegy for George.

A bit more now on Aiken:

As a reviewer and poet himself, it was always hard to pull the wool over Aiken's eyes, I believe. He also saw D.H. Lawrence's strengths and weaknesses pretty clearly, for example. Aiken had a good sense of human psychology. HIs criticisms of Eliot were prescient in that they were echoed by later scholars, and in some of Stephen Spender's criticisms.

Aiken's own poetry is unjustly neglected these days, with only a Selected Poems currently in print and regularly available—perhaps because his poetry is musical-lyrical, openly so, which is unfashionable in these days when intellect and abstraction are paramount—but also perhaps because Aiken's poetry is also deeply psychological poetry, and makes people uncomfortable. He was perhaps overly influenced by Freud—but among the Moderns, who wasn't? His magnificent Collected Short Stories would be legacy enough, had he not also written plays, novels, and memoirs, in addition to poetry. A lot of Aiken's stories are deeply insightful. I've always been puzzled why people give Raymond Carver so much credit for developing psychological character studies in the short story form, when Aiken had already done so. At least a few of Aiken's stories were made into short films, and I believe that the film made of Silent Snow, Secret Snow, one of Aiken's best-known short stories, aired as an episode of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone or Night Gallery TV series, I don't remember which.

My understanding was that Aiken and Eliot knew each other, and were friends. I don't find Aiken's accurate assessment of the strengths and weaknesses in Eliot's poetry to diminish Eliot's place in the canon; that place is secure. What re-reading Aiken's criticism brings out, though, is that sense of what's wrong with a lot of the Eliot scholarship since, which by contrast lacks Aiken's insight into the poetry.

So it is interesting that the post-Modern children of Eliot, currently in the ascendant, laud the abstraction, disjunction, and collage effects in Eliot's most influential poetry. Probably the reason Aiken's poetry is at nadir is the same reason why the Four Quartets are dismissed by the acolytes: too much music, too much continuity, too much meaning in the poems. The poems that actually mean something, that aren't just playing with words, that aren't abstract to the point of obscurantism, are currently unfashionable. (Of course, fashions change, and this too no doubt will pass.)

For my own part, I don't find abstraction to be inherently bad in poetry just as I don't find meaning in poetry to be inherently good. Those are moral judgments, not poetic ones. These don't really have anything to do with the poem, but with what one prefers to discover in any poem—i.e. these are personal preferences. If you believe that poetry either must mean something, or should not, those are both moral positions that have nothing to do with poetry: because poetry as an artform has always been abstract and figurative. The truth is, as Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, a poem can never be completely abstract because it is made of ordinary words, which are the signifiers and carriers of meaning. A poem can never be completely abstract because it is made of language. But neither does a poem need to mean the same thing to every reader, as if it were an engineering diagram to be read, or a puzzle to be solved.

Poetry, because of its compactness and its exaltation, is always at its best when it contains many layers of meaning and abstraction, so that one is constantly finding new things in the poem every time one re-reads it. If you can read it just once, know exactly what it says, and throw it away never having to re-read it, then how is it different from a prose essay? Argument is for essay—evocation is for poetry. A poem elicits a meaning in the reader—not necessarily the same meaning as it had to the author, even—because it invites it, it evokes it, it calls it forward. Not because it imposes one fixed meaning, one fixed interpretation, on the reader. That is what "communication" means, and far too many poets nowadays think that that is all that poetry is: communication. If you want to communicate, use the phone. That is what prose does very well, and is supposed to do: communicate. Of course, a great deal of poetry nowadays really is prose, just broken up into odd lines on the page. One finds very little music at times. (As Aiken once wrote, music in poetry means much more than meter and rhyme.) That the average reader, including many under-experienced poets, might confuse prose and poetry nowadays is thus perfectly understandable. But that explains—it does not excuse.

I think it unwise to get stuck in some false polarity between meaning and abstraction, although many poet-critics do indeed seem to cling to that polarization. I think a poem is a rather more holistic enterprise, intended to be read, intended to connect to the reader and evoke in them some experience, some sensation, some presence. A poem ought to be an experience in itself—even a more abstract experience, say, than an adventure movie—rather than be about an experience. And even poems such as The Waste Land which do not immediately parse themselves clearly to one's intellectual comprehension or rational understanding, can still pack a gut-punch. Meaning and abstraction can and do coexist in poetry. A poem doesn't always have to be immediately and instantly understood to get under your skin, and become a memorable experience. Something slips through, and disturbs your universe—the experience of being disturbed by art is a poetic experience. Sometimes understanding does come, but it might come much later.

Conrad Aiken, Critical Poet

I periodically delve into reading poets writing criticism and reviews and essays about poetry, and other poets. I find this develops one's own critical faculties, but it's also interesting on a purely social level: what did these poets think of each other?

I'm currently reading, with much pleasure, Hayden Carruth's Selected Essays & Reviews (Copper Canyon Press, 1997), literally several decades of critical writing. I find Carruth to be a congenial read, and while of his opinions parallel my own, I find it instructive when he writes appreciatively of poets I had not paid much attention to before, or, in the case of Paul Goodman, a poet I hadn't thought about in awhile, although I like Goodman's poetry, especially his homoerotic poems scattered through his various collections.

I periodically delve deeper into such collections of reviews, so I have been re-reading Conrad Aiken's Collected Criticism (1968, originally published as A Reviewer's ABC, 1958), which I recommend to everyone who ever reviews or critiques poetry. It is a model of wit, decorum, and civilized discourse: Even his blunt condemnations and strongly-expressed reservations—he is very hard on Amy Lowell and D.H. Lawrence, and rather unconvinced by T.S. Eliot—are done with overall tact and good manners. One might wish more critiques were of this caliber: insightful, honest, blunt, but never rude or capricious.

Aiken never compiled an actual book of systemic literary criticism, other than (possibly) this one. Rather, he discussed his critical ideas in these reviews, in his poems, in occasional essays, and in his letters. So, he has no obvious overarching ideological theory. I find this advantageous. He promotes poetry's musicality and psychological effectiveness, even as he misses the boat on mysticism, but he does it in such a way that even when one disagrees with him, he has made one think carefully about one's own position. THInking about one's own position is the best reason to read other poets' criticism: the mirror of awareness helps one find clarity.

Many of Aiken's quick summations are resonant and long-lasting; they get to the marrow of the matter. hor example, here's a quote on Surrealism that Aiken just throws out in a review of Lorca's Poet in New York, which I find felicitous. Referring to Lorca, Aiken writes:

To call him a surrealist is a mistake, for to be a surrealist is to be something else than a poet, something less than a poet: surrealism is perhaps one of many names, merely, for the substratum out of which poetry is made.

This comment crystallizes for me a feeling I have always had about Surrealism, but had not been able to articulate; (I am still occasionally working on an essay about surrealism, and this will have to go into it.) Surrealism was, in effect an ideology, which as critical stance was used to dictate who was a genuine Surrealist, and who was not. André Breton, in his various manifestoes, was the gatekeepr and strongman of the Surrealist enterprise; so, it was largely Breton, in tandem with the other core members of the original group, who promoted Surrealism as an ideology. The difficulty with ideology in poetry is that when any critical theory becomes dictatorial, the art itself suffers.

I far prefer Aiken's placement of surrealism as "the substratum out of which poetry is made." That is a rich and resonant re-evaluation of an entire artistic movement, putting it into its place as a foundational element of poetic technique, and removing it from its inflated place as a rhetorical ideology.

In this way, we are prepared to look at the genuine full flowering of Surrealism, which, I have been arguing for some years now, attained its full bloom in the Latin American poets, and not in the Francophone poets who began the movement. That's the kernel idea of an essay on Surrealism I've been trying to compile for a few years now; so, more on that later.

Aiken, if one is to infer a critical stance from his reviews, was suspicious of systemic ideology. He was more interested in psychological truth, and musicality, arising from the poem in a genuine manner, and his criticism often displayed a mistrust of art created to adhere to a prescriptive ideology. In this, I very much appreciate Aiken's clarity of critical expression, because my own suspicions of critical ideology mirror many of his.

The Problem(s) of Criticism

If you are a real critic, you are going to annoy, even anger, someone. Like a prophet, often unloved in his own village, a critic must speak the truth of what he perceives.

The dearth of real poetry criticism nowadays is caused by the cooptation of poetry criticism by the professionals: professional poets, a class never seen before a century ago, who make their living teaching and writing, usually in the academy. The problem with bad criticism is that it is dishonest: it pretends to propose the truth, while obfuscating it. It's hard to find a good critical take on a poetry anthology nowadays, because most of those poets who dominate the publishing world are peers, and afraid of offending one another. It's the vicious backbiting of academic competitiveness, which I witnessed all too well in my several years in grad school. So, it's hard to get someone to write a negative review, even when it's deserved, because they fear retaliation. If you give my poetry textbook, which I edited, a good review, I'll give yours a good review in return, when you publish it. It's the dishonesty of marketing (a field in which I worked for two decades), where everything is shiny and bright, and blurbs stand in for actual criticism.

it is similarly difficult to take seriously criticism that relies too much on theoretical concerns placed before the word at hand. Criticism, like theory, must follow praxis, and not attempt to dictate it. Reviewing at its best is reportorial, interpretative, and illuminating. Critical theory at its worst has a visible axe to grind.

I like talking about art as much as the next person, and I even enjoy reading critical theory, and good critiques. But I do wonder how much about making art one can learn from critical theory, which is essentially talking about art but not making art. Theory follows praxis, it doesn't dictate it. It cannot. It describes it. It explains it. (Or attempts to.)

The point of being a poet is to make art. The problem with artists is they're unruly. They think outside the box, they explode the envelope, they keep coming up with things no one else has done before. The reason why there are so many nifty new critical theories all the time is because the critics are always trying to catch up with the artists—the wisest of whom generally ignore the critics and everything they have to say.

Is it possible to be a good, honest, fair critic, and still maintain civility? I believe so.

I have recently been re-reading Conrad Aiken's Collected Criticism (originally published as A Reviewer's ABC). The selections in Aiken's collection span the range of writers we now consider to be among the greatest of the 20th Century—or at least the most influential—from T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound to D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and many others, some of whom are now rarely read outside the halls of academe. The book spans Aiken's published reviews from 1915 through 1955. I find Aiken a model of critical writing: even when he is quite negative, even harsh, he manages to pull it off in a tone that is respectful of what is good and bracingly clear about what could be improved. He can be severe, but he manages to do it with civilized discourse. Any modern poet who wishes to learn how it's done might wish to read this book.

Throughout, I find Aiken insightful and provocative: he makes me rethink some of my own assessments, or at least consider my defense of my own judgments; at other times, he clarifies my own ideas by clearly stating something that I was always on the edge of, but could never quite articulate. His assessment of Lorca validates my own view that the epitome of Surrealism occured not with that movements French originators, but in the hands of Spanish-language poets: Lorca, Machado, Neruda, Paz, Villaruttia, and others. But Lorca was not a "Surrealist" in the French sense, that weaker sense of "over-reality" that never quite achieved transcendence. As Aiken writes about Lorca: To call him a surrealist is a mistake, for to be a surrealist is to be something else than a poet, something less than a poet: surrealism is perhaps one of many names, merely, for the substratum out of which poetry is made.

So, why do criticism at all? Isn't it all a matter of subjective taste?

The total subjectivity argument doesn't wash. That way lies solipsism, and the ultimate shrug: why bother, then, to write a critique at all, if there is only subjectivity? I mean, that implies that nothing anyone can do is ever communicable to anyone else, and it really is all masturbation. I disagree.

There are elements of poetry that can be looked at objectively, starting with those elements that commonly fall under the rubric of craft. There are also elements beyond that, in terms of affect, style, tone, musicality. A great poem has more in common with other great poems than it does with lesser poems, and one can discern that a great poem has an impact of a special type on the reader.

The argument is then made that learning the academic theories—say, from Freud to structuralism to post-modernism—might help one become a better poet. I agree that it can make one become a better critic, but I disagree that it can make one into a better poet. All the -isms in the world cannot substitute for inspiration.

Perhaps it's useful to know about the history of theory, but it's also useful to know where the theories fail. I agree that the New Criticism made a good point about looking at the poem from the inside, on its own terms: getting into the text itself seems obvious. But it is not true that the Text is all that matters, and the Author can be entirely ignored. Texts don't magically appear out of nothing: authors write them. While I completely agree that an author's biography is not necessarily determinative of the text—the autobiographical fallacy, as if all author's were utterly unaware of what they are revealing (some are, of course)—at the same time, the text is not written in a vacuum, and the artist's biography, mood, and context does have some input. Yet even the clichéd writerly dictum to "write what you know" cannot account for fiction, science fiction, poetry, or essay, all of which present stellar examples of writers writing well about what they "don't know."

So, I'm not at all clear that knowing theory can make one a sharper poet. I think it's just as likely to get in the way, or, even worse, turn poetry-writing into a purely intellectual exercise. Literary theory is a purely intellectual exercise; poetry, especially great poetry, is embodied, visceral, multi-valent, and contains factors that are not purely intellectual, such as emotion, surprise, etc. There are non-rational elements to all artistic processes, including where the heck the impulse comes from to begin with. So much theory ignores all of that.

The idea that Theory can help me work my way into a poem, so that I can look at it from the inside out, on its own terms, has severe limits, because as long as I'm thinking about the theory, I'm not actually inside the poem, thinking the poem's own thoughts. I'm thinking about the poem, not inhabiting the poem. It is a filter between self and experience: a filter of mind, persona, intellect. It is a veil, however permeable, between what is and what we think is.

The removal of thought-filters is the whole purpose and point of meditation practices, contemplative practices, yoga, Zen, even Western monastic contemplation. It is in fact quite possible to remove a maximum of filters from one's perceptions. It is practical, and technical, a skill that can be learned, and a viewpoint that can be attained with practice. Nothing magical about it. So, when one removes thought-filters in life, one notices they also get removed in one's critical life, and writing.

Poetry itself is a way of contemplation. Creative work can be done with mindfulness, attention, concentration, envelopment. I think that a reader can often sense the difference between a poem that is lived, inhabited, which has enveloped the poet, and a poem which was more of an intellectual exercise. There is something Other present, then. I may not be able to define it, in all cases, yet it seems an essential component of great poetry, that is often absent in lesser poems.

My fundamental point is this: writing poetry is not intellectual play. Intellect is of course part of it all, but not the primary part, or even the most important part—except as intellect is the directive force behind poetic craft. Saying that intellectual play is the most important part of poetry is the same thing as saying that craft and/or form are the most important parts, which I also disagree with.

The strength of my reaction comes from the fact that I feel that modern poetry and poetry criticism is heavily overbalanced in the theoretical direction—just look at many of the L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poets, or the faux brilliance of a James Tate or a John Ashbery. I desire to keep the balance between craft and the ineffable source of creativity centered, so that they work together in harness, in alliance, supporting each other.

I notice that some literary critics unconsciously reveal their personal biases about poetry (etc.) when they adhere to one school of thought or another. I think the proper first response to a poem is visceral, personal. When a critique seems off the wall or unconnected to the poem at hand, underlying assumptions and ideological agendas are exposed. In my experience, most critical theories are created in reaction to something, usually a prior theory, or in an often covert attempt to propose an ideological paradigm. I don't think people realize how much they reveal of themselves, their inner workings and prejudices, when they put forth certain theories as gospel truthes or Big Pronouncements. Similarly, I find art that is produced in line with a manifesto or theory to be usually pedantic and only intellectually interesting. Surrealism sold itself out in this matter, eventually. Dada did not, only because its root assumptions remain shocking and radical, and most critics would rather ignore it, and pretend it never happened. (The only two writers who have said anything really profound and accurate about Marcel Duchamp's art are Octavio Paz and John Cage.)