The Ideology of Critique

We keep returning to Jean Cocteau's plangent observations: We are inclined to judge what is beautiful by what is familiar.

And: When a work of art appears to be in advance of its period, it is really the period that has lagged behind the work of art.

And: Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

All these happen with regularity in the ferment that is poetry in transition. But Cocteau's comment about the tendency to judge the beautiful by what is familiar speaks not only to the rejection of the unknown in art, but also to entrenched ideologies and opinions about what is genuine and true in poetry criticism itself.

Is a cliché always bad in poetry? Almost always; but it can be turned to good and effective use, too. Where we have difficulties is with the ideology that rules of quality are absolute standards, and therefore objective. The problem is, while some aspects of poetry can be judged objectively—matters of craft are the obvious example—other judgments are often less objective than they claim to be. There is usually something else going on, whether or not it's openly acknowledged.

Does a reader's emotional reaction to a poem, positive or negative, obviate the critical faculty, short-circuit it so that bad poetry passes simply because people like it? This happens often enough, surely; it is surely true that a lot of bad poetry still stirs people to feeling. If this were not so, the manipulative sentiments expressed in greeting cards would be ineffective, and the entire greeting card industry would collapse.

But the reverse assumption, which can be seen often enough in poetry criticism, that any poem the reader has an emotional response to must therefore be suspect, on the grounds that emotional responses are themselves suspect, amounts to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It ridiculously overstates the valid and honorable attempt to be as objective as possible in poetry criticism. The mistake here is not the attempt to be as objective as possible; the mistake is in believing one has succeeded.

All art has the potential to elicit an aesthetic, emotional, and transformational response in its audience. There are always both subjective and objective qualities in art, intermixed and blended. They can be difficult to sort out. While it is valorous to attempt to set aside one's feelings and look at a work of art as objectively as possible, in its context of craft, historical moment, and subject matter, etc., assuming that one has achieved total critical objectivity is a form of self-delusion. The critic who can admit to error and subjective opinion is the far more honest critic. Whether their assessment is right or wrong is also not the mistake; the mistake lies in believing one's own critical acumen is greater than anyone else's, which is hubris, and delusion. Not to mention, unprovable.

Even critics who are right most of the time must acknowledge that they can be wrong—because anyone can be wrong, about anything—or they are in deep, deep trouble.

Offhandedly rejecting one's emotional responses when undertaking criticism isn't the same thing as admitting a fondness for a really bad movie, or panning a novel because one ate bad shellfish for lunch. It is, or rather can become, a critical ideology that claims that the person assessing the poem must always be unemotional and objective. This is an impossible standard that, honestly, no one has ever lived up to. It allows absolutely no wiggle room for aesthetic appreciation. It removes the human response from the equation; in its worse extremes, it mechanizes the critical response (which it should never be forgotten is prompted by the aesthetic experience of witnessing or being confronted by the art itself) by banishing it and replacing it with a list of obvious criteria. They may even be valid criteria. But this approach to criticism takes valid criteria and turns them into a categorizable list of items to be checked off, to see if they fit. Too much of an emotional response? Check: must be a bad poem. Next!

Cocteau also commented: We are worried when we cannot make comparisons. Our whole system of pleasure is based on comparisons. If we are satisfied with our own work, it is probable that it bears some resemblance to other works with which we are preoccupied. But if we produce something really new, as this novelty is not based on any definite recollection, it leaves us as it were, with one leg in the air, alone in the world. We are as much disconcerted and disappointed by it as the reader will be.

The artist can be as surprised by the art that appears as anyone. The artist can be quite alone, quite surrounded by bickering, with no rudder with which to navigate.

This can run in several directions, even conflicting ones. For example, what happens when a formalist poet suddenly discovers that a poem came out as free verse? How do they deal with that? Do they let it happen, and accept the results, or will they try to re-format the poem into a familiar metrical form that they are more comfortable with handling?

Or, what happens when a poet who is used to working in more "experimental" terrain, has become used to being vilified more than praised, generally if not universally misunderstood and miscategorized, who has become suspicious of most critique on the grounds that it no longer helps him or her grow as a writer—what happens when such a poet suddenly finds him or herself expressing a more conventional poetry, a less experimental form and language, and cares more about the outpouring in the poem itself than in its language and technical aspects of craft? (In other words, that had something to say, and just said it, plainly and simply, with very little artifice.) How do they deal with that? Do they accept it and let it happen, or do they fight against it?

And then, when they have become used to all their recent poems being rejected, even openly vilified and condemned as non-poetry, how are they to respond when the criticism comes back on this newest poem, a poem different from what they've been doing for some time, and this new poem is lauded, praised, highly touted, heaped with honors by one camp who thinks it's best poem of its type they've read in 30 years? while another camp says it's an aberration, and the poet has lost his or her self-respect, is pandering, and this is the worst thing the poet has written in years.

One the one hand lies a welcoming embrace, on the other a faux-objectivity that portrays cynical rejection as simple honesty. On the one hand a pleasure in the familiar in which critical acumen is not willfully set aside but perhaps is overruled in the moment, on the other hand a violent insistence on a continuity of innovation in which the sensual pleasure of just writing what you feel has become suspect. On the one hand Dionysus, on the other Apollo (but which is which)? On the one hand the pleasure of the text, on the other a dedicated dismissal of pleasure (but which is which)?

Who is the poet—who whirls suspended in the midst of all this—to believe? (And when did revising a poem become a choice between who you please, other than yourself, and who you piss off?)

What's endlessly fascinating is how both camps claim to be objective and unemotional in their assessments of the poem, while having diametrically opposed views of the poem in question. The poet is left with a situation in which no criticism is any longer useful, or even helpful, because it's become obvious that even those who claim to be driven by objective standards still wear blinders of taste and opinion that they are using to substitute for actual criticism.

Both camps would dictate to the poet what the poet "should" do—if only in avoiding the pitfalls of what they each think is bad in poetry. But a completely negative aesthetic, an aesthetic of avoidance, produces nothing. It's a shortcut to the abyss of acedia. Both camps would deny that they are setting boundaries around what they like and calling it "good," but that is what both camps are doing. This is political action disguised as literary crticism; it is of course nothing new in poetry criticism, which has been fighting between camps for a very long time indeed.

Who is the poet to listen to, if the poet has grown weary of the divisiveness of critical camps, and just wants to make poems?

Yes, I am referring to myself here. This has all happened to me in the past few days with this poem. It's been a hilarious exercise. Both of these camps, both of these diametrically opposed reponses were triggered by this same poem.

Who does this poet believe? No one.

An always-available option, of course, is to continue to write what you write, ignore everyone, and let them catch up to what you're doing, if they ever do. This is where Cocteau's comment is relevant, about when art appears to be in advance of its period. The solution is to just keep writing, and let the critics fall by the wayside. It is equally amusing when the camps revert to their usual party lines, if the next poem reverts to "normal."

The issue here for the poet is self-esteem, and retaining self-confidence in their own artistic process. Humility lies in admitting that they could be wrong. Self-esteem lies in not bending to every wind of fashion, even those you agree with; it lies furthermore in letting the art be the art, and in having the courage to take risks and make mistakes. Meanwhile, the poem itself languishes in a kind of limbo; attempts to revise it have been stifled by the conflicting responses; the poet might choose to set the poem aside, and revise it later, when he can hear himself think again, after the din has died away.

What is laughable, all around, is the utter lack of self-awareness (one might say, the breathtaking ignorance of their own internal asuumptions and filters) in each camp, in how both claim to be objective yet cannot see where they are not. Even where they are objective and accurate can now be called into question by their failure in this instance. So, I guess nobody's perfect, and no-one's right all the time. Critics least of all.

Beware of anyone who claims that they are right all the time: they are driven by an ideology of critique, and they are fundamentalists—even if you agree with them.

I suppose, in the end, none of it really matters. Lists of poets you like and want to promote as fellow-travelers are beside the point. Critical cheerleading is the most ephemeral game in town. It matters not at all, in the long run. The only real test is the test of time.

I don't know what, if any, of the art I have produced, or have yet to produce, will affect anyone in the future; nor am I likely to ever know. The truth is, it doesn't matter. Like any other artist, I have ambition for my artistic children, but—apparently unlike many other artist/critics I know—I seem to lack the essential hubris required to believe that I have already changed the world with my art, or will, for good or ill. I cannot know. That actually frees me up to not care very much about what the various camps say; it frees me to write rather than talk about writing. As much fun as it can be, the criticism is not the art. Some of the art will hopefully endure; criticism has always had a notoriously short shelf-life, and always will.

The result of such an experience is the artist's realization that critical approval is subject to fashion and taste, that critics who claim to be objective are never as objective as they think they are (even when they're right most of the time, no one is right all of the time), and that all that matters to the artist—all that can matter—is to keep making art. If you let what the critics think about your art rock you, deter you, steer you off course—either for approval or in rejection of approval—you will surely lose your way. The artist must maintain his or her own convictions, her or his own center, and not be swayed. Don't stop listening to opinions—but don't let them sway you, if in your heart you know what you are pursuing must be pursued. Even if, in the long run, what you are doing proves to be something you repudiate years later, it must nonetheless be given its head, and pursued—for now, if not forever. Both critical camps can be quite wrong about the progress and direction of your art—even when they are occasionally right about the details. It's your art, after all: it is no-one else's.

Moralizing vs. Experimentation 2

The next question that came up in the attack on my new poetry was along the lines of: How could I ever expect this sort of poem to be published anywhere in the established print media? i.e. it was doubted that the poem would get anywhere in any edited literary journal.

Well, the first error in that criticism is the assumption that I care to be published in such poetry venues—which tend to be inherently conservative, regardless. The second error was in thinking I would be so stupid as to bother submitting to any venue I already knew would reject the poem; anyone could recognize what a time-waste that would be.

So, pay attention now: the criticism about publishing is quite correct.

The poem under question (which may be found here, titled Kenosis) will very likely never get published in the establish(ment)ed poetry journals such as Poetry, Paris Review, Antioch Review, National Poetry Review, Ploughshares, or Prairie Schooner. (Ignoring for the moment the inherent editorial conservatism of most of these journals; and the implied conservatism of the viewpoint that assumes they're even the best place to publish poems.) I never expected it would. Nor did I ever intend to submit it to them. The assumption that I would even bother to try submitting to those venues is amusing; I'm far more cynical about the poetry publishing mainstream than you could imagine—because I've worked in it, as a typographer, designer, and jack-of-all-publishing skills. I am far more likely to submit an "experimental" poem like to a smaller, less well known journal—one that is fundamentally more open-minded to the unusual and non-mainstream, even to the orthographically unusual. At the same time, since the poem has "meaning" and "content," it's also unlikely to be accepted at any of the "postmodern poetics" journals—but I wasn't planning to submit it there, either.

The third assumption underlying the criticism was that I aspire for this poem to be published—which is not at all certain. But that is not at all why I wrote the poem.

Considering how many times I've stated my personal truth, that I never write for publication, or for a journal (unless directly commissioned), or even with publication in mind, I confess to being frustrated at having to repeat myself yet again:

When I write, I'm not thinking about the "destined future" of what I write—frankly, to me that seems incredibly calculating, and rather arrogant—when I write all I am doing is writing.

It happens in the moment, and it is about the process of creativity in-the-moment. The artistic product that results, be a it a poem or artwork or piece of music, is an entirely different matter. Similarly, revision and editing are entirely different processes from writing, and are processes that I only think about later, not when actually writing. Submitting a poem for publishing is a process taking what I've already written, and trying to find it a good home—not about forcing what I write to match what has already been published, even in the "prestigious" poetry journals. If I do have a philosophical bias with regard ot poetics, that's it in a nutshell.

As to the poem's "future," if it even has one, and assuming I give a damn, the criticism made several unwarranted assumptions not only about poetry in general but about why I write poetry, and what its purpose is in my life—again, one can only surmise that the objection was a moral one, beacuse it consisted of some other poet projecting their own values onto my poem.

If you think about it, that evaluative projection in its essence can be summarized as asking: "why didn't you write this poem more formally"? which can be reduced to: "why didn't you write this poem they way I would have?" or perhaps "why didn't you write this poem in a way like other poems that I like to read, and understand?" To address the last point, which does come at it from a slightly different angle, I might once again quote Jean Cocteau:

We are inclined to judge what is beautiful by what is familiar.

In other words, "making it easier for the reader" doesn't really have anything to do with the style or orthography of a poem. A complaint about legibility, comprehension, or readability may be a valid complaint, but it will fail the instant one tries to use it as an apparently-objective mask pasted over a personal prejudice.

Notes & Quotes at Semi-Random

Clearing off all my desks, both virtual and actual, and cleaning out some of the clutter. Notes towards things I've been meaning to write about, as yet unwritten; proving once again (to myself) that nothing I ever plan to write about ever gets anywhere, or is any good (with one or two exceptions), while all the things that emerge spontaneously, following my anti-writerly practice of the mind of readiness, are often lucid, cogent, and timely. So, some random scraps of elucidation.

•

Philip Larkin on poetic clarity, and on not being a "difficult" or "abstruse" poet:

I think that a poem should be understood at first reading line by line, but I don’t think it should be exhausted at that first reading. I hope that what I write gives the reader something when they read it first, enough in fact to make them read it again and so on ad infinitum.

•

The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.

—H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

This makes me think of the usefulness of doing nothing, which is in fact the opposite of being bored. People avoid boredom by filling all the gaps in their time with rapid activity, in the same way that people who are afraid of silences, especially in conversation, chatter incessantly without really saying anything. Their signal-to-noise ratio is very high, in that mostly what they fill the gaps with is noise, not signal. In fact, signal arises from silence, or that place that surrounds silence with active listening.

•

from Henry David Thoreau's Journal, 12 May 1857:

How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden. I take my neighbor, an intellectual man, out into the woods and invite him to take a new and absolute view of things, to empty clean out his thoughts all institutions of men and start again; but he can’t do it, he sticks to his traditions and his crochets. He thinks that governments, colleges, newspapers, etc., are from everlasting to everlasting.

•

Jean Cocteau on the new in art:

We are worried when we cannot make comparisons. Our whole system of pleasure is based on comparisons. If we are satisfied with our own work, it is probable that it bears some resemblance to other works with which we are preoccupied. But if we produce something really new, as this novelty is not based on any definite recollection, it leaves us as it were, with one leg in the air, alone in the world. We are as much disconcerted and disappointed by it as the reader will be.

We are inclined to judge what is beautiful by what is familiar.

•

Rilke wrote in The Notebooks of Malte Laurits Brigge, his fictionalized almost-autobiography, that poetry is experience, not emotion:

Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with some many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,—and it still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of live, each one different from alll the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not enough yet to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them. (trans. by Stephen Mitchell)

•

Here's a bit of a psychological insight about why so many teenage angst-ridden journal-poets write about the Inner Darkness Of My Soul: it’s because they just discovered it, and it scares them, and also attracts them.

The problem they have, when they write these mostly bad adolescent poems about what they have just discovered, is that they haven't followed Rilke's advice in Malte, and gathered enough experiences yet in order to be able to let the true poem arise. They write too soon, and think they were the first to have so written, and that they were the first to have discovered their own inner darknesses. And they are astonished when they go out to read poetry of great depth and richness that was written before they were born: they discover, in their reading, that they have found nothing new at all, but something very old, and very familiar to any poet who has been through the dark night. Furthermore, it is nothing to be feared, but embraced and brought into oneself, and made new, that way, in those inner rooms, in which the real poetry will later reveal itself.

•

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Which leads me to think of John Masefield's poem Sea Fever:

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life.
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

•

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

—Walter Pater

On Style (self-reflection, self-awareness)

As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year. —Vita Sackville-West, in a letter to Virginia Woolf

To cultivate one's thought - to learn to shape and handle it - is to cultivate one's style. Looked at from any other point of view, style merely makes for obscurity and acts as a drag. —Jean Cocteau, Professional Secrets

His poetry went on living, changing, developing unabatedly for sixty years or more; and being always a part of himself, growing as he grew, it remained 'original' even when it was most imitative. Originality is after all not absence of models, but what one can make of one's models; it is the recognition of kinship and the capacity to transform; above all it is the refusal to imitate oneself. Goethe wrote in the style of (and here everything is mentioned from north-European folksongs, to Italian verse-forms, to the Homeric hexameters, to classic lyric Persian forms, to ancient Chinese poetic forms); and when he had done what it was his to do with these idioms, he would drop them and turn to something else.... He worked his models first into his system, then out of it. He was resiliant, able to forget, willing to leave things behind, deep enough to be inconsistent, big enough to be both personal and universal, alive enough for his life to be art and for his art to be life. —editor David Luke on Goethe

This quote about Goethe very nicely sums up how I feel about it.

I look in the artistic mirror as an artist, writer, musician, etc., and I see myself. I'm not comparing myself to Goethe in some arrogant way, but I do strongly identify with Luke's comments about Goethe, as they might possibly also apply to other artists, myself included, and those artists who I feel have been mentors to me, over the years, whether or not I ever knew them in person. Mentorship is essential for finding oneself: mentors provide a mirror in which one can see oneself, and provide examples to point, if you wish to explain yourself to others.

I seek to develop my personal style. But I don't want to be a stylist. I write in a lot of different styles, poetry, prose, prose-poem, haibun, my own new forms, etc., and I can see a thread that runs through all of them, unifying them as mine—but I wonder if anyone else can? Do others look at my various bodies of work and see only diversity? Is a personal style only a matter of personal interests?

All my life, since I was a small boy, people have been telling me to settle down and just devote myself to one art, to become expert at one medium, to just do one thing well. I've never understood that. I've always been capable of doing better-than-average at more than one medium; my creative repertoire crosses genres and media, and I've never felt that was a problem. My artistic mentors, since I was that small boy, have all been polymaths along the lines of Goethe, and have all done good work in more than one artistic (and/or scientific) medium: John Cage, Ben Franklin, Gordon Parks, Leonardo da Vinci. Add Goethe to the list.

What does this say about style? Can one work in multiple arts and still have a recognizable style? (Yes.) Does personal style have to be eternally consistent? (Hell no!) Can one say that the artist's work in one medium has more of a coherent style than the same artist's work in other media? (Perhaps so. I think sometimes my visual artwork has the most coherent sense of style, but even there, there are two artistic poles to the style: stark wabi-sabi simplicity, and cluttered fractal chaos.) My work has always contained a diversity of styles and tones.

I strongly question the insistence on consistency, unification, unitary style, etc., within any artist's body of work. I think that Goethe's inconsistency and constant growth and change is precisely the mark of a living, working, gorwing artist. I can't honestly imagine an artist being any other way—perhaps because I'm that way myself, and thus find it no easier to wrap my own head around unitary consistency, than it is for one of my critics to wrap their own heads around my inconsistent diversity of styles and media.

I identify with Goethe's refusal to imitate himself, or repeat himself: repeating myself is the most boring thing I can imagine doing, artistically. The next project is always the most interesting project. An artist who only repeats earlier work is creatively stuck, or creatively dead. (Or, perhaps, attempting to capitalize on previous work to have a stable income.) So, I've ended up as an artist with several internally-consistent yet externally-diverse bodies of work.

Certainly consistency makes it easier to categorize (and market) an artist's style. Art galleries expect you to present yourself to them, when you present a portfolio for review, in exactly this way: as having an enduring, unified style to your work. This usually means leaving out some of your best work, because it's off in another style-zone. But galleries are there to sell art, not to appreciate it: they are profit-making businesses. Many good artists go overlooked by the gallery scene simply because their work is less marketable. Consequently, I usually can only market one body of work at a time; which of course means having lots of eggs in the air all at once, which I admit can be a struggle to balance. Sometimes I just want to crawl in a hole, and give it all up, be a monk, ignore the world.

But the final word on consistency lies perhaps with Emerson, a quote I carried around with me all through music school and after: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.