Poetry on the
Loose, the name of my poetry and performance series and of this site, may seem somewhat
foggy in meaning, but that is precisely the point. “On the loose” is meant to imply an
overstepping of boundaries, a flouting of restrictions, a phrase meant to
describe my writing, my taste, my sensibility, perhaps my life.
My poetry reading
series have had always an open door to writers of every sort and style. My main goal was to bring something new every
time, and thus I never repeated a feature.
People of all backgrounds were equally welcome, and I specifically
sought performers who would stretch the listeners’ expectations. Every personality has a certain beauty, and
one may sometimes learn more from a writer who does not at first seem
particularly appealing.
As a critic, I
cultivated similarly broad interests. Whereas
scholars generally specialize in a single author or, at most, an era, I have
been willing to contemplate literature of all ages and all cultures. Recognizing that I lack the depth of an academic
mandarin, I claim in compensation a Gargantuan all-devouring breadth. While professors treat texts they have been rereading
repeatedly for years, I typically write about something I have just finished,
sometimes for the first time. I write
even about works I can read only in translation, a taboo in the Comparative
Literature discipline in which I was educated. (A well-published friend, with books from Yale
and Cambridge, once said to me, ”You know the unspoken rule, ‘it’s okay to read
in translation, if you quote in the original.’”) Yet, like academic papers, my essays usually
seek to demonstrate something new about the topic. When I write about a Tibetan novel, my
ignorance, if it does not allow a novel insight, at least reproduces the
average reader’s equal lack of knowledge and thus may be useful in ways a
professional monograph may not. Yet I
differ as well from journalistic reviewers who assume little if any prior
knowledge and assume the task of either praising or panning as a guide to
readers’ choices, with analysis subjugated to the aim of recommendation. The scholar creates new knowledge; the
reviewer basically advises potential readers.
I find myself aiming toward the liminal space, halfway between.
My poetry betrays
a weakness for the recondite, and does not shrink, now and then, from using as
seasoning a word that might send readers to a dictionary. A town at the end of a dusty foreign road is
a likelier source of inspiration for me than the walls of my study, for I am a
poor meditator. My poems are for the
most part, I believe, lucid, though with a hermetic residue to thicken the
plot.
In literary
essays I often treat somewhat obscure books, and I do not shrink from the use
of technical terms, even deploying a bit of jargon at times. While regularly providing evidence and citing
sources in notes, I violate academic standards with informal usages, personal
references, and casual organization. Since
virtually no one apart from professors will care to read about Praxilla, or
Matthew of Vendôme, and the academicians will look only at peer-reviewed
professional journals, I have reduced my readership to a minimum, though I like
to think of them as a kind of saving remnant, preserving culture in a
philistine era.
Far from
cultivating a limited field until I make it my own, I wander from one author to
another, “floating on the ocean of words.”
Having little system may disable some investigations, but it opens unsuspected
possibilities in others. I am aligned
thereby with the common reader who like me reads for pleasure, though I cannot
doubt that long years in graduate school have left their mark. Further, the more fundamental and theoretical
a question may be, the less the choice of a specific text matters. My dissertation dealt with medieval European
love poetry, but its thesis, about the transformation of convention, might
equally have been demonstrated by a study of television situation comedies or,
for that matter, literary research papers themselves. People are everywhere and in all times in
most important respects the same; their literature reflects this commonality,
so any reader is entitled to have a look at any text.
Though I shy away
from confessional poetry, I foreground the role of delectation. The subjective, in which the strongest
impulse is erotic, has more influence in the consciousness than any product of
ratiocination or article of faith. My
poems do not presume to retail eternal verities, but only to reflect the
rapidly shifting ripples in the mind.
In criticism as
well, I privilege pleasure. Art provides,
I believe, the most densely signifying symbolic system our species has devised,
and stories, poems, and dramas do accurately express states of consciousness,
but the lure of the aesthetic is invariably the promise of pleasure. Beauty, as Santayana said in The Sense of
Beauty, is "pleasure objectified" or "pleasure regarded as
the quality of a thing." In spite
of being the leading human motive for consuming art, pleasure is notoriously resistant
to analysis, stubbornly subjective, and thus often ignored or discounted in
discussions of art. The pursuit of
pleasure in one form or another must be the fundamental motive for reading
literature; indeed, it is the fundamental motive for all action.
In my critical
oeuvre, I not only readily grant pleasure its primacy in the experience of art.
I most commonly address topics linked to
sexual love, the jouissance outstripping other human experiences yet
which is familiar to everyone. This embraces,
yet is not limited to, orgasm, romantic attachments, courtly love, marriage
conventions, loveless laments, and ribald transgressive verse. Mystical love of the divine, misogyny and
other aggression, fetishism, and a whole panoply of phenomena arise from the same
energies, if in errant or tangential
directions. Erotic energy generalized to
tint all life experience manifests as the carnivalesque as we see in its
physical aspect in Rabelais and in its spiritual in Gerard Manley Hopkins.
I confess to a
fondness for the recondite. Apart from the
novelty of little-studied texts, I fancy the reader will more easily come upon
novel insights traversing fresh territory than when trekking more frequented
paths. Thus I write about remote places
I have visited and odd characters I have encountered. I relish as well a bit of the grotesque and
the eccentric in Gogol, Poe, and Céline and of the aesthete in Wilde,
Dowson, and Firbank. My philosophy tends
toward the skeptical and I appreciate Gorgias, Sextus Empiricus, and Nagarjuna.
Quite intentionally, I have pursued a
largely counter-cultural career, such as it is, and I am fascinated with the
avant-garde: Dadaists, Surrealists, and Beats.
These elements interchange
and mingle and, in part, account for my fondness for Sappho, Jaufre Rudel, Christopher
Smart, Kleist, Pound, and Nabokov. My
love of essays has led to my reading and rereading Montaigne, Burton,
Browne, Addison and Steele, Hazlitt, and Lamb.
Just as I can scarcely imagine a better way to spend an hour than in
conversation, offering opinions on anything under the sun, I continue to contribute to the ongoing discussions
of all things in written form.
All these
characteristics of my oeuvre are reflected as well in my personality and thus
in my life. Yet this fact is quite
ordinary. Any body of work of any size
will similarly reflect (sometimes refract) its author. Every writer seeks readers, yet each is
self-conscious about being read, since one cannot help setting down one’s
nature on the black and white page. Whereas
it may or may not possess beauty, every text embodies its creator in detail and
thus each is as unique as a profile or a handwriting sample. One writer will hew to the punctilios of
convention with reserve to spare like T. S. Eliot’s suits while another will
slash those same expectations like an apache and run for a getaway. One will luxuriate in lush descriptions like
a canvas by Boucher while another will be ascetic like St. Anthony. Existential edginess or pious confidence. Melodious song or the croaking of frogs. Comradely chatter or magisterial
pronouncement. Each has a place. Each may succeed or fail in the reading, but
all are in the running. The reader will
return to revisit those texts which have been catalyst to the most satisfying
reactions when first read, but every literary work bears the imprint of a human
mind and thus must be fascinating and complex and subtle.
The beauty of art
requires both the skill of the artist and the taste of the consumer; beauty is
not demonstrably inherent – it manifests only in art’s reception, and art
cannot, alas, bring those who experience it to every enlightened realization,
but it does reliably delver one truth.
Every work of art embodies a take on reality, either copied from life or
compounded in imagination or, most often, midway between. The artifacts a person makes indicate with
considerable precision how one might have viewed the world at a moment in
time. This, I submit, is as close to Truth
as any of us will approach.
